Review
Searching for games that fit, I am reminded that there's a frustrating number of games that have a difficult mode, but refuse to let you play it until you've beaten the game on an easier setting (sometimes more than once!) It might be possible to work around that by copying someone's save file.
This list isn't super filtered, but here's some games that seem vaguely in line with your request:
Solar Settlers
Short strategy game with somewhat-risky exploration, pointed resource optimization, and exponential growth (if you play well). Advertises a 10-minute playtime, but I think (this was years ago) that my games lasted more like 1-2 hours; I expect this is partly because I'm slow but partly because the better you play the more stuff you need to manage.
I think (66% confidence) the difference between difficulty levels is just how many points you need to count as a "win", and that you can finish the game even if you reach that threshold, so you could maybe tune the difficulty of the exercise by asking for a different score than what the game says. (Though IIRC there's a regular play mode, and a skill-calibration mode, and I think only one of those lets you keep playing after you reach the target score, and I don't remember which.)
Defense of the Oasis
Explore the map and invest your followers into exploiting various terrain features to prepare for a barbarian invasion. Short levels escalate in difficulty, play until you die. Starts easy, but you could probably pick some number of stages (or some score threshold) that would be challenging.
Various Roguelike Deckbuilders
Those I've played tend to be a bit longer than you asked for but not hugely so. The default difficulty is often hard for players unfamiliar with these types of games (but easy for veterans), and there's often harder unlockable difficulties. There's typically "rules-based" hidden information in the form of not knowing the full set of cards and challenges that exist in the game, but rarely any "gamestate-based" hidden information.
The best-known is Slay the Spire. I think the original and the hardest I've played is Dream Quest, but it's very luck-dependent. Some others that have informed my impressions of this subgenre include Monster Train and Roguebook. There's a zillion other ones nowadays.
You mentioned Luck be a Landlord, which is sort of on the edge of this category; compared to most I've played, it's faster, simpler and has no hand management. Another game I've played that's on the edge of this category is Crop Rotation, which is more of a tableau-builder than a deckbuilder since all your cards are available at once (there's still luck, but mostly in what cards are offered in drafts).
Into the Breach
A tactical battle game where the enemies need to charge up their attacks and you can make them miss (or even hit each other) by moving things around, and you gradually upgrade over a series of short missions. I think this one actually lets you play on hard mode from the start, but I don't remember for sure. Not much in the way of hidden info.
You can vary the game length by choosing to play 2, 3, or 4 islands before doing the finale.
ETA: Tyrant's Blessing has very similar gameplay and is much less likely to have already been played by your audience (though it's so similar that I'd expect a lot of skill transfer, and I'm uncertain about the difficulty and playtime).
Renowned Explorers: International Society
This is likely too long, but allegedly there are players who can finish a run in under 2 hours. It's basically a combination of story events and turn-based tactical battles, with periodic breaks to spend your accumulated resources on upgrades. There's a mechanic where you can do extra events for more resources at the cost of taking penalties that make the fights more difficult.
It's not that hard, but if you restrict yourself to only choosing expeditions from the highest-unlocked difficulty rating then most players probably won't win their first run. Experience at tactical skirmish games may provide a significant advantage.
ETA: Thought of a couple more, although these seem even less promising to me:
Farm Keeper
Turn-based economic strategy where you need to make escalating rent payments. The starting difficulty is almost certainly too low for you, and once again, it only unlocks higher difficulties one at a time as you win. Meeting various conditions while playing also permanently unlocks "secret tiles" that make all future runs easier by giving you more (and typically better) options. Harder modes are also longer and may exceed the playtime you want. So setting up an appropriate challenge might be painful.
It's also somewhat unfair as a one-shot exercise, because as you play you get access to new tiles that substantially alter the optimal layout, but you can't move your existing tiles and you can't see the late-game tiles in advance, so you can end up getting punished for having done a good job of optimizing the variables that you knew about. (Though conceivably this teaches something about flexibility?)
Lueur and the Dim Settlers
This game actually isn't even out yet, but there's a free demo. The demo is certainly too easy for your purposes. But it's a relatively short turn-based survival strategy game where exploration plays an important role. (Note: I have only a vague memory of how long this took to play.)
I think there were some simple action-based mini-games, too, so it's not pure strategy.
ETA Again: If unknown information is not such a priority, one could also look at some solo-friendly strategy board games--several of which have digital versions, such as Spirit Island, Aeon's End, or One Deck Dungeon.
I see a lot of roguelites in the comments (many of which I will happily second, particularly Slay the Spire) but my vote and highest recommendation go to the traditional roguelike Brogue.
This game got me into the genre, so I do have a bit of a nostalgia bias towards it, but it is heavily recommended in traditional roguelike communities and considered to be a staple.
Brogue is as traditional as it comes -- descend into the procedurally-generated dungeon, pick up the Amulet of Yendor, and escape with your singular and fragile life. In my view, it is a refinement and distillation of this formula and of traditional roguelike strategy mechanics into something endlessly replayable and perfectly streamlined.
I would say it meets both your first and second qualifications. There are milestones, both with each floor of the dungeon, and ones that are typically community-defined, and a run in two hours is feasible. However, it is incredibly difficult to win on your first try. I have never heard of anyone doing it, although I'm sure that they have. Among myself and my IRL friends who I have gotten into it, I am the only one to have successfully beaten it, though two of the four of them have gotten very close multiple times. There are players capable of winstreaking it in the community, even when taking on optional additional objectives and descending even deeper into the dungeon than necessary. Every seed, random though it is, is fundamentally winnable and fair. Unlike in many, many similar games, I have never once walked away from a death thinking "that was bullshit" -- there's something beautiful about that, to me. It feels like an elegant game of something almost chesslike, purely my own strategic merit and improvement run to run against the computer.
Regarding strategy/resource management/hidden information/value of information:
Last but not least, a few technical details: The game is free. The community edition is still continuously developed and updated. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and the entire app is only a couple of megabytes.
If anyone tries it out, please let me know what you think and how you like it.
This varies pretty dramatically by how careful an individual player is (as well as whether or not autoexplore is used) but to provide a data point, I would say I'm probably 6.5/10 self-rated careful (increasing sharply from 4/10 to 8-9/10 after I get out of the early floors and get a sense that I'm well-positioned to go deep) and my first victory took about three and a half hours. However, I've gotten very close to victory in other runs in closer to 2-2.5 hours.
Most games will be shorter than that, many significantly so. There is a website that provides statistics for people playing the web version of the game -- http://brogue.roguelikelike.com/#gameStatistics -- but total game length isn't part of it. You can get a sense of difficulty as well as the distribution of where/why runs often end, which can help give an indirect sense of length.
I think your list of conditions is very restrictive; to the point at which it's really difficult to find something matching it.
Most (all?) modern difficult strategy games rely on some version of "game knowledge" as part of it's difficulty, expecting you to experiment with different approaches to find out what works best -- this is a core part of the game loop, something specifically designed into the game to make it more fun. This is baked into the design on a fundamental level and is extremely difficult to separate out.
Combine that with the one-shot nature and a strict time limit (so strict that in a large amount of cases this isn't even enough to start making meaningful strategic decisions: either because learning all the systems takes longer or because you need to progress through the game enough to be aware of the later payoffs) and you are basically rolling a die on whenever you can land on a solution or not via some combination of prior gaming knowledge and luck -- I don't think you can meaningfully "try harder" to guess the decisions the game designers have made about the systems and obstacles you've not seen yet (besides playing more games beforehand of course, collecting game design principles trivia along the way).
Yes, you can bias the roll in your favor with genre savviness and experience; one of my friends has an absolutely uncanny ability of picking excellent builds in games with no prior information. He has also played games for some inordinate amount of time in order to build this intuition up.
Tentative recommendation of Slipways; the VOI part isn't as central as I suspect you'd like, but sending out probes sure does cost time and money you could use for settling planets and forming trade routes; and while it's easy enough to survive to the end of your term, it gives what you're asking for if you choose to define 'victory' as 'get 5+ stars on Tough'.
Lots of people have mentioned various flavors of roguelikes. One of my goals is to have games in different genres. I agree that roguelikes are often a good source of the qualities I'm looking for here but part of the point is to try applying the same skills on radically different setups.
Another thing I'm interested in is "ease of setup", where you can download the game, open it up, and immediately be in the experience instead of having to do a bunch of steps to get there.
It's good to clarify that you're looking for examples from multiple genres, though I'd caution you not to write off all "roguelikes" too quickly just because you've already found one you liked. There are some games with the "roguelike" tag that have little overlap other than procedural content and permadeath.
For instance, Slay the Spire, Rogue Legacy, and Dungeons of Dredmor have little overlap in gameplay, though they are all commonly described as "roguelike". (In fact, I notice that Steam now seems to have separate tags for "roguelike deckbuilder", "action roguelike", and "traditional roguelike"--though it also retains the generic "roguelike" tag.)
And that's without even getting into cases like Sunless Sea where permadeath and procedural generation were tacked onto a game where they're arguably getting in the way more than adding to the experience.
Stratego
It's old and not 'fancy', but it contains all the required elements. Balancing explore/exploit, hidden information, strategic risk-taking, difficulty that can be tuned to be subjectively high but still beatable (against an adjustable computer opponent), a single game doesn't necessarily take very long (and can be explicitly limited by turn-time-limits).
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/mastering-stratego-the-classic-game-of-imperfect-information/
Disrecommending Slay The Spire. While it's a great game and it fits the rest of your criteria like a glove, it has very little hidden information in a practical sense (one of the more innovative things about it is that you can almost always see what the enemy will do next turn), and as such has basically no places where explore/exploit tradeoffs and VOI calculations would be relevant (I assume that this isn't a negotiable part of what you're asking for; if not, yeah I also recommend StS).
I think I disagree with this comment. StS really does have hidden information and tradeoffs, as you don't know what you will encounter later in the run. Very often the value of a card depends on what cards you are offered later, or even which bosses you face.
Unless I'm mistaken, StS does not have any game actions the player can take to learn information about future encounters or rewards in advance. Future encounters are well-modeled as simple random events, rather than lurking variables (unless we're talking about reverse-engineering the PRNG, which I'm assuming is out-of-scope).
It therefore does not demonstrate the concept of value-of-information. The player can make bets, but cannot "scout".
(Though there might be actions a first-time player can take to help pin down the rules of the game, that an experienced player would already know; I'm unclear on whether that counts for purposes of this exercise.)
(Though there might be actions a first-time player can take to help pin down the rules of the game, that an experienced player would already know; I'm unclear on whether that counts for purposes of this exercise.)
I think one thing I meant in the OP was more about "the player can choose to spend more time modeling the situation." Is it worth spending an extra 15 minutes thinking about how the longterm game might play out, and what concerns you may run into that you aren't currently modeling? I dunno! Depends on how much better you become at playing the game, by spending those 15 minutes.
This is maybe a nonstandard use of "value of information", but I think it counts.
If your definition of "hidden information" implies that chess has it then I think you will predictably be misunderstood.
Terms that I associate with (gaining advantage by spending time modeling a situation) include: thinking, planning, analyzing, simulating, computing ("running the numbers")
Yeah I do not super stand by how I phrased it in the post. But also your second paragraph feels wrong to me too – in some sense yes Chess and Slay the Spire hidden information are "the same", but, like, it seems at least somewhat important that in Slay the Spire there are things you can't predict by purely running simulations forward, you have to have a probability distribution over pretty unknown things.
(I'm not sure I'll stand by either this or my last comment, either. I'm thinking out loud, and may have phrased things wrong here)
Some concepts that I use:
Randomness is when the game tree branches according to some probability distribution specified by the rules of the game. Examples: rolling a die; cutting a deck at a random card.
Slay the Spire has randomness; Chess doesn't.
Hidden Information is when some variable that you can't directly observe influences the evolution of the game. Examples: a card in an opponent's hand, which they can see but you can't; the 3 solution cards set aside at the start of a game of Clue; the winning pattern in a game of Mastermind.
People sometimes consider "hidden information" to include randomness, but I more often find it helpful to separate them.
However, it's not always obvious which model should be used. For example, I usually find it most helpful to think of a shuffled deck as generating a random event each time you draw from the deck (as if you were taking a randomly-selected card from an unordered pool), but it's also possible to think of shuffling the deck as having created hidden information (the order that the deck is in), and it may be necessary to switch to this more-complicated model if there are rules that let players modify the deck (e.g. peeking at the top card, or inserting a card at a specific position).
Similar reasoning applies to a PRNG: I usually think of it as a random event each time a number is generated, though it's also possible to think of it as a hidden seed value that you learn a little bit about each time you observe an output (and a designer may need to think in this second way to ensure their PRNG is not too exploitable).
Rule of thumb: If you learn some information about the same variable more than once, then it's hidden info. For instance, a card in your opponent's hand will influence their strategy, so you gain a little info about it whenever they move, which makes it hidden info. If a variable goes from completely hidden to completely revealed in a single step (or if any remaining uncertainty has no impact on the game), then it's just randomness.
Interesting Side Note: Monte Carlo Tree Search can handle randomness just fine, but really struggles with hidden information.
A Player is a process that selects between different game-actions based on strategic considerations, rather than a simple stochastic process. An important difference between Chess and Slay the Spire is that Chess includes a second player.
We typically treat players as "outside the game" and unconstrained by any rules, though of course in any actual game the player has to be implemented by some actual process. The line between "a player who happens to be an AI" and "a complicated game rule for selecting the next action" can be blurry.
A Mixed Equilibrium is when the rules of the game reward players for deliberately including randomness in their decision process. For instance, in rock-paper-scissors, the game proceeds completely deterministically for a given set of player inputs, but there remains an important sense in which RPS is random but Chess is not, which is that one of these rewards players for acting randomly.
I have what I consider to be important and fundamental differences in my models between any two of these games: Chess, Battleship, Slay the Spire, and Clue.
Yet, you can gain an advantage in any of these games by thinking carefully about your game model and its implications.
Another possible reason to disrecommend it is because it's hugely popular.
(The more popular a game, the more of your audience has already played it and therefore can't participate in "blind first run" exercise based on it.)
If you choose a single player game, you are going to have to carefully calibrate the level of difficulty and the type of difficulty. However, if you pick any two player comptetitive strategy game you can focus on the type of difficulty, as the level of difficulty will be calibrated automatically to "half your participants will win."
My recommendation would be to rig up a way to randomly sample from the two player board games on boardgamearena.com that neither player has every played before (can be as simple as putting 20 names on index cards, the players remove any cards they recognize, then shuffle and draw).
To add explore / exploit, just start the game's chess clock before allowing the players to start reading the rules.
Several thoughts occur, in relation to this list of criteria.
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.
This is a simple strategy game that's so old you'd have to run it with an emulator. I think it did a good job of explore/exploit and hidden information though. Later versions were increasingly complex, but I actually think the original makes for a good time-limited pure strategy game.
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5762-starbound
[Edit: there's a link on the page to play the game in an emulator that runs in your browser window.]
I would probably have suggested roguelike deckbuilders too if others hadn't already, but I have another idea:
Start a campaign of Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord, and try to obtain at least [X] gold within an hour.
Bannerlord's most flashy aspect is its real-time battle system, but it's also a complicated medieval sandbox with a lot of different systems that you can engage with - trading, crafting, quests, clan upgrades, joining a kingdom, companions, marriage, tournaments, story missions, etc. Even if you're no good at battles, you can do a lot by just moving around on the world map and clicking through menus.
The game's community derides a lot of these systems for being simplistic and unbalanced. But I think that makes for a good explore/exploit tradeoff when you only have a short amount of time. What systems do you bother learning about, when trying to learn a new system takes time you could be spending exploiting the last system you learned?
(I'm not sure what the right value of X is, for the amount of gold you're trying to get. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand?)
One downside is that the game involves an action-oriented battle system. If you don't want action gaming skill to be a factor, you can remove it by requiring the player to auto-resolve all battles. But this would cut out many viable early-game moneymaking strategies.
Seconding Slay the Spire, though it might be slightly too easy to win on the first attempt (I did and I'm not a god gamer). An advantage of StS is that you can specify the RNG seed, so you could give everyone the same test.
FTL (another roguelite) on easy difficulty also might work, though it's realtime with pause which might be tricky for less experienced gamers.
Both of these are games that benefit a lot from thoughtfulness and careful risk management.
Is Slay the Spire programmed in such a way that giving players the same random seed will ensure a meaningfully-similar experience?
If it were programmed in the simple and obvious way, where it generates random numbers exactly when they're needed, I wouldn't particularly expect 2 players to see similar things. For example, suppose at the end of her first battle, Alice's card rewards are determined by (say) her 21st, 22nd, and 23rd random outputs. But Bob plays a slightly more conservative strategy in the first battle and takes 1 turn longer to beat it, meaning he draws 5 more random cards and the enemy takes 1 more action, so Bob's card rewards are determined by the 27th, 28th, and 29th random outputs and have no overlap with Alice's.
Statistically, I'd still expect more overlap than if they used different seeds--if you try this many times, they'll sometimes be "synchronized" by coincidence--but I'd still expect their results to be more different than the same, unless they also play very similarly.
I could imagine deliberately programming the game in a way where various important things (like battles and rewards) are generated in advance, before the player starts making choices, so that they're affected only by the seed and not by what the player has done before reaching them. But that sounds like extra work that wouldn't matter except for exercises like this, so I'd be moderately surprised if they did that. (I haven't checked.)
There are separate random number generators for most things in Slay the Spire.
Specifically, this piece of code is executed at the start of a run:
public static void generateSeeds() { logger.info("Generating seeds: " + Settings.seed); monsterRng = new Random(Settings.seed); eventRng = new Random(Settings.seed); merchantRng = new Random(Settings.seed); cardRng = new Random(Settings.seed); treasureRng = new Random(Settings.seed); relicRng = new Random(Settings.seed); potionRng = new Random(Settings.seed); // The following rngs are actually re-initialized each floor: monsterHpRng = new Random(Settings.seed); aiRng = new Random(Settings.seed); shuffleRng = new Random(Settings.seed); cardRandomRng = new Random(Settings.seed); miscRng = new Random(Settings.seed); }
From https://forgottenarbiter.github.io/Correlated-Randomness/ (which does point out there is some unfortunate correlated randomness, though I think there are mods that fix that)
Wow. I'm kind of shocked that the programmer understands PRNGs well enough to come up with this strategy for controlling different parts of the game separately and yet thinks that initializing a bunch of PRNGs to exactly the same seed is a good idea.
Nice find, though. Thanks for the info!
(I note the page you linked is dated ~4 years ago; it seems possible this has changed since then.)
IIRC the same encounters are present at the macro level - eg which enemies and cards are available. But there's still a luck element there as one player may choose to go left and the other right, without either direction giving evidence in advance about which has better rewards.
Slay the Spire, unlocked, on Ascension (difficulty level) ~5ish, just through Act 3, should work, I think. Definitely doable in 2 hours by a new player but I would expect fairly rare. Too easy to just get lucky without upping the Ascension from baseline. Can be calibrated; A0 is too easy, A20H is waaay too hard.
Point of comparison: Slay the Spire consistently takes me ~3 hours. (I have a slow, thoughtful play style.)
Universal Paperclips is the first thing to come to mind (the fastest Speedruns are ~1.5 hours but finish the first 2 stages in ~1 hour, and the time to complete each stage is a decent milestone for measuring people), with the problem being that you can't lose; you have as much time as you need to to explore the mechanics. Any mistake will only slow you down, the worst thing that can happen is a single occasion where you lose one single point of trust, you never get shut down by the humans even if you mismanage the wire extremely terribly at the very beginning and completely run out of resources.
Also, there is some pretty annoying RNG with the stock trading and yomi generation which are key time bottlenecks. If you reach out to the designer Frank Lantz, he might be glad to see that his game is being used for something valuable and give you what you need to turn off the RNG (or even reconfigure the game into something better for the purpose, as it is a very simple system).
I went back and tried playing it again, and I'm no longer confident in Universal Paperclips. It's way too heavy on the explore aspect of the explore-exploit tradeoff; you're constantly bombarded with new things to try and have no way of knowing how much they're helping you (maximizing things other than paperclips is usually the winning strategy). It probably doesn't outperform speedrunning most things e.g. various parts of TOTK.
Recently encountered a game that made me think of this thread.
King of the Bridge is a game where you play an unfair chess variant with partially-secret rules and the opponent sometimes cheats. I reached the first ending in ~40 minutes. Getting there without ever losing a match seems like it ought to be possible with great paranoia plus some luck.
If you want to try this you should probably avoid looking at the store page in detail, as some of the secret rules are revealed in screenshots.
Long Live the Queen takes about 4 hours. It would take some luck to beat it on the first try, but generally you win by using common sense and training useful skills.
I haven't played it, but someone disrecommended it to me on the basis that there was no way to know which skills you'd need to survive the scripted events except to have seen the script before.
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:
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")