...expansion should always strive for complexity and not simplicity.
I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Expansions should strive for variety. That's not to say complexity is necessarily a bad thing, but it's not an end unto itself.
Huh? It is fairly easy to come up with a village or trasher variant. Anybody can do that. But if a new village is not more complex than Village it'll probably suck.
I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Expansions should strive for variety. That's not to say complexity is necessarily a bad thing, but it's not an end unto itself.
I'll say it: complexity sucks.
Strategic complexity is fine; I'm not talking about that. Perhaps a misunderstanding along those lines is why there's a disparity here. I'm talking about rules complexity.
Ideally you quickly read the cards and then it takes a while to explore the implications. It's great when you play with a card a bunch and still don't have a handle on it. It's awful when your eyes glaze over at all the text; maybe I'll buy some other card and worry about that one later. When you mentally shorthand the card into something that's wrong and it matters. When you aren't sure what's supposed to happen and make a thread in the rules forum.
I don't like rule-messy Dominion cards like Possession. But rule difficulty has nothing to do with complexity. A Euro can be more complex than a wargame in spite of far simpler rules.
What I meant is that stuff that makes the first and fairly non-complex deckbuilder more complex is IMO good. Whether that's stuff like Landmark that makes the road to victory more tricky to evaluate or different starting hands via Shelters and so on doesn't matter. Again, Necro is not a difficult card to understand rule-wise yet the addition of variable starting hands makes the game more complex and thus, IMO, better.
So the goal, then, is variation. One can add things that create complexity with the goal of generating more variety while striving for simplicity OR one can add complexity for its own sake. Your comment made it sound like you wanted the latter. If that's not what you meant (and based on your follow up, it seems like it isn't) then perhaps we don't truly disagree.
Of course complexity for its own sake. A non-complex game would be Tictactoe and that is utterly trivial and solved.
I don't care much for variety per se. Just adding more cards to Dominion doesn't make it complex/better just like adding new Chess pieces doesn't per se improve the game.
But if those cards achieve something new and innovative that changes how the game works, like the aforementioned Shelters and Landmarks, that's a plus in my book.
The best thing is of course complexity out of simplicity like e.g. in the case of Chess or in the case of rule-wise simple Dominion cards that are nonetheless tricky to play with. And of course complexity that arises out of interaction of cards.
