Ask for the shape of the challenge.

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.

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.

A storyteller AI aims raids at whatever you are worst at, and mood is a second economy that collapses faster than the defensive one.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.