The only way this will ever stand a chance to get have a user-base of NON-stackexchange people is if it loosens up a little bit. IMHO
On other sites, a moderate amount of strictness is fine. Programming languages, game development, math, and many other subjects are inherently non-subjective. Its pretty easy to see what topics are useful, and what topics aren't.
Games on the other hand are supposed to be fun!!! What's fun is going to be subjective a lot of the time. This site is different from the other sites in that its objective is fun instead of knowledge. If you guys disagree and say that knowledge of games is more important than fun, IMHO you're missing the point of games! :D
If this site wants to be able to compete with other sites, its going to need to change its goals a little. Would you rather go to a slightly less well designed site based on board game fun like BGG, or an SE site based on knowledge with strict limitations on the types of questions allowed? This site is very unfriendly to new users and frankly I wouldn't recommend it to any of them yet.
I totally agree that the mods are closing too many questions (no personally offense to them whatsoever, I greatly appreciate the time and effort they've put into their jobs :).
Take a look at these questions that the community upvoted several time, but one mod closed:
What Risk variants do you like? 15 upvotes, 7 favorites.
what games use the worker placement mechanic? and economic games for mature players? 10 upvotes each and one mod closed them.
5 other highly voted but closed questions
Please open your ears and listen to the community before closing stuff!!!! There are more to board games than rules!!!! :D :D
Put it this way. People come to Stackoverflow because they want to get answers to objective programming questions. Programming is a huge profession that you can make a living with, and many people do. People go there to learn from others and solve problems.
This site is about games. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the vast majority of people play games and go to board gaming sites for fun. If what you want from a programming site is strict restrictions to objective only questions, that's fine, and this site could fill that role perfectly. However, IMHO some people want to have fun and ask questions about recommendations and other subjective topics that SO would deem less than perfect. If this site feels like turning them away, we will only be left with questions about rules and strategies. If that's all this site wants to be, that's fine. However, I believe very few people have a reason to specifically talk about strategy and rules and NOT anything subjective/fun, so this site would be left with a very small user-base.
Closing fun questions just makes the site unnecessarily strict. They are closed on SO because they are not very useful as programming is about skillfully communicating with computers. Board Games are about fun, and restricting well written, on-topic, useful fun questions is only going to hurt us when the whole site revolves around a source of fun anyway.
What I think we need to do is make the site a little more friendly. I doubt most of you had the first 3 questions asked on a stackexchange site closed with almost no explanation. I did, and it doesn't feel good. If this stupid site doesn't want my questions, I'll leave. And I almost did. Fortunately, I stayed and came to love it. The more we can make new user's experiences nicer, the more users we'll have and the more awesome the site will be. When users have a nice first experience, they tend to stay. Light-handed moderators are a huge part of this. :)