I disagree about DF. I just grabbed a tutorial and started playing. The real curve starts later in the game when the crappy UI is no longer enough to drive 80+ dwarves.
I think I'll take another shot at it. First time around, I got lost in the complexity and gave up after a day spent on exploring available actions and values to track.
Yeah, I can imagine how playing DF by exploring the actions might suck. There are lots of them and most don't make sense, especially in the beginning of the game.
The value of the tutorials is that they show the smallest working set of actions and how they interact.
It's me always trying to learn everything with minimum amount of tutorials required. Orbiter and KSP have beaten me in the same way - I had to read up a bit before being able have any kind of a meaningful gameplay.
For what its worth I can relate to that. Recently my wife said "I'm going to go out and buy us some cake".
Two hours later she returned, happily bearing cake, and said "Yeah I got distracted hacking portals". She'd walked something like six miles.
She's certainly keen, and enjoys it, though I've never really seen the point of it myself.
You and parent should both try playing Diplomacy by email! Great fun, and can take as little as half an hour a week or so.
Re:Meeting strangers in the street
by icebraining on Friday September 26, 2014 @12:18PM
(#8373356)
Thankfully, doesn't work for me. It's just grinding.
So there it is. Ingress. Free. Easy to start. Too easy to incorporate in your daily life. You start doing groceries in the other shop; it's few minutes more of walking, but you pass by five portals on the route. You stop reading Facebook on the tram, you hack portals instead - you'll need all that inventory later. You go out to buy a beer. It'll be only five minutes, you think. Ok, ten, because you need to retake that two portals on your way. You come home an hour later, after flipping the entire neighbourhood.
All those games you mentioned are addictive like hell. Out of them, Ingress has the lowest barrier to entry. It's so small that you can tunnel through it by accident. At some point you just start playing and can't stop. There, you're sucked in for life.