I dreamed up an interesting game idea:
Tales of a Wizard Librarian, a roguelike-lite game. The massive ruins of an ancient magical library have been discovered, complete with cursed books. The player leads a group of up to ~20 wizard-scholars.
Bookshelves and desks are common, as you'd expect from a ruined magical library. There is a command to order your underlings to start researching the texts near them. Frequently, this will unleash monsters, which they then fight. Occasionally you'll get a debilitating curse, which takes about half a minute for an anti-curse minion to cure. Some books contain upgrades for abilities or valuable information, which will be converted into gold for equipment, new people, or minion upgrades, between levels. There are ~4 mini-bosses per level. Killing all of them will open the stairs to the next level.
Death can normally be cured with a several-second revive spell. Abandoning bodies to regroup, or deaths by certain mini-boss attacks (disintegrate), require a higher powered revive that can only be cast between levels.
Each minion can be equipped with two abilities, such as fireball, curse removal, revive, increased sword damage, or a passive mana buff to five selected wizard-scholars. Switching abilities is easy, and only takes enough time that someone can't swap abilities during a battle. Everyone also gets teleport, which they'll use to return to the leader if their pathfinding gets confused.
You get to set a formation, such as a small cluster around the leader (great for force concentration against mini-bosses), concentric rings (useful for studying everything in an area), or small clusters that study and fight together.
It might be interesting for an hour or two, but it's missing something. "Research everything nearby quickly" or "slowly research some nearby things safely," all while "I'll sit back and occasionally toss in a fireball" is not an interesting gameplay choice.