I feel like a lot of board games are traditional games. E.g. there is an explicit win condition and lose condition.
But what if you just want something a bit more relaxed? Like building a world or civilization with some friends?
I feel like tabletop RP games have this down, although the majority are character based. Like, let's have a story about our OC's going on an adventure.
But what if I want something more rigid, like 7 Wonders, but with a more relaxing goal (e.g. have fun, have a cute civilization, have over 1million people without anyone in poverty, etc.).

Like some of my favourite game sessions in Civilization 4 is not playing to win (although I definitely know how to win), but it's was the roleplaying.
There is of course an explicit win condition, but winning isn't always the most fun. I suppose an explicit win condition could guide a player towards certain paths (e.g. conquest victory drives players to be aggressive warmongers like certain irl historical states). But what if none of my roleplaying goals align with a victory condition. If anything, the malleability of board game allows a lot more flexibility in this realm.

@TipsyTentacle When I played Civ 5 it pretty much always went like this:
I would focus on something like science or culture or just making citizens happy, but eventually someone would try to invade me, so I'd switch all of my cities to production, make an ungodly number of ships and military units, steamroll whoever just tried to invade, and then just go back to chilling and trying to make their citizens happy too.