What is the pong of turn based games?

I've seen a lot of people recommend that before you make your passion project, you should start with something simple like pong or asteroids, and work your way up to a simple 2d platformer.

I'm not interested in making action games though. I want to make the next slay the spire or super auto pets. I feel like working on these would just mean a lot of time is getting wasted on learning skills that won't translate over to what I actually want to be doing. What would be a good simple first project that would be helpful for this direction?