Solitaired Study Declares Magic World's "Most Complex" Tabletop Game

According to a study done by the gaming website Solitaired, Magic: The Gathering is officially the most complex tabletop game in the world. This study occurred on August 15th, 2024, and featured an aggregate of three game lists, all gauging gameplay complexity differently. It turns out that the game you're likely to read about on this website has some serious nuance!

Conducting The Solitaired Study

Solitaired used data from 242 different board and card games to determine its list of most complex tabletop games. The website gleaned information from three different sources: One from Amazon, one from BoardGameGeek, and one from YouGov. Each of these sites individually ranked several tabletop games by wordiness and the reading comprehension required to understand them.

As a result of these compilations came two initial lists. The first list ranks based on the wordiness of the rulebook of a game. The other ranks how confusing a rule set is for a game. Magic: The Gathering, perhaps to its credit, was deemed the pinnacle of rules length. It did not rank as the most confusing tabletop game (that distinction goes to the board game The 7th Continent), but it still made the list at a notable 15th place.

Additionally, one more list does exist as an aggregate of the first two. Based on the weight of the results, Magic is officially ranked as the most complex tabletop game worldwide to date.

Where Does Magic Stand?

So, while it's clear that Magic stands above the rest in a major category, giving it the distinction of being the top of the top overall, how much does that actually mean? Let's break this down. Solitaired's rankings for the top ten games by rules length are as such, going by game title, tabletop game medium, and length of rulebook in words:

10) Smash Up (card game): 18,202 words

9) Android: Netrunner (card game): 18,213 words

8) Nemesis (board game): 19, 384 words

7) Gloomhaven (board game): 22,168 words

6) Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization (board game): 23,001 words

5) Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island (board game): 23,450 words

4) War of the Ring (board game): 23,763 words

3) Mage Knight Board Game (board game): 26,849 words

2) Twilight Imperium (board game): 35,069 words

1) Magic: The Gathering (card game): 100,057 words

With the second most wordy rulebook being that of Twilight Imperium at just over one-third of the words that Magic's Comprehensive Rules has, by and far, Magic aptly deserves this superlative.

As far as confusion in reading comprehension is concerned, Magic: The Gathering ranks at only 15th place. Yes, this figure is out of 242 games so it's still pretty massive. However, the divide between 15th place and 1st place is also notable. This scoring used the Flesch Reading Ease Formula to provide aggregated results from the three sources mentioned above. In short, the lower the score, the more confusing the material is to comprehend.

Magic, at #15, has a "Standard" score of 62.98, while the #1 most confusing game according to the Solitaired study, The 7th Continent, got the only "Difficult" score of 30.03. In many ways, it ranks miles ahead of other games in its level of confusion. Simply put, no other game assessed in this study comes close. This makes it similar to how Magic scored in the wordiness department. However, it's relatively safe to say that "Most Confusing Rules" was a superlative that Magic did not necessarily want to boast.

The Solitaired Verdict: Just As Complicated

So if Magic has the most lengthy rule set and The 7th Continent has the most confusing, how does this factor into what makes Magic the "most complex" tabletop game to date? The scores as given aggregated into a system that checks complexity based on the two scoring factors. It's a safe assessment that Magic having nearly ten times as many words in its rules as The 7th Continent (with its 10,590 words versus Magic's 100,057) was the deciding factor.

However, it appears that The 7th Continent's confusion factor was weighted a bit more than Magic's rules wordiness. This caused the margins to be quite close in the end, with Magic: The Gathering having an overall complexity score of 9.14 versus the runner-up's score of 9.02. Note that gauging complexity here meant gauging the density of the core and comprehensive rules of each of these games.

Magic Has A Complex

With that, when looking for a complex game with a rich rule set, you can safely look no further than Magic: The Gathering. This game has been able to be used as an analog computer in some instances. In that way, these findings aren't a shock to most. However, the fact remains that knowing we play this complicated game makes us feel smart. And who can deny that that's a pretty good feeling to have?

Have you played any seriously complex games besides Magic? How did they play, and how did they make you feel? Sound off below!