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.
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 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.
Interesting, this is a _feature_ of poker games like Texas Hold'em. If the losing players didn't go on convincing winning streaks, they'd stop playing. And those winning streaks can convince them they don't need to learn anything else about the game in order to be a winning player.
My experience as well unfortunately. No matter how many books on chess I read, no matter how many games I played against Battle Chess to try to get better, he always won.
But about having nobody to play because you crush everyone - as long as you want to play to enjoy and not just always go full-on try-hard mode - just stop crushing everyone and you'll have people to play with.
Let people win every third game. If you're good enough (at it), they won't notice. They'll have a good time and you will. In Tekken it works to have them win some rounds (extra points if you let them have two out of three), but still win the match, tho maybe only if you're not just 2 ppl playing.
That's a rule established from rat behavior observation study, you can hear about it in every third jbp lecture.
Ever since implementing it, I never end up with nobody to play with. Just curb your wanting to always win and focus on maximizing the amount everyone enjoys playing in the long run.
Even a game where there's always a winner and a loser doesn't have to be a zero sum game.
Sure, I'll go back and tell my 12 year old self to do that.
But, actually, I did do that, to some degree. As I mentioned, I would drop hints and talk about my strategies in games, usually after the game, so he could be more competitive and understand how I was thinking about things. That also has a cost on the fun for both parties, though. Smart people can recognize when you're going easy on them. Nobody normal likes being pandered to.
What was the secret of your success?
It's been a loooong time, and I don't recall all the details. But it revolved around doing probing attacks to determine where the ranks were in the enemy formation, and then having "channels" in my side to move up a soldier that outranked by 1 a targeted attack.
Color me surprised that it would be difficult to write a program to play it.
One thing Stratego did was implement the "fog of war". My Empire game took inspiration from Stratego and Risk.
And, I'm also working on a game that kind of pulls on that same kind of upfront planning, where how you place your pieces to start is as important as how you move them; a settling and strategy game that's heavy on clever defense and using terrain and the interplay of pieces.