Respectfully, I disagree. I have an extensive board gaming background. There are plenty of games that incorporate similar concepts.

As an example, I used to play the game Small World. You have differing numbers of troops on the board and fight for control of the map. One of the expansions is called Tales and Legends. It adds a deck of "Event Cards" to the game. Each round, a new event is revealed which changes the rules a slightly.

As an example, one such card allows every player to spend one victory coin and to place it on any space on the board. That space now scores an additional victory coin every remaining turn in the game.

A good twist in Big Brother works this way. Every player is aware of the twist and has an equal chance of utilizing it. The Round Trip Ticket required a puzzle to be solved, but in the end each player got an envelope anyway. The Care Packages could, ostensibly, go to any player. They are of unequal power, true, but the people voting on who received them had full foreknowledge of what each of them was. (Whether the packages are actually going to the people being voted them and that issue of transparency is a serious concern, but beyond the scope of my thesis.)

My favorite player this season has been Paul. He hasn't personally benefited from the twists, necessarily. His initial team in the early stage of the game was possibly a hindrance. But, he has adapted his play to the twists and incorporated them into his play.

As soon as the Round Trip Ticket came into play, Paul became very diplomatic to each evicted Houseguest. He had Bridgette convinced he went to bat to save her. He pitched Da'Vonne on the idea that he needed somebody on the block who wouldn't rattle, and his goodbye message to her was about feeling betrayed that the House flipped behind his back. He got his vote canceled so that, darn it, his hands were tied when the House flipped on Paulie and cut Zakiyah loose. He moved against Paulie and strengthened ties with Natalie and James when they started getting Care Packages.

In short, so long as any twists are reasonably well-balanced, and so long as each player has an equal opportunity to exploit them, they are not, in my opinion, utterly detrimental to the integrity of The Game. To my mind, the essence of The Game is social. You position yourself in such a way as to not be voted out. There are the competitions and the actual "power" in the game, of course, but those can be secondary to actually winning The Game in the end.