Ask for the shape of the challenge.

Gentle to look at and quietly ruthless to score — the tile you place carelessly on turn ten is the one that ends the run four hundred turns later.

A fishing game with an inventory puzzle and a night timer. Panic is the mechanic, and the punishment for giving in to it is deliberately mild.

Nothing in it is hard to do; almost everything in it is hard to find out that you can do.

Needs decay on a timer and nothing else really threatens you. The depth is in what the systems let you build rather than in anything they demand.

A card game that keeps changing what kind of game it is. The difficulty is noticing which rules you are allowed to break, and when.

Weakness targeting is the whole of combat, and the calendar is the real difficulty: a day spent wrong in November cannot be spent again.

Depth and darkness rather than combat. It is careful never to tell you where to go, which is either the appeal or the wall depending on the player.

A build with no points where it matters hits walls it can neither talk nor shoot past. Hardcore mode adds logistics, and the Deathclaws north of Goodsprings teach direction before the game does.

It plays itself for the first ten minutes, then asks whether you were paying attention to what you were building the whole time.

Nothing fails quickly. A road laid in the first hour becomes unfixable in the twentieth, and that delay is the only real difficulty in it.