There are plenty of games that control like living digital boardgames. Many Paradox titles, for instance, and even a lot of Civilization titles. By digital boardgame I mean that the pieces are not animated and slide around (same as many of he civ games), and the general representation is a bit abstract. By LIVING boardgame I mean this does much more than any boardgame ever could. The pieces move themselves rather than you moving them, etc, etc.
Re target audience: anyone who likes strategy games, god games, or simulation games. Not everyone in all those markets obviously, but those are the intersections of interest. And holy moly are people seeming interested; the press caught onto this with no press release and it's been happily talked about on most major sites. Also: if you go into every game thinking about the target audience, you'll never do anything novel. Chiefly our technique is to think of something that appeals to us and that we want to make, and then see if others are also interested. When you're doing something nobody has done before, that's more or less required. This particular game just happens to have an easy to describe audience.
Re: not seeing the complexity. You'll just have to wait and see then!
