Losing the game, you might get a few chance to respawn, but most games have some sort of scoring system. It is not much different than a game of Chess, in many ways.
With chess at least you have to restart from the beginning, like starting your life over I guess, making you rethink your strategy. With video games you typically regain health and restart from the last save...
In the middle ages, backgammon was more popular than chess as it was seen as a closer to real life than chess. In backgammon, you have the concept of luck playing a role too.
The meta lesson is: Luck can play a big role, but you still need a strategy.
There are many games where death is permanent. It seems to be the default for roguelikes. Unfortunately the games of this kind are harder the longer you can play them, which means that the best ones are almost impossible to beat. That reminds me to try my hand at nethack again...
It depends on the game. They could play Civilization which gives someone an intro to strategy, history, politics and science all in a friendly looking package, and when you lose you have to start over from the ancient era.
Is Civilization different from, say, Age of Empires in this respect? Because in AoE you keep your card deck etc. and merely restart the battle, which still puts you at an advantage compared to when you started off.
Yes, there's no carryover between games of Civilization. Then again, I'm pretty sure the card deck you're referring to only exists in AoE 3 which makes it pretty unique in the genre. Almost every other RTS has you start from scratch each match.
