One of the frustrating aspects of many games is that you are sitting in the game, you have absolutely no hope of catching up and there is nothing in the game that allows you to do a highly risky move that has a high payoff. Euros seem to be the most guilty of this, even though they have many mechanisms that throttle back the leader many of those mechanisms make it tough for someone in the back to catch up.
Anyways, I saw a Geeklist where they mentioned Hearts. Hearts has "Shoot the Moon" where you give 26 points to everyone else if you can get all the hearts and the queen of spades. Most of the time, if you are playing against good players, you end up with 25 points yourself because they managed to save the right card. If it works, you have a good shot of catching up. If it fails, well you were losing and you're losing even worse.
In Risk, you have the cards. If you manage to take a territory a turn, you get a card. As the game progresses, you get more armies. If you time things right, you can take what was an untenable position and turn it into something. If you really go ballsy, you could even end up winning.
In the article with the card game, it sounds like that has some high risk, high payoff things.
Anyways, why do people think the throttling the leader mechanism is better than these? Do the high risk things involve some luck? Yes. Do they involve a game with some unpredictability? Yes. But in those games, they always give you some hope that you can pull off that last minute miracle. I mean look at John Elway....
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