This is a great list, I've tried to order them into what I think would be easiest to hardest, so you can work through all of them whilst improving your skills!
If you think the list could be ordered better let me know and I'll edit it!
1:Pong
2:Minefield
3:Tic-tac-toe
4:Memory Puzzle
5:Simon
6:Sliding Puzzle
7:Duck Hunt
8:Yahtzee
9:Maze
10:Typespeed
11:Lunar Lander
12:Nibbles
13:Katamari Damacy
14:Tron
15:Asteroids
16:Arkanoid
17:Flood It
18:Quoridor
19:Space Invaders
20:Scrabble
21:Othello
22:Quarto
23:Fruit Ninja
24:Tetris
25:Minotaurus
26:Connect Four
27:Missile Command
28:Abalone
29:Sokoban
30:Dr. Mario
31:Kirby’s Avalanche / Puyo Puyo
32:Checkers / Draughts
33:Pipe Dream
34:Blackjack
35:Grid Lock / Traffic Jam
36:Last Stand
37:Bloxorz
38:Bejeweled
39:Zoop
40:Rampart
41:Mancala
42:Snood / Bust-a-Move
43:Scorched Earth / Worms / Gorillas / Angry Birds
44:Stratego
45:Risk
46:Go
47:Diner Dash
48:Fire ‘N’ Ice
49:Chess
Go is likely harder than chess: counting points (with dame not all filled), handling dead groups, handling ko, and offering support for superko seems much more challenging than handling an 8x8 board of pieces with fixed move patterns.
I would say Pong approaches easiest for a game with real time graphics, though.
The difficulty of Pong depends to a large extent on how real you try to make the physics. For a classic-style implementation you flip some state bits to test a different axis depending on movement direction; all angles of travel and reflections are defined as a small LUT. The most complex test needed is the paddle boundaries.
Relying on LUTs and state machines to avoid complex behavior is the cheat that defines a lot of the early arcade games, however tutorials tend not to teach them in this way and just immediately dive into trig functions and AABB tests.
