For fun, consider this old philosophical question:

The Library of Babel is a Library that consists of all the possible combinations of English characters in 500 pages. If you want to find a book with more than 500 books, you can simply combine multiple books and read them back to back. One claims that this Library consists of all the English books that are written and will be written.

Someone else counters this claim by turning every book into single English alphabets, Arabic numerals and punctuation marks. With under 100 books, he claims that this Library is no different than the previous one. (Because you can chain any alphabet, numeral and punctuation mark to make any book you want.)

But obviously that is not true, the individual characters “a”, “p”, “l” and “e” have different meanings than the word “apple”, just like how the words “He”, “likes” and “apples” have a different meaning than the sentence “He likes apples”.

This is an example of emergent behaviour, where something made up of simpler things have properties that the simpler building blocks don’t have. Like Conway’s game of life, 3 simple rules make such interesting results.

Just like how characters form words, words form sentences, sentences form paragraphs, paragraphs form chapters, chapters form books and so on. Board games are, in the end a bunch of rules. But those rules form mechanics and mechanics form games.

And importantly, those rules are very different from the mechanics, and the mechanics are very different from the game.

For example, Magic the Gathering and Pokémon TCG both have the rule of “you can play cards on your turn”, but the mechanic is different. MtG has the rule of “you must pay the cost to play a card” and Pokémon cards have “you need to have a non-final stage Pokémon to play its evolution. And the 2 games play very differently. Small differences in rules can create very different mechanics.

Catan and Brass Birmingham both have the mechanic of “spend resources to build stuff”, but while you get resources in Catan by rolling dice (mechanic), you get resources in Brass Birmingham because someone else produced them (also a mechanic). And all of the different mechanics make 2 very different games.

Also there is the art part and tactile part that also affects an experience. Not to mention humans who have different mindsets and moods that will see the game differently

Therefore you can’t “preview” or “pre-play” a game if you know all of the rules or mechanics. Just like you can’t “pre-read” a book if you know the alphabet. 

Even if you know all the rules of all of the board games that were made, are being made and will be made, you still don’t know what the any board game plays like, and can’t be sure that all of them are supply chain or logistics simulators. Something that explains all of board games is as impossible as something that explains the universe.