Grid appears to be based on LOVE: https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/api/Game_Loop

They are not comparable with Pygame, but easier for beginners:

https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io

https://github.com/mjbrusso/game2dboard

Disclosure: I am the author of game2dboard

I recently found https://arcade.academy/ Haven't used it myself but it looks feature rich and has an active community.

Arcade is pretty nice. It's what pygame should be, at least in terms of installability.

https://arcade.academy/

I'm curious as to what you found nightmareish about Pygame... It's SDL.

Years of being extremely difficult to run on a Mac (no pip install), horrible website update (the old one was bad, but at least it was cool & functional), and on-going issues like this: https://github.com/pygame/pygame/issues/555

There's not even a note on the website that it's entirely broken in Mojave. It's just _always_ something.

Compared to LOVE and numerous other projects which just worked right out of the box. I'm a total Python guy, but Pygame has always been frustrating.

Fair enough. Though I have similar complaints about other packages on mac (Python and Ruby MySQL packages being good examples.)