this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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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 wouldn't call it awful ckick bait article. It's just heavy games the writter happens to enjoy. It's not like they are bad games or games with fancy IPs.
The campaign for North Africa would just be a waste of a slot, no one is actually interested in completing a play. It takes 20 years and a group of 8-10 players (yes, that's a real player range). I would also argue that wargames are their own tabletop category. A factual top 10 most complex boardgames would be, without a doubt, 10 wargames.
I agree with you here, well said
He didn't call his list "the most complex games I enjoy". He called his list the 10 most complex games, which it absolutely isn't. You're ignoring the reality of what he published.
To be fair I was expecting a lot worse from a videogame website. It may not be the absolute top 10 but it's a plausible list of some of the most complex games that the average boardgame player is likely to encounter.
For comparison, BGG search for gameplay weight over 4 and at least 100 votes
(which needs to be taken with a grain of salt too but it's what we've got)
"Some of the average games that are a bit more complex" is a useless arbitrary list.
By your own criteria, that list had none of the games over 4.7 weight with more than 100 votes on bgg