Shoot, didn’t notice Kit La Touche beat me to Mythender.

Paul Beakley maybe the issue is intricacy.  A game is intricate when its rules interact in deep ways that are difficult to explain but can be obvious once used in play.   Intricacy requires a certain amount of complexity, but doesn’t have to have to be rules heavy. 

Mythender is an intricate game.  In a world with Hero System and D&D 4E in it, it isn’t really a particularly complicated game.  But the way the tokens move around from type to type, and the REASON for that movement, is something that really can only be understood by playing it.  

All intricate games need to bring players to an epiphany moment, where the game suddenly clicks and people get what is going on.  A tutorial can serve that purpose, or a slow paced first session.  But until the epiphany moment, the game will simply not be fun, it will just be frustrating or annoying.

It could be, given the time you have available and the people you play with, intricate games just aren’t your thing anymore.  The investment of that period of frustration before epiphany (and in the case of board games, repeating that period with new players maybe many times) is never recouped later in play with people who have had the epiphany and are just enjoying the game.