Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.