I've been playing a lot of board games in the last year, mostly with larger groups but some with smaller groups, and I've come up with a list of things that really bug me about board games from less experienced brands.
They're not always an indicator that the game is going to suck, but they do act as a marker that the company behind it thinks they know better than the rest of the industry.
Easy to learn, hard to master!
That's called a strategy. Mastering any game is going to be relatively hard. Learning any game should be easy.
If your game isn't a game of chance, this statement should be implicitly true, and not proudly plastered all over the front of the box as testimonial.