The rules are arbitrary and that is the whole point

Nothing in a game had to be that way, which is precisely why it works.

People new to a game frequently object to a rule on the grounds that it makes no sense. Why can this piece only move in that direction. Why does the round end there and not two steps later. Why must you say a particular word out loud before you may act. The honest answer is that it did not have to be this way, and somebody decided, and now it is. Arbitrariness looks like a flaw only if you assume the rules are trying to model something true. They are not. They are trying to manufacture an interesting problem out of nothing, and constraint is the only material available.

This is why houses that tinker with rules usually make their games worse before better. Remove the restriction that felt pointless and you often find it was holding three other things in tension. The rule was not describing reality. It was generating a shape. Once you see rules as load bearing rather than descriptive, the arbitrariness stops being an embarrassment. A line drawn anywhere creates an inside and an outside, and that division is where all the interest lives. Draw no line and you have a field with people standing in it, wondering what the plan is.

There is a second benefit, quieter and more valuable. Because the rules are obviously invented, everybody knows the stakes are invented too. That shared knowledge is what makes it safe to try hard. You can throw yourself completely at a problem whose importance you and everyone else openly acknowledge to be fictional, and lose, and nothing has actually happened. Very few adult arenas offer that combination of full effort and zero consequence. It is a strange and badly underrated luxury, and it exists only because somebody, at some point, was willing to make something up and persuade other people to honour it.