Hand of Fate

I just came off a playthrough of Hand of Fate, and although I understood the weapons, modifiers, and general minute-to-minute gameplay, I just couldn't wrap my mind around gaining equipment in a round and then not having it equipped the next. And seeing that this is a major component of the deck-building, I ended up using the auto-building function every round. At the end of the day I understood I was gaining cards to use in a round, but I couldn't understand the building process enough to manually employ it adequately. Oh well...

I never could beat any of the Ultima games. I pretty much enjoyed them all, just running amok and doing oddball stuff like a sandbox. Ultima 7 was special, in that you could find a flying carpet. Use powder kegs to blast doors. Collect random treasure and even rob a bank lol

Best time was when I found out how to make pastry treats and skip on over to the bank to rob it of all the gold with the weapons I just stole. Good times! xD

7th Guest, but mainly because there were no subtitles and the diction and sound quality in it is terrible (apart from the GM music). I don't have a pressing desire to buy a remaster for a lot more money, but understand that the anniversary one has subtitles, which would probably fix my problem.

I never played the Talisman PC game, and that's because I couldn't understand how it works.

When it was released on GOG and I saw people talking about the dozens of DLCs for it and trying to explain what is needed and what isn't, I still couldn't understand it even after reading their posts.

I assume there may be some fun to be had from that game, but it doesn't seem to be worth the bother of doing Ph.D level research to determine what DLCs would need to be bought or not in order to have the most fun with the game.

A friend got me into Terraria at some point, and we must have played around 30 hours over a few days. I understood literally nothing. All the crafting, processes for summoning the bosses, the "hellevator".. He had several hundred hours of experience, so it basically felt like I was following him. Maybe it's less complex than it seems to me, but I definitely didn't learn anything.

I've started co-op campaigns in Divinity: Original Sin with several times with several different people, but it always ends up with us getting one-hit KO'd by everything after a few hours and not figuring out how to progress or get stronger. The game is too smart for us.

A friend gifted me Crusader Kings 2, and.. I have never understood less in any game. Completely clueless from the start.

Personally I consider Talisman one of the best boardgame adaptations for pc.
The base game alone can provide lots of fun (specially if you play with a friend on hotseat mode).
Except for the "deluxe cards" (which are basically same as regular cards but with a extra difficulty added - monsters are tougher, etc) the DLCs basically add more playable characters, different rules, more items, more monsters and extra scenarios.
None of them are essential and some of them may even make the game better or worse, depending on the player's taste.

Personally, I'd suggest you buy the base game first. And if you enjoy it, then you can later buy a couple of DLCs, to try new things.
The base game is 1.50$ right now and IMO it's quite worth it if you like board games.
Just don't mistake it with Talisman :Origins, as it's the single-player only version of the game.

I still want to enjoy Cultist Simulator. And pull it out occasionally. I 'understand where it's going'. But it just never congeals for me.

Reigns is one I played and played a lot. I thought it was just an open 'see how long you could go' game. Then I learned it had an ending. I looked it up. And holy expletive how would you come to that? I still load it up to toy with now and again, but I don't bother trying for the ending. Nothing lost. Talisman is a terrible game. I have a bad habit of trying "grand strategy" games and coming to that same conclusion in all of them. Some of them may even have a core game in there if you can get around the UI. Only one that ever clicked for me is no longer on GOG. (Evil Bank Manager). Abstractions work in games, but grand strategy games abstractly abstract their abstractions into another abstracted layer. I think that's where they break down.

Ah, yes, the Hellevator! The one structure that could have saved me from the unexpected nightmare that was the second part of Terraria!

I found out the hard way that on the very edge of the map, on the bottom of the sea, there are blocks you canot reach. If the corruption spreads there, you will never be able to control it.

Pizza Syndicate - I'm not sure if tutorial didn't cover all aspects of the game (or I missed something), but basing only on the knowledge from tutorial, I wasn't able to make any succesful run with bringing some stable incomes. Despite watching out for expenses and trying to satisfy customers. And yet by some reason I enjoyed this game more than any other entry in the series.

- When I was little a friend of mine's father had a flight sim installed on his computer. Tried as we might we could figure out anything. Once we somehow managed to get airborne, only to crash a short distance later.

- More recently, but this is already quite a few years ago, I felt extremely noobish playing Hearthstone, as well as when I tried out pvp in Elder Scrolls Online after a friend gifted me a copy. Both barriers I expect requires grinding to break down :P

- Played cricket a couple of times. I'll be damned if I understand the appeal of that game. It's ok when you are batting, but mind numbingly boring otherwise. You're most just standing there in the sweltering heat, hoping against hope that your sunscreen is strong enough for the brutal punishment inflected on your exposed skin.

Actually that's not a bad idea. Cricket, but there's trees on the field!

Yeah... I've watched many videos on Talisman and think I have a grasp of the game, but those dlc...

... so many dlc!

That's where it loses me.

That's the thing with CCGs like Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering, of which it really is just a dumbded down version - the basics are simple, but to be any good against others it's a hopeless time sink. There are so many ways for cards to interact, so many synergies, and the game keeps changing with new cards being added, some being rotated out (or, in case online CCGs, altered) that you can never really take a break without being back to square if you ever come back. There's really no way to be a casual player, unless you're only playing with friends who are just as casual about it.

As for me, I think it's pretty safe to say I never truly understood Starcraft, or really most RTS games that offer more than two factions and make them fully asymetrical. My approach to RTSes (at which I was never very good to begin with) is really to just try to make a lot of things fast and throw whatever I can at the opponent in the hopes his things will stop moving first. The intricacies of all the strenghts and weaknesses of all the units and their possible interactions, the upgrades, the strategies of what to make first and how much of it to make... it's just too much for me in a real time game, where I'm way too busy trying not to die to the first zerg rush to ;earn any clever art of war shit.

I loved the hell out of Warcraft 3 and "got" a lot of its of its mechanics and stuff, but its armor/damage TYPES system was needlessly complicated. And then you'd end up with weird patches that reallocated "siege" type (meant for buildings) to another random unit and you'd be like HUH?

The other end that I *despise* are RTS games that just go full transparent rock-paper-scissors. A lot of the historical RTS games [AoE, etc] go that way (spear beat horse beat bow beat spear).

These deeper systems can better be groked in a TBS game (like Civ4's "horse units attack siege units of its tier or lower in the defending stack first" ability).

Sim City 2000. Although I've played hundreds of hours, I still think I'm playing it wrong. I never bothered to try and learn the right way to play, tho

That's why in the olden days we had things called manuals that came with games.