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[Magua]

It is trivial to get a boring fort, once you understand the game.  A proficient cook, brewer, and planter will give you more food than you need for 20 dwarves, and by the time you have 20 dwarves, the legendary trio will give you more food than you need for 100.  Food/booze is not a threat.

Drawbridge + moat is the perfect defense -- only giant eagles can bypass it, and those are pretty rare.  But what if you find opening and closing the drawbridge too tiresome?  Traps are ridiculously easy to make, and 100% proof against goblin sieges as well.  Or, if you're feeling sporting, take five dwarves who've wrestled for a year and give them armor and shields you buy off the traders...the goblins will be dead regardless.  Sieges are not a threat.

Unhappiness?  Three words.  Legendary dining room.  Unhappiness is not a threat.

HFS is hidden and fun, but it's not terribly hard -- a group of wrestlers who've been sparring for a few years, outfitted in steel, will beat two of the three types of HFS without breaking a sweat.  A group of marksdwarves can easily take down the third one.

Really, the game is a sandbox.  You don't "beat" it, because, aside from your first game or two, having a successful, well run fort is actually pretty easy.  It's also pretty boring.  All the "good" stories about DF forts are about where things went wrong. 

Now, personally, let me recommend things you don't want to hear:
1) I lower the population cap in the init.txt to 50 to 100, depending on the fort.  200 dwarves is just too much for me to keep track of.  You can always change it later if you find you need more dwarves, and wait for the next migrant wave.
2) The orc mod.  Drawbridges are still almost 100% effective, but traps are useless and combat is a hell of a lot harder.  Sieges become something to fear, rather than laugh at.
3) Have a goal.  "Survive" isn't much of a goal for a standard setup (now, "Survive in the evil swamp bringing an empty wagon and seven unskilled dwarves"...that's a goal).  Check out the Megaprojects thread for ideas.  Without a goal, once your fort is self sufficient -- usually within the first year -- there's little else to do.

[Dvergar]

Thanks Magua, that is actually what I was looking for....you answered my question, even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear.  The answer being it is impossible to have a challenging fort, I guess I just felt left out when I heard of everybody else's catastrophies/endeavors.

[Dorfus]

There are always challenges. Even those that don't involve handicapping yourself. Ever set up an efficient cloth industry? How about encrusting everything you can with gems? Knowing how to make the game easy also doesn't guarantee that it will be. I know how to pump water up a tower or how to get a flooding chamber to work, but it doesn't mean I won't make a mistake or have an oversight. My only miner recently got killed by a werewolf and I'm waiting for a cook to dig out my well before the orcs arrive. It's interesting, not because I knew what I was doing but because the game will always throw unexpected things your way if you keep an eye out for them.

Edit - Why on earth was that green? I didn't intend it! Must've keyed it by accident, would explain why my frantic order issuing and designations weren't working...

[LegoLord]

Dark green is hard to read on a dark background.

Anyway, one thing I like to do is only have three cage traps preceeded by three stonefall traps.  That way, I get prisoners, the rest of the siegers can still attack, and trivial animals won't clutter up my cages - only prisoners and tameable megabeasts (others I would release).  That relives tedium.