That’s true, Mage Knight is very symmetrical. I haven’t played High Frontier, although I’d really like to. It looks up my alley. I also haven’t played Vast, but that also looks fun.

What do you think about Xia? It seems like there are asymmetric approaches to victory. And it’s not at the high end of complexity, although it’s not at the low end, either. That said – I’ve only played it once, so I don’t know how many strategies are really valid.

I will say, there are some games, and I put Magic Realm, Civilization, and maybe High Frontier in this space, where players will say, “I need to make the lower complexity version of this game that has the same level of awesome.” But, that’s always struck me as an impossible task.

In the case of Magic Realm and Civilization, there isn’t any cruft. Now, you may not want that amount of complexity, but those games are not badly designed. All the choices have a reason for being there. They’re just… very complex. But, that complexity yields all sorts of amazing emergent narratives and situations that a more streamlined game just can’t provide (IMHO). In the case of Civ it’s also less the complexity and more the social footprint of playing a game that long.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “finally, the two hour Civ game has been solved!” And then I play it, and, yes, it might be fun, but, no, it’s nothing like the rewarding experience of playing a full blown game of Civ. It just can’t be. Changing that time dial creates a very qualitatively different experience. I imagine changing the complexity dial does the same thing.