Who are you indeed?
This is one of the first questions any publisher would ask you when you are presenting them with a board game. Are you a merchant sailing the mediterranean sea selling salt and fabric? Are you colonizing a new land or planet? What is your goal? Are you playing the forces of good trying to stop an elder god from entering this world or are you an evil cultist trying to make it happen?
I am a mechanisms person, but in order to have a full whole game you need to connect the basic mechanisms of the game to a story. As much as I enjoy a smooth and well oiled machine of a game, I think a game becomes ALIVE when the machine fits its mask.
One game that is a very well oiled machine is Russian Railroads. It's a worker placement with very unique and cool mechanisms where you play a railway company building tracks in russia (or Germany in the expansion). With all that, it is hard for me to really enjoy this game, because it doesn't make sense whatsoever. Every player has 3 rails, the same 3 rails to build. It is possible that all the players will build the same rail (why would this kind of thing happen in life?!). They will first build a lousy rail, than it may be improved to a better rail and then to a fancy rail. I'm not a railway construction person, but would anyone do that? I ask every player that likes that game what they think about this issue and they all answer quite the same: "I don't care, it's a sold Euro / worker placement game".
If the trends of the board game world tell us anything, is that it does matter and that as a designer you should care. More and more games put you in increasingly interesting shoes. Gamers game in order to be in the role of building a civilization, finding new land, beating the competition or saving the world of an apocalyptic disaster. Make the game feel like you think it should feel!
Make the shoes and they will walk in them.