I am (co)designing a pickup-and-deliver strategy game.
Extensive playtesting has revealed what I believe to be a slightly broken aspect of the endgame (basically, there comes a point when everyone can visualize the rest of the game, and there's nothing to be done to change the outcome/winner). The first 45 minutes of the game play smoothly and are quite enjoyable; it's only the last couple minutes that get stale when the end is in sight.
Knowing that "KC" will likely be submitted to an established publisher - and expecting their developers to take over - we have only taken the theme, artwork, and rulebook so far.
Will a publisher accept games that have slightly broken aspects to them, or is the designer responsible for having a mechanically polished game at the start of the submission process?
Edit:
Consider Settlers, but without development cards (and also without longest road, as those points are temporary). This hypothetical game would be "broken" in the same way that mine is - not to mention missing out on what is a great aspect of the game.
There would be no hidden information. A king would rise, and at some point everyone would be able to see the same writing on the wall: if something extremely unlucky doesn't happen, the final victory position of each player will remain unchanged.
So in terms of this hypothetical Setllers game, my original question might be reworded:
Have any games been submitted to publishers with noticeable problems that were subsequently fixed by the developer's addition of a new mechanic? (If so, what are they, and who are the publishers?!)
Edit 2: I believe the solution to lie in an alternative scoring mechanism that introduces hidden information and (more) variance/randomness. Rather than advancing a certain number on the VP track for completing certain tasks, basically players will take a tile corresponding to the task they completed. The tiles will have various VP's on them with a certain distribution (think Jaipur bonus tiles).
A simple example: Ticket to Ride. In TtR, you immediately score 15/10/7 etc. for claiming routes of length 6/5/4. If, instead of scoring this immediately, players took tiles from the 6/5/4 "stack" upon completion of corresponding routes, this would be like my game. The tiles for a "6" route would probably range from 14-17 VP each, "5"s would range from 9-11, etc.
The larger issue remains (for future games of mine and of others): how much should the designer do before submitting to a publisher?