@LukeAlmighty There’s a distinction to be made between game complexity and game depth, and it can be related to how solved a game is. Game complexity is how many details you need to keep track of in order to play the game well. Game depth is how many viable paths to victory there are without them being such due to dumb luck.

Most people regard games being solved when you can know the objectively correct answer at any point; that’s a classic game theoretical conception of how solved a game is.

However, as people’s understanding of a game improves, they approach solution in this sense without actually arriving at it. See chess, for example. It isn’t solved but if you think people know nothing about how to play chess well, you’re an idiot. This idea of a partial solution is well-understood as the current meta in most games.

But a lot of games have these really complex systems where if you run the numbers there’s a single correct answer and it’s obvious once you do that. Those games are shallow, even if complex. That’s bad game design. The best game design has a low complexity and a high depth.

Case in point for good game design (low complexity, high depth): Go, Texas holdem, Magic Case in point for bad game design (high complexity, low depth): League of Legends, Hearts of Iron, Yu Gi Oh

tldr don’t conflate complexity for depth

@ChristiJunior