So over the past weekend my dad and I played a boardgame called Empire of the Sun. After we'd finished (a convincing victory to me), he stated that it might be "the most complicated game I've ever played". It got me thinking about what role complexity plays in games in general, but more specifically in strategy and wargames.
Now, I've learnt the rules to a whole lot of games in my time, so I feel like I'm in a pretty good position to comment on when a game is too complex, or too complicated. To an extent I feel like it comes down to the attitude of the game. Advanced Squad Leader (the Greatest Game of All TimeTM) is a game with lots of rules - we're talking about 35 pages for the bare minimum - but it's also a good example of a game where you don't need to actually follow all the rules to still have a good time, and to still get a good experience. There are so many different little rules and nuances that you could play it with ten different people and play in ten slightly different ways.
On the other hand would be something like The Guns of Gettysburg, a beautiful board game which "only" has around fifteen pages of rules. The difference is, however, that if you forget or misplay a single rule, the entire game collapses and doesn't make any sense. Empire of the Sun, a World War Two strategy game set in the Pacific, has a lot of rules, don't get me wrong; around 30 pages of wall to wall text, and a distinct lack of pictures; but it does create a very accurate picture of the Pacific War. ASL on the other hand is a system, and as such it seeks to accurately (ish) simulate any land battle between 1936 and 1945. As a result ASL can afford to be more lax with its rules, as it isn't trying to recreate a specific experience in a 100% totally accurate way, but is instead trying to convey the general tone and feel of that experience in hundreds of minute little ways.
It's also important to note how different it is to teach different games to people. I could teach the basics of ASL in about five, maybe ten minutes, and have my opponent playing not long after that. It's a game structured into numerous bespoke rounds, and as such the new player only needs to be concerned with what is happening right at that particular moment. The amount of actual mechanical choices are also fairly limited, at least early on, and almost always boil down to "do I fire with this squad or do I move with this squad?". EotS on the other hand just has an "Offensives Phase" where you play cards and they let you do literally everything. There's no way to gently break someone into playing that game, as you can just do everything, all the time. Is this a bad thing? I don't know. It means that once you're comfortable with the game you can do a huge variety of really cool things. But it takes such a long time to get to that point, it begs the question of whether it's really worth it.
I had this fairly recently with a video game called War in the Pacific as well. I've played the other games in the series, namely the widely-considered pinnacle of World War Two strategy gaming War in the East, and I'm reasonably competent at it. But there's something about WitP that means I just can't bring myself to play it. I look at the screenshots and it just looks... boring. War in the East simulates the entirety of the Eastern Front from 1941-1945, but it isn't hard to just move counters around and get into some fights. Out of the 382 page manual (!) I've probably read... about fifteen pages or so not including the tutorial? And yet I can play that game fairly easily. I don't think I could say the same about WitP and I doubt I'm the only one.
Computer games can always be more complex than board games (with the notable exception of a couple of insane board games out there). They have the computational power allowing them to simulate more and more stuff, although that isn't always a good thing. I don't think it's necessary to track literally every single plane and pilot available to my nation quite frankly, or exactly how much cannon ammunition my brigades are chewing through every day. But computer wargames in particular struggle with interface. And they struggle hard. War in the East's interface is beautiful. It's super clean, and it's easy to interpret even with just a brief glance at the manual. Sure it's full of nested menus and gigantic spreadsheets but you can basically just ignore them and still play the game reasonably easily. War in the Pacific... not so much. There's basically nothing but menus, and horrible, dull, unclear graphics and it actually annoys me that this is the case. Spend some damn time on your interface! If you're asking me to sit here and play your game for hundreds of hours, don't give me a crap interface where I have to spend fifteen minutes just to find out an approximate relative strength of my units.
So I suppose the real question that I want to figure out is whether more complexity is always a good thing. Generally speaking the answer is no. Just adding complexity for complexity's sake is a common and oft-touted feature of many hardcore wargames, but at a certain point it becomes too much. It becomes too difficult to play the game, enjoy it or even experience it at all, which is the entire point after all. As this incredible "review" (it's more like an odyssey) so clearly shows, when a game becomes too difficult to play, you become unable to see how all the different systems link together, and it begins to feel like you're actually playing five different games at once, all of which are only tangentially related to one another.
On the other hand then, is it always better for games to reduce their complexity as much as they can, to create a streamlined, simplified game? Again, I don't think so. If you streamline a game such that you essentially remove all complexity, you basically have noughts-and-crosses or rock-paper-scissors, which aren't exactly the most exciting games. On a more serious note I think this is something A House Divided suffers from. It's easy to learn and only takes about 90 minutes to play, but to an extent the Confederate player can just make a huge army and attack Washington. If they get lucky and win, they win the game. If they don't, they lose the game. The victory conditions are too simplified.
Most of the time I think that some abstraction should basically be enforced upon a game, in some area or another. Almost all of the "best" wargames out there abstract something, if not everything to one degree or another. If you don't abstract enough you end up with something like A World at War, a game so complex and detailed it's literally almost impossible to play. But equally you can't fall into the trap of trying to make the game playable by everyone. Not everyone (indeed, most people don't) likes wargaming, so by trying to make your game simple enough to appeal to them, all that's likely to happen is that nobody ends up really liking it.
Some games nail the precise line between complexity and accessibility. I think ASL being taught to someone is fairly easy to gently get into the system over an extended period of time. The Command and Colours series, where what you can do is determined by a hand of cards, is an elegant way to suggest moves and limit the complexity of a given turn. Unity of Command is an excellent simplification of the Eastern Front, which focuses on what it believes to be the most important aspect of that war (supply) and creates a great system which really gets that feeling across. Ultimate General: Gettysburg does a great job of making a large and complex battle reasonably manageable and a lot of fun to play, with a great interface and very intuitive controls.
So it's not an impossible problem to fix. It's tough, for sure, because wargame designers always want to put more stuff into their games; a lot of the time the more things you can simulate, the more accurate the simulation, right? But in terms of creating an actually enjoyable experience it just isn't good design; it asks too much of the player. Maybe next time you boot up or get out a strategy or wargame, just think about what's being abstracted in order to make it actually playable, and how additional complexity or simplicity might have an impact on an otherwise great design.
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