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Pure curiosity
I recently realized why some I find board games/puzzles boring after a while:
The returns on "cognition" for these games has a sharp cutoff.
While this seems a bit obvious in retrospect, I haven't seen anyone talk about "returns on cognition" in any other context apart from thinking about AI-Doom scenarios.
One thing that always made me a bit frustrated with different board games is that a lot of them get boring once you've played a few times, and there are a lot of heuristics that are obviously close to optimal play. Other games really encourage me to "actually think", because there are highly non-obvious situations coming up all the time.
One example for a game that is boring is 2048 (or at least doesn't encourage more than executing a fairly trivial algorithm). Once you have figured out you always need to put the big numbers in the corner. But there is a close cousin of this game Dive where you can merge the numbers if one is a multiple of the other. For Dive I don't have any good heuristics like this, and it feels more engaging for that reason.
Interesting concept I stumbled upon while googling:
- game complexity: the Wikipedia-article goes into a lot of different measures for how hard it is to play a game optimally