The Imaginary Fantasy Game is the one in which we try to justify plays already placed on the basis of what would have happened had we made any other play at all:
"The ice cream would have all melted and been lost if I hadn't bought that new $1,000 freezer for the garage."
"The Japanese in 1945 would have continued fighting street by street and block by block if we hadn't incinerated 150,000 women, girls, boys, and men with nuclear weapons."
"The rain would have held off if I hadn't washed the car."
In the Imaginary Fantasy Game neither the counterfactual premise nor the fantasized consequence ever happen. If I DID splurge on an additional freezer which WAS installed in the garage and which DID keep the ice cream cold then the ice cream never did melt and spoil, and we have subsequently eaten all of if up, sold the house with its attached garage, and moved to Cleveland.
Or possibly not.
On the other hand, if I had bought the new freezer and an ice storm occurred the next day and the power lines snapped and the power was out for 2 weeks and the ice cream melted and was lost ... or if I bought the freezer but forgot to plug is it ... or if our neighbors' oldest daughter gave birth to twins and the whole neighborhood celbrated with ice cream and cake the day before the freezer arrived ... or if any other counter-factual happenstance is imagined instead of the specific one presented, then the fantasized outcome might seem to be more or less plausible but neither more nor less actual.
What is the probability that something which never happened would have led to something else which also never happened?
The problem, it seems to me, comes when such imponderables are adduced as arguments to justify past choices and the imagination of that non-existent history is then laid out as the example for modelling our future action. What weight should a phantasm carry when an actual situation impends? None at all, I think.
Every such scenario is unsupported by the facts or perhaps is entirely impossible but still the Imaginary Fantasy Game may be a fun game to play. The players surely ought to bear in mind they are not playing with actual reality. They are not playing with objective probabilities.
Often they are not playing with a full deck either.
"You would have lived happier, healthier, and longer if you had only read and heeded my advice sooner."