Etrian Odyssey has some of the most satisfying "progress" feelings in RPGs I've ever experienced - getting to a new floor, building your parties skills, finally beating a tough boss.
Very interesting diaries, you can tell the director was very ambitious and the final product shows the amount of work put into the game
This strategy is only viable if nobody is blocking you from the tier 2 and especially tier 3 cards either by reserving what you're obviously going for, or shorting the supply of a colour you clearly need - But it works great otherwise.
Splendor has clever subtle player interaction here which I think is a real strong part of its design.
I've seen some of those before - the algorithm is a bit strange about people who hang around the edges of the border and sometimes create some fairly horrifying abstractions of humans