Gloomhaven is actually pretty straightforward. My group played about three games before everything clicked — BUT, those first three games were a ton of fun and still “worked” even though in hindsight we weren’t following all the rules correctly. It does have too many parts, but there’s an app available (gloomhaven helper) which replaces 2/3 of the parts and makes the game very much easier and more fun.

I have thought a lot about this concept of using a smartphone app to replace some physical components of a game, and I'm surprised more games don't do it. On top of being less cumbersome, using your phone would allow for some mechanics that simply aren't feasible (or even possible) with physical parts. The flip side is that you have to "sync" the app state with the state of the physical board, and you need a clever solution that doesn't require doing things twice. (Plus, I'm sure some would argue that having parts of the game be digital would take away from the immersion, though I personally disagree.)

The problem with this is that it's very easy to get stuck with a useless board game if the app doesn't get updated.

If you're selling physical product that needs an app to run, there is no reason for the app not to be Free Software, or distributed in some other friendly way (e.g., Space Alert has a CD-DA disc that plays the scenarios as audio).

I've seen more and more games do that, from XCOM and Space Alert, which mostly use it to provide randomness and a timer to Mansion of Madness, which is mostly facilitating exploration.

Those games work well, but for me, I wouldn't want to play a board game that leans on an app any more than Mansion of Madness; at that point it's a video game, and while I enjoy those, it's not why I play board games!

Anecdotal: The on-ramp to Gloomhaven is quite smooth, compared even to many "simpler" games. It feels like there is an MVP-design of a game initially introduced and then as you play more features and complexity are added.

I highly recommend it, even as a solitaire game. There is a digital version on Steam as well, which approximates the mechanics and gameplay well.

I think I played gloomhaven varying levels of wrong (monotonically decreasing) for the first 15 or so scenarios. The classic "wrong attack modifier deck", "elements only move up 1 when you generate", "Monsters cannot move through each other", "That monster has flying" are a smattering of my misread rules.

Who cares? The game was still fun, now we play more correctly (God knows what I haven't noticed I do wrong yet). I'm a firm believer in playing early, and learning from mistakes / as you go.

The Gloomhaven spin-off Jaws of the Lion also has a much more explicit ramp-up, as well as being a simpler game in general.

Tell me about it, this was my first real boardgame.

In a group with engineers and lawyers, it was bad enough that each session started with "what will we get wrong this time"

yes. mtg has less physical items but they more than make up for it with rules. if you want to have a laugh look up the full official rules.

This is true to an extent (and in basically any pro tournament even the best players in the world can disagree about complex interactions and need a judge). But I've rarely found it matters with beginners - just start with vanilla creatures and simple removal if you're worried, my kids learned the structure of your turn, paying for spells and combat in about 10 minutes. Everything beyond a few keyword abilities is just reading the cards, you don't _really_ need to refer to the rules for the most part. This is in stark contrast to Yu-Gi-Oh, we've found, where you can't just play what's in front of you.

either you have really really smart kids or you maybe are exaggerating a little. I learned mtg as an adult playing with a friend and each and every game we would get into a situation where it wasn’t clear how/when to apply the rules - it wasn’t a big deal and i would usually text a buddy that has been playing since for ever.

to give you and example: it took 2 weeks to figure out that there is a difference between +1/+1 as a result of an instant or sorcery and a +1/+1 counter.

Most of the complexity is to handle a small number of cards that are essentially never used except to prompt rule puzzles. The rules have to be very complex to accommodate when these complex cards redouble their complexity by interacting with each other. Sadly, this doesn't work, because the game rules are complex enough to simulate a Turing machine, and as a result some board states are undecidable!

https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828

here are the rules: https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-fo...

I disagree about the complexity being associated with only cards that are never used. the "Spells, Abilities, and Effects" is the thing that makes the rule book grow with every release. they keep introducing abilities and it gets more and more complicated