Some game designs seem more robust than others.
Dominion is a very robust design. They recently reprinted the base game, and replaced six of the original twenty-five cards because they were too underpowered or too situational. What other game could not only survive having nearly a quarter of its components being nearly useless, but manage to sell millions of copies despite this? Maybe we can look at some of the reasons behind this robustness, and learn something that we can apply to our own games.
Underpowered is better then overpowered. If Rebuild had been in the base game, folks would have complained a lot more. It’s a one-card engine that’s basically a must-buy.
High variance adds to robustness. It’s harder to detect a bias in a noiser signal.
Nobody is forced to take a bad card (except through something like Swindler, where the availability of bad cards is arguably a perk). Having a choice available that nobody ever takes are is terrible. The effect is that the designer has wasted some time, and there’s a bit of additional cognitive load. Otherwise, it’s fine. If there’s a whole subgame that’s useless, that’s bad because players shouldn’t have to learn a useless subgame. But if the choice is just one card vs another, it turns out, it’s workable to have a few less-good choices.
There are other reasons that Dominion is a great game, but I don’t know if there are other reasons why it’s a robust game.
It’s OK for a game to be less robust. With a less robust design, the flaws in those six Dominion cards might have been discovered during development, and they would not have been printed. But I think that overall, robustness is a virtue. Once a game gets out into the world, players will discover, over the course of many years, how the game ought to be played. A robust game will better survive that experimentation process.