[brimble]

In defense of complex games:

My favorite part of a game is discovering it.

I'm in it for the easy "a-ha!" moments and as soon as it starts to look like a particular game is going to have to become a whole thing for me to keep getting those from it (by moving on to "competitive" levels of play, memorized strategies, et c.), I'm done with it.

Complex games often throw enough variables in the mix to keep things interesting—to me, anyway—longer than simpler games. A lot of times all that's just smoke and mirrors, but it's effective smoke and mirrors.

> Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas.

Right—which is precisely what I don't want. If I need to start deliberately practicing or reading books or something to get better at a game, that's a job, and I don't want it.

[EDIT] Just to be extra clear, I'm not saying this is "the right" reason to prefer a certain kind of game, and I'm very aware that lots of people want the exact opposite: a game they can play for life, taking it very seriously, and never stop improving because the depth of play is practically unlimited. That's just not why I play board/card games.

[secabeen]

> My favorite part of a game is discovering it.

Interesting. I feel similarly, but I would place my joy in exploration rather than discovery. I'm not interested in discovery, where I take only the rules/components and try to discover the best plays and strategies. I don't have the time or the inclination to endure the dead ends and plays of failed strategies. (Some people love that, they want to find the best plays themselves; not me.) I want a map, a guide, then my joy is in taking that map, and applying it to the game state I'm in.

Thus, I love reading strategy guides, and following instructions. I build Lego sets frequently, but I never build My Own Creations. For me, the fun is in execution. Thus, complex games give me more paths to walk, more levers to pull. Simple games get boring, and often end up in the deeply iterative analysis that you see in Chess/Go: if I do this, then they'll do that, so then I need to do this, etc. etc. etc. Not fun at all for me, and why I largely avoid most abstracts too.

In a related note, this is also why I ended up in SysAdmin, not Dev; I want to implement the awesome programs that other people make; I have little interest in creating something new myself.

[brimble]

Yeah, my joy from games comes in figuring things out, not in recognizing and applying something I picked up elsewhere. Now, you can keep figuring things out even in very deep games, but it requires ongoing study and effort and meanwhile you'll be losing to people who've memorized a whole bunch and aren't (against you, at least) having to figure out anything new at all—rather than do all that, I just play a different game when things get to that point :-)

I play games to feel "clever", not to feel "smart" (for values of smart like "ah ha, I happen to have read and memorized a counter to this opening that you don't know, so now I will crush you"), and continuing to feel clever with a deep game requires more commitment than I care to give to them, personally.

... this is probably a holdover from painfully-typical bad attitudes developed during a "gifted" childhood. It took me a very long time to stop seeing—if only subconsciously—studying as something adjacent to cheating, like "yeah you got an A but you had to study, so, that hardly counts". Looks very dumb written down like that, but it was the rut my brain got stuck in for a long while without my even realizing it. However, in the specific case of games, I haven't bothered to try to work past it, because I'm still having a good time with my approach, and I really do not want to get serious enough about any game that studying & focused, non-play practice becomes necessary to keep getting "I did a clever thing" dopamine hits.

Weirdly, this "preparation is akin to cheating, and at the very least a sign that you have already failed" attitude didn't transfer over into sports, where I was totally fine with (and loved, actually) practice and drilling.

> Thus, I love reading strategy guides, and following instructions. I build Lego sets frequently, but I never build My Own Creations.

Oddly enough, though, that's me too. I had lots of Legos as a kid but rarely built my own thing, usually building from instructions, and then if I did anything else it was typically combining, re-theming, or adding on to, instruction-built sets.

[2muchcoffeeman]

>Interesting. I feel similarly, but I would place my joy in exploration rather than discovery. I'm not interested in discovery, where I take only the rules/components and try to discover the best plays and strategies. I don't have the time or the inclination to endure the dead ends and plays of failed strategies. (Some people love that, they want to find the best plays themselves; not me.) I want a map, a guide, then my joy is in taking that map, and applying it to the game state I'm in.

I feel this really depends on who you are playing with. If everyone is new, I don't mind exploring the strategies. You can learn something and still get a good game. If one person knows the game fairly well, it's sometimes good to play half a game with open hands (if there is secret info) while the one person teaches and gives hints. It's definitely no fun if one person knows a lot of the game and trounces everyone.

[svachalek]

This is actually a nice part about board games being more niche than video games. Pick just about any game on a computer and console and it’s been analyzed to death, every secret and strategy found and quantified.

Many moderately popular board games don’t have anything even approaching this level of analysis, some have quite broken combinations and strategies that have never been published anywhere, so even if you’re not the first to figure it out you can feel like you are. I really enjoy that feeling, that your discoveries have not been trampled over and graffitied long before you got there.

[scrollaway]

Thanks for sharing your view! It's interesting you say your favorite part is the discovery. For me, my first play-through of a game, if it's a decent game I always end a little sad and annoyed that the next playthroughs will probably be a lot better now that "the group knows the rule"... simply because we likely won't play it again, so it feels like I missed out.