Corsairs

Corsairs was brought up with respect to MeaningfulChoices, and this was written in response. This isn't to say that it is a bad game, just that this one aspect of it is weaker than it could have been.

First of all there is a fairly high luck element; the cards you draw, the ships that come up, the roll of the dice - there are a number of factors at work here that can weaken the impact of any one choice.

The cards you have may limit the ships you can go for; so even a choice like going for one color might be thwarted by the inability to take those ships. Since you are at least a little at the mercy of the cards, the simple strategy of trying to play out as many as you can each turn, can be effective.

Decisions also tend to be localized - Once somebody takes a ship, it is removed from the board and has little further impact on the game. There is a little bit - how many resource each player had put into trying to take it, your evaluation of like colors in the future, but any bad decisions probably won't affect you for very long, so each one has less weight.

LuckVersusStrategy?: Actually, I got into answering the immediate question about MeaningfulChoices, and sort of lost sight of the original question: what is fun? Luck is fun - or their wouldn't be so many games that use it, we presume. It creates Surprise and CalculatedRisk. The interesting thing about calculated risk is that it can create meaningful choices - you know the odds and the rewards, so you make the choices and then see what the results are.