In my opinion you can generally get a feel pretty quickly for whether a game has interesting emergent behavior/strategy or not. Some brief examples of the idea I’m getting at:
- Go, obviously, is “interesting”. Go if you switch the order of the “remove opponent stones without liberties” and “remove own stones without liberties” is, I think, easy to tell that it’s significantly less interesting, even though this is a perfectly natural ruleset - Capture Go, even, seems more fun!
- Symple I haven’t played too much, but I get the feeling it has this sort of depth. Propose some Symple variant where growing instead adds a stone to every vacant group-adjacent intersection, this is again clearly less interesting of a game.
Another category of abstract game you might dismiss is those that are too “sharp” - there are very few possible good lines from any given position, so reading doesn’t help much for the average human. These sorts of games may have the sort of depth you want at the master level, but from a historical perspective they’re unlikely to gain a following and thus get masters in the first place because, for beginners, they don’t have this natural narrative structure of “I calculated/intuited this line correctly, gaining a decisive advantage” that makes playing rewarding.
I think Christian Freeling’s site, the BoardGameGeek abstract forums (related, an interesting video), and some other blogs I can’t think of right now may have material you may find interesting w/r/t thinking about board games from a historical/evolutionary perspective like this. @claire_yang on these forums also has lots of interesting go-origin-historical posts. Some threads from various users I have saved:
- If Go Were Going To Evolve, How Would It, And Why?
- Pondering Upon The Rules Of Go - #4 by meili_yinhua
- A hypothetical precursor game rules of ancient Go - #15 by claire_yang
- Some musings on a "reverse" ko rule - #8 by claire_yang
(Edit: so in summary, I think in almost any culture which has a concept of games where go is invented, it will be recognized as interesting; furthermore, it seems pretty natural that someone at some point in a game-playing culture would invent go. On the other hand, to go against the Lasker quote a bit, whether it sees mass adoption is a matter of historical contingency and I get the feeling we’re lucky it’s so popular in our world).