Technically, while the Steam tag says the game is turn-based, the description says it is "turn-based RPG with real-time mechanics". In practice, it is turn-based with what is known under the name of "Quick Time Events", QTE: You get a prompt on screen, and need to press the corresponding key or button within a short time window. That, in itself, still doesn't tell you much. To measure the impact, we need to know how important it is to get that button press right, and how long the time window is in which the button press counts as being done right. Sadly, in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 those Quick Time Events are used (among other things) to parry and dodge attacks from enemies that can one-shot you, and the time window is short on the easiest difficulty, and very short on normal. In other words, if you have a perfect strategy and tactics for turn-based combat, it is still likely that you will lose that fight because you pressed a button a fraction of a second too late and the monster just killed you with a single hit. Aggravating that situation is that at release the game isn't very optimized yet, so there is lag, and that affects the timing of when you have to press the button. People report getting visuals of having dodged an attack, and then still getting full damage and dying.

While I don't like button-mashing games, I do think that there is a place for them. Some people like Souls-like games, Elden Ring was a huge success. But combining this with a turn-based combat mechanic is extremely weird. Imagine a game of chess in which the game board sometimes with only a very short announcement launches one of your game pieces into the air, and you lose the game if you don't catch it. It is easy to see how a regular chess grandmaster might totally fail at that version of the game, while somebody who is very good at dexterity and reaction-time based games still could find the chess part unpleasant. Chess and Guitar Hero might both be very good games, but they simply don't mix very well, because they demand very different skill sets.

I am extremely bad at Quick Time Event games. I wasn't even good at them when I was young, and there is ample scientific evidence that reaction time gets slower with age. I am usually good a turn-based combat, but my reaction time just lets me down here, and I don't think I will be able to play this. At best, I would be able to play in "story mode", but while that is said to make the Quick Time Events a bit easier, it also makes turn-based combat in general a lot easier, which I don't think I would enjoy when too simple.

In terms of accessibility policy, this is really stupid. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 *also* uses Quick Time Events to enhance attacks, think "press button at the right time to achieve a critical hit". And in the "Accessibility" options, you can turn that off and make it auto-succeed. But, as the game says, "Automatic QTE does not affect QTEs during enemy attacks (Dodge and Parry, for example)." Why would you have an accessibility option that only affects the less important added damage part, but doesn't work on the part where slow players get one-shotted? That is like having a colorblind mode that doesn't work during color-based puzzles.

According to some review aggregator sites, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the best game released in 2025 so far. I am upset that their weird accessibility options exclude slow and old players from enjoying this.

What is the basis for Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs? Once you’ve removed all the lies and looked at the way they were calculated, you understand that the tariffs are based on the trade balance between the US and every other country. The formula calculates the tariff needed to balance trade, assuming a rather simplified and linear response of demand to prices, which is almost certainly incorrect from the get go. But I think that instead of just shouting about how stupid this is, we should have a closer look at the underlying assumption that a balanced trade would be a good thing for America.

I will not discuss the “exorbitant privilege” here, that actually allows the US to run a persistent trade deficit, but instead look at even more fundamental economics to see what this all means. Economic theory certainly doesn’t say that balanced trade is a bad thing. But what does it mean if a country that has a large trade deficit currently is trying to achieve balance of trade? If a country regularly imports more than it exports, to achieve trade balance it needs to either export more, or import less, or both.

Exporting more is not a bad idea for a country. But if we look at the data, we see that the US has a particularly low trade to GDP ratio. Only 11 percent of GDP is exported, and 15 percent imported. Compared to most other countries, imports and exports are relatively small compared to the internal economy. In other words, exports are low, because Americans consume most of what they produce, and there is very little left to send elsewhere. And if you look at the various factors of production, you’ll see that there isn’t much room for improvement here. Unemployment is low, productivity already high, and demographics combined with anti-immigration policies don’t suggest that there will be much labor force available for any theoretical increase in US manufacturing capacity.

The most realistic way to increase exports would be to consume less of the manufactured goods, and consuming less is obviously also the solution to decrease imports. And this is exactly what tariffs do: They decrease consumption by raising prices. Decreasing consumption to match production is certainly not a crazy idea in economics, and everybody visiting a personal financial advisor due to a debt problem is probably getting exactly that advice: Don’t spend more than what you earn. The difficulty isn’t economics, but politics. For Americans to achieve trade balance by consuming less, Americans would have to lower their standard of living. That not only will be unpopular in itself, it will also be highly regressive, as luxury consumption is such a small percentage of GDP. Compared to the rest of the world, Americans own and buy more stuff. But that doesn’t mean that they would be happy to adjust that consumption downwards.

If we assume that through all the chaos and frequent changes the Trump administration will ultimately pursue their goal of a more balanced trade, and will make at least some progress towards it, the most likely outcome will be them failing the famous “are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” test at the next elections. In as far as I am not 100% sure how crazy Trump really is, or in how far he is just successfully playing a crazy guy on TV, I consider it possible that he is aware that many of his policies will have unpopular outcomes. He is more of a crash and burn rather than fade away type of guy.

After having had the problem in a previous run, this time I avoided one major scaling trap that nobody warns you about: The number of enemies scales directly with the number of combatants in your team. That is especially significant if you let "fun" combatants join your team, like a war horse or a mole rat. Most animals in combat are significantly less efficient than human mercenaries of the same level. So hiring them actually makes combat harder, as their presence causes more enemies to appear, and they are less efficient in killing enemies.

The bigger problem in that scaling of enemy numbers was that one is tempted to hire new mercenaries to try out different weapons and related classes. But if you run around with 20 mercenaries, even simple fights end up taking a lot of time. I limited myself to 11 mercenaries this run, because it is the number of different professions in the game. And maybe some professions I could have done without, like brewer, and gone with an even smaller team.

Scaling enemy numbers to character numbers at least I understand: If you can choose your group size freely, the game basically has to do such a scaling. If enemy numbers were fixed, players could just hire enough mercenaries to make fights trivial, and that wouldn't be good game balance. What I don't understand in Wartales is why they decided to scale xp from enemies as they did: In Wartales, the xp you gain from killing a group of enemies does NOT depend on enemy levels. My group is mostly level 8, but whether I kill a group of level 2 back in Tiltren, or a group of level 9 in Ludern, I get about 50 xp for the fight. As levels now need over 2,000 xp, it is quite annoying to do a big main story fight against a high-level group, and be rewarded with so little xp.

Game design wise, I don't understand this design decision at all. Fights against low level groups for me are very quick now, sometimes my first attacker with a two-handed weapon kills several enemies with his first hit, and the rest runs away directly. So if I need a level, I would "farm" those low-level fights, which isn't very interesting. I can only assume that this is because the game was designed to be played in "adaptive" mode, where enemy levels just scale with your level. They added the "region-locked" mode to be more similar to other RPGs, but failed to scale the xp to that.

My Steam account is already 17 years old, next year he'll be able to vote. The account has nearly 600 games, so it isn't surprising that I spent thousands on that. In fact, I was surprised that if I divided the spending by the number of games, I came out at below $20 per game. Then I realized that this is because the page only lists the money given directly to Steam. For example, at some point in time I was subscribed to the Humble Monthly Bundle, so my money did go to them and not Steam, but it added lots of games to my library via Steam keys.

I don't own any of the games in my Steam library, legally speaking. I have a license to play them. And given that I am already in retirement, it has to be pointed out that this license ends with my death. Accounts are non-transferable, even via a will. That is why that help page is careful in describing this as "money spent", not "value". While there are websites that let you estimate the "value" of your steam library, that number is questionable. If you bought a game a few years ago on release, played it for 100 hours, and really don't want to play it again, what is its value? Anything between priceless memory and worthless. The same is probably true for the totality of your Steam account, it is valuable as both a memory and as an opportunity to play the games in it, but not something of legal commercial value.

In the end, that help page is only surprising in the fact that it exists, not in the fact that over many years you probably spent a lot of money on Steam. If you could get similar information from your local supermarket, or Starbucks, you'd be surprised how much money you spent there over a decade or more. I am always trying to get at least 1 hour of entertainment out of any dollar spent on Steam or on other video games. The fact that this is still possible makes video games rather cheap, compared with other forms of entertainment. 

The underlying problem is that the two purposes of tariff announcements work on dramatically different time scales. On the one side, a stated goal of tariffs is to get manufacturing to move back to the USA. That is going to take years. Even on something decidedly low tech as building a factory to make toys or board games, planning a factory, buying land, getting building permissions, building the factory, hiring people, organising supply chains, and getting production up and running takes several years. On the other side, the number of tariff changes announced since "liberation day" is staggering, and there is a very clear message from the administration that tariffs are subject to negotiation. Nobody in his right mind is going to start a project to build manufacturing in the USA which is solely based on the current tariff rate, as there is zero certainty that the tariff will still be around when the factory is up and running.

Thus Chip Theory Games, understandably, opted to delay their delivery to the USA, despite being an American company. Anybody would feel rather stupid if he shipped something from China today with a 145% tariff, and next month that tariff is dropped again. Of course, there is a possibility here that the China tariff is staying. Chip Theory Games said that they would then ship the games anyway, and eat the loss, being in a good financial situation due to the success of their previous game, The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. Not every company will be able to do so. It is foreseeable, that warehousing space in China is going to become rather expensive in the coming weeks, unless the tariffs drop. At some point, the owners of these goods, many of them American companies, will have to decide to either ship the goods and pay the tariff, or ask for the goods to be destroyed or shipped elsewhere. With some companies simply going bankrupt, leaving the fate of their goods stored in China in limbo. Logistics is going to be a huge mess over the coming weeks, you can't just press pause on the China-US trade for weeks or months without things piling up somewhere in huge volumes.

Coming back to an earlier subject in this series, nobody knows right now how much the tariff for a Nintendo Switch 2 made in China is going to be on release day June 5. It temporarily looked as if it would benefit from the "Apple exemption" for consumer electronics, but then the administration that this wasn't an exemption, but just a reclassification, and devices containing microchips would be hit with a different set of tariffs soon. And that might hit the smaller number of Switch 2 consoles being manufactured in Vietnam as well. For the time being, preorders in the US are still delayed. But preorders in the rest of the world are strong. Which opens the possibility to another solution which would be good for other countries, and bad for Americans: Nintendo could reasonably ship more Switch 2 consoles to other countries, and fewer units to the US. Even if the final tariff in June on a console is just 25% instead of 145%, Nintendo might not want to officially raise the retail price in the USA from the currently announced $450. And if they make a loss on the console, it would be in their best interest to sell as few as possible. The other option being to raise the price, which would presumably lower demand, and also result in fewer units being shipped to America. And that is just one example from the millions of goods that are manufactured in China. We might be looking at a year 2025 in which Chinese goods become increasingly cheap and abundant in the rest of the world, due to everything getting directed elsewhere than America.

The typical reality of a crowdfunded board game might look like this: A Finnish company launching a crowdfunding campaign on a Polish crowdfunding platform. They get 2,000 backers for their $100 board game, of which half are in the USA. All the manufacturing of the game is done in China, and the project takes a year because of lots of back and forth of instructions being sent to the Chinese manufacturer, samples being sent back to Finland, and changes being demanded from the developers. The cost for making a $100 board game in China is about $20 just for manufacturing. But as there are tons of other costs for the whole chain from developer to publisher to distributor to retailer, the profit margin per board game is maybe just $10.

Now imagine this board game finished manufacturing today, and the Chinese manufacturer asks the Finnish game company for shipping instructions. Normally, 1,000 of those board games that cost $20 would go into a shipping container and be shipped to the USA. However, there is now a 145% tariff on this. And it isn't "China" paying that tariff, nor the Chinese manufacturer, but the company owning the goods, in this case the Finnish game company. Besides shipping cost, they would now have to pay an addition $29,000 on that shipment to the USA. Which is more than the $20,000 they made as a profit for the whole game worldwide. And probably more money than they actually have cash in hand as such a small business. For crowdfunding, which is based on customers paying way in advance, that is a huge problem. And it isn't just $29 per game more, because if the game costs more, everybody in the distribution chain also wants more money. It would be impossible to ask customers for $145 more, but at least for the next project that is what you would need to do to keep the same profit margin.

There are millions of dollars worth of crowdfunded board games currently in the period between having been funded and being produced and delivered. And with tariffs changing on a daily basis, nobody knows what to do. There is of course some chance that in a few weeks America and China come to an agreement and the trade war stops. But it is also possible that neither wants to show weakness, and tariffs stay as they are, or rise even further. And that would result in impossible business decisions for the companies that crowdfunded those board games. How are they going to finance those tariffs, when their customers have already paid in advance? How do you price your next crowdfunded board game, if you believe that tariffs are here to stay? Is a crowdfunding campaign still viable, if you decide that US customers have to pay the full effect of the tariffs, and many of them decide not to back you at that price?

While those tariffs won't directly affect the crowdfunded board games shipped to Europe, we need to remember that crowdfunding isn't legally the same are preordering. Backers don't have a legal right to the product. If a company would make a loss on a game or go bankrupt due to tariffs, it is completely possible that the game is never going to get shipped anywhere. Especially if the game company is American, it wouldn't go down well if they decide to fulfill their obligations only outside of America. If you can't afford to ship to the USA, and you don't see any future business, why still ship anywhere at all?

Right now, nothing much has happened yet. A Kickstarter board game project that launched this week only commented: "Tariff information is rapidly changing from day to day, we don't know where things will be a year from now when manufacturing is estimated to be complete. We will be monitoring the situation closely and maintain an open line of communication with backers." Companies that just finished manufacturing are currently just waiting for the situation to become clearer, before taking any business decisions. And as that isn't just the case for companies making board games, there are stories of Chinese warehouses rapidly filling up with goods nobody wants to ship at the current tariff. A board game isn't exactly the same as a toy, but in a similar category. 80% of toys sold in the USA are made in China. If you are American and have kids, you might want to do your Christmas toy shopping now.

At the current rate, it is totally possible that the Switch 2 costs €500 for me, but $750 to Americans. Even $1,000 if Trump raises the tariff on China to 104%. Now from all what I can see from the announcement and specs, the Switch 2 is a great console, and I absolutely want one. But I don't think I would want one for $1,000. Yes, some people paid that to a scalper for a PS5, but that were exceptions. The history of the console wars has shown that customers are rather sensitive to console prices. The shortest console announcement in history was for the first Sony Playstation, where the Sony spokesman just said "299", undercutting Sega by $100 and thus winning that round of the console wars.

The easiest and fairest would be if Nintendo said that the Switch 2 cost $500 everywhere *plus* all locally applying taxes and tariffs. I'd pay Belgium's 21% VAT, Americans pay whatever the orange man has decided that day. Unfortunately that is not how the real world works. Companies adjust prices up and down as a function of what the people can pay. It is totally possible that I will end up paying more for my European Switch 2 in order to allow Nintendo to sell the console at a lower profit margin in the USA.

If not, those PS5 scalpers are in for a career change. A long forgotten criminal profession will be back, baby: Smugglers. Buy a $500 console elsewhere in the world, smuggle it to the USA and sell it for less than the local retail price of $750 or $1,000.

I really appreciate how Shiro Games is maintaining Wartales with patches and content DLCs. There is even a roadmap for 2025, when most other games at best have a roadmap at release and then never again. My Steam library is full of games that were released in a not quite finished state, and then either only got a few hotfixes or no patches and content addition at all, while the devs had moved on to their next game. Then there are games like Civ 7, where it feels as if the DLCs contain just content that has been cut out from the original main game, and fixes to major gameplay issues and bugs are slow to come.

The only downside is that I already have too many games to play, and coming back to games with a good rate of maintenance and content addition adds to the list of things I would like to play. But that is certainly a good first world problem to have.

Now it has to be remarked that the globalization and free trade was not an unmitigated force for good. It created a lot of wealth, but that wealth is very unevenly distributed. Free flow of capital means that capital has a distinct advantage over labor, which can't move that easily. Thus of the newly created wealth, a smaller and smaller part went to the people who produced the goods and provided the services, while an increasingly large part went to the people who financed the companies, the investors and shareholders. Thus at least theoretically, deglobalization could also reverse some of those bad effects, and strengthen the negotiation power of workers.

On the other hand, it isn't obvious that the US is still able to dictate the economic world order to everybody else. They control about a quarter of the global economy by GDP, but less than 10% of global trade, due to increased trade between developing and emerging markets. And while the headlines talk about a "global" trade war, it is obvious that this concerns only trade between the US and everybody else, not the trade between the other countries. If the US doesn't buy the goods of the world anymore, and can't sell their good to them either because of high tariffs, trade between everybody else will rise instead. America not wanting to play nice with others anymore doesn't mean the others can't play with each other. Unilateral deglobalization could turn the US into a much bigger and much richer version of North Korea, but with declining wealth and power compared to the rest of the world.

There are strategic reasons why the US might want to crash foreign imports. Historically, in case of war, countries with a lot of manufacturing factories could easily retool those to produce military goods. It is why the North won the Civil War over the South, or why the USA won World War II. A factory that makes trucks, can make military vehicles, maybe even tanks after retooling. If all US truck factories move to China, America would be in a bad situation if war with China breaks out one day. Apple shares are down 13% in the last 5 days, due to 80% of Apple's production being in China and thus now threatened severely by those tariffs. It isn't obvious that Apple could move that production to the USA, even if they wanted to. At best it would take many years, and billions of dollars. But the more likely scenario has already started a while ago, with Apple trying to better distribute their production away from China, and towards countries like India or Vietnam. A company trying to bring back manufacturing to the USA would have a high risk of either Trump changing his mind on particular tariffs, or there simply being a very different administration in 4 years that doesn't believe in deglobalization that much. Growth of US manufacturing would also be limited by labor shortages, especially if America simultaneously expels millions of immigrants.

Funnily enough, deglobalization might simply fail politically, due to the undue influence that rich people have on US politics. Globalization made these people rich, deglobalization threatens their wealth. The last thing they want is tariffs kicking off a wage-price spiral of inflation, combined with a recession. And poorer people hate inflation too, which is what brought the previous administration down. The potential positive effects of higher tariffs won't manifest for some time, possibly not even in Trump's lifetime. The economic pain will come quickly, and weigh heavily on the next elections. Trump said that "there are methods" for him to run for a third term, but even if that was right, he still would have to be elected. "It's the economy, stupid" and "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" are still what determines US elections. Changing the economic world order takes decades, if it is still possible at all, and right now it isn't clear that there is actually a majority that wants this.

The problem with the concept is that it is extremely macroscopic. If you were a shareholder of Kodak, or an employee at Kodak with 20 years of experience in making film products, you got the full blast of the "destruction" part of the concept. Somewhere else a completely different set of people that invested in and developed digital photography reaped the benefits of the "creative" part of the concept. You might consider that as a business case, where the company Kodak failed to go with the time. But the reality of things is that neither existing experience in developing chemical film, nor existing machinery to produce it, are of any use when making digital cameras. There are examples of companies that managed to adjust to innovation, but even there people with the "old" expertise got fired and replaced by people working on the new technology.

Expertise, and especially the level of expertise needed to make something really good, is often highly specific. You probably all heard stories of video game companies that had great expertise in making excellent single player games; then management decided to make live service games instead, and it turned out that the same people who made great single player games now made pretty mediocre live service multiplayer games and the game studio closed down and fired all the devs.

In a previous post on D&D I mentioned how I had hoped that Sigil, the official D&D virtual tabletop software, would revive the D&D brand and enable me to find people online to play with easily. On paper, that idea wasn't so bad. But it is also easy to understand that programming such a software product needs very different expertise than making a printed D&D book. Hasbro / WotC quite obviously failed to secure the expertise at a high enough level, and thus wasted 30 million dollars to make a mediocre and barely functional product nobody wanted. Creative destruction to make a better D&D *could* have worked, especially if they had added the right sort of tools to turn played games into Twitch streams and YouTube videos. But Hasbro had neither the technical skills to pull that off themselves, nor the management skills to secure a mutually beneficial collaboration with another company that does have that sort of expertise. Sadly, in the history of the companies owning D&D, the mutually beneficial collaboration with Larian Studios was an exception, and didn't last. There are far more examples of TSR/WotC/Hasbro trying to screw the outside contributors to the success of D&D, instead of understanding how essential these people were. It is now uncertain whether there will be a lot of innovation in how we play multiplayer roleplaying games in the coming years, and whether that will involve the D&D brand at all.

The most expensive game I bought was an older one, Zombicide Black Plague. Zombicide is considered a bit of a joke in the board game crowdfunding community, as the company CMON has for years since 2012 launched a "new" Zombicide game several times per year, about 16 core games and an endless stream of expansions. From a classic zombie theme, to fantasy zombies, cowboy zombies, superhero zombies, to science fiction zombies, every imaginable theme has a Zombicide version. Each game comes with a lot of plastic miniatures, but the variation and innovation in gameplay between the different versions is limited. Why did I buy it? Well, simply, I did previously not own any Zombicide game. And while the suggested retail price of Zombicide Black Plague is $109.99, and you can usually find Zombicide games on Amazon for around $90, at the fair I only paid €50. And Black Plague has a fantasy theme, which would be the Zombicide I am most interested in.

The stand I bought this had only a few games, each in large numbers and at a high discount to the suggested retail price. Basically a board game surplus store. Which brings me to the biggest game that I *didn't* buy: Descent: Legends of the Dark. Suggested retail price $174.95, available at the surplus stand for just €70. When the game came out, I was interested, but considered it to be too expensive. So for less than half price, I was considering it again. But as I wrote in my previous post, I have more campaign games than I can reasonably hope to play, and Descent would have been another campaign game. I also didn't like that Descent: Legends of the Dark uses a lot of 3D cardboard terrain, which isn't terribly stable. Looks nice on the table, but takes more time to set up, and isn't always practical if you end up sitting on the wrong side and a higher element blocks your view. So ultimately I decided that I don't need that game, even at this low price.

A similar story was the other game I considered buying: SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Normal retail price €70, available at the fair (another stand) for €49, which is quite a good price for such a recent game. Now I have played SETI already twice and really liked the game. However, even the second game with people who had already played the game once still took 4 hours. Which means that SETI isn't a viable option for my weekly board game night, where I need to bring a game, set it up, explain it, play it, and put it back into the box in 3 to 3.5 hours. Now I have some groups with which I play board games privately at home, and don't have that time constraint. At which point another problem kicked in: Some of the groups I play with are German speaking, another group is French speaking. I can usually play English language games with both groups. There are also games which have only symbols, not text, on their cards and game material, with only the rulebook being language specific. But the copy of SETI was a German one, and there is a lot of German text on the cards, so I wouldn't be able to play it with my French group. So in spite of me liking the game, I didn't buy it.

What I did buy was a game where I had previously fallen into the language trap: Castle Combo. I have a previous game, Faraway, from the same company, and that game didn't have any text on the cards. As it is a French company, it was easier to get Faraway from France, and I have successfully played it with German speaking groups. So I made the mistake of assuming their next game, Castle Combo, would be the same, and bought the more easily available French version last year. It turned out that there was French text on the cards, so I never played the game at my German weekly board game night. So I picked up a German version for €20 at the fair in Dortmund.

Another game I bought specifically for the board game night was Tower Up. This is a relatively short and easy city building game that came out recently. The reason I was interested was that it seems to have a solid amount of player interaction, as every time you build, you also interact with the adjacent towers on the map, even if those aren't yours. I found that in recent years there has been a trend towards games I call "multiplayer solo" games, in which everybody works on his own game engine, with little interaction with other players, other than trying to score higher than them at the end. So I always look for games that have a good amount of interaction between players, because for me that interaction is where the interest of playing a board game around an actual table is.

Slightly more complicated is another purchase: Great Western Trail: El Paso. Or as I call it, Small Western Trail. Even the publisher describes it as "the perfect game for game nights when there is not enough time for its big brothers". The original Great Western Trail takes an estimated 15 minutes to set up, 45 minutes to explain, and then another 3 hours to play with 4 first-time players. The El Paso version is easier, thus quicker to set up and explain, and should play in half the time. Thus a much better fit with my board game night time requirements.

The concept of making an existing successful game smaller brings me to the last purchase, which I bought mostly because it seems so unbelievable how far that concept can be pushed: Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. I have the original Gloomhaven, a huge box that weighs 10.5 kg. Buttons & Bugs comes in a very small box, weighing just under 0.3 kg. It also cost under €20, while at another stand the newer Frosthaven complete box was sold for €280. Yes, Buttons & Bugs is only a single solo adventure, compared to the large number of scenarios in original Gloomhaven and Frosthaven. But for that price I was willing to see how similar a tiny version of the game could be to the original, or whether miniaturization to this degree was just silly.

Overall, the Spiel Doch! in Dortmund was a better shopping experience than the Spiel in Essen, simply because it was less crowded. My plan for Essen this year is to book a hotel more in the inner city, and take public transport to the fair. Instead of going for just one day, I want to stretch it out to two days, but less intensive each day. That way I also hope to profit from less crowded times, e.g. at the end of the day, rather than participating in the rush to get in. But it is kind of a last try. The Essen fair has become so successful that it is suffocating under its own success. Even just walking from A to B without looking at stands is a slow shuffle in a crowd, and that isn't much fun. On the other hand, I am not sure whether 2 hours drive to Dortmund for a fair that I can see everything in 2 hours is worth it. Big fair, small fair, both have advantages and disadvantages.

Today is also the day that UPS will deliver a board game to me that I backed in crowdfunding. I just don't know which one. Surprise! Basically making a crowdfunded board game is an exercise in coordinating a bunch of different sub-contractors, with the last in line being the shipping company. The end customer usually doesn't know which backed project uses which shipping company, and the shipping notification doesn't always specify the content of the parcel. So now I got a shipping notification that I'll receive a parcel of 6.5 kg (so I am pretty sure it is a board game), coming from Awaken Realms in Poland. But as Awaken Realms is the owner of Gamefound, and Gamefound is both its own crowdfunding platform, and is being used as pledge manager by games on Kickstarter, I still don't know which game this will be. My best guess is Dragon Eclipse, a game I backed in September 2023, and which was promised for September 2024.

One reason that I am less enthusiastic about backing crowdfunded board games is that the delays sometimes mean that by the time the game arrives, I'm not all that interested anymore. For example I love campaign games, but the last two campaign games I finished each took about 1 year to complete. So I realized that I bought more of this type of game than I can reasonably hope to play through, even with me currently having two different groups to play with. Well, two reliable groups; I have a third group running to play another campaign game, but we only played once, and now have problems finding another date.

Tomorrow I'll visit a board game fair in Dortmund. It is an order of magnitude smaller than the Spiel fair in Essen in October every year, but that is probably both an advantage and a disadvantage. Essen last October felt too crowded to actually try a game out. I think I'll have better opportunities to try out games at the smaller event. And it would be nice to try out a game, and then immediately be able to buy it. I still see the advantages of crowdfunding board games, especially if I want the deluxified edition, or games that are too niche to have retail appeal. But I'll probably pick up a game or two tomorrow, which is a whole lot less complicated and involves less surprises than crowdfunding.