Exactly this. As an avid board game player this is one of the things that has always frustrated me about chess. Those that like to play have been playing for a long time and there is a steep learning curve. Even the parent was throwing off vernacular. This is not just intimidating to many newcomers but will likely put them off because it is difficult to see yourself make progress. On the other hand, most board games have luck elements in them and have a wide range of luck-skill balances. You'll find that how people are introduced to board games (and videogames) depends on what game they try first. If that game requires a high skill level (or worse, high skill and high dependence on opening actions, like Catan (unfortunately is a common "intro game")) then people tend to not like "board games" in a general sense. But once people are comfortable with the space and patterns (there's only so many concepts in gaming) then they are far more open to more complex rule sets and more skill based games. Chess and Go's killer problem is that it is difficult to get started. Ironically we're on a form of mostly programmers and this is analogous to the "Python before C++" argument, but with less benefits to the C++ side.