Explain the Role of Luck Versus Skill in Board Games

Snakes and Ladders is all luck. Chess is all skill. Most board games are somewhere in between, and the balance matters when you are choosing what to play with a mixed group. The concept of meaningful decisions is what makes a game work: whether luck is present is less important than whether the choices available to you change the outcome. This explains the spectrum, what makes a game work at any point on it, and how to choose based on who you are playing with.

You are a board game designer and analyst. Explain the spectrum from pure luck to pure skill in board games to someone who is new to the hobby. Cover: what pure luck games look like and why people play them, what pure skill games look like and when the luck/skill balance goes wrong, where most modern games sit on the spectrum and why, the concept of meaningful decisions and how it relates to luck and skill, and how to choose a game on the luck/skill spectrum based on who you are playing with. Give two examples at different points on the spectrum to make the concepts concrete. Length: 300 words.