Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Armour has to be stripped before any control lands, surfaces do more damage than swords, and the game explains neither. Act two is where under-levelled parties stop entirely.

The failure state is a confused kind of boredom — you will rule for two centuries before you work out what you were supposed to be doing.

Hundreds of hours of interlocking systems with a mid-game crisis on a timer. Most losses happen fifty in-game years before anybody notices them.

Division templates, supply and production efficiency are the game, and none of them are on screen when you start. The front line is only ever a symptom.

Thermodynamics as a colony sim. The base that runs beautifully for forty cycles fails on the sixtieth because the heat had nowhere to go.

Nothing threatens you for hours — and then the base you laid out at hour four becomes the thing you cannot fix at hour forty.

A storyteller AI aims raids at whatever you are worst at, and mood is a second economy that collapses faster than the defensive one.

No luck and no reflexes: every loss is a chess problem you were shown in full and got wrong anyway.

It barely tests your hands at all; it tests whether you can walk away from a dungeon you have already paid for.

A game about item literacy: the run is won or lost by whether you recognise a pickup you have never seen before.