Getting a steam game to work on ubuntu 16.10

I bought the Humble Bundle Freedom Bundle (supporting the EFF). Before now, I had never used Steam. The install was pretty painless and some games worked just fine but some didn't (e.g. Ninja Pizza Girl). Not only did they not work but they just failed silently which is pretty crappy.
After some poking around, I found this guide, most of which did nothing but the last few commands
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wget gdebi libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libc6:i386

triggered installing some missing items
The following NEW packages will be installed: gdebi libcairo-perl libglib-perl libgtk2-perl libpango-perl

and now the game runs. I don't know which of these actually fixed it.
This is a pretty awful user experience. There was no indication what was failing or what was needed. Steam's site has no documentation that I can find on getting things working well on Linux and most of the guides I found were telling me to install packages that I already had.