What would it take to develop the meta skill of becoming good at board games? Has anyone tried this?

i have some friends who are (annoyingly) very good at this and what they do is pattern match any new game into the genre (like "german style") then they already have a toolbox of approaches that work in that specific type of board game

Yeah I think I’m near that point - worker placement, deck building, engine building, etc.. but somehow can’t convert that into figuring out how to actually win the game haha