Executive Function

Executive function is the umbrella term for the mental skills that get you from “I want to do this” to actually doing it — planning the steps, starting the first one, holding several instructions in mind at once, and switching gears when something changes. It’s an area a lot of neurodivergent people find genuinely harder to draw on, especially under time pressure.

It’s a big part of why the complexity rating exists as its own separate thing from age range. A game can be simple to understand and still be exhausting to set up, if the rulebook buries the setup steps or the rules shift halfway through — and that’s a genuinely different obstacle than the game being too hard to play once it’s running.