One-shot strategy games?

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”)