Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.