[mmcdermott]

A board game can choose to engage in a multitude of different ways. A well-crafted simple game can offer as deep a problem space as a more complex one, but strategy is only one form of engagement.

A lot of rules-heavy games like Twilight Imperium, Arkham Horror or Dune use rules to simulate a setting as much as to create a strategic problem space. If you removed rules from these games, you can make them easier to play and possibly keep the same raw depth, but you would lose the setting they were trying to build. I remember explaining to someone recently that almost every rule in the Dune board game was a reference to something in the books.