boardgames

None of these games are even remotely close to the most complex board games.

The campaign for North Africa is by far the most complex game, being as it was created specifically for that purpose and nobody has ever managed to even complete a singlr game of it.

Behind that are dozens and dozens of games in the 18xx genre, which is a giant cluster of rules from bespoke stock market operation details to complex route profit calculations to natural disasters and a million other things. Games can often take 8+ hours.

After that you have the entire hex and chit wargame genre, which will have tons of complex rules for combat, tables for looking up results, a million classes of units, and usually many rules that are included not even for game design purposes, but just for historical accuracy.

This is an awful click bait article just designed to get views for a more casual audience with popular well known games.

I’ve played gloomhaven, spirit island, and mage knight. Mage knight is the only one I found overwhelming and sold it after a few plays. I don’t have any interest in trying Oath or Twilight Imperium but the rest I’d like to play one day. I feel like this list is “popular complex games”, I’m sure there are larger rule sets out there.

I've played Gloomhaven and Frosthaven (not on the list, but a bit more complex) and they are brilliant games. They take a long while to set up so we basically went out and bought a separate table - now we have a Frosthaven table.

I know there are some computer renditions of Gloomhaven, but honestly, it doesn't have the same appeal to me. Part of the fun is painting the minis and actually touching the game.

How does Dune's complexity rank anywhere near any of the other games listed? Feels like the author was just cherry picking popular games for the list

The most complex game I've ever played was the original Android game from FFG. That game is some kind of crazy fever dream. It's a cyberpunk mystery inspired by Blade Runner. It has 8 different playable characters, each with their own unique rules. I only managed to get it to the table once and we weren't even able to finish it. It was definitely a very unique and interesting board game experience.

ASL would like a word.

I've played most of these but nothing comes even close to Lisboa!

I own most of the titles in the list, and they definitely forgotten about Imperial Steam.

I have played WotR 2nd edition a lot. And after literally more than 100 plays I have to agree with the list that it is one of the most complex games ever. Not necessarily the core mechanics/rules, but there are really a lot of special/edge cases that you have to keep in mind. Especially when adding expansions. Dune is also really complex, I agree, but it's also an outstanding and epic game.

I tried playing Human Punishment the Beginning and it just wouldn't click in my head. That's probably the most complex game I have (or the game with the shittiest rulebook).

@dpunked I playtested Oath, but I've never played the final ruleset (we did all of our contributions at the beginning before covid started). It is complex though, and requires people to really sign on for that experience so I agree with that inclusion.

I've played a snot load of Terra Mystica and I've heard that Gaia Project is effectively "Space TM w/ a variable setup." I've also played a lot of FCM, the expansion really helps the game, if for nothing else than the new milestones. I would have nominated Indonesia over FCM, but that's purely personal.

Even if you exclude wargames though (so ASL, Here I Stand, etc which all have monster level rulebooks), the one omission I'm surprised about is that John Company 2nd didn't make it. That's like 45 pages but its doable. It's not like it's out of print or just unavailable either. Might not be able to walk into a generic hobby game store and pick it up, but that's a bending of the criteria IMHO (even if the article is intended to be a list of complex stuff that would be something you graduate to, which excludes High Frontier for example). Overall not a bad list.

PS: High Frontier should be a computer game for the rules enforcement standpoint and I'll die on that hill. Also, while the rules are only 1 sheet of paper, Southern Pacific from Winsome should be a computer game for the automated accounting alone...

This is a pretty good list that balances how fun the game is with complexity and popularity. I've played all the games except Star Wars and War of the Ring, and I liked them all (except maybe Gaia Project, because I like Terra Mystica more).

Of course there are a lot of war games that are more complicated, but I can't think of any war game that's more complicated, more popular, and more fun than the games on the list.

I don't know the author of the article, so, for all I know, they might have just searched for the top complicated games on BGG, but the result is a pretty good list.