Tobold's Blog
Monday, January 05, 2026
 
Silencing my computer

I bought my current PC a bit over 2 years ago. Although it came with a basic water cooling system (Xilence LiQuRizer LQ360PRO ARGB), it never was a particularly silent computer. But as I hadn't built the PC myself, and it was my first PC with water cooling, it didn't occur to me that something was wrong. Until recently the computer started to make more and more noise, to the point where it became obvious that this wasn't working as intended.

I buy my PCs in big tower cases with easy to open doors. That way even I can do minor maintenance operations, like changing a graphics card. So I looked into the computer while it was running, and quickly identified the problem: The three fans on the heat exchanger of the water cooling unit were making the noise. And when I looked at my CPU temperature, it was below 30°C, which even I know is unusually frosty. And little by little I figured out what the problem was: The fans on the water cooling heat exchanger had been running at 100% capacity for two years. Which A) is unnecessary, B) makes the fans louder, and C) causes a lot of wear on those fans.

So first step, I replaced the Xilence fans, which I suspect aren't particularly high quality, with new fans from Corsair, bought as a set of 3 for just $20. That eliminated the part of the noise that was caused by the old fans now scraping against their frame. While changing the fans wasn't very easy, I just about managed, and at the same time could clean the heat exchanger and ventilation of my PC from two years of accumulated dust. The main problem was that the old fans each were separately connected with long cables, while the new fans had short cables and needed to be daisy chained.

Now the computer was back up and running, and the CPU was even cooler, as low as 26°C when just running Windows and Chrome. Then I looked into software for controlling the fans. With the MSI Center software for my motherboard I had a lot of problems. So in the end I decided to set things up directly in the BIOS. While I couldn't find the controls for the LED lighting of the fans, that wasn't really that important. What I did find was how to set a curve how fast the fans should be running as a function of the CPU temperature. That worked like a charm: My computer is now very silent, and still has a CPU temperature of just over 30°C. When I run a game like Baldur's Gate 3, the fans audibly speed up a bit, although still less than the noise they made at 100%, and CPU and GPU temperatures stay below 60°C.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:21 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Sunday, January 04, 2026
 
The purpose of international law

Yesterday, the USA attacked Venezuela and captured sitting president Nicolás Maduro. You might have seen this or that pundit on international law on TV explaining how this is against the law of nations. What most people don't realize is what exactly international law is, because it works very different than national law. International law exists by consent. Breaking international law carries very little risk that you will be successfully sued somewhere, and if yes you can usually just ignore the consequences. Breaking international law carries a much higher risk that the previous consent is considered null and void, and that others now consider an action that was previously prohibited to be a valid action.

As could be seen just a few days earlier, last Monday, when Russia claimed that Ukraine had launched a drone attack on Putin's residence, there is a longstanding international agreement that you don't go after a country's leader before you haven't beaten that country in war. Think Saddam Hussein. The reason why international leaders agreed on such a rule is obvious: It is to their own personal benefit. The rule also benefits large countries more than it benefits small countries, because large countries can take over another country by war.

A country like Venezuela has zero possibility to launch a successful invasion of the United States. While it wouldn't be easy for them to attack US political leaders, at the very least that option would be a lot easier than an invasion. We have seen over the last years several examples of assassinations or attempts on US politicians, which showed that even protecting a speaker against a high powered rifle at 500 feet distance is difficult. Protecting a person against a drone attack is a lot more difficult. It isn't to the United States' advantage to have declared open season on foreign leaders.

And that is before considering a part of international law that actually can't be broken, because it is just a rule how other people will see your actions: Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule. The USA will be held responsible for whatever happens for the foreseeable future in Venezuela, and chances are that a lot of what will happen will be pretty bad. And voters will hold Trump responsible. The history of regime change is not a happy one.


- posted by Tobold @ 7:33 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments
Saturday, January 03, 2026
 
Gaming status January 2026

In computer games, I have put Europa Universalis V on hold, probably until patch 1.1 in February. The main reason for that is the aggressiveness of the AI in patch 1.0.10, which makes it hard to play smaller countries. Instead I am playing Let Them Trade (currently 30% off on Steam), a cozy city builder with a surprisingly deep economic system, and a very nice "wooden toy" look.

In board games, I have been playing some lighter board games like Railroad Tiles and Welcome to Everdell with family over the holidays. I have started to play The Dark Quarter with my wife. We aren't sure yet how much we like it, but gameplay is rather similar to the Destinies games we played, just cooperative instead of competitive. Weirdly, while in The Dark Quarter we are playing detectives, I have the impression that we are doing less deduction than in Destinies. Instead we are often just visiting everything in a more or less random order, which doesn't feel very challenging.

The best board game, if you can call it that, that I played in the last weeks is Tend. Uncharacteristically I have been playing this several time as a solo game. Next week I want to bring it to my board game nights, and see how it holds up if played with several players. It has to be said that there isn't a huge amount of player interaction, just the neighbor cards. I think I'll try to play it with 2 other players, which is the lowest player count in which everybody has two different neighbors. I tried out different strategies now, and they all seem to be viable. So looking at the random objective and task cards and choosing a strategy that fits with them is key to a high score. My best score up to now is 190.

End of 2025 I discovered an app called Board Game Stats. So I installed it, and started using it since January 1st. The idea is to have a bunch of statistical data about what games I played at the end of this year. It has some nifty features, like importing my game collection from BGG, a stopwatch to time how long a game took, and digital score sheets specific to each game. I'll try to use it for all of my board game sessions over the year and see whether the statistics are interesting. 

- posted by Tobold @ 1:59 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
 
Board game collection cleanup

The hobby of collecting board games is distinct and separate from the hobby of playing board games, with the former needing a lot more shelf space. Even with having my own board game room with a full wall of shelves, I was reaching capacity. Because I am collecting games, I rarely throw a game away. And when I actually did throw a big box game away this year, that turned out to be rather difficult. You can't just chuck the box into a bin, especially not if some of the dimension of the box are larger than those of the bin. For ecological reasons and garbage separation rules you'll also want to throw e.g. plastic miniatures into a different bin than cardboard tokens.

The better solution would obviously be to resell the game. But if the game isn't very good, isn't very rare, and isn't in pristine condition, that is not so easy either. If you sell it online, on a platform like eBay, you risk meeting obnoxious people with extremely high demands only wanting to pay bottom dollar. There used to be a shop in the area buying used games for a pittance, but even they stopped doing so. While international websites like BGG have a marketplace section, international shipping for a big box game is very expensive.

So I looked around for a national board game forum, checked whether they had a marketplace, and then asked on the forum whether their rules allowed me to a) give a game away (to avoid the discussion how little a used game is still worth) and b) limit that offer to people who would come and get the game by car (avoiding shipping cost and effort). That worked out pretty well. The game I mostly wanted to give away was Malhya: Lands of Legends. I had backed that on Kickstarter, it arrived over 3 years later, and by then it wasn't really a game I wanted anymore. Malhya is a game that would require a lot of effort to learn and play. If I am going to play a game of that complexity, it would have to be a top rated game like Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. It was obvious that Malhya isn't quite that good, and I didn't see me put that much effort into a just okay game.

On the forum I found somebody living an hour or so drive away from me who was only too happy to get Malhya for free. We chatted online, arranged to for a date where he would come and get it, and I asked him whether he would like some other games as well. He did, so I also got rid of 4 big boxes of Tainted Grail in different conditions from played to new; I had tried the main campaign three times and never finished playing it, so I had given up on that game. And I also gave away another big box campaign game, Artisans of Splendent Vale, where I hadn't realized on backing the game that it was in fact an attempt to bring the culture wars into board gaming and make a "politically correct" adventure game, with limited success. I threw in some smaller games which I had played and not liked all that much, like the recent Covenant.

This ended up feeling like a win-win deal: I gained two empty shelf sections, and the guy got a car boot full of games to play. As he clearly appreciated those games more than I did, that felt a lot better than throwing the games away. I do think that I will do further collection cleanup actions in the future. In the end, a board game I don't want to play is better off elsewhere than collecting dust on my shelf.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:59 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Monday, December 29, 2025
 
Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor

Just a shorter addition to yesterday's post, reviewing board games from my Essen Spiel 2025 haul. After playing Recall, we finished the afternoon with a game of Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor. Dartmoor is a stand-alone new version of Forest Shuffle, a card game that has been highly successful over the last two years. In all versions of Forest Shuffle you play cards that represent a habitat for other plants or animals, like trees, bushes, or in the new game moorland terrain. You can then play cards for those other plants and animals around those habitats. Most cards score some victory points, and who has the highest score at the end wins the game.

The Forest Shuffle games are a mix of luck and strategy. You can spend your turn drawing two cards, either blind from the stack, or picking up cards other players discarded. Many cards you want to play then have a cost of discarding other cards, with some cards giving bonuses when the discarded cards have the right color. What you are trying to do is to play cards that have synergies with each other. For example there are cards that give victory points for every bird you have in your habitats, or cards that allow you to draw a card every time you play a bird. If you have those, then bird cards become rather valuable for you, and you'll want to pick up the bird cards another player might have discarded, because for him they were of no use.

One flaw in this is that if you play against experienced players, they'll see what cards you need, and avoid discarding those. There are also tricks like discarding cards when the discard row is nearly full, at which point they will be permanently removed before the next player can pick them up. Unfortunately that means that if you play against less casual players, your chance of picking up a discarded card that is really good for you is slim, which then means that the game becomes more about luck, and less about strategy. The other big flaw of the Forest Shuffle games is that counting all the points at the end is a lot of work. Some people even developed apps to count the points faster, but those don't necessarily speed up the process all that much.

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a game I would certainly recommend if you don't have any other Forest Shuffle game yet. The rules aren't much more complicated than the original, and the balance of cards is better. In the original Forest Shuffle, the player drawing two wolves or more won most of the time, while certain other strategies were much inferior. The expansions to the original Forest Shuffle somewhat diluted the wolf problem, but didn't solve it completely. In Dartmoor it is a lot harder to say which is the best strategy. Dartmoor is also a good game if you have already played a lot of the original Forest Shuffle and want more variety.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:26 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Sunday, December 28, 2025
 
Recall

This is another post in my series of short board game reviews for the stack of games I bought at the Spiel in Essen in 2025. Yesterday I had some friends over, and we played Recall with 3 players. It took me over half a hour to set up the game, as Recall works with quite a large number of different cardboard pieces and meeples. Then when the other players arrived I explained the game to them, which despite the relatively thin rulebook isn't very fast. Explanation plus playing the game with 3 players took us 4 hours, without the time for setting up and putting it back into the box. With my regular board game nights having a maximum of 3.5 hours for a game from opening the box to closing it again, Recall is clearly too long. I'm not saying it can't possibly be played in 3.5 hours if everybody knows the rules and plays quickly. But it is also possible that it takes much longer, especially with 4 players, or with people who need some time to think when moves get very complex.

It is said that Recall is an evolution of a previous game, Revive, but I didn't play that. So I'll try to explain from the ground up. Recall is a game that is played over 13 rounds, with some other things happening in mini-turns in between. In each of the 13 rounds you can either insert a key in a slot in your player board or you can recall all your keys. You start with 2 keys, so if you manage to gain a key before turn 3, your first recall will be in turn 4. Then if you manage to get another key before turn 8, your second recall will be in turn 9, and the game will be over before the third recall. I got this very simple math wrong, thinking that I would have an advantage if I concentrated early on getting keys. But the reality is that it is simple to have only 2 recalls in 13 turns, and impossible to get down to just 1, so the keys are actually not all that important.

While your starting keys are blank, you can get keys with symbols on them during the game, either as new keys or from upgrading. If you insert a key in a slot of your player board, you then do all the actions shown as symbols on the key plus all the actions shown as symbols on the slot. As you can also upgrade the symbols on the slot, moves tend to be short in the early game and get longer over the course of the game. Still, 13 turns feels short to achieve everything you want to achieve, and we didn't even reveal all of the map tiles before the game ended.

Much of the game is played on those map tiles, which consist of 7 hexes, one in the middle, and six around. Two starting tiles are revealed at the start of the game, the other tiles need a special reveal action, at which point the revealer can choose the orientation. The hexes have different types of terrain, and the terrain determines what kind of building can be built on that hex. The overall map is elongated, and all players start at one end, exploring the map in roughly the same direction. Getting anywhere first is an advantage: The first building on a hex is cheaper than the second or third, some spaces have a single relic cube to collect, and excavation hexes only have 3 ability stones to excavate on. So while the player board has 6 slots to put keys in, 4 of these slots are some variation of moving your followers across the map and then interacting with the hex by building or excavating.

Every player starts the game with a tribe, that gives him an asymmetric player power. We followed the suggestion to distribute those randomly for the first game, but I had the impression that these powers weren't all that balanced, and one player got a lot more out of his power than the other two in our game. There are also three, initially hidden, neutral tribes in the game. A big part of the game is going up on three knowledge tracks, which reveals these three tribes, and then allows to use their powers. The player with the winning strategy concentrated on these knowledge tracks, and it turned out that they also score the most victory points in the end scoring. Tribes also come with random gadgets, and players can during their turn use ability stones to activate the powers of the tribes or the gadgets as a free action. Besides keys and ability stones, an important third resource are crystals, which come in three levels from white to pink to purple, and which are used to pay for some building or excavation actions, or to boost certain moves.

It is totally possible that if you add up all the symbols on your key, your key slot, and your free actions from tribes, gadgets, and crates you found, you will do 6 different things in a turn. Helpfully every player gets 6 green cubes, which are simply used to mark which symbol you already used, as you can use them in any order. But as you can imagine, doing many different things in a turn in any order makes this a rather complex game, and if you are the kind of player who tries to optimize things, you can well take a rather long time for your turn due to analysis paralysis. Recall isn't really a game for casual gamers playing intuitively, as they would score rather badly. There are six different scoring cards, plus a secret objective card per player, and players need to make decisions on the scoring cards and the objective card in those intermediate mini-turns. That creates quite a point salad, so by the time I realized that my strategy was bad, it was way too late to rectify.

Still, I had fun playing Recall. The long setup is due to lots of things being randomized, so the replay value is quite high. And Recall is clearly a game which I would need to play a few times before getting a solid feel of which resources and actions are more valuable than others. I can totally see a group of players that have the time for 4+ hour sessions regularly to have great fun playing Recall repeatedly. Unfortunately for my board game night time constraints, Recall disqualifies itself. It isn't really the optimal game for pickup groups, but would benefit if everybody had already played it a few times. For me it means I won't be able to get Recall to the table all that often, and that much diminishes the game's value for me.

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Saturday, December 27, 2025
 
An uncharitable observation

The end of year holidays come with an increased demand for charity, presumably because people also feel more charitable. Would you like to give to Unicef and save children's lives? Would you like to give to a website you have been using all year, like BoardGameGeek? Would you like to give to me? Not that I am running a Christmas donation drive, but both of the donations I received this year came around Christmas. Thank you! Now I'll explain to you why you shouldn't. :)

In isolation, the reason for charity appears obvious: You give to Unicef, you save children's lives, and you make yourself feel better about yourself. Or you express your gratitude towards some community website or content creator for entertainment provided over the past year.

As soon as there is more than one demand for charity, things become more complicated. You have only a limited amount of money to give, so who is more deserving? Should you give to Unicef for the children, the World Wildlife Fund for the animals, or to the Red Cross for some specific catastrophe relief? What about political implications, of for example giving aid to Gaza and potentially ending up funding a terrorist organization? How does a donation for a website or content creator stack up against a donation for somebody in need? For any dollar you give to a charity, how much is actually reaching the charitable target, and how much is "lost" paying administrative costs, paying a first world secretary instead of feeding a third world child?

You obviously can't give to everybody. Which leaves you with two solutions, neither one being really good: Either you give to some causes, based on random encounters and gut feeling; or you don't give to anybody at all. I have to admit that this year I mostly went for nobody at all, seeing how much lower my pension is than my salary previously was, and feeling as if I first needed to see how my retirement finances are going to work out before giving money away. In the middle of a global cost of living and inflation crisis I don't blame anybody who decides to not give any charitable donations.

What I am extremely sceptical about is the growing percentage of the economy that is based on donations. Yes, part of the influencer business runs on sponsoring contracts or advertising revenue, but another part of it clearly runs on donations. One reason I pay for YouTube Prime is that part of that money is distributed to the channels I watch proportionally to how much I watch them, which makes me feel less bad about not donating to anybody's Patreon they remind me about in every video. A part of the gig economy is running on tips, with a potential big gap between what a delivery driver thinks he should get for delivering a $20 pizza, and what the recipient thinks would be a fair tip.

In the end everybody gets squeezed between some sort of social pressure to donate and tip, and the economic pressure of not really having money to give away. The amount of money the median household has left after paying for a roof over their head and a long list of life's necessities is shrinking, and the number of people who want donations and tips is growing. That doesn't look sustainable.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:20 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Friday, December 26, 2025
 
Tend - Second look and a philosophical excursion

Earlier this month I wrote a very short post about Tend, a flip & write game I had received via crowdfunding. As some commenters remarked, the post was too short to tell you much about the game. So now that I played it, I want to give you more information. And I want to talk a bit of board game philosophy, and why it makes a difference how game elements are represented.

Technically, Tend is in the flip & write genre of games. That is to say that every round 5 cards are flipped over (actually 2 of them are flipped a round earlier, so you can see what is coming). Every player independently chooses 2 of these cards, and performs the action from that card. In round 1, there are only very basic cards, which contain the 4 fundamental actions the game has: Tending, fishing, chopping, and mining. Over time more and more cards with a second part are added to the game: First do a basic action, and if you fulfill a certain condition, you get an additional reward. As you see the upcoming cards in advance, and they get reshuffled with the basic cards once the deck is empty and thus come back, you can try to prepare and be able to fulfill the condition in order to have better turns in the future.

The "write" part of the genre means that you don't represent goods or items in the game with any sort of meeple or cardboard token. Instead you mark it with a pen on printed sheet of paper. There are a lot of roll & write or flip & write games in which that piece of paper is relatively simple, sometimes no more than a grid on which you then draw a map (Cartographers) or a network of railways and roads (Railroad Ink). But Tend is much more complex, comparable to games like Hadrian's Wall. But Hadrian's wall uses a mix of meeples and printed pieces of paper you write on, while Tend doesn't have any meeples at all (but it has dice you rotate to represent plants and animals).

Thematically, Tend is like a cozy game, a paper version of games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. You collect resources, which you can either sell, or use to craft improved tools that make your actions better. Once you think your tools are good enough, you concentrate on shoving the resources in your cargo bay, where they will score you victory points. You also gain victory points by achieving intermediate objectives, which are different each game, and badges, which are not. As tools don't give victory points, the trick is to know at which point to switch from using your resources to improve your tools to producing cargo. The action selection mechanic, with just 2 actions per turn and just 12 turns, means you need to optimize to get as much done as possible.

The overall result is that the gameplay of Tend strongly resembles typical Euro board games that aren't flip & write. In fact, I am pretty certain that you could theoretically design an alternative Tend game that has exactly the same rules and gameplay as  flip & write Tend, but uses only meeples and tiles and cards as game materials, with no writing at all. Which brings me to the philosophical discussion on why Tend would choose to represent its game elements with paper you write on, instead of with reusable game components. Because the consequence is that Tend can't be played forever, at some point you'll run out of the preprinted sheets and scratch off cards. There are ways to replace stuff, even print sheets yourself, or use an app instead of a physical scratch off card. But out of the box Tend is a game in which you use up game components while playing and throw them away at the end. And some people strongly dislike that aspect.

If you think of our theoretical Tend the Euro game with meeples, tiles, and cards, and you look at the actual printed sheets used to play Tend, you realize that the printed version is smaller, and a lot faster to set up. For example for mining and chopping each player has a scratch off card with two areas of 7 x 8 squares. They are random, and you could achieve the same effect with tiles, but that would mean you need to set up 112 tiles per player randomly at the start of each game, which certainly would take a good amount of time. In the printed version, these squares are also just 8 mm x 8 mm small, which for cardboard components would be rather fiddly. Those mining / chopping areas and the cargo bay area in a game with cardboard tiles would probably have to be bigger. Drawing a shape on paper, or using the stamp side of the pens in the deluxe version, is also a lot faster than finding the correct cardboard tile. I recently played Covenant, a board game I bought at Essen, and really didn't like the long setup of cardboard components and meeples at the start of the game. Tend in cardboard is theoretically possible, but in reality impractical, expensive, and cumbersome.

But besides the practical advantages of sheets of paper to mark game states, there is also the haptics of it. The scratch off cards are fun because not so many games use them. In the deluxe version of Tend, the stamps on the colored pens are fun because not so many games use them. There is just an inherent pleasure in scratching off spaces or stamping shapes into your cargo bay in Tend that feels unique at this point in time. Having said that, the system certainly has disadvantages, and I'm not just talking you ending the game with colored pen markings on your fingers. The small size of the squares is sufficient for the player sitting in front of the sheet of paper; but in a multiplayer game, even just looking at the paper in front of the player next to you, isn't likely to give you a complete picture of his state of the game. And normally you could / should play Tend simultaneously instead of consecutively to not make the game take too much time. Which means you look even less at what the other players are doing, and Tend quickly turns into a multiplayer solo game, where everybody is just playing for themselves with very little interaction between players. Which is an inherent issue in roll/flip & write games. On the positive side, it makes Tend more suitable for solo play than many others of the board games I own.

I very much like Tend, both as a solo game, and for small groups. I am not very worried that I can't play the game forever, because (200 divided by player count) is still a large number, and I don't think I ever played any board game that often. It is possible that the haptic fun of scratch off cards and stamping with colored pens will fade over time, but right now it feels innovative and unique. Pricing of Tend is somewhat weird. I paid $99 for the deluxe version, plus another $50 for VAT and shipping. But with the standard version costing $69 plus VAT plus shipping, I feel that the deluxe version was well worth the slightly higher price. If you bought the standard version and than bought the stamp pens and extra sheets separately, you would pay a lot more. Admittedly there is an advantage of the standard version coming in a smaller and lighter box, as the deluxe version is rather big and heavy if you need to transport it. It is very possible that 100 copies of everything is enough, and the pencils last longer than the stamping markers. Well, I'm happy with my deluxe version. The only component I still upgraded was a longer scratch off tool with a smaller tip, but I had that already for a previous legacy game with scratch off components.

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- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, December 25, 2025
 
Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all of my readers, regular or not so regular.

Regarding the latter, I observed a curious phenomenon in this holiday period, that apparently some readers are "catching up" and commenting on old posts. I just wanted to let you know that in that case your comment will not immediately appear. As many comments on older threads are spam, Blogger is set up so that I get to moderate these comments automatically before they are published. That can take a day or two. But don't worry, your comment didn't get lost or deleted, it is just delayed.

In a similar vein, I would like to apologize also to all readers whose comments ever got caught in the spam filter. False positives happen. Again, nothing gets lost, I can identify the comment as not being spam and then it gets published, just with some delay.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments
Monday, December 22, 2025
 
EU5 Winter Break - A question of scale

Europa Universalis V is on a winter break, with the devs having announced that they are on a holiday break for a month from mid December to mid January. When they come back they'll need some time to work on a major patch, so version 1.1 of EU5 is probably coming out in February. And given the state of the current version 1.0.10, maybe it is a good idea for me to also take a break until February at least.

Europa Universalis V simulates a lot of things at a rather small scale. There are 28,570 locations, and in each location there are several population groups, and several buildings in which they work. If you were playing a country with 10 to 20 locations, you could already be rather busy to optimize the production of various raw materials, their further refinement in buildings, and their trade. But even Portugal, which I played in my last run, already starts with 67 locations. Hungary has 189 locations, and the Great Yuan in China have 1,855 locations.

Nations with over 100 locations have a lot more of historical content than small nations. EU5 offers a lot to you if you want to play let's say either England or France and experience the Hundred Years' War. But if you do that, you can't really occupy yourself with managing all your locations and economy at small scale. There is an additional problem with the time scale, for example if you wanted to trade manually, you'd have to adjust your trades every month; in a game that spans 5 centuries, that is 6,000 months of manual adjustment. In my Portugal game, where my number of locations grew due to colonization, I ended up using mostly the mass build button. That probably didn't give the best results, but my economy felt too big for individual fine tuning.

I would like to play something smaller, but version 1.0.10 of the game is getting into my way. Since release there has been a battle ongoing between people who thought that the AI was playing countries too passively and those who thought that the AI was too aggressive. Right now, the AI is very much on the aggressive setting. In some cases, safeguards have been installed in particular to make some countries playable: While in my Portugal game I used console commands to save me from being immediately conquered by Castile, that specific protection of Portugal has now been added by the last version of the 1.0.10 patch. But right now no such protection exists for small HRE states, and several people have shown time lapse videos in which the HRE patchwork practically disappears in the first century of the game. I'm just happy I played Holland and Mecklenburg in earlier patch versions, because right now these countries don't seem very viable anymore. Holland was always threatened by France, but now it is rather often also being invaded by England.

Players who like to play large countries appreciate if AI-controlled large countries are aggressive and pose an actual threat instead of being pushovers. But for players who want to play a small country, sitting between several large neighbors that frequently attack you feels pretty bad, as you can't really defend yourself against them. I felt as if Portugal was already more than big enough for me, and as I like the economic gameplay more than I like the military gameplay of EU5, I don't really want to play one of the big countries that then more or less automate their economy.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:57 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Sunday, December 21, 2025
 
Valid use of AI generative art

With the end of the year come an endless sequence of different Game of the Year awards, the large majority of which are utterly forgettable and irrelevant. I would therefore consider it not impossible that the decision by the Indie Game Awards to disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for the use of AI is actually a marketing trick, because you otherwise would never have heard of the Indie Game Awards. It also produces utterly misleading headlines, because of cause all the art you remember from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has *not* been created by AI. Instead in the production process of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, AI was used for some placeholder artwork, and a small bit of that AI placeholder artwork in some background made it into the release version, before it was patched out.

To which Larian Studios replied that, yes, of course, they are using AI placeholder artwork for the production of their freshly announced Divinity game. Causing more outrage from people who have no idea how games are made. To me, with my history as a dungeon master for roleplaying games like D&D, the idea is pretty obvious: The creative person that is designing a scene for a game is not necessarily the creative person that will ultimately provide the artwork. A game designer might decide that his game needs red barrels that explode when hit, and put a placeholder red barrel in. Later in the process, a person in a coordinating role sees that the game needs a final image for a red barrel that looks explosive, and then asks a graphic artists to draw that image, with maybe an art director checking the coherence of that image with the graphic style of the rest of the game.

Some people might remember having played alpha or beta or early access versions of some game, where not all placeholder art had yet been replaced by the final artwork. In older games that was often rather obvious, the placeholder being something like a purple cube. Those had the advantage of being obviously placeholders and easy to spot in quality control. But I can totally see the advantage for the game designer to use an AI generated placeholder artwork in the design process. Not good enough for release, but easier for game design and communication to already have art that somewhat resembles the object you want to depict.

As a DM, my creative output was the adventure, the story I was trying to tell. As I can't draw, I could only ever use "stolen" artwork when I felt a scene needed an illustration. And trying to find an illustration that more or less fit to the story I had created was cumbersome. I would have loved the ability to create AI art for that. I totally understand why the people who create the stories for games like Clair Obscur or Divinity might want to use AI art for these placeholders, as it makes it easier for them to see whether an idea for a scene works. For a computer game, for which the art is a selling point (which wasn't the case for my privately run D&D adventures), you then need an art director and quality control to make sure that any placeholder artwork is replaced by a better version created by an actual artist. You don't want the final customer to see the intermediate placeholder, for the same reason that you don't want your client to see all the drafts and sketches of everything. As Bismarck said, it's like sausages, it is better not to see how things are made.

I think that the Indie Game Awards rescinding the awards for Clair Obscur, or people complaining that Larian is using AI to make Divinity, is an exaggerated reaction and part of a general AI panic that is as unnecessary as it is unhelpful. It is like complaining that Rembrandt used coal drawings to make sketches for his oil paintings. Making a computer game with a large team is most certainly an iterative process, in which intermediate steps like sketches and placeholders are very necessary. One placeholder slipping by quality control is a minor error. Using that to create headlines that might make people think that the excellent art of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was produced by AI is disingenuous. And there won't be any AI art in Divinity either. Larian described their use of AI as "an optional tool for devs that want to generate a reference image for Larian's concept artists to use". I find that is a totally valid use of AI generative art.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:43 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Saturday, December 20, 2025
 
What makes a good campaign board game?

In my last gaming status I mentioned that the group I play campaign board games with is one session away from finishing Tidal Blades 2, and we are considering what game to play next. Although I have more games than that, I proposed a short list of 4 games: Kinfire Chronicles, Oathsworn, Arydia, and Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. I don't know yet which game we are going to chose, or why, but I was already thinking about what the criteria are for myself. And I was thinking about a game that isn't on the list, Malhya: Land of Legends.

If you read my posts from back when I backed Malhya in 2022, and when I finally received the game in October of this year, I was optimistic that this could be a good game. Since then my optimism had faded quickly. In part that is due to me looking at the game and the rules. In part that is to other people publishing their experience with the game. And I think the problems some people have with the game are rather important general criteria to judge a campaign game by.

The reason I was optimistic about Malhya is that it provides the things that I want a narrative campaign board game to provide: On the one side some fantasy story or fantasy world to explore and have adventures; on the other side some sort of system, combat and otherwise, in which board game mechanics are used by the players to have their characters perform actions and try to overcome challenges. I used to play Dungeons & Dragons, and these sort of board games are kind of "roleplaying games in a box" or "roleplaying games without a dungeon master". While I would say that a roleplaying game with a dungeon master is inherently superior to a roleplaying game without one, that advantage is reaped mostly by the players who aren't the dungeon master. Me, having mostly been the dungeon master in my roleplaying games, I have a lot less work and stress in a game without a DM.

And that brings me to the other side of the equation, which also applies to selecting the best campaign board game: How much work does setting up the game, learning its rules, and then playing it actually involve? The main reason I am less optimistic about Malhya now is that in an attempt to make the game less language-dependent, the developers decided to use hundreds of different icons on the cards and other game materials. That is a bit as if you had cards with text on it, replaced the text by translating it into hieroglyphics, and then asked of the players to learn those hieroglyphics to play the game. Many games use iconography to replace at least some text, but that tends to be a handful of icons, at maximum half a page in the rulebook. Malhya has an icon glossary that covers an astonishing 8 pages, and sometimes the differences between icons aren't all that obvious.

The game we are currently playing, Tidal Blades 2, has a rulebook of 35 pages. That might seem a lot compared to other board games, but these narrative campaign games tend to stretch over 50+ hours of gameplay. That is fundamentally different to games you can play through in a single evening, where you wouldn't want to have much more than 20 pages of rules even for a complex game. (And yes, number of pages is just an approximate measure, as some rulebooks have more illustrations and examples than others.) Malhya has 80 pages of rules. Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era has 98 pages of rules. And if a group wants to play such a campaign game, that is going to be in several sessions, going on for months. Reading the rules once isn't enough, all players are supposed to have at least a large part of the rules memorized, and only look up special cases when needed.

So why is Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era on our short list, and Malhya isn't? I have already played one session of Elder Scrolls: BotSE, and know that it is a complex masterwork. Chip Theory Games have been making successful games with similar combat systems for over a decade, and Elder Scrolls is the sum of all what they learned over the years about how to make this combat system interesting, combined with the very interesting Elder Scrolls universe and the closest a board game can get to open world adventure games like Skyrim. Malhya is the first game of a small group of 4 people; while they poured years of effort into this, according to the reviewers they haven't quite nailed it yet. To the best of my knowledge, Malhya would require a large effort to bring to the table for an okay result, while the Elder Scrolls: BotSE would require a large effort for a more likely also great result.

The other extreme from the shortlist would be Kinfire Chronicles. The initial rulebook is tiny. When you look inside the box of Kinfire Chronicles, you find a lot of other boxes representing the scenarios. The game is designed to be learned while playing, nobody has to read a long rulebook in advance or memorize pages of icons. Kinfire Chronicles is more like Tidal Blades 2 insofar as there is a main story being told by a sequence of scenarios, and much of that is just linear. There is no such thing as adventuring in an open world, and besides some minor branching or side quest options, there is no decision to take as to what to do next. In Elder Scrolls: BotSE you start by deciding in which region of the world to adventure, and what quest from what guild to pursue. In Kinfire Chronicles you start by opening box 1 for scenario 1. Kinfire Chronicles gives up freedom in exchange for accessibility and ease of bringing the game to the table.

And in the end, that is our decision to make. Do we prefer a game with more potential, but a higher barrier to entry? Or are we okay with less choice and a linear story in exchange for quick setup and better accessibility? How much tactical depth do we need, and how much work are we willing to put into learning the rules for more complex combat? Before actually playing a game, it is not always obvious to see how much effort a game demands, and even less how rewarding the experience from that effort is going to be. Especially if you buy a game years in advance via crowdfunding. It is totally possible to buy a huge box of game for $200 and then find that there isn't enough fun in there for the effort.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:31 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
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