Complexity is one of those words the board game hobby uses constantly. We talk about heavy games and light games, about weight ratings and learning curves, about games that are "too complex" or "surprisingly approachable" — all without much agreement on what we actually mean. This post is an attempt to unpack that, from the designer's workbench to the player's side of the table.
Complexity as a design tool
Before we get into the weeds, it's worth acknowledging what complexity is actually for. At its best, it's a tool. Complexity creates depth — the sense that a game rewards continued attention, that there are layers to uncover over multiple plays. It drives replayability, because systems interact in non-obvious ways and produce different outcomes each time. And used right, it creates a satisfying feeling of achievement, a sense that the game respects the time and effort the players put into it.Used poorly, though, complexity becomes something else: obfuscation. A way a game hides its thinness behind elaborate rules. A system that feels intricate without ever feeling meaningful. This distinction — complexity in service of the game versus complexity as a substitute for depth — is at the heart of almost every design conversation worth having.
Complexity as an allowance: the budget
The most useful framing of complexity comes from Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, who introduced the idea of a complexity budget. The premise is straightforward: every game has a finite amount of complexity players will absorb before it stops adding value and starts overwhelming them. Spend the budget well and you get a richer game; spend it poorly and you get a cluttered one.Garfield's insight is that complexity is a cost, not a virtue. Any time you consider adding a rule, you should be asking whether it's worth it in play value — not whether it's interesting in the abstract, but whether it earns its place at the table. Richard Baker, drawing on his work at Wizards of the Coast, sharpens this further: a system that's highly complex but not very important is a misuse of resources; the budget has to be spent where it matters.
This maps directly onto the player experience. Every additional rule, exception, and moving part imposes cognitive load — mental energy that players can't spend on actually playing the game. The budget isn't just a design metaphor; it's a real constraint on how much people can hold in their heads at once.
Complexity as the cost of innovation
There's a second, subtler dimension to this: the relationship between complexity and novelty. Designer David Welch, in a piece for Medium, draws on psychology's Wundt curve to argue that novelty and complexity are effectively using the same budget. Both impose cognitive load, and both follow the same arc — up to a point they increase engagement, beyond that they overwhelm it. The ideal is something Welch calls "complex familiar": deep enough to reward, familiar enough to absorb.This is why innovation in board games typically comes in bite-size pieces. Entirely novel systems tax players' ability to pattern-match, to lean on what they already know. There's a reason designers build on established mechanics — worker placement, deck building, area control — before subverting them. Familiarity extends the complexity allowance. When a designer spends it all on novelty, players pay the price in cognitive overhead.
Garfield makes a related point: every time you innovate, you cost your players, because they have to unlearn something or relearn it. In other words, innovation isn't free even when it works.
Complexity as a ratio to optimize
Depth and complexity often get used interchangeably, as a reliable proxy for one another. Daniel Piechnick, designer of Radlands, has a very different take: they are not the same thing, they don't scale together, and conflating them is one of the most persistent mistakes in game design.His concept of the Depth:Complexity ratio is clarifying: depth is how strategic and interesting a game is; complexity is the cognitive cost of engaging with it. The ratio between them is what actually determines whether a heavy game feels satisfying or exhausting — and the key insight is that this ratio is non-linear. As complexity increases, the depth required to justify it doesn't increase proportionally: it grows exponentially. A game that's twice as complex as another needs to be dramatically more rewarding to break even on the player's investment.
From a player standpoint, this is why the feeling of a game that "could have been ten rules lighter without losing anything" is so common. From a designer standpoint, that’s why systems get cut in testing — they just weren't dramatically better than the simpler version of the same idea. When complexity accumulates system by system, the total cost ends up exceeding what the game delivers.
To Piechnick, strategic depth should come from the interaction of many simple parts, not from the internal complexity of a few complex parts. It's an unusual design goal — not just to add interesting things, but to find the simplest possible set of things that produces interesting interactions. He sums it up neatly: coming up with complex things is easy, coming up with simple things is hard.
Complexity as a cost of entry: the setup problem
There's a dimension of complexity that deserves its own section, yet designers rarely address it directly: setup.Setup is a vector of complexity in its own right. It's the first thing players encounter, it shapes their first impression of the game, and — crucially — it's a design choice with design consequences. The question worth asking is whether a game's setup cost is load-bearing or purely frictional.
Load-bearing setup teaches you something. It creates asymmetry. It builds anticipation. Endeavor: Deep Sea is a strong example: the setup is sparse almost to the point of feeling incomplete, and that sparseness is the point. The ocean floor is mostly blank because revealing it is the game. The setup communicates the design before a single turn is taken.
Frictional setup is pure overhead. It's the 30 minutes before the real game starts, the sorting and shuffling and placing that doesn't inform the experience — it just precedes it. Andromeda's Edge sits firmly on that end of the spectrum: it asks a lot upfront before giving anything in return.
This leads to a different kind of metric: the setup-to-playtime ratio. A game that takes 30 minutes to set up and runs 3 hours is a different proposition than one with the same setup time that runs just 60 minutes. In that framing, the setup isn't just overhead — it's part of the total complexity cost the player pays, but upfront instead of in-game, and it should be treated that way.
Garfield, Baker or Piechnick don't address this directly but the logic follows from their frameworks: if complexity is a budget, setup is a line item in that budget. And if the depth:complexity ratio needs optimizing, setup complexity that doesn't generate proportional play value is exactly the kind of waste the ratio is meant to expose.
Complexity as a player metric: the limits of BGG weight
Once you arrive at the table, complexity manifests differently than designers experience it. Players feel it as learning curve, decision density, and pace. BoardGameGeek's weight rating attempts to capture this — it's the most widely used complexity metric in the hobby — but it conflates at least three different things: how hard a game is to learn, how hard it is to play well, and how long it takes.A long-running community thread on BGG has made this argument for years, proposing that weight be separated into rules complexity and gameplay depth at minimum. The frustration is real: a game with a steep learning curve and a shallow skill ceiling has the same "weight" as one that's easy to learn and hard to master. They are not the same experience.
And setup complexity doesn't appear in the BGG weight rating at all. A game's weight score is a snapshot of its rules and decisions, not of the full cost a player pays to get there. Game length gestures at this, but imperfectly: it captures time at the table, not time before it (setup) or after (teardown). As a player metric, weight is useful but incomplete. It tries to measure the game; it doesn't fully measure the experience of playing it.
Complexity is integral to board games. It's a resource — finite, costly, and worth spending carefully. The best games earn their complexity by converting it into depth, into replayability, into the kind of decisions that make a session worth discussing afterward. The worst games spend it on systems that feel intricate without feeling meaningful.
The setup question feels like the least-examined part of this. Designers who agonize over every rule exception and every card effect don't always ask whether the time spent sorting through components before the game is a fair price for what follows. Players feel it acutely — it's one of the most common reasons good games sit on shelves. And our current vocabulary for measuring game complexity doesn't have a clean way to name it. That gap would be worth closing.
The setup question feels like the least-examined part of this. Designers who agonize over every rule exception and every card effect don't always ask whether the time spent sorting through components before the game is a fair price for what follows. Players feel it acutely — it's one of the most common reasons good games sit on shelves. And our current vocabulary for measuring game complexity doesn't have a clean way to name it. That gap would be worth closing.
Cheers,
Ady
Ady
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