When new content is added to a Video Game, Collectible Card Game, or Tabletop Game, it tends to be more complex than what's already there. And even if it isn't, the game probably lets you use new material alongside the old, which still boosts the overall complexity. This leads to Complexity Creep — that a game gets more complex over time. This can be good or bad depending on the game and the situation.
On the positive side, added complexity can help flesh out a game that feels a bit bare-bones, leading to Growing the Beard. It can keep the game interesting to established players, and allows the designers to keep adding material once the design space for the original mechanics starts to run dry. It also helps avoid It's the Same, Now It Sucks! reactions if you add new mechanics instead of reusing the old ones.
On the negative side, excessive Complexity Creep can lead to the slow death of a game. Too much complexity can overwhelm potential new players and make them give up on it quickly, or even reject it on sight after discovering that most of its cards have a Wall of Text on them. For this reason, many games limit complexity creep by trimming mechanics (often unpopular, overpowered or underpowered ones). Another approach is adding a low-complexity option that lets beginners ease themselves into the game.
Another pitfall is that added complexity might undermine an elegant design without bringing enough to the table to justify the trade-off. This goes doubly if simplicity and accessibility were important selling points for the original.
Complexity Creep is particularly common in Board Games, as Expansion Packs often add new mechanics without having the players remove any of the old ones.
Complexity Creep can be nasty if combined with Power Creep — the new units are complicated, but you have to use them if you want to win. Then again, why would you bother to grapple with the complexity if there's no reward?
Compare Power Creep. For the narrative equivalent, see Continuity Lockout.
Examples
Board Games- 7 Wonders:
- Most of the expansions introduce new mechanics.
- Both of the expansions for Duel revolve around introducing an all-new game mechanic.
- Abyss:
- Kraken adds a new resource with special rules tied to it.
- Leviathan massively fleshes out the monster mechanic, which was as simple as "if you draw a monster card, you can either ignore it or take a bonus" in the base game.
- Carcassonne is infamous for the sheer number of expansions it's received. While each expansion individually tends to be straightforward, combining several into one game quickly adds up to a multi-hour game with a long list of mechanics.
- Chess got some complexity creep as a result of people's desire to speed up the game. This lead to the finicky special rules of castling, the "a pawn can move 2 steps forward on its first move" rule, and the Obvious Rule Patch en passant that only serves to fix one issue created by the aforementioned pawn rule (namely that it would allow a pawn to move two steps and slip past an enemy pawn if not for en passant).
- Most Dominion expansions introduce new mechanics, most of which can be combined with each other.
- The expansions to Everdell all add mechanics to the game.
- The expansions to Root have a pretty solid reputation of making the game just too complex and often impossible to play thanks to the sheer scale of Variable Player Goals they introduce and the fact they encourage to play with as many players as feasible.
- The Res Arcana expansions are generally low on complexity creep, with the only major exceptions being Lux et Tenebrae introducing the somewhat finicky Illusion effect, and Perlae Imperii adding the Pearl essence which has special rules tied to it.
- Star of Africa is a fairly simple Roll-and-Move game where you move around in Africa, try to find the titular diamond and bring it back to a starting space. The Retkikunnat Expansion Pack adds a bunch of new mechanics like having the players form a team, finding resources and allies.
- Sushi Go Party!, the Updated Re Release to Sushi Go!, adds some card effects more complicated than the base game, such as Fruit having unusual scoring and the Spoon letting you take a card from someone else's hand. It also adds logistical complexity — the game lets you choose between multiple setups, but changing between them requires you to sort cards.
- Wingspan:
- The European Expansion is low on complexity creep because it just adds more bonus cards, bonus tokens and birds. With that said the Teal powers it introduces are more micromanagement-heavy than the base game powers.
- The Oceania Expansion, in addition to introducing Yellow powers (which, like Teal powers, can be micromanagement-heavy), brings in a new mechanic in the Nectar resource.
- The Asia Expansion features a new 2-player mode and a new 6-7 player mode, both of which are more complicated than the normal game.
Collectible Card Games
- Magic: The Gathering: As the game keeps adding new elements, it grows more complex. The developers strive to keep the overall complexity manageable by not using too many complicated mechanics at once, streamlining complicated elements and cutting mechanics and rules that aren't pulling their weight. This led to the death of mana burn, and several early mechanics (e.g. regeneration and banding), have been phased out because players found them confusing. Also, the rotating Standard format limits the number of card effects a new player has to deal with.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: In the very first set, most Monsters were Vanilla Units, and most Spells and Traps had simple effects like "you gain 500 LP". However, the complexity has since ramped up to the point where most cards will have at least four lines of text. Exacerbating the complexity is that the game uses a non-rotating format, with thousands of cards and card effects coexisting, but Power Creep does keep this in check to some degree because a lot of old cards aren't worth playing.
Video Games
- Pokémon: There has been a trend of battles adding more mechanics such as Items, Abilities and generational gimmicks. In addition, every game allowed you to use almost any Pokémon and moves from previous generations. It culminated with Pokémon Sun and Moon allowing as good as everything, notably having both its own generational gimmick and that of Gen VI. This trend ended with Pokémon Sword and Shield, which started to cut back by excluding some Pokémon and moves, as well as ditching both old gimmicks in favour of having its own unique one.
