> But, I eventually couldn't find anyone to play with me because I crushed everyone

I think this is a problem with many deeper games. I remember going over to other people's houses and they would pull out obscure-board-game-xyz. The rest of the night for me was trying to figure out how to play, while others were 30 steps ahead of me.

I think you need something like chess club - stratego club - where people have all gotten to the nuance level and you can play with people of appropriate level.

I feel like the depth of a lot of board games gets undersold simply because of how inconvenient it would be to play a large number of games physically. And/or because it's easy at the start to try something complicated, fail to get it right and end up concluding wrongly that only the simple things actually work.

At one point in my life I got in literally thousands of games of Dominion, and I was definitely still not as good as some of the people I discussed the game with online, but in person I could barely find anyone to play with, ever. (In fact, of the people I knew who were familiar with it, few even seemed to think it was any good as a game.)