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this reminds me of the ~semi-famous Ignacy/Vlaada design stories in board games.

each are board game designers, and Vlaada was play testing one of Ignacy's designs:

https://boardgamesthattellstories.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/t...

Really good story. I'll have to remember that one. I think I've kind of come to the same conclusion when designing board games but after a lot of trial and error :).

I met Ignacy once several years ago, at Gen Con. He's a really nice guy.

Somehow everybody overlooked the obvious solution of splitting the good events and bad events into separate decks?

That's not at all rare in other games.

the trouble with that solution is that players are aware of the direction of what they'll get and can make action decisions appropriately. if I know one deck is the bad one, I'll avoid actions that result in draws to that deck, unless impossible to avoid.

I think Ignacy wanted there to be ambiguity there.

The game as originally described already forced exactly 5 draws, so that's not an issue. If you're forcing draws, you can force some good draws and some bad draws.

You can solve the "players know what's coming" problem easily, and some games do ("before you begin, take three disasters and two windfalls and shuffle them together"), but that adds a large logistics overhead that may not be worth it.

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