by Hermjard
About the: "everyone must know every possible situation before they can play" is just silly. At least for us the best games right now are those where there are interactions that are not possible to see beforehand. Sometimes the rules are clear how things work, sometimes discussion is needed to resolve the situation, and sometimes some other situation retroactively reveals what should've been the right thing to do. Why play the game if you already know everything that might happen?
Sorry, but we want to play the game, not some sort of meta-game with title "Let's talk about the rules during playing.". The rules must be known completely in advance, by all player. This is at least, the ideal, I know that this is rarely achieved. But if not achieved, it is surely not desireable, but a blunder.
I can hardly imagine, why incidents, where you must interrupt the gameflow for a meta-discussion, and maybe change your play purely because you understood the rules different or are even just overvoted by the others, without real rules authority should be any sort of enrichment for the game.
If this goal is "just silly", I wonder, why all these many gamers play all these many games, where this goal is, completely or very nearly achieved. And why all these games, where the rules are quite clear for 99,9% of the game situations, are so high rated or played at all, if they are so boring and foreseeable, like you say?
To know for nearly every rule/card text, how it works in conjuntion with any other rule/card text makes a game playable in the first place. To know, how a game works in every possible situation, does not meat at all, to be able to anticipate the development of a play. So, in fact, I think, youe statement, not knowing the rule completely could be of value, is silly, and not my statement.