[allturtles]

I think the lesson to learn from this is that different people are different?

While most people are repulsed by the complexity of extremely heavy games, others will luxriate in them. There is a whole 40-year-old community built around Advanced Squad Leader, a game with rules so complicated that there's a 135-page tutorial to teach the Starter Kit version of the game [0]!

The board game industry creates many very mainstream games with wide popularity, and many games across a large number of niches that each have their own narrow appeal.

I think this is great!

[0]: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/40482/jay-richardsons-asl...

[almostdeadguy]

I think there has been a shift in what kinds of games get published that privileges a slim set of experiences that are possible in board games and risks narrowing the range of what people think a board game is capable of. I agree there’s a vast range of different player types and psychological rewards people get out of playing games, but I personally find myself increasingly uninterested in new game designs, because the designs I like are harder to sell to impulsive buyers, players who don’t want to play a game repeatedly, or players who will have difficulty playing games again if anyone has a bad time (which I totally get! But it means designs that might prompt negative emotions are not sought by many publishers). I wouldn’t even say “heavy” games are the problem (I disagree with OP about high time commitment being a problem, there’s many games like that that deliver commensurate value to me).

[pkal]

The article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim. The premise

> They provide interesting puzzles to solve, and you work in a technical role - some part of your brain must find that appealing

is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.

[allturtles]

> he article doesn't sell it that way. "You should play modern board games if ..." would be a different claim.

Indeed, but neither does the article try say you should play games with "20 different piles of crap to set up at the start, and then a dozen different pieces of state to track in your little corner of the table during what will inevitably be a complicated five-phased turn", which is the comment I was responding to. It doesn't actually recommend any specific games at all, but those types of games are really a small subset of modern board games (of the games mentioned in the article, I think only Twilight Imperium and maybe Labyrinth would qualify).

> is something I do not relate to at all. Almost every time I am in a situation where I play board games, my intuition is to think about how you solve the game so that one side always wins or break the rules so that everyone loses, but almost never am I actually interested in investing the energy to get invested in the game itself, let alone the rules.

Okay, great, you have learned that board games aren't for you. This article is aimed at people who haven't tried modern board games: "I chose to introduce them to the world of modern board games in an attempt to encourage some of them to give them a go."