[slightwinder]

This is not limited to board games. You have the same with tabletop, video games and basically everything. There is always that special crowd that enjoys long, complex stuff. How many people here are proud of their hundreds and thousands of hours game time in something like factorio, civilization, rimworld, in the year-long work they invested in some obscure software-project or something physical they had built?

Some people like the kick of fast success, others like the long-running, slow burning joy. People are just different.

[moate]

If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better we would only see more and more complex games. We don't, and major hobby game producers are constantly putting out low complexity games because, spoilers, some people are playing games to goof around and have fun!

It's just like any other form of entertainment. Think about genre movies. What makes more money, the latest giant Marvel/Disney zip bang popcorn flick, or the deep and complex Oscar Favorite? Why is the Marvel movie making all the money but not winning Best Picture? Why don't complex, difficult stories consistently pull in Marvel level money?

Value is always in the eye of the end user/consumer.

[slightwinder]

> If it were true that complex games were inherently, objectively better

What are you talking about? Complexity is more enjoyable for some, not all people. And the joy a game brings is subjective, not objective. You can't measure game-quality by saying this has x rules more than other games, so it's objectively better.

> we would only see more and more complex games. We don't

Not true. There is a rise of complex games in the last decades, especially in digital games. But it's still a relative small market, so the number of casual games are rising significant faster, distorting the impression on surface. And there are also several constraints which influence this rise. You can't measure this by simple binary logic.

> What makes more money

Money is an irrelevant metric for this.

And we are long over the point were complexity in moving pictures was a thing of movies. It's now all in series, and the complex sh*t is on netflix, prime video, etc.

[moate]

I was agreeing with you.