I'm looking for computer games that involve strategy, resource management, hidden information, and management of "value of information" (i.e. figuring out when to explore or exploit), which:
- *can* be beaten in 30 – 120 minutes on your first try (or, there's a clear milestone that's about that long)
- but, it'd be pretty hard to do so unless you are trying really hard. Even if a pretty savvy gamer shouldn't be able to by default.
This is for my broader project of "have a battery of exercises that train/test people's general reasoning on openended problems." Each exercise should ideally be pretty different from the other ones.
In this case, I don't expect anyone to have such a game that they have beaten on their first try, but, I'm looking for games where this seems at least plausible, if you were taking a long time to think each turn, or pausing a lot.
The strategy/resource/value-of-information aspect is meant to correspond to some real world difficulties of running longterm ambitious planning.
(One example game that's been given to me in this category is "Luck Be a Landlord")
You may be looking for traditional roguelikes! If you search for old BBS archives of when the term was coined, you'll find surprisingly little mention of integral concepts like "permadeath" and "procedural generation", instead everyone's talking about portability and FOSS. Many modern -likes (not -lites) retain that focus on simplicity, and Discord has been very nice for this community: can often talk to the devs weekly if not daily, so the games don't remain too difficult/easy/solved for too long.
My personal recommendation is The Ground Gives Way:
Note that full wins in RLs are def closer to 2h mark or longer, if thinking about every individual decision, especially when reading through monster descriptions to learn the game. I can play a few of these games at 30min pace while maintaining ~90% winrate, but learning exactly when you can spam commands with miniscule risk takes hundreds of hours.
I will also second Brogue, which is only a bit longer & more complex. And echo StS even if it's not a roguelike, pretty good fit but Ascension-0 or 1 is def too easy, A-20 runs should be closer to what you're looking for.