[thom]

The Football (nee Championship) Manager series is one of my all time favourites, and is effectively just a bunch of spreadsheets about football players and teams. It has the advantage that the numbers underlying the simulation are also interesting enough to form the majority of the UI. In some ways it proves your rule though - for a long time there was no actual visual match engine so you couldn’t watch your team play, and it was every bit as addictive back then.