You are coming with the assumption that "fun" is some objective standard that is on a scale with "playing to win" on the other end.
For some people, playing to win and finding the metagame is the fun.
And there is nothing wrong with that. And too often I find that people who complain about people who are just "playing to win" are really just trying to complain about losing without seeming sore. The pattern is easy to spot, anything that causes them to lose is somehow "playing wrong" or not "fun". There's apparently some intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality being lost. But in reality, the only thing actually being lost is your chance to win.
> There's apparently some intangible, undefinable, nebulous quality being lost.
Yes, it's called "fun". It's using the game as a platform for creativity and expression, not merely optimization for a fixed arbitrary set of rules.
Saying that this doesn't count is you saying "you're having fun wrong".
It's also why professional sports evolve rules to stop camping strategies like scoring 1 pt and then sitting on the ball/puck unitl the clock runs out.
And I never said fun didn't count. I said people find fun in different ways and trying to police how other people have fun is a bad look. So please, if you want to argue against me. Do it against what I actually said and not just what you wish I said.
Replacing every game by its metagame, as some "board game geeks" tend to do, destroys the diversiry and value of inventing different games in the first place.
"Scrabble is an area control game with a complicated resource tree" may be fun for some, but informal not-technically-enforceable rules like "only play words you have ever used or seen before in a sentence" keeps it fun and interesting and meaningful for people who play games for valuable reasons (like learning, or skill development, or humor) other than just the W and L. If you are afraid to make an elegant or humorous play because it harms your chances in the metagame or to win overall, you are shortchanging yourself and your play partners.