How much should we focus on depth?

Welcome to this week's behind-the-scenes post. Today's is about how much we should focus on building depth into our games. 

I value replayability in board games, in both the games I design and play. Three reasons:

1. Value Commitment - Let’s say a game plays in an hour and costs $50. If you play it once, you’ve spent $50 an hour. If you play it 100 times, you’ve spent 50 cents an hour. To me, the first feels like theft and the second like a steal.
2. Environmental Commitment - I'm in an odd place: I think we must cut our carbon footprints to have hope of limiting serious difficulties in coming years. That requires, among other things, reducing consumption. But I make consumer goods for a living. In light of that, I'd love to make games people play so much they feel less inclined to buy. Playing a game has a lower carbon-footprint than buying one.
3. The Velveteen Rabbit Effect - The Velveteen Rabbit is a children's story in which a child's stuffed bunny becomes real in virtue of being loved over time. Something like that happens in my relationship with games I’ve played many times over years. It's as though a kind of magic enters and makes them alive in a way they hadn’t been (the good games, anyway).

For the purpose of this essay, I’ll define replayability as creating a continuing sense of surprise and delight over repeat plays.

How does a designer build replayability into a game? Two main ways:

1. Mechanical/Situational variability - this means ensuring different, interesting challenges and possibilities arise each time you play. 
2. Depth - This means building layers of skill into a game, such that as your skill grows, the way you think about the game and play it changes. 

I have no reservations about mechanical/situational variability, but I find the question of depth trickier: 

Two benefits of designing for depth

1. Depth creates the most long-lived kind of replayability - There’s a reason the games people play most, the so-called "lifestyle games", are deep (Chess, Go, Poker, Magic, etc). Speaking as a player and not as a designer, depth is precious to me. There’s one game I’ve played more than 15,000 times (not a typo!), and that experience is my most cherished in games. It was a deep game, my goal was to beat a very strong AI, and I eventually did. It's hard to describe how much my experience changed and improved between my first and my 15,000th play, or how great my sense of satisfaction was when I achieved my goal.
2. Depth creates the greatest opportunities for learning how to learn - We're committed to the learning value of games. In my own experience, the act of trying to become good at a deep game taught me techniques for learning that apply to everything else in life. As such, deep games can help us learn lynchpin skills.

Three risks of designing for depth

1. Lopsided outcomes - The more depth a game has, the more likely it is to create situations where one player always wins. This can be designed around but it's risky.
2. Games with depth tend to have worse first play experiences - Because of the way so many people play games these days, games without killer first play experiences tend to struggle.
3. Most people won’t experience it - again due to the way so many people play games now. You could argue that work on depth is wasted work. Game publishing is a low-margin business where it doesn't take much waste to go out of business.

I don't have firm opinions. I'm writing this because I'd love to know yours. If you were dictator of our design efforts, how would you have us think about depth?

Best,

Nick