The Iteration Process

A very valuable lesson we have been learning in Robs Tuesday morning lectures is the importance of iteration. Iteration is primarily a way of improving ideas and concepts at an early stage, where the risk of things going wrong is practically non-existent. If a fantastic idea is made and progress is made on this it may not be reaching its full potential. If the idea has already been implemented and the game is 6 weeks down the line into being made and it's suddenly realised something doesn't work, then that causes big problems. Lots of wasted time, resources and effort. Yikes. Luckily we're getting into a good habit of finding an idea and iterating rules and gameplay before anything goes wrong.
The same goes for regular and existing games!
For example, one Tuesday morning we learned to play a game called 'Liars Dice' which I (and probably the majority of the class) recognised as the game that Will plays with Davy Jones in the second Pirates of the Caribbean films. The game by itself was alot of fun, I thought. I know one of group mates felt it was too slow and she became bored with it quite quickly. We were set the task of iterating the rules for this game, improving what we could find to be hindering the fun of the game. After some deliberation we came up with a set of rules, which having used, we realised didn't really work as well as we had thought. The beauty of this iteration was that in discovering one of our ideas hadn't worked, we only lost about 10 minutes. Boo hoo. It feels much better to experience the perks of iterating the right way than to lose (as mentioned earlier) time, effort and resources.
Recently it happened again, we were set the task of iterating the rules of a card game called 'War'. With pretty simple mechanics and alot riding on chance, the game can be played amongst a number of people, although we practised in groups of 2. Although the tricky bit came in when one of the instructions in the iterating was to 'add an element of skill'. Well now. This stumped me and my partner, how were we to add skill to a game of chance? We had a few ideas, but nothing that didn't involve the chance card. In the end we had nothing. Nada, zip, zilch. I felt quite defeated, but understood when we heard everyone elses iterations. It seemed like in order to add an element of skill to this game, everyone who participated in sharing their ideas had to change (most of) the game itself. This is completely understandable, it seemed the only way, but in changing it and iterating it to that degree, surely it's not the same game anymore? I mean you can change the rules of a game without changing the game itself right? I need an example. . . .

Ok this took me 3 seconds of staring out of my window into the snow to dream up, so sorry if it's a poor example. In Monopoly, we're going to void the money. Money doesnt exist any more in Monopoly. Instead, everytime a player passes a side of the board (from Go>Jail>Free Parking>GoToJail>Go) they are allowed to choose a property they want to possess. Now we've changed the rules quite significantly, destroying money, the one asset that Monopoly as a game feeds off. BUT, it's still the same game, players still have to get round the board and collect sets of properties before the others etc.  

So I'm wondering what's the balance? How much of a game or an idea can you change and iterate until it's something completely different? It seems like quite an important cut-off point, but I can't help but wonder. . .