Tesler’s Law, also known as the Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that every system has an inherent amount of complexity that cannot be eliminated—it can only be moved around. Named after computer scientist Larry Tesler, this principle reveals a fundamental truth: complexity doesn’t disappear through good design; instead, designers choose who handles it. The question becomes whether the designer absorbs that complexity through careful iteration and elegant systems, or whether it gets pushed onto the end user.
In board game design, this law explains why seemingly simple games often require the most design effort. The complexity hasn’t vanished—it’s been carefully absorbed into intuitive mechanics, clear component design, and streamlined rules. Conversely, games with convoluted rulebooks or frequent mid-game reference checks often represent complexity that the designer left for players to manage. Understanding where complexity lives in a game and consciously deciding where it belongs is a sign of thoughtful design.
Impact on Board Game Design
The designer’s role is to decide where complexity yields the best player experience. Some complexity enhances gameplay—strategic depth, meaningful choices, and tactical decisions are the heart of engaging games. Other complexity detracts from experience—rules overhead, bookkeeping requirements, and unclear component functions create friction without adding value.
Effective designers absorb complexity in areas that would otherwise frustrate players. This means extensive playtesting to eliminate edge cases, iterating component designs until their function is self-evident, and restructuring rules to minimize exceptions. The goal is transferring complexity away from learning curves and mechanical execution, and toward the satisfying mental challenge of strategic thinking. When done well, players focus on decisions rather than deciphering systems.
The trade-off is real: making something elegant for players requires significantly more work from designers. A simple three-action turn structure might represent dozens of discarded alternatives. An intuitive iconography system could be the tenth iteration tested. This investment in absorbing complexity separates accessible, replayable games from those that feel needlessly complicated.
Azul
Azul demonstrates Tesler’s Law through its effective handling of spatial complexity. The core rules are super simple: draft tiles from factory displays and place them onto your player board. However, the designer absorbed enormous complexity in creating the tile-drafting system and player board layout that makes pattern-building intuitive despite its underlying mathematical puzzle.
The drafting mechanism is brilliant in its simplicity—take all tiles of one color from a location, and the rest go to the center. This single rule creates cascading strategic implications about timing, denial, and resource management, yet players grasp it immediately. The designer could have created a more complex drafting system with numerous conditional rules, but instead absorbed that complexity into an elegant physical mechanism.
Similarly, the player board’s visual design communicates its entire function without extensive rules explanation. The triangular pattern lines clearly show capacity constraints, the wall grid immediately reveals the one-tile-per-color-per-row restriction, and the floor line’s negative scoring is self-evident from its presentation. The designer transformed what could have been pages of spatial placement rules into intuitive component design. Players focus on strategic pattern completion rather than remembering placement restrictions, because the complexity lives in the board design rather than the rulebook.
Splendor
Splendor demonstrates how absorbing complexity into economic systems creates strategic depth from minimal rules. Players have exactly three action choices: take gems, reserve a card, or buy a card. This deceptive simplicity represents careful design work that eliminated unnecessary mechanical overhead while preserving meaningful gameplay.
The cleverness lies in how the designer handled the economic engine complexity. Rather than creating complicated resource conversion rules or multi-step production chains, the permanent gem discounts from purchased cards elegantly represent growing economic power. Players immediately understand that owned cards reduce future costs, yet this simple mechanism creates sophisticated decisions about development timing and card synergies.
The designer also absorbed complexity in the game’s information architecture. All relevant information is public and card abilities are identical within each tier, eliminating the memory burden and hidden information tracking that could have made the economic calculations overwhelming. Players can focus on the genuinely interesting complexity—evaluating opportunity costs and building efficient engines—rather than managing bookkeeping or remembering card abilities. The streamlined action set and transparent information structure represent design choices that shifted complexity from rules comprehension to strategic planning.
Ticket to Ride
Ticket to Ride showcases how designers can absorb network-building complexity while maintaining accessible gameplay. The core mechanism is straightforward: collect matching train cards and claim routes on the board. Behind this simplicity lies complex route-planning and network optimization that could easily have been buried under complex rulebook exceptions.
The designer absorbed geographical complexity into the map design itself. Rather than requiring players to calculate distances or reference charts for route values, the board’s visual layout and color-coding communicate connectivity intuitively. Route lengths correspond directly to point values in a clear progression, and the double-route rules between cities are minimal exceptions that enhance rather than complicate gameplay.
Most importantly, the destination ticket system transforms what could be a computational nightmare into tangible goals. Instead of complex scoring formulas for network efficiency, players simply connect cities shown on their tickets. The designer absorbed the complexity of determining optimal network structures into the ticket design and point values, letting players focus on the satisfying puzzle of route planning rather than mathematical optimization. The physical act of placing trains and the visual progress of completed routes provide immediate feedback, reducing the cognitive load that more abstract systems would require.
Conclusion
Tesler’s Law reminds designers that complexity is conserved, not eliminated. The designer’s responsibility is choosing where that complexity lives—in the design process through careful iteration and elegant systems, or in the player experience through rules overhead and mechanical friction. The best board games feel effortless to play not because they lack complexity, but because designers worked to ensure complexity enhances rather than obscures the core experience. When evaluating game design, ask not whether a game is complex, but whether its complexity lives in the right places.
