[Xortl]

My personal favorites are those games with simple rules and deep strategic depth and I play them regularly online or with other people who love those games in particular. I am also in two general boardgame groups and they both much prefer the complex rule games, I'll give my best guesses as to why.

1) They like the worlds of the complex games, building societies or facing some major broad challenge. 2) Elaborate games are so open-ended and hard to analyze forward strategically that they are much more balanced across people of different skill levels. People who would have no hope of a competitive, fun game of chess will have a more interesting game of Brass: Birmingham or Eclipse. 3) The games can be played with a lot of players and involve a lot more human-human negotiation and discussion, rather than pure strategy.

I love the simple but incredibly complex games myself, but I understand why they're not everyone's cup of tea.

[Jensson]

Well, simple games are like simple procedural generation, just like how procedurally generated items all feel the same very soon every game of chess feels the same. To some they don't care about that they just want to play the same puzzle over and over, each chess board state is like another sudoku, to others they just want to consume more content designed by humans and then you need more elaborate rules.

To the ones who want human designed things chess is like this vast procedurally generated forest that just has trees everywhere with different branch layouts, so you have to climb them in different ways.