You guys should just try the game. There have been a few articles that highlight the difficulty of the game but that is only in comparison to modern console games targeted at soda guzzling teens with a one second attention span.

You can grok the basics of the game in an hour or so by following a beginner tutorial. During your first few hours you will fail your first few fortresses.

After your first session, you should have a grasp of things and the next time you should be able to just pick up the game and get back to it.

I think the time suck aspect of this game is exaggerated a lot. You can pause and save the game at any point and get back to it later.

There's one thing that some of the tutorials and introductions don't make clear: you control the fortress, not the individual dwarfs.