My own exposure to C started with a dated issue of 'A Book On C' by Ira Pohl. That's ANSI C and I never moved beyond the command line. I could do somewhat interactive programs but I never cracked being able to modify characters at certain screen positions - could only ever bang out a whole newline at a time. So ASCII graphics never happened for me and eventually I dropped it.

Despite the tutorial I already linked to being focused on Haiku, so far a majority of it applies equally to any platform with a C compiler - C was always supposed to be transportable.

As far as a command line hangman game goes (or any other program), if you can describe the rules of the game in the syntax of C - which is inputs, outputs, loops, comparison, evaluation etc - then it's as good a learning project as any. If you want something *really* simple, how about a program that asks the user to guess the number it's 'thinking'?