Do your favorite games do everything or do they focus on one thing?

I played Shards of Infinity and City of Remnants yesterday. Shards of Infinity is just a deckbuilder, a good one but really just focuses on that. But City of Remnants has a lot of stuff in it: dudes on a map, auctions, deckbuilding, and more. And I'm wondering if I prefer games that do a lot of stuff more than games that really do just one thing. And how do you classify something like Heroscape or Wiz-War? I'm still thinking about this but I was wondering what you all think about it.

I tend to really like games that are doing more than one thing. In particular, I enjoy when games have group phases that break up the individual phases. Some examples from my collection:

Millennium Blades - real time card market, individual deck curation, group tournament phases

Spartacus - auction, betting, gladiator battles, deals, etc.

Lords of Hellas - group drafts every now and then broken up by individual turns that can encompass many styles of play

A little of both, obviously, but my favorite games are mashups, the more exotic the better. Sidereal Confluence is like this, or Here I Stand, or Gears of War

Hotseat beat me to Lords of Hellas. See my review Wednesday as I go further in depth about that.

Sort of a copout answer, but I really think it depends. I like Dominion more than most other deckbuilders, just because I think it does it the best. Meanwhile, something like Settlers of Catan and Power Grid work because it all makes sense in the larger mechanical framework. I don't think of them as "route building + trading/hand management or auctions/market manipulation" etc. I like "pure" combat games like Heroscape and X-Wing, but one of my favorite worker placement games is Dungeon Lords because I find the scoring and the mini-game to be a refreshing mid and end-game goal instead of getting a little bit of points for everything. So I guess I like games doing multiple things as long as the scoring is focused. For this reason I dislike a lot of "pure" Euro engine builders or WP games because you kinda get points for everything. I like more concrete goals instead of death by a thousand VPs.

Interesting insight! I love it when rules are streamlined as much as possible. A focus on the end goal might be the thing I'm searching for here.

I like when a game can be explained in a logical, thematic way. Take Lords of Waterdeep: your goal is to get VPs. You get them mostly by fulfilling quests. Here's how you get quests. You need cubes to complete them. Here's how you get cubes. Everything works towards a single end goal. You don't have a lot of "this does X UNLESS" or "these are Y, HOWEVER", and there's not a lot of "in addition, you also need to do this".

Power Grid has a bunch of different things going on but again, everything is in service of a simple and straightforward goal: you want to power the most houses.

On the other hand, Splendor does mostly one thing, but I find the thing it's doing uninteresting and dull, so I don't care.

I appreciate streamlining, particularly with lighter or gateway games, but my favorite designs tend to do lots of things.

Sidereal Confluence
John Company
Earth Reborn
Eclipse
Cosmic Encounter
Dune
Cave Evil

I quite like sandbox style designs.