Going Deep on Depth in Games
By Brendan Hansen
When a player, critic, or designer remarks, “that’s a really deep game” what do they mean? That they had a profound experience playing the game? That they were awestruck by the sheer size of the game’s decision space? That they were overwhelmed by the strategic nuance offered? That they believe the game in question has a long skill ladder and a high skill ceiling? That they believe the game to be a well of play that they could return to and drink from eternally?
I have always been fascinated by deep games. My appreciation of tabletop games has not only cemented this as an ideal characteristic of games but it has also exposed me to a large group of people who seem to share that similar sentiment. Among the denizens of the tabletop game playing world, depth is venerated as a near virtuous quality for games to have. A game being deep is a reason in and of itself to celebrate its existence.
Not everyone who plays games, and then discusses them, has the same definition of what depth means. I am writing this article to help shed light on what it means for a game to be deep.
What is a Game?
To get there we have to take a short detour–what is a game? The late philosopher of sports and games, Bernard Suits, offers my favorite definition: games are participating in “a voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle.” In playing games we take on a disposable end; for example, getting 30 points in Root, having the most pretend money at the end of a game of Modern Art, or failing three missions as a spy in The Resistance, things we do not care about in the world outside the game. We take on these disposable ends to experience a struggle. In life we often bear a struggle in pursuit of an end. I work to have a salary to provide for my family. Games invert that–I take on a goal that I do not care about outside of the world of the game, so I can experience a struggle.
We play games to experience the joy of a struggle, the joy of overcoming obstacles. Depth is a measure of a game’s ability to sustain a continuingly rewarding struggle for its players.
For another definition of depth readers should look to “Depth in Strategic Games,” by Lantz et al, suggesting that depth “corresponds to the capacity of a game to absorb dedicated problem-solving attention and allow for sustained, long-term learning.”
There’s something tricky about depth in games then–the depth of a game can only be assessed by a player if it is scrutinized and explored, if it holds up to repeated play and continues to challenge us. However, games, especially tabletop games, offer other types of distinct struggles beyond the struggle to make the right decisions in pursuit of its disposable end–the type of struggle that we mean when we say a game is deep.
Rules Grit vs. Strategic Depth
What about the struggle to learn a tabletop game? Tabletop games don’t have automatic rules enforcement like video games. To play a tabletop game players have to learn its rules first. To read a rule book and internalize it is a type of struggle. This is especially the case if the rulebook is long or imperfect. The same is true of all tabletop rules experiences, watching a video, being taught by even a great rules explainer, struggles of their own sort. The more complex the game, typically, the more rules there are to learn before playing it. The greater the obstacle of learning to play the game becomes and the more effort it will take for us to struggle through learning the rules of the game to begin to play it. This struggle, however, is not depth. This is rules grit, this is complexity.
A Complexity Masquerade
There are other struggles that might masquerade as depth in games too. When players begin to play a complex game, it can be a struggle understanding the impact of one’s decisions in the game. As players approach mastery in a game the consequences of their own decisions become more clear, but at the outset the consequences of one’s own decision in a complex game can feel completely opaque, even arbitrary. It can be a struggle to understand the cause and effect relationships governing a game. Being in the thick of this sort of struggle can start to feel a lot like the type of struggle that we mean when we talk about depth. This is a struggle produced by the design of the game itself brought on by its complexity. This is a source of enormous confusion because if a player has only played a complex game once, or even a few times, it is very difficult, likely impossible, to understand if the struggle against the complexity of the game is the product of depth or the product of navigating the complex systems and approaching understanding. Only through repeat plays might it be uncovered that the complex game has a dominant strategy that in reality removes all depth from the game such that its first player only needs to follow a prescribed set of actions to win. If there were many steps in this inevitable operation towards victory, that would still be a complex game, but it would not be a deep one. Knowledge has removed the obstacles to victory before the game even begins. The struggle to understand a game might feel like depth in the short term but for a struggle to signal depth it must sustain.
Complex games through sheer combinatorics in terms of the size of their state space and depending on the game’s design, their branching factor, can offer players a struggle as they labor to make meaningful decisions and understand the relationships of systems in the games but what about games that are less mechanically complex, lighter games? Few would refute that light games can be exceptionally deep. Tag Team, The Fox and the Forest, and Babylonia are all examples of light games that have exceptional amounts of depth. While this article aims to define depth rather than speak to what produces depth, or relish in the joy of struggling with a deep game, it is too difficult to avoid the temptation to speak to some of these qualities.
Tag Team is a delightfully simple game that manages to have an enormous amount of depth through one of its core hooks–each time you play you select two characters, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, to form your team. However, if your opponent manages to KO just one of your characters (or you manage the same for your opponent), then you have succumbed to your struggle. There is an enormous amount of nuance in the different team match ups in this game which leaves a lot of room for strategic depth as you consider which characters to select for your team and how their strengths and weaknesses will counter the strengths and weaknesses of the characters your opponent will choose. There’s also depth in the ordering of new cards when you add them to your deck and a high degree of variance that makes each play of Tag Team feel like a new puzzle to solve and that is before you add the uncertainty of another human sitting across the table from you whose decisions will directly impact yours–injecting a healthy dose of depth through simultaneous choice and the donkeyspace these types of systems can create.
The Fox in the Forestis a trick-taking card game for two players. There’s three suits, special powers on the odd value cards, and a multi-round point structure that all bring something to explore but what really makes The Fox in the Forest deep is its novel scoring system. A given hand in a trick-taking game can be played in numerous ways. The player can try to win tricks, lose tricks, sluff a suit, maintain access to suits, etc… there is a range of expressive choices in most trick-taking games and The Fox in the Forest makes one of these core expressive decisions inherent to the scoring structure. Instead of bidding, players benefit from determining as soon as possible if they are the player who is likely to win the majority of tricks or not and then shape the game accordingly. It can be good to lose tricks in The Fox in the Forest, great in fact, but not if you lose too many of the tricks in a hand–if you lose 10 or more then the game lobs insults at you, calling you “Greedy” and strips all your points for the hand away, giving you a big zero for the hand. This value judgement around this core question, “do I want to win tricks with this hand, or lose tricks with this hand” is a fascinatingly deep problem to solve.
Babylonia is a tile-laying game by Reiner Knizia that invites players to add two tiles to a board depicting Mesopotamia that can be taught in fewer than 5 minutes. There are three sources of points in the game–cities, farms, and ziggurats. These scoring opportunities are juxtaposed, my ability to score from farms comes at the opportunity cost of scoring points from scoring ziggurats, but they are also overlaid because cities reward players for creating large chains of their own tiles on the board to benefit from scoring them multiple times. Babylonia’s depth is the product of players needing to make difficult evaluations around the risk and reward of taking immediate point grab against vying for longer term connected control of key areas on the board. This does not even take into account other mechanics that add depth like special powers from controlling the game’s ziggurats that can completely alter a player’s decision space, changing how they manage their own personal pool of tiles, what they can add to the board on a turn, and more.
Puddles and Oceans
So depth is not the measure of the size of a game but rather the ability for a game to sustain its challenge. The word “depth” can feel like a bit of a misnomer then. A deep pool of water is larger than a shallow one in terms of water volume, it is literally larger. However, when we call a game deep we mean something different. A deep game is like a pool of water we can continue to peer into and remain engaged regardless of its size.
In games, puddles can be deep and oceans can be shallow.
Why We Go Deep
Why is depth an ideal quality for a game to have in the first place though? So many of us who play games like to experience the breadth of games the market has to offer. Many of us know people for whom playing the same game more than three times is an anomaly in their gameplaying journeys. I love “going deep” on a game, playing it repeatedly. If games were songs played from boom boxes on our porches, I am sure that my entire neighborhood would be sick of the songs I play ad nauseum. My wife and I played through the entire one-hundred-sheet scorepad that comes with Cascadia. I have played Reiner Knizia’s legacy game, My City, three times and its eternal game more than one-hundred and fifty times. I still enjoy the struggle with these games.
Depth offers a reason to replay games by providing players with a more nuanced perception of their experience. The more you play a game, the more you understand the game, and the more you see in the game you are playing. There is often a turning point in exploring the depth of a game, typically sometime just after you think you understand how its systems interact, that can feel a lot like untangling the plot of a mystery novel or a dense film. This moment is like a flashback montage revealing to the viewer all the clues they missed in plain sight along the way. Experiencing the depth of a game is seeing things that were always there, for the first time. A benefit of this more nuanced perception of the game is that the player is empowered with a broader range of experiences within the game. Because the player has a more nuanced understanding of the game, a more meaningful relationship with the game’s options, board states, pacing, etc… they will have a clearer picture of the stakes and the likelihood of them overcoming the game’s obstacles. This clearer picture, more nuanced understanding, means that players are more likely to understand when they have accomplished a highly improbable come from behind victory and when they have been dealt a terrible hand and triumphed anyway. Overcoming obstacles is a reason for playing games, understanding that you overcame a set of obstacles against terrible odds and persevere feels even better.
An example of a genre that makes the most of this interesting relationship between depth and the emotional experience of the player are roguelites. Roguelites like Slay the Spire (I have more experience with the PC version than the tabletop version) encourage repeat plays and exploration of the game’s depth, through a variety of techniques–unlockable content, high variance, a relatively quick core gameplay loop, variable difficulty, multiple characters, etc… these are often high skill, high luck games that are typically very difficult and very deep. Anyone who has played and meaningfully explored a roguelite understands the joy of winning a run. But players who have probed the depth of a roguelites know that the true elation lives not in winning a run with good luck (where all the variance played to your favor) but rather wrestling against terrible luck and succeeding anyway. The joy is in the struggle. Depth provides an incentive to play repeatedly rewarding the player with a more nuanced perception of the game and keener experience of their journey with it.
This article barely scratches the surface on depth in games. What about games and their designs make them deep? Does player driven depth feel different for the player than system driven depth? Are some types of struggles, some types of obstacles, more popular than others? Do we all have our own relationship with the type of depth we like in games? Regardless, I will be struggling on, enjoying my quest to better understand games.
This article follows a conversation I had on Decision Space alongside my co-hosts and Jon Perry the designer of Hot Streak; Air, Land, & Sea, Spots, and contributed to more than twenty of the games in UFO 50. If you would like more discussion on this topic please consider listening to episode 262 of Decision Space.
Article published on March 22, 2026
