We live in a golden age of board game, wargame and TTRPG releases. And I don’t like some of them – not because they are poor designs or bad games, but because they are way too smart for my chimpanzee brain. I don’t enjoy these games personally, but I respect the hell out of them. Maybe you’d enjoy some of them.

In no particular order:

• Pericles: The Peloponessian Wars 460-400 BC: This game fries my brain, frustrates, and makes me outright idiotic. It’s also a brilliant design, though in some senses too deterministic for my liking. There’s a balance of limited communication with your teammate, lots of computation to figure out battle odds, and to achieve anything, moves must be executed in well-coordinated sequences, and that’s far harder than you’d expect due to the order assignment system. It’s brilliant, and I’ll never play it again.
• GURPS 4e: I’ve played this a lot back in the day. And I don’t think I ever played it right. Like an old friend who lures you into their world and take you on a brain-melting all-night bender, leaving you with a headache. But I still love it. GURPS is great in its own way, but the level of mastery it requires to run smoothly is beyond my capabilities these days.
• Fellowship 2e: I want to love this game, but I cannot for the love of me figure out how to balance threats and fictional positioning in it.
• Warhammer 40k: Laugh all you want! My gripe here is less about the rule system as such and more about the brainpower required to engage with the game on a more than casual level. I will happily take a battle or skirmish in this any day, but staying on top of the meta, competition rules, errata, etc.? Might honestly just be bad experiences of younger me coloring my views here, though.
• Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy of the Utmost North: This game is beautiful, inspiring and its themes seem almost laser-targeted at my sensibilities. I just wish I knew how to run it.
• Campaign for North Africa: Included for completeness’s sake.
• Dominion: I love deckbuilders, but they just don’t love me. And since Dominion is the deckbuildiest of all deckbuilders, it stands to reason it has resisted all my intellectual overtures and reduced me to gibbering monkey by the end of every game.
• Hands in the Sea: Deckbuilding? Punic War subject matter? Yes, yes, yes! Too bad I absolutely suck at executing anything in this game and cannot for the life of me properly chain a card sequence.

Probably many more out there. Check these games out though if they sound cool to you. All of them are potential winners (perhaps with the exception of Campaign for North Africa).