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.)

I've played a lot of Dominion with people who have played thousands of games. I've even beat them with some frequency (it's not that hard!).

I don't think Dominion is a good game. It's good if you maybe think cubing is good. And it can be a lot of fun!

But as a game? It's not good. If you have no idea what you are doing and are totally unfamiliar, you can even win pretty easily with some luck. But you won't understand why you won, or rather why others lost.

There are many, many games where everyone can read the rules together and be, more or less, on even footing. Dominion can sometimes be that way, but it can pretty easily be extremely opposite of that.