Some of the more convoluted games have too many rules for me- I remember feeling more than once that a game was just a complex prop-filled game of cheat where other players made up ways of winning that they hadn't told me.
(Or it might have been that my sister was a bitch).
I think it depends a lot – a fair number of rules in games are actually clarifications or exceptions, often retroactively put in in later editions to deal with ‘rules lawyers’ who try and exploit ill or loosely defined game mechanics.
On one level it’s great that these people exist because clearer rules improve games but in general they are dreadful people to play with as they ignore the spirit and intention of the game. Effectively people like this are why most committees are dreadful – they get populated by people who like being on committees.
But there are people who just lie or make things up. I think the technical name for these is ‘older siblings’.
I tend to go for the extremes – games with few, simple rules that are quick and fun to play or complex monsters that are effectively war simulations and require detailed lengthy rules in order for you to be able to explore various historical options.
As I said upthread, these sorts of simulations are exactly what computers are good at, in fact pretty much what computers were designed for* but much of big the money in game development tends towards the blammykilly first-person shooters at the moment, rather than game AI (or at least the sort of AI I want for wargames) - gaming has gone through several cycles, which kind of seem to be repeating themselves and mirror the bloated nature of the film industry with over dependence on repeat titles from big name series and reboots.
It’s being argued that the industry is on the verge of a crash because of this – certainly many of the big studios (film or game) are potentially only one big failure away from bankruptcy.
Board games suffered to an extent over the last few decades from the mass appeal of computer games but there are a lot of good games coming through now, particularly from the German market and I think there’s at least a small rally in popularity, if not a resurgence.
*Computers are great for working out stuff like complex supply rules, ‘fog of war’, line of sight and other such stuff that’s tedious record keeping for a human player.
