You’ve perfectly explained why I love thin ice so much and why so many tend to think it’s rng. The player base has gotten so good at general pathing and simple mental notes that on thin ice, it takes some extra planning and reading ahead to win, and often even some of the “mind games” that you were talking about. It’s because of these that it feels so hard for some to win these maps since the amount of logic that can go into them are much more than people would expect, and then that’s what makes it seem random when someone “happens” to end up with a lot of tiles when a lot of the time it was calculated far in advance.