I toyed with an approach once that separated animations from game state updates. Every player action could cause a cascade of updates, which would all be resol

I toyed with an approach once that separated animations from game state updates. Every player action could cause a cascade of updates, which would all be resolved “instantly” to the point no more cascaded updates were left to be processed. While this is happening, any update that includes an animation pushes that to an “animation stack”, then the animations are played back one by one to show the player what happened. In this animation state most input in disabled and the game is effectively on hold until the animations complete (or are skipped by the player). The “animations” were basically commands that the Model used to update the View, just with the option to apply them one by one over time. So the model is always up to date as fast as possible as possible, and the view just lags behind a bit and catches up.