There are two entirely separate things going on here: was it correct to close this question, and general policy about who should and shouldn't close questions.
It seems you've decided that the answer to the first is no, the question shouldn't have been closed, and have moved straight on to concluding that this means that other users are voting with insufficient experience. This is, to put it mildly, a bit of a leap.
I'm going to avoid trying to lay out arguments about whether or not the question should've been closed, and focus on the more drastic policy suggestions. If you want to debate the closure of this specific question, I'd suggest asking a separate question focusing strictly on that, without any of the pieces about users' behavior.
Experience requirements
Nope. There should be no tag reputation requirement for close votes.
You have no idea how much experience these users have with spades or other trick-taking games. You know that they haven't posted about them. But there's a pretty good chance they know something about the game, and they've been active enough on the site to learn in general about what makes questions too broad. So it is completely acceptable for them to vote to close on questions about spades.
More broadly, this site cannot be run as a collection of independent sites, one for each tag. Our policies need to carry across tags, and we certainly don't have enough active users to split ourselves up that way. We're a community.
New users
Yup, we should be careful about how we treat new users, but that doesn't mean declining to close questions. We need consistent standards. The best way to avoid driving off new users is to help explain why their question was closed, and even more importantly, what if anything can be done to get it reopened, or ask a new variation of the question that wouldn't be closed.
Guidelines
There are a few things that users with the close vote privilege should keep in mind (but flat-out avoiding tags they're not experts in is not one of them):
- Edit the question or suggest improvements when possible. It's better for all of us if the question never has to be closed in the first place, or if it's at least quickly reopened.
- When you do cast a vote, explain yourself, especially with new users, especially if no other users have yet. Our general rules are not always obvious, and the reasons for applying a particular close reason are often even less obvious.
- Vote based on your best judgment. That may include thinking about whether you understand the question and the kinds of answers it is likely to receive. You've earned the close/reopen vote privilege, which means we generally trust you to make this judgment.
- Be ready to learn. Follow the reopen queue, read clarifying edits and comments, read meta. If you realize a vote was wrong, great! You can reverse it or cast a reopen vote, and you can do better in the future.
These can be difficult things to do consistently, but we can all try to keep them in mind and see what we can do.
Enforcement
Even more nope. We can talk about what the best policies are for the site, but we're really not to the point of needing to do much more at this point. If a question appears to be incorrectly closed, we can reopen it (likely after meta discussion, especially if it's a borderline case), and that's that. Users with the close vote privilege should try to be aware of this sort of thing, and learn from the example. But mistakes happen; they don't need to be deemed unethical or punished. The best way to improve is to let people learn.
The only time when we should be concerned about users' behavior is when they've had the opportunity to learn but continue to knowingly go against site policy. If you truly think you've seen this, don't call people out on meta, just flag an example, explain in the flag reason, and let moderators handle it. (But that's not what's going on here - please don't go flag that question.)
