Well crafted board game rules are about systems that interact with each other. You don't have to be rules heavy to have an interesting game, but the interactions between systems needs to be there to be interesting beyond some number of consecutive plays. A lot of lighter games will quickly feel samey if your players are half way competent. You'll simply pickup the patterns, game state and work out the value of each move quite quickly.
Ahaha tell that to a writer! Perhaps others are more strategic with their use of words than you are :)
Larger board games are very often mere laundry lists of systems that can be found in many other board games. The longer games tend to have systems that MAKE the game long, rather than cause people to develop a strategy. One example is some mechanics forcing synchronous turns, or even worse, preventing you from preparing your turn in advance. Which gets even worse as the players have to iterate over more and more items in the turn checklist every time.
I have a strong but obviously opinionated dislike for these mechanics, so YMMV. Still, these longer games very often feel "same-y" to everything else because they don't truly bring original interactions between players. Playthroughs don't even always vary because as you re-play the game, a meta quickly develops and settles on a tiny portion of the offered gameplay.
More systems is also more opportunities to get the balance wrong. To fuck up. Which, if you don't tweak the rules preemptively, means the meta settling on an ever smaller part of the game.
Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas. Yes, they're not necessarily as varied in "number of things that can happen", but honestly, sometimes the gameplay elements I see in larger games are so incoherent you might as well play different games concurrently, and turn the whole thing into XKCD/2488.
To be clear, my point is not that shorter/simpler games are always better. It's that "longer doesn't always mean better, and more often than not means worse".
The same does apply to books. You can more reliably draw meaning from an extremely-well-crafted fable, than from a massive heptalogy. Your experience will be wildly different, and there are unique attributes for which you need length in order to achieve. But a rock solid series of books is a much rarer breed than an interesting fable. And a much larger waste of time if you don't end up drawing something from it.
And indeed the same applies to everything else. Assembly-line AAA video games that stuff themselves in a checklist of content to justify their price are often far worse in depth than shorter, sweeter ones (Portal, Hades, whatever). More seasons of Dexter and Game of Thrones ruined extremely deep and interesting works, whereas Breaking Bad crafted a truly unique experience by finishing exactly where the author intended it to. And your next lunch won't be improved by emptying your spice rack on it and overwhelming your palate, but by finding the exact mixes of ingredients that will result in a great meal.
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.
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.
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.
But if you're not a person who loves intricate, shallow pastiche, you're probably not a person who buys 1-3 retail games every month. Which means that the market shouldn't cater to us. I do wish that BGG still did sometimes, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that BGGs visitorship is shrinking.
I've almost dead-stopped visiting of late, but 1) picking the right selection of geekbuddies can narrow BGG into something that's still useful to find good games and some good conversation about games, and 2) the geekmarket can help you find those games when they've been out of print for a long time.
Here's a less commercial recommendation that gets you a warehouse full of games for almost nothing: New Tactical Games With Dice and Cards, and Dice Games Properly Explained by Reiner Knizia.
Includes dozens of games with variants that thoughtfully explore the spaces of those games, and encourages you to play around with them to discover new challenges. I wish Wolfgang Kramer would start giving away his secrets like Knizia always has.
