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This is like saying bigger books are better because more pages = more complexity = more interesting plot. You must be a big fan of the dictionary. I've found the best board games are often the simplest ones. 2-player vanilla Splendor is one of my favourites and all it takes to play is a deck of cards and a stack of tokens. When both players have a good level, the depth of strategy of that game is crazy good. And unli…
That's a bad take. Words in a dictionary have no interactions. It's a list of words in alphabetical order and their definitions. Well crafted board game rules are about systems that interact with each other. You don't have to be rules heavy to have an interesting game, but the interactions between systems needs to be there to be interesting beyond some number of consecutive plays. A lot of lighter games will quickly…
Larger board games are very often mere laundry lists of systems that can be found in many other board games. The longer games tend to have systems that MAKE the game long, rather than cause people to develop a strategy. One example is some mechanics forcing synchronous turns, or even worse, preventing you from preparing your turn in advance. Which gets even worse as the players have to iterate over more and more items in the turn checklist every time.
I have a strong but obviously opinionated dislike for these mechanics, so YMMV. Still, these longer games very often feel "same-y" to everything else because they don't truly bring original interactions between players. Playthroughs don't even always vary because as you re-play the game, a meta quickly develops and settles on a tiny portion of the offered gameplay.
More systems is also more opportunities to get the balance wrong. To fuck up. Which, if you don't tweak the rules preemptively, means the meta settling on an ever smaller part of the game.
Small, highly-focused games tend to develop much more interesting metas. Yes, they're not necessarily as varied in "number of things that can happen", but honestly, sometimes the gameplay elements I see in larger games are so incoherent you might as well play different games concurrently, and turn the whole thing into XKCD/2488.
To be clear, my point is not that shorter/simpler games are always better. It's that "longer doesn't always mean better, and more often than not means worse".
The same does apply to books. You can more reliably draw meaning from an extremely-well-crafted fable, than from a massive heptalogy. Your experience will be wildly different, and there are unique attributes for which you need length in order to achieve. But a rock solid series of books is a much rarer breed than an interesting fable. And a much larger waste of time if you don't end up drawing something from it.
And indeed the same applies to everything else. Assembly-line AAA video games that stuff themselves in a checklist of content to justify their price are often far worse in depth than shorter, sweeter ones (Portal, Hades, whatever). More seasons of Dexter and Game of Thrones ruined extremely deep and interesting works, whereas Breaking Bad crafted a truly unique experience by finishing exactly where the author intended it to. And your next lunch won't be improved by emptying your spice rack on it and overwhelming your palate, but by finding the exact mixes of ingredients that will result in a great meal.