Game feels fundamentally broken

CL 401 here. I’ve been enjoying the game to a degree, and I like that it doesn’t use some scummy pay to win type setup, but I feel like the core gameplay mechanics are broken—or to put it more kindly, they rely heavily on luck.

I guess the main issue is the locations and the fact that they aren’t all revealed until Turn 3. I end up in a lot of situations where the deck I’m using doesn’t mesh well at all with one or more locations or situations where I put cards on an unrevealed location only to find out that there was some negative effect tied to it.

I would be OK if the game were strictly player versus player. Two decks that have different attributes, one will win. But the game is more player versus player versus environment.

All of this leads to many cases where there’s no way to win and you’re forced to retreat. So the goal of the game is to win, but the mechanics dictate that you have to retreat quite often because there’s no way to win.

I haven’t played a ton of deck building games. Is this normal? Being forced to retreat so often, being in situations where it’s impossible to win, those seem antithetical to the goal of winning…