Several thoughts occur, in relation to this list of criteria.
Is 30-120 minutes supposed to be how long the game would take if you were playing normally, or if “you were taking a long time to think each turn or pausing a lot”? I’m a pretty thoughtful and methodical player in strategy games, and some genres of game seem to take me as much as 2-5x as long to play as they take for a typical player, so this can make quite a difference. (Though the upper end of that range may only apply if I’m actually pausing to take notes.)
Are you looking for games where a typical player on their first play will lose, or where they will take longer to win than the given timeframe, or is either fine?
With respect to “value of information”, I usually make a distinction between learning gamestate and learning rules—for instance, in Poker, the first would be learning what cards someone has, while the second would be learning whether or not a straight beats a flush.
Hidden gamestate generally has precise bounds for what it could be (if you already know the rules), but are generally made deliberately unguessable within those bounds. The rules of the game have no strict boundaries on what they could be, but usually aren’t designed to be mysterious, and your ability to guess them may be extremely dependent on how much experience you have with similar games.
It would be extremely unusual for a game to take into account how much a move reveals about the rules of the game when balancing them.
Most modern video games are designed to teach you the rules during your first game (which may actually be an obstacle if you want an exercise where the rules are taken as known)
My impression is that most games with exploration as a mechanic are optimized to deliver feelings of discovery, rather than interesting strategy around explore/exploit trade-offs.
Any game where information is valuable, and where gathering less than the maximum amount of helpful information is a viable strategy, is a game with a significant amount of luck. (Since this implies you can gamble on unknown information at reasonable odds.) This means players who only play once will not have a reliable measurement of how well they actually played.
Several thoughts occur, in relation to this list of criteria.
Is 30-120 minutes supposed to be how long the game would take if you were playing normally, or if “you were taking a long time to think each turn or pausing a lot”? I’m a pretty thoughtful and methodical player in strategy games, and some genres of game seem to take me as much as 2-5x as long to play as they take for a typical player, so this can make quite a difference. (Though the upper end of that range may only apply if I’m actually pausing to take notes.)
Are you looking for games where a typical player on their first play will lose, or where they will take longer to win than the given timeframe, or is either fine?
With respect to “value of information”, I usually make a distinction between learning gamestate and learning rules—for instance, in Poker, the first would be learning what cards someone has, while the second would be learning whether or not a straight beats a flush.
Hidden gamestate generally has precise bounds for what it could be (if you already know the rules), but are generally made deliberately unguessable within those bounds. The rules of the game have no strict boundaries on what they could be, but usually aren’t designed to be mysterious, and your ability to guess them may be extremely dependent on how much experience you have with similar games.
It would be extremely unusual for a game to take into account how much a move reveals about the rules of the game when balancing them.
Most modern video games are designed to teach you the rules during your first game (which may actually be an obstacle if you want an exercise where the rules are taken as known)
My impression is that most games with exploration as a mechanic are optimized to deliver feelings of discovery, rather than interesting strategy around explore/exploit trade-offs.
Any game where information is valuable, and where gathering less than the maximum amount of helpful information is a viable strategy, is a game with a significant amount of luck. (Since this implies you can gamble on unknown information at reasonable odds.) This means players who only play once will not have a reliable measurement of how well they actually played.