u/Effective-Muffin-224

I feel like this is such a specific and petty thing to be annoyed about, but I've noticed that I'm increasingly avoiding all games that have a 'race' mechanism.

My main examples would be Ticket to Ride and Ark Nova. In Ticket to Ride the game ends when someone has less than 3 trains, and in Ark Nova it ends once someone reaches enough points.

Every single time this happens, the other players are screwed over. They can't finish what they wanted to do and there's a good chance someone gets pissed off. It feels like everyone is having fun, and then this one guy goes 'no' and just ends the game. It always feels like it ends prematurely and it always takes away the other players' big payoff moment.

I actually started to avoid these games and gravitate towards games with a fixed amount of rounds. And I feel like the people I play with enjoy these way more. You can plan out every move and there's never a risk of your strategy fizzling out because someone decides that they want to stop playing the game while everyone else isn't done yet. And at the end you just feel more fulfilled, since you didn't just get blue-balled.

Was wondering if anyone else made the same experience or if this is specific to my groups.

I've played a ton when I was child, and just got done with the Early Days Collection. And now I was interested in seeing how the game, the meta and the mechanics evolved from those early days until now. Apart from emulating the DS games, is there a way to get this experience on PC?

I've tried Master Duel, but there's almost no 'old' content. Everything has all of the new cards mixed in in some way. The free simulators like Omega don't seem to have anything like a solo mode. I could look up old metas and import decks, but that's not really the experience I'm looking for.

I think what I want is an entire campaign that goes through the different anime seasons or eras and has prebuilt decks that were used at the time. Does something like that exist?