What is the most complicated board game is a difficult question because how do we define “complicated”? Chess for example has more combinations than atoms in the universe. But there’s only 1 world chess champion giving and the complexity of this game really depends on the strength of your opponent. On the other hand, the games in this list are complicated from the word go. Typically this will be down to the level of detail in the game and the complexity of the mechanics. You won’t have a perfect first run-though, but hopefully that will mean you’ll want to come back for more.
Table of Contents
- Twilight Imperium
- Eldritch Horror
- World in Flames
- The Campaign for North Africa
- Pax Transhumanity
- Advanced Squad Leader
- Magic Realm
- Bios: Genesis
- On Mars
- Lisboa
- What Makes The Most Complicated Board Game?
- Why Don’t You Check Out?
Twilight Imperium
The 4th edition of Twilight Imperium is the most refined version of the game. The developers have taken in a lot of the community feedback since its inception over 20 years ago in 1997. This game based in the far future has up to 25 different playable factions.
Factions range from humans to well… I don’t really know what this is, but you make your mind up. The complication is that each of these factions have vastly different play styles and probably even 4-5 different ways to play each faction themselves. When you factor in playing with friends there is almost limitless possibilities – just about 15,000 combinations if you are only playing in 3!
Enjoy an element of engaging in public and secret goals. With success you’ll work towards enough victory points to rule the galaxy.
Eldritch Horror
The world of Eldritch Horror is ruled by sleeping evils who has just started waking from their eons of sleep. Your job as the player is to make sure they don’t wake up, but we wouldn’t recommend tucking them up into bed with milk and cookies.
You play as an investigator who travels the board searching for clues to stop the beasts from awaking. Each investigator has a different playstyle and abilities. They include, but aren’t limited to: the explorer, the magician and the gravedigger. Teamwork is essential victory, so make sure all the investigators are on the same page.
Travel the world and solve mysteries unique to the individual Eldrich Beings. But its not that simple. There are clues to find, rumours to investigate. All the time battling monsters that will hinder your progress. On top of this, characters can get injured, face impassable terrain and even risk madness.
The difficulty of this one is that all the time you’re fighting to find the answer, the ancient one is closer to awakening. The tick-tick-tick of the Doom Tracker will haunt your every turn. Good luck for this one, you’ll need it.
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World in Flames
Word in Flames is WW2 ultra-realistic battle simulator it focuses on the 5 key fronts of WW2, the European and Pacific theatres. Mechanics stretch from supply, weather, and industrial output air. This ranges across sea, land. The most complicated part of this world domination strategy game is the sheer number of things to keep track of, over 1000 counters appear in the standard box. As you’ll find with many games on this list they’re on the more expensive side, over over $100m. This is often due to the number of components that have gone into the game, size of the board etc.
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The Campaign for North Africa
The Campaign for North Africa also appears as our #1 on longest games of all time. That should tell you a small amount of the complication behind this. Estimates have ranged to as much as 1500 hours to complete a full game.
Another hyper-realistic war game, this simulates the entire North Africa Campaign of World War II which lasted almost 3 years between mid-1940 and 1943. To give you an idea of the complexity in this game you will typically take around 120 actions per turn. There’s even a feature where you need to check hot weather for water evaporation. This game is certainly the most complex WW2 board game. They don’t call this genre hyper-realistic for nothing!
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Pax Transhumanity
Pax Humanity works as a bit of a market simulator. Instead of money in this far future cubes are moved about three different sections of the player board: capital, wealth, and debt. Instead of traditional currency you don not exchange currency. If you “spend” the cubes they move to a different section of the board e.g. Capital Cubes move to wealth. These Cubes are used to take actions, like Syndicate, commercialize or fundraise.
Words on a page don’t really do the complication of this game justice (Review in the link for more detail). To win each of the actions you took through the game offer certain benefits. But how much you benefit from them depends on the current “regime of humanity” and that is determined by you and the other players. Essentially, you and your fellow players essential move the goalposts as the game goes on and determine the victory conditions over time.
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Advanced Squad Leader
Advanced Squad Leader provides a squad based simulation World War II. In the last couple of WW2 based entries we’ve focused on a commander type eye-in-the-sky view, but this will bring you to the trenches. The game, reasonably popular in its own right has sold over 1 million copies since 1985. The hexagonal map regulates fire and movement, and are used to depict terrain represents different theatres of the war. You’ll need to manage squads of soldiers, crews, individual leaders, support weapons, heavy weapons, and vehicles all at once to dominate the battlefield. The rule book itself should help explain why this game is so complicated. A colour coded three-ring binder with over 170 pages of rules will point you in the right direction…
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Magic Realm
An oldie, but a goldie, Magic Realm is a fantasy adventure board game published in 1979. Magic Realm is more complex than many wargames and is similar to a role-playing game. Coming in a time well before video-games, this was the archetypal RPG of the time. The game can be played with up to 16 players and game time can last 4 hours or more, so I’d recommend putting some time in the diary.
The player takes the role of one (or more) of sixteen different characters. Each character has different abilities, strengths, weaknesses as you would expect. An Interesting mechanic is that these characters will have allies and enemies among the native groups and visitors that can appear on the board. To add to the replay-ability each player chooses individual victory conditions based on 5 categories: Great Treasures, Spells, Fame, Notoriety and Gold.
The player will then attempt to obtain these goals through any number of methods. Maybe you will seek fame by fighting with monsters. Or is it wealth and Gold by trading. The victory conditions are as imaginative, or straightforward, as you want it to be. One commentator said that the game can be so complex it’s like a Supreme court decision.
Ironically, this game is tricky before it even starts with a long setup time, sometimes up to 30 minutes, but well worth it.
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Bios: Genesis
Cast your mind, quite literally, back to the beginning of time for this one. You might need a PhD in Biochemistry to pull this one off. Bios: Genisis focuses on creating life on earth. You start as an organic compound and progress through various biological means. The Amino Acids command Metabolism, the lipids create cells, the pigments control energy absorption and storage. All I know is the Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. There’s 2 goals in this one (so twice as difficult?). First, as Autocatalytic Life – a metabolic cycle reproducing organism. Second, evolve as a Darwinian Life replicating your RNA in the world.
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On Mars
On Mars is a space time colonization simulator – Elon Musk take notes. Each several round consist of two phases: Colonization and Shuttle
During the Colonization Phase, each player takes a turn during which they take actions depending on which side of the board they are on. If you are in orbit, you can act more strategically, taking blueprints, buying and developing technologies. If you are on the surface of the planet you’re in the thick of it. You will construct buildings and then upgrade them using the blueprints we developed earlier. Then, explore the planet’s surface with your rover giving information and contracts to your scientist. In the Shuttle Phase, players travel between the colony and the Space Station in orbit. In this way you have to plan a couple of moves ahead to figure out what you want to do next turn.
The complicated part of this game is, well, making a space colony – we’ve never done it before! All buildings on Mars have a dependency on, all are interlinked. Building shelters for Colonists to live in requires oxygen; generating oxygen requires plants; growing plants requires water; extracting water from ice requires electricity; electricity requires mining minerals; and mining minerals requires Colonists. You can see how this is all intertwined – I got a headache from just writing that.
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Lisboa
On November 1, 1755, Lisbon suffered an earthquake magnitude of 8.5–9.0, followed by a tsunami and three days of fires. It was a bad week in the office. This game, Lisboa, is about the reconstruction of the city.
The player, a member of nobility, seeks to use their influence in the reconstruction and development of the new city. Work with architects to build Lisbon new and better. But you aren’t doing this out of the goodness of your own heart, but for Wigs! This is the scoring in the game. The game ends after a fixed number of rounds and whoever has the most wigs by the end of the game wins. Straightforward, but this isn’t what this list is about.
During the game, players schedule hearings to get character favors These include commerce, construction, and openings. The iconic buildings score the stores and stores provide income to the players. Players manage their influence, construction licenses, store permits, church power, workers and money.
It’s not as simple as just buying a store. The accountants out there will be pleased with this one the cost of stores is a book keeping mini-game every time. If you like data you’re in for a winner. There are five key areas to manage in the game: influence, treasury, value of goods, church, and scoring!
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What Makes The Most Complicated Board Game?
Well, that sums up what the most complicated board game list. There’s a clear trend from our research. Fantasy-like games such as Magic realm, or D&D, have rich roleplaying characteristics which lead to replay-ability. In Contrast, the Hyper-realistic WW2 simulation games gained a great deal of popularity in 80s where headaches like Advanced Squad Leader were published. Myself, I personally enjoy the futuristic type games, they’re completely original as they use mechanics of new world and the future and, well, I’ve always been a star wars fan so I enjoy playing in galaxy’s far, far away.
Why Don’t You Check Out?
I’ve also included in the text itself hyperlinks to reviews on the games, they go into alot more detail than I can here, please check them out.
For more from TableTopTemple see below:
https://tabletoptemple.com/why-board-games-are-so-expensive/
