Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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.

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.

Orbital mechanics with no tutorial worth the name. It is endlessly patient about failure and completely unwilling to explain a delta-v budget.

Deduction with no fail state and no hints beyond the ship itself. It only confirms an answer once three of them are right together, which keeps guessing expensive.

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.

The manual is written in a language you cannot read and is also the walkthrough. Combat is secondary to noticing what a page has been telling you for hours.

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.

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.

The rules are the puzzle, so being stuck feels less like failing and more like simply not having had the thought yet.