Rules, Rules, and More Rules
Learning a board game can sometimes feel like signing up for night school. Some rules are neat, clean, and easy, while others have sprawling instructional manuals that read more like grad-school engineering textbooks. Some games aren’t just heavy on the rules but have integrated systems within systems that require you to constantly refer back to the rulebook to ensure you’re playing properly. The following twenty games are notorious for their complexity.
1. Twilight Imperium
With its medley of galactic politics, trade, and warfare, it’s not uncommon for this game to become an all-day marathon. The rules aren’t just long, they’re layered with voting systems, technology trees, fleets, and alliances. You sit down thinking you’re playing a space game, and three hours later you’re arguing about tariffs with your neighbor.
2. Advanced Squad Leader
This isn’t just a war game; it’s practically a lifestyle. It comes with a binder-sized rulebook, with detailed scenarios and charts covering every possible condition you can imagine. Playing feels like both a history lesson and math homework wrapped together.
3. Mage Knight
A chaotic hybrid of deck-building, exploration, and RPG leveling, every turn in this game requires that you juggle cards, special powers, map tiles, and advancing enemies. Even moving from one place to another feels like a thesis defense.
4. Food Chain Magnate
On the surface, this game is about running a restaurant empire. In practice, it’s brutal capitalism dressed in bright ’50s regalia. The hierarchy of employees, the timing of marketing campaigns, and even the way drinks and burgers weave into demand takes a while to digest.
5. High Frontier
This space exploration game was designed by an actual rocket scientist. The rulebook is dense with scientific terminology, orbital transfers, and propulsion systems. You can almost feel your brain overheating when you realize you need to calculate fuel efficiency just to move a piece.
6. On Mars
Designed by Vital Lacerda, who has a reputation for games that make your head spin, On Mars is about colonizing the red planet. Playing it well involves managing resources, conducting research, as well as maintaining shuttles and buildings.
7. Through the Ages
This epic strategy game consists of civilization building. Everything happens through cards—government operations, military coups, changes in leadership, new technological advancements. While the lack of a map means you cannot lose territory, you can certainly lose resources to stronger players.
8. Pax Pamir (Second Edition)
On one hand, this game is full of beautiful carpets and pastel colors. On the other, the rules of shifting alliances tie your brain in knots. The politics of 19th-century Afghanistan aren’t simple, and you may very well spend half the game rechecking the manual.
9. Lisboa
Another creation of Vital Lacerda, this game’s focus is on rebuilding Lisbon after an earthquake. There are ministers, city plans, churches, rubble to clear, and a card system that works in three directions at once. One card can do three things, but which three? That’s the question plaguing your mind at every turn.
Karthik Balakrishnan on Unsplash
10. Here I Stand
This game crams 16th-century religion, politics, and exploration into a single point-to-point map. You’ve got the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the English—six main powers altogether. Every faction has different rules, which means everyone at the table is essentially playing differently, creating an oddly chaotic game.
11. Feudum
In this medieval fantasy economy game, actions chain together in odd, sometimes hilarious ways. The board looks like a children’s book, but don’t be fooled, as each action affects guilds, in turn affecting your available resources and your ability to move.
12. Campaign for North Africa
People often joke that it takes ten years to finish a round, but the exaggeration isn’t so far off. One infamous rule requires accounting for how much water Italian soldiers need to boil pasta. That level of detail might be charming, if it weren’t utterly mind-numbing.
13. The Great Zimbabwe
The rules themselves aren’t the longest, but the way they interact is dizzying. Every player strives to build the most impressive monument to their god that they can. To accomplish this, they must first establish a logistical network to carry their supplies across the region.
14. Antiquity
A game where pollution spreads, famine threatens, and every decision eats away at the land. The rules aren’t always intuitive, and you have to spend half your time flipping through the manual to confirm whether something works the way you think it does. And usually, it doesn’t.
15. Roads & Boats
The title sounds almost quaint, but the game is a sprawling logistical nightmare. You’re tasked with moving geese, bricks, and gold across rough terrain, slowly building a network and inventing a civilization before your competitors outpace you.
Christopher Paul High on Unsplash
16. Indonesia
In this game, companies merge, shipping routes expand, and demand rises and falls as players compete to build an economy that earns the most money. It’s one of those games where you think you understand the flow—until your company merges with another and suddenly your empire evaporates.
17. Bios: Megafauna
In this game, you play an evolving species, managing climate, tectonics, and catastrophes on your way to terrestrial dominance. The rules read half like a game, half like a science textbook. By the end, you’re not sure whether you’ve learned biology or just been punished by it.
National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
18. Arkwright
Players run up to four factories in England during the late 18th century, managing factory workers, machines, and product demand. The game expects you to balance efficiency with expansion, all while staying solvent.
19. Barrage
This resource management game pits players against one another as they all try to build majestic dams, raise energy production, and gain contracts for the energy produced. The mechanics interlock in ways that punish missteps. The resource wheel, where you have to wait for machinery to cycle back before using it again, feels brutal.
20. Diplomacy
Rules-wise, it’s almost simple, but the complexity extends beyond the board to the player tactics. Players must negotiate, forming alliances and quietly planning betrayals. Some friendships just don’t survive a game of Diplomacy.
