Most commonly called a ‘skill ceiling’ in video games. It’s not exactly the same as complexity though.
Some games are complex in the sense that it’s computationally difficult to ‘solve’ them perfectly, but in terms of human splaying the game, a few simple heuristics are good enough to make the game quite boring. And the inverse of this: even if a game can be solved by a computer, the game could have an essentially infinite skill ceiling for humans and they will never run out of non obvious situations, because humans can’t rely on the search speed through the game states as the computer.
A classic board game like Agricola has a pretty insane skill ceiling, though it looks fairly simple on the surface.
Many board games with a strong multiplayer element necessarily have a high ceiling. Once the players discover a clearly ‘best’ strategy, they will play to deny this strategy from their opponents. In a role-selection card game, you might pick a key card to an opponents build from going exponential, even though you don’t need the card yourself. Or if a class of cards is overpowered, simply having multiple players fight over those cards makes that class of cards less powerful.
Just having freeform trading does the same. Monopoly is a classic example of a legendarily terrible board game for numerous reasons. But simply because it’s a game involved trading and negotiation between players—that’s a huge open field for skill to enter the game. (I absolutely do not endorse playing Monopoly, there are far better board games that do similar things.)
Most commonly called a ‘skill ceiling’ in video games. It’s not exactly the same as complexity though.
Some games are complex in the sense that it’s computationally difficult to ‘solve’ them perfectly, but in terms of human splaying the game, a few simple heuristics are good enough to make the game quite boring. And the inverse of this: even if a game can be solved by a computer, the game could have an essentially infinite skill ceiling for humans and they will never run out of non obvious situations, because humans can’t rely on the search speed through the game states as the computer.
A classic board game like Agricola has a pretty insane skill ceiling, though it looks fairly simple on the surface.
Many board games with a strong multiplayer element necessarily have a high ceiling. Once the players discover a clearly ‘best’ strategy, they will play to deny this strategy from their opponents. In a role-selection card game, you might pick a key card to an opponents build from going exponential, even though you don’t need the card yourself. Or if a class of cards is overpowered, simply having multiple players fight over those cards makes that class of cards less powerful.
Just having freeform trading does the same. Monopoly is a classic example of a legendarily terrible board game for numerous reasons. But simply because it’s a game involved trading and negotiation between players—that’s a huge open field for skill to enter the game. (I absolutely do not endorse playing Monopoly, there are far better board games that do similar things.)