Nintendo Hard / Tabletop Games

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• Antiquity is a city building game set in a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of medieval Italy. Here is a quote from the manual:
  As this is a highly complicated game, we strongly advise you to play a couple of trial rounds in order to learn the basics before playing a full game. In our experience the game can be finished in two hours. However, many starting players may take considerably longer. The game is quite unforgiving: famine and pollution will pile up if your economy doesn't grow fast enough, which can lead to a slow and painful death.
• Arkham Horror is extremely difficult. First, you have to understand that it's the players versus the game, not each other. The game usually wins. The randomly drawn opponent Eldritch Abomination Big Bad changes a number of rules, monsters, and often has instant-kill conditions should the game end in a final battle. Strategy and teamwork is mandatory, random events and blind luck will usually ruin your plans, and it's all a Race Against the Clock. Expansions for the game generally exist to make the game ever harder, such as adding The Dragon or The Corruption to the mix. In general, you don't expect to win a given game, completely appropriate to the setting. This intense difficulty can be avoided by using custom characters.
• Atmosfear:
  • The "Staring Contest" in the original game. It lasts for two minutes, which will probably result in all but the most adept starers losing a key.
  • In Nightmare IV, one of the twists was that Elizabeth could remove a player from the game permanently if they were unlucky with a roll of the die, in addition to transforming players into a vampire that is forced to stalk the other players and play spoiler.
  • The booster tapes for The Harbingers are only 45 minutes instead of the standard hour, and have an additional limitation in the form of fewer Keystones per province if more players are present.
• Battlestar Galactica the board game is extremely hard for a traitor game. Often favoring the Cylon rather than the Humans. More often than not the Cylons win.
• Betrayal at House on the Hill has many scenarios which are won or lost based on victory conditions. However, before the endgame begins, players have found items, gained and lost stats, and explored the house. End-games range from fair challenges to virtually impossible.
• Bunnies & Burrows: The game is about fluffy bunnies, whom everything else thinks is tasty.
• Call of Cthulhu, the RPG, is usually murderously difficult to survive. Characters are at risk of death from a single rifle round, and many monsters deal enough damage that player characters who are hit have almost no chance to survive. The Corruption is killing you, your Sanity Meter is killing you, the McGuffin is killing you, the Tome of Eldritch Lore is killing you... They're not trying. They're succeeding.
  • Three words for you: Masks of Nyarlathotep. If you thought Call of Cthulhu was tough to survive in general, try a minimum-year-long campaign with globe-trotting pulp adventure in a game where you are decidedly not Indiana Jones levels of plot-safe. There's multiple places the party can experience a TPK, monsters in pretty much every chapter that can easily kill you in one hit, and there's plenty of Sanity loss to go around from the various titular avatars of Nyarlathotep to the situations experienced. Then there's at least four cults that all want the player characters dead, and that's without lengthening the campaign. The game's also on a time limit - the players have a year before rituals surrounding a solar eclipse cause a gateway to open, allowing The End of the World as We Know It. Multiple character deaths are more common here than average, and even the cover of the campaign calls it "perilous". Yeah, there's a reason why most Call of Cthulhu players consider it one of the most challenging modules ever written for the game.
• Dark Heresy, being based on Warhammer 40,000 has a long list of lethal effects of critical hits, such as "marrow flash-boiled, turning bones into frag grenades."
• The Deadlands dime novel adventure Night Train is alternately referred to as PC Death Train. A locomotive carrying thirty nosferatu and a zombie conductor (and not one of those relatively easy to beat head shot zombies) will do that. Rumors that its writer John Goff gets a royalty every time running it ends in a Total Party Kill are officially denied, however.
• In his childhood, James Rolfe designed a cruel bordering on unplayable board game, Deadly Danger Dungeon, which as demonstrated when the game was shown in Board James, has basically half its board being instant death. (try it if you dare...)
• The casino game "Diana" is an surprisingly old example, predating Nintendo, the TV itself, and even radio!, having beeen introduced to the Wild West in the 1800s. It was variant of Faro played with two decks. The players would bet on the color, suit, or even the specific card with the payout varying depending on the type of bet. However, the odds of actually winning were so bad that most gamblers steered clear of it.
• The Tabletop version of Doom was this, potentially unintentionally. Because of the rules on ammunition making guns extremely unreliable, Marine players were forced to rely on the fist and chainsaw whenever possible, potentially putting themselves in the lines of fire of multiple hard-hitting demons.
• Several Dungeons & Dragons modules have developed reputations for being "meat grinders" due to the high mortality rate of parties attempting to tackle them.
  • The original Tomb of Horrors module.
    E. Gary Gygax: Heh, heh. Oh, man. The Sphere of Annihilation in the statue's mouth. That never gets old.
    The reason for the difficulty is that Gygax was annoyed by his players bragging about their characters, and wanted to teach them a lesson. The difficulty was less about giving a proper challenge and more about giving upstart players a humiliating smackdown.
  • Throne of Bloodstone, the module that has your party going to the layer of the Abyss where Orcus resides in order to steal his artifact wand.
  • And then there's the Dark Sun module "Valley of Dust and Fire" which details the city of Ur Draxa, home of the Dragon of Tyr. The whole Dark Sun-setting was intended to be the Nintendo Hard among the D&D-settings (though Planescape is more or less on par with it).
  • Labyrinth of Madness - not only are the monsters and traps extremely deadly, but to progress past certain points, you need to find magical glyphs, without which certain parts of the dungeon (mainly the entrances to new areas) don't even exist for you. There are twenty in all, and you're pretty much screwed if you miss even one. (To make matters worse, the original printing has a typo that makes one of them impossible to actually get, but honestly, most groups will give up before this actually becomes a problem.) In its comic book adaptation, the dwarven fighter was instakilled about 3 pages in, turned into a zombie and sent back to attack his friends.
  • "The Skinsaw Murders", a Pathfinder adventure path installment, is infamous for TPKs. Lots of ghouls, whose paralysis attack can be very cheap and very nasty, a haunted house full of unavoidable "Haunts", one of which forces you to jump out a window, possibly hitting the water some 50 ft below, or run outside into a flock of undead crows. And the final boss encounter... no. Just no.
• Eclipse Phase can be described as a cross between Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, and Shadowrun. Player characters rarely survive missions. If they aren't eaten by a swarm of Nano Machines, decapitated by killer robots, eviscerated by mutant horrors, or enveloped by alien slime molds it's likely their benefactor will call in an orbital strike on their position in order to contain whatever X-risk they uncovered. But at least they'll buy your backup a new body (or more likely a used one).
• An example Older Than Radio, and likely Older Than Steam, is Frustration Solitaire. Dating back to at least 1708, this Solitaire variant involved shuffling a deck then drawing cards one at a time while calling each card in order, if the card matches what is called Game Over. The only way to win is to draw all 52 cards without ever getting a match.
• Hunter: The Reckoning stresses its brutal difficulty in its fluff. The rules are not on the same level as Call of Cthulhu. However, if the Game Master decides to use the rules in the game lines for other supernaturals in the Old World of Darkness, the Player Characters are mayflies.
• In KULT you are a regular human that can be instakilled by a shot or a bad hit. Good luck with the Archonts and they friendly minions.
• Paranoia: Played for laughs. The PCs are agents of an insane supercomputer who hunt down Commies, mutants, and conspiracies, which includes everyone in the complex, including the PCs. (Friend Computer has not caught on how widespread the problem is, though many people have at least a rough idea.) People are cloned in packs of six, and it's not uncommon for a player to burn through an entire six-pack in the course of a single mission.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse's OblivAeon mode. Fitting, since it represents the biggest, deadliest, most dangerous villain ever fought in the game's universe. Each Scion has a different set of abilities it can use to screw you over, Aeon Men come in faster than you can take them out, the environment will get in your way as usual, and that's not even getting into all the ways OblivAeon himself will screw you over. For example, one of his cards does a frankly unnecessary 9999 damage.
• Shadows over Camelot is infamous for being virtually impossible for the good knights to win a campaign, due to a multitude of bad things that can happen, some of which can occur before a player's turn even starts. It is significantly easier for the Traitor in the group to win if there is one, especially since remaining undetected until the end of the game may result in a Kaizo Trap for the other players!
• Torchbearer can be punishing, rolling successes is difficult and failing gives the GM carte blanche to introduce you to new problems or let you succeed with a negative condition (your character can be left Afraid, Injured or Dead among other things). Conditions are also earned every four turns of the game, meaning that careless adventurers are closer and closer to die as far as they go down the dungeon. On the other hand it is really difficult to actually die in this game, you have to take a series of bad decisions or have a long long streak of bad luck, but, as the book puts it: "In Torchbearer death is a mercy".
• Unknown Armies opens its chapter on combat rules by advising you not to get into a fight. Do anything to de-escalate the situation. Because fighting in UA? Can be very lethal. The rules are percentage-based and it's easy to flail around without hitting anything if your skills are low. And if someone's skills are high? Damage is calculated by adding together the digits of the successful attack roll (for melee, so a roll of 55 deals 10 damage) or by just taking the attack roll as the damage score (for firearms, so a roll of 55 deals 55 damage). The average person has 50 hit points. You can survive a few good melee hits but just one gunshot could completely ruin you. On top of that, magic is useful but highly situational, averting Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards hard.
  • It is also a somewhat explicit assumption of the setting that the most powerful supernatural abilities typically are difficult to use, dangerous to use, sanity-blasting, grossly immoral or some combination of the above. Thus, your character has to choose between an overall disadvantage in power levels, or risking xe life, mind and soul frequently. And you WILL end up facing serious threats, because the Occult Underground is paranoid, greedy, insane and ill-tempered.

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