Board Game Arena

I'd say drawing most of them aren't that good. New encounters is bad design imo; like you said it raises the luck factor, because it dilutes the pool of Kuge and clutch miko draws. My ranking would be Saru>pano guy/itamae>takatsuso. Saru is two achievements in one basket, which is fair I guess. The pano guy can grant you a headstart or instant pano achievement, which is a fair reward for one coin (Hiroshige's ability lol). The tricky part is Itamae. He rewards sloppy play which is commonplace in casual players, but in reality he is giving you 3pts for 1 coin, or 6 if you (likely) get the goumet achievement. Why is it 3? Let me explain. The baseline "meh" encounter is samurai of 3 pts for no coins. Basically anything else is better in some sort of way. So paying one extra coin for 3 extra pts is only okay. The upside is that you are likely to get an achievement, and that 6 instant points is nice and rare, tho I'd most likely want to utilize my coins elsewhere. Note that he is not a reason to miss a meal, because missing guaranteed points is almost never worth it. The worst part is if you hit a meal you've eaten: it's almost impossible to come back from the temp loss of 1 coin 1 stop do nothing, which is actually an deduction in points. From here it should be easy to see why takatsuso is terrible. 1 coin for 4 pts? Even randomly donating is better. In conclusion: new encounters can randomly flip a win for your opponent, which is annoying, but careful analysis tells us that it's not that swingy. It makes encounters worse even, because most of the time I'm just fishing for the 1/8 chance of Kuge.