Ask for the shape of the challenge.

The rules are the difficulty. A fight lost on turn one was lost in the inventory screen, and the game is content to let you walk into an encounter five levels early without a word. Honour mode makes one wipe final; Explorer makes almost nothing final.

Deity is an economy handicap rather than a smarter opponent, so the skill is knowing which of forty systems can be safely ignored this particular game.

Poker hands as a scaling problem. The ante climbs faster than a fair deck can, so a run lives or dies on whether the multiplier joker you needed ever appeared in the shop.

Classic mode makes every death permanent, and the calendar decides months in advance who will be strong enough to survive. Maddening turns recruitment into its own strategy layer.

The town is gone, so there is no bank of spare heroes to absorb a bad decision — a run is four people and every relationship between them is a mechanic.

A city builder where the scarce resource is time and every law you sign is unrepealable. The storm arrives on schedule whether or not the city is ready.

Two games at once — a campaign map that decides the war and real-time battles that can still lose it. Army composition answers most questions before the fighting starts.

Every run is decided by about ten card choices you made while thinking about something else.

You do not lose fights here, you lose campaigns — and usually about three missions before you notice.

The aircraft are modelled well past where the tutorials stop. An instrument approach in an airliner is a procedure most people learn outside the game entirely.