It's hard to playtest a rulebook, because you need to get fresh players every time, if you want to optimize for the out of box experience (which I think you sho

It's hard to playtest a rulebook, because you need to get fresh players every time, if you want to optimize for the out of box experience (which I think you should!). But also, I think selection bias for playtesters is going to give you testers who are willing to dig through complex rule interactions, and that might not be everyone. I've had the best luck with explaining games that have short rule sets. Anything more than 4 pages and you really need the multiple sets of rules paradigm, and a good tech editor to make sure the playthrough instructions are accurate with the reference instructions. It's my personal choice, but I also don't care for the games where there's enough stuff going on that it's easy to skip things that are important to balance the game; but there's certainly a balance --- I want a game where there's enough chance that anyone could win, but enough skill that I feel like I can still do well even if chance is against me, and I strongly prefer games where everyone is engaged until the end.