Interestingly, there are some boardgames that do a great job of ludonarrative harmony. This is tangential, because it’s a totally different medium, obviously.

There is a lovely game called Oceans. The game is themed as an aquatic ecosystem. And what’s awesome is that the game mechanics are all about players identifying unexploited niches created by the game or other players and then exploiting those resource pools. The better they do at that, the more likely it is they generate surplus resources and that can be a niche exploited by others. Oceans does a better job of naturally simulating ecosystems than most simple models I’ve come across in textbooks.

Boardgames that have strong harmony between narrative(setting) and game mechanics just feel great to play.