I love BGG as a resource, but sometimes the groupthink there is poisonous for a game designer. You start worrying about all the little arbitrary truisms that this game element or that game element are never good inclusions, and that's just not true. If you follow all the rules, you make soggy bread.

I hit a patch in my career where I spent way too much time self-censoring my designs to remove randomness, take-that elements, and such, but none of that stuff sold in the end. Now I'm coming back into freelancing with a renewed sense of my own style and tastes, and not everyone's gonna like that.