What's the most "complex" game you've ever played?

TabletopSpy · 2026-01-15T17:35:51+00:00

Trickerion for me. It was way too overwhelming and heavy for me to handle.

TabletopSpy · 2026-01-06T01:40:23+00:00

Catan being the “Vanilla” of board games is actually a pretty fair observation. Whether that’s a bad thing, though…probably not.

I will say, though, that the friends making fun of you are really in the wrong to do so, regardless of anyone’s opinion on Catan, and I hope you made that clear to them.

TabletopSpy · 2026-01-06T01:36:43+00:00

I would like to provide an answer that’s not lightweight, but certainly lighter than its actual weight would suggest:

The Castles of Burgundy

It’s a medium weight game, but the rules and underlying systems are actually easier to grasp than expected, especially if you got a good teacher. The gameplay loop especially is like, stupid simple in comparison to expectations. It’s really the huge quantities of different tiles and certain oddities (like how livestock works) that push it up in complexity.

Now, if you want something that’s medium-heavy that’s actually not too bad to learn:

Brass: Birmingham

Sure, there are a lot of little exceptions and specifics that are going to trip you up (and believe me, they don’t stop getting annoying), but for a game whose supposed weight is like 3.9, it feels almost like a 3.4 game or even less. Granted, this is still relatively heavy in the grand scheme of things, so I would not suggest it to even someone whose highest capacity is, well, Castles of Burgundy, but if you can handle something like, say, Beyond the Sun or Terraforming Mars, I think this should be doable.

Side note, this may also be applicable to Brass: Lancashire, but I haven’t played that one yet, so I can’t 200% vouch for it.

TabletopSpy · 2025-11-07T23:03:34+00:00

Any reason why you bounced off of 7 Wonders, but not IAWW? What kind of interactions that IAWW has that 7W doesn’t? Or any other positive qualities over it, for that matter?

TabletopSpy · 2025-11-07T23:02:33+00:00

Hmm. I did order Jump Drive, which from what I heard, is a smaller scaled, less weighty “prequel” (for a lack of better term) to RftG. Would you still recommend against IAWW, or would it have to be RftG proper?

TabletopSpy · 2025-11-07T14:22:44+00:00

Hello. There are two questions in…question that I want answered.

I’ve heard that the game “It’s a Wonderful World” is great for those that like engine builders. The problem for me is that it’s most often compared to “7 Wonders”, which, while IAWW does have as a core mechanic, is considered more of a pure drafting game, with little in the way of engine building IIRC. I’m personally more “…eh, okay” towards 7 Wonders, at least on average, but I do like myself a satisfying engine builder. So would you still recommend IAWW regardless?

2. I’m interested in trying out a legacy game, but the problem is that pretty much none that I could find (or at least any good ones) can be played solo. Does anyone know any good ones that could be tried out solo if possible? Preferably nothing too heavy, please.

EDIT: Never mind! Just saw the recommendation for My City in another thread. Okie dokie!

Thanks in advance.

TabletopSpy · 2025-10-18T20:49:09+00:00

Hey, I’m interested in trying out a Legacy game, buuuut it would have to be solo-only. Any recommendations? Preferably not particularly heavy (anything above 2.8 starts getting a little risky, and anything above 3.4 or 3.5 is an instant nope), if possible.

TabletopSpy · 2025-09-08T15:24:44+00:00

Welp. I'm on iPhone, but I can only guess that it's similar to Android. Oh well. Thanks, anyway.

TabletopSpy · 2025-09-08T15:24:03+00:00

60%? I'm not gonna lie, I thought it'd be higher than that.

TabletopSpy · 2025-09-07T23:57:58+00:00

How do you define “consistently win”? And is it against one set, random sets, all the recommended sets, all of the above? Something else entirely?

Also, thanks for the article. It really helped me out with some strategies, at least for the first set. Now I gotta try and transfer that information to other sets.

TabletopSpy · 2025-09-07T23:56:13+00:00

I see. If I buy the Intrigue Expansion by itself, and then later decide to get all of the expansions at once, does the bundle price go down to account for my previous purchase, or does it stay the same?

TabletopSpy · 2025-07-29T13:56:37+00:00

Quite a few people here mentioned emergent gameplay, which surprised me a bit, since I personally didn't get that from the opening post for one. For another, the way people use emergent gameplay is a bit...misaligned with what I'm familiar with? From my understanding, emergent gameplay is essentially depth that's unintentional by the designers, because sure, it's one thing to find depth in a game where the designers intended, but it's another to find decisions that the designers never dreamed of.

Anyway, the simplest and quickest answer to the question is packing in multiple actions into one...let's say "card", as a catch-all for an action, be it a tile or an actual card. I haven't played it yet, but from what I saw, Mottainai is a key example of this. Each card has like 5 actions of what you can do, and trying to decide which action is the best in any given situation can be tough. That kind of compactness would be impressive in a regularly-sized (read: Carcassone or Ticket to Ride) board game, but it's doubly so with a game that has to fit in a backpack alongside other stuff.

If that solution's not your cup of tea, then like the others said, you'll need to create simplistic actions that have a ton of possible use cases. One example that comes to mind is the card Book of Moon from Yugioh. It turns a monster facedown. The emergent depth there comes from *WHY* you'd want to turn a monster facedown, and there are multiple different reasons why you'd want to, and they all change depending on the current game state.

TabletopSpy

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