I don’t know... this seems likely easy to get going, but limited by the cards. And then you can jump to JS, so it may be a good gateway?
I met a 10-year-old who made a cat-and-mouse game with Scratch. He was thrilled to explain to me that in a previous version of his game, touching the mouse would do infinite damage. He needed to throttle the damage function to 10 times/sec to get reasonable scores.