this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Board Games

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Board games with emergent complexity? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by naught101@lemmy.world to c/boardgames@sopuli.xyz
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Some games are complicated - they have really complex rules. Examples of this are games where you have to track many different types of tokens, with different rules for each.

Other games have really simple rules, but still manage to produce extreme complexity in they way they are played.

Go is the perfect example of this. It literally has 2-3 rules, but because you can play anywhere, the complexity it can produce is wide and deep, to the point that tomes have been written on how to play it.

What other boardgames exist that have very simple rules, but produce complex and interesting game play?

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[โ€“] boatswain@infosec.pub 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'll throw in an answer from a different angle: social deduction games can be incredibly rules-light while still maintaining a lot of complexity. Resistance, for example, has not too many more rules than Go, but games can get deeply complex as players try to figure out who the spies are.

The big difference is of course that the complexity offered by something like Resistance is the product of imperfect information and willful deception, which means that a good ability to read people (or conversely, to lie) can be at least as important as strategic mastery.

[โ€“] naught101@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah, that's totally true. I guess there the complexity mostly comes more from the preexisting complexity of people.