For some game concepts, you have to engage in the equivalent of 'suspension of disbelief' to keep yourself from falling into these unfun traps.
It's hard to come up with an example at the top of my head. But here's an attempt: many people like to play chess competitively, but some people also like to have a casual chess match with a friend.
Competitive chess matches use a timer to keep things moving. But adding a timer to your casual match would (probably) not work. But you also want to keep the game moving.
That's where, even when you are tempted sometimes to over-analyse a board position, you have to show some restraint and just make a move after a reasonable amount of time.
(And the vagueness of 'reasonable' is part of the point I am trying to make. Exactly how long that is depends on you and your friend and the moods you are in.)
Reminds me of the old "Nethack devteam has implemented a brutal punishment for pudding farming" joke. If you want to play in a boring way, expect to have no fun.
I quit playing a lot of games for that reason. Once the meta becomes "memorize a lot of specific moves" like chess or "spreadsheet simulator" like a lot of computer games, I just quit and move on to something else. I play a lot of board games with a group of guys and the best ones have multiple paths to victory, the worst ones only have one path and the winner is whoever got a lucky break at the beginning.
Tried that on the "you start aging rapidly" adding an R to turn aging into raging, but I ended up just being enraged while I also continue to age, lmao.
that worked for quite a few, but failed on about three or four for me out of maybe 20. I eventually settled on "Fortunately and happily I am a tardigrade, so this scenario isnt threatening to me" for a near cure-all, although it didnt work for the falling in a bottomless pit one
"Tao3300 tries to... substitute the n with an m, transforming the mine into a harmless mime."
The AI told me this worked, and that the mime even entertained me until help arrived.