Our experience last year was that when arriving with a car an hour before the convention opened, it was very hard to still find a parking space anywhere. So this year we came in the afternoon of the day before and stayed at a hotel, which wasn't cheap due to the 200,000 visitors of the convention driving up the prices during that period. That turned out to be a lot more relaxing, and very easy for the parking. I hope that if I book a hotel even earlier for next year, I'll be able to get a better price, and stay two nights. We did the convention this time with only a lunch break, but were exhausted by mid-afternoon and left. If I had a hotel room booked for two nights, I could take more breaks for comfort and spread out my visit over two days. I hope it won't be that full next year, because the huge crowd made it very hard to interact with the exhibitors and get some explanation of games.

Ara: History Untold is not a Civ killer. It is a game with currently a score of 76 on Metacritic, and 68% positive ratings on Steam. Player numbers don't tell us much, because the game is somewhat overpriced on Steam, while having first-day availability on Game Pass: So a lot of people figured out that for an unknown game, playing it for $12 on Game Pass is a better idea than playing it for $60 on Steam. I don't think anybody at Firaxis is having sleepless nights over Ara: History Untold.

Having said that, Ara certainly has some potential. The general idea of combining the crafting and chains of goods from games like Anno 1800 with the civilization building genre is a good one. A lot of people are disappointed *because* Ara is fun to play in the first act, and then loses fun much faster in the mid- to end-game than Civ does. There are clearly two potential futures here for this game: One in which it receives great support, and by a number of patches and DLCs becomes a really good game; and another in which the project is somewhat abandoned and forgotten.

Another part of the general public disappointment is due to modern day influencer marketing and Steam refund periods: Ara looks graphically great in a streamed video of act I, and it takes way more than 2 hours of own play to realize its more serious long-term flaws. It doesn't help that not every streamer that is playing Ara is actually serious about it: I have seen far too many of them saying things like "oh, for my first building, I'll build a farm, to grow my starting city"; which simply doesn't work, as farms in Ara only give +3% to city growth. Putting a maximum of resources in round 1 into your Great Hearth to build a feast, which gives +25 city growth, is significantly more important at the start of the game. In fact, I don't build any building at all in the first region of my starting city early in the game, as these central spots are sorely needed later for dwellings and the palace. Building a scout, followed by a spearman, followed by a settler is a much better strategy. By the time you finished that, you'll have a second region, in which a farm on a wheat/corn/barley resource if you have it is probably the best move. That then enables you to build a granary and produce grain stores, which give another +30 to city growth.

One thing I like about Ara, but which is potentially already too demanding for the average player, is that it uses math quite cleverly: Buildings or resources can give a flat +X bonus, or they can give a percentage +Y% bonus. Over the course of the game, the relative value of these changes: In a city of size 12, the +3% bonus of the farm becomes as large as the +25 flat bonus of the feast, and with larger cities the percentage bonus becomes better, while for small cities the flat bonuses are better.

The same level of math knowledge is needed to understand how the crafting of goods works. Typically to produce a good, let's say fabric, you need a certain number of production points, in this case 500. The weaver building will give you a number of points each round, which depends on the city production value (which grows with city level and various bonuses), as well as on the supplies and experts of the weaver building. Let's say that all together the weaver building produces 50 production points, then it takes 10 turns to make 1 fabric. But the fabric has 3 slots to put in resources for accelerated production. And each slot gives +500 production points! If you fill all three slots, your fabric production goes up from 0.1 per turn to 3.1 per turn, which is a huge difference. Some slots can be filled with either a specific resource, e.g. fur, or replaced by putting in wealth. You can get +500 production on the first slot of fabric production with either 1 fur, 1 llama, or 50 wealth. These resources are used *every round*, so the more slots you fill, the cheaper the resource cost per produced item gets. If you have only fur, you can get 1.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur per turn. If you have fur, wool, and silk, you can get 3.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur, 1 wool, and 1 silk. Overall that means that without the correct input resources, producing a crafted good is slow and expensive, while it gets cheaper and faster when you have the right resources. Understanding how all of that works is the key to playing Ara well. Sorry for the math! It takes a lot of juggling, because for some goods the bonuses from resources are a lot smaller than for others. For example bandages at that same weaver have only 2 slots for accelerated production, and they only give +25 production points each, while 100 points are needed to make a bandage. It is a lot more viable to produce bandages without resources than it is to produce fabrics without resources. And while an expert giving +150% to base production of the building is quite impactful to bandages, it doesn't do very much for your fabric, as it doesn't increase the accelerated production points.

As I mentioned in a previous post, each city has 5 stats, and these stats receive a negative modifier based on city size, e.g. -10 at size 6 and -30 and size 12. But the size 6 city has only 3 slots for amenities, while the size 12 city has 6 slots. The game loop of Ara is growing cities to gather resources, crafting amenities from those resources, and compensating the negative size modifiers with the right amenities to keep everything going. That is fun in act I, and would be fun in acts II and III if Ara had the right UI tools to scale, bundle, and automate certain tasks. That isn't the case right now, so having 10 cities with sizes up to 30 in the end game is just too much of a chore to manage, and even fans of micro-management might give up way before that.

The basic game loop of Ara is significantly different from that of other 4X games, like Civilization or Millenia. If you are trying to play Ara like any other 4X game, you won't be very successful. You need to understand the resources and the crafting, and in many cases that only comes through playing; the game often doesn't tell you what exactly you need and how impactful a resource will be before you actually constructed the building. While I can tell you that if you build a farm on a non-resource space to just grow basic food will produce different amounts of food based on the fertility of the specific region and the city size, the math for that is so obscure that I haven't understood it fully.

If I'll start another game of Ara, I will probably just play until the end of the first act and then declare myself the winner if I am leading in prestige. Setting the difficulty right for this to be interesting isn't obvious. It is possible to set the difficulty for the AI to a different level than for yourself, and that might be necessary: If you apply the same high difficulty to both yourself and the AI, the AI becomes stupidly aggressive and unresponsive to diplomacy, as well as cheating to a frustrating level. Thus I might try a game with a high difficulty for myself to make the economy challenging, but lower difficulty for the AI to make the cheating and bad diplomacy less crippling.

For example in my current game, I am on turn 275, in the last era of the second Act. I have 10 cities, which have 130 regions, and each region has between 2 and 5 zones. The game tells me that I have 85 crafting buildings, but doesn't offer similar information about harvesting buildings and support building. But I'd guess I have around 200 total buildings to manage. Every turn I craft 70 to 80 items, which I know because the game insists on giving me a stack of 70 to 80 popups every turn, and there is no way to close them all at once. Crafting buildings are privileged in that there are tools to show, for example, all your weavers. Harvesting buildings don't have a UI like that, and if you are looking for all your iron mines, you need to cycle through the list of harvesting buildings of all your cities, manually. That is probably because harvesting buildings can only produce up to 3 different things, while some crafting buildings can produce a dozen different things. While there is an UI to display crafting buildings, there is no way to either automate them, or to issue bulk commands to all of them. If you want all your weavers to switch from making fabric to making rope, you need to do that manually. And for each individual building you need to not only set the produced item, but also the resources used. If you don't have specific resources, you can sometimes replace them with money, or you will craft much slower. It is an extremely detailed system, which is fun enough as long as you have a very limited number of buildings, but then gets rather tedious by mid-game.

Cities have 5 main stats: Happiness, health, knowledge, prosperity, and security. Some buildings add to these stats. But mostly the stats are falling whenever the city is growing. So much of the stuff that you are producing in all these crafting buildings are amenities, consumables that give a stat boost for 5 to 10 turns. It is complicated, but manageable in Act I. But by getting more cities, and having each of these cities growing to more regions, balancing your cities' needs with the production of amenities becomes really tedious. And the imperfections of the UI makes every action take more clicks than it should do.

And that is Ara in a nutshell, a game mostly about crafting consumables. This is the part the devs really cared about. In some instances you can get an excruciating amount of details on crafting, like for example how much production you are losing due to rounding errors. The other parts of the 4X game mechanics are much less informative. Combat still gets some interesting numbers shown, but the battle animations are useless. Diplomacy is nearly completely a black box. One AI opponent offered me an alliance, and when I accepted he denounced me a turn later and started a war against me. With zero information what would have caused this radical change of mind. You never get messages that you are settling too close, or that you should keep your troops away from his territory. You just get a meter that ranges from adversary to ally, and that can fluctuate wildly without giving you any reason.

I will stop my current game, because there is no victory condition I could fulfil early. The winner is the player with the most prestige, and I already have twice as much prestige as the next player. Setting the difficulty right is somewhat difficult in Ara: At the end of each act, the lowest third of the players in prestige is getting kicked out of the game. Unless you specifically disable human players getting kicked out, you need to set the difficulty level low enough to be at least in the middle third of the prestige ranking at the end of the first act. But if you do that, you probably top the charts by the end of act 2. The AI difficulty, like in all 4X games, is set by how much the AI players are cheating, and that tends to be much more impactful in the early game.

Overall Ara feels as if the devs got a huge budget from Microsoft and made a very beautiful game, which doesn't work all that well in the long run. Unless you absolutely love micromanagement and crafting, I don't think I can recommend Ara for $60. I can, however, recommend paying $12 for the Gamepass for one month and trying Ara out that way. You'll probably still have time to try out a bunch of other games that month.

On the other hand, later today Ara: History Untold is getting released, and it will be on the Game Pass from day 1. As this is $60 on Steam, and I probably would have bought it, I am keeping my Game Pass subscription for the moment. I also want to try out the recently released Frostpunk 2, although I never got around to play the first one.

Board games are frequently even more expensive than computer games, especially if you consider the larger crowdfunding projects. I just backed A Wayfarer's Tale: The Journey Begins for $82, and that doesn't include shipping yet. I just received Thorgal: The Board Game, and with shipping that cost me €111. I usually take just the core game with maybe a handful of selected extras these days, because I learned that going for the $200+ all-in pledge usually isn't worth it.

In spite of all these rising costs for entertainment and games, my overall annual spending for my leisure is way down. The reason for that is that I used to travel a lot more. But since the pandemic, I haven't taken a single flight anymore. First of course there were restrictions that kept me from flying, but I quickly realized that I wasn't missing traveling all that much. And a flight anywhere costs a lot more than a PC game or board game. A week in a hotel that isn't abominable is easily a thousand bucks. There are cheap package holidays, but they aren't only "cheap" in the sense of not costing much, but also often in the quality of the service. Cruises are not only even more expensive than other holidays, but also make me feel like part of a herd of cattle being prodded through various locations.

There is a general expectations for people like me in the early phases of retirement to travel a lot more. I am not convinced. I believe that the trip you take at 20 leaves you with a lot deeper experience and more memories than when you take the same trip at 60. At 60 you are more likely to notice that the mattress in that hotel wasn't all that comfortable, and due to memory loss you don't remember the voyage as intensively as a young person. Many locations suffer from serious over-tourisms these days, and aren't actually all that much fun when visited in a large crowd. Thus I have gotten a lot more selective in my travels. I prefer visiting spots that are closer to home, I prefer renting a holiday apartment rather than going to a big hotel, and I prefer city trips to some exotic tourist attraction or the beach. I also don't need 3 weeks of holiday just to relax from my 50-hour work week anymore.

Although I have financially provided for my retirement, the loss of monthly income is noticeable. Nobody wants to run out of money later in retirement, as you don't know how much care you will need later. Cutting down on big ticket items like travel is probably the wiser strategy for keeping my money together. It allows me to not worry about the cost of my games for the moment.

In 1508, Juan Ponce de León reported on the hurricane San Roque. Other reports of extreme weather events go back way further, and are even in the bible. The term "act of god" describing natural disasters is actually a legal term now, and not affiliated with any specific religion. People with different beliefs thus attribute extreme weather events like hurricanes to different sources: Some believe they are caused by human-made climate change, others believe that they have always been there, or are an expression of some divine will.

Even the best meteorologist can't possibly draw a direct causal link between any given hurricane and global warming. What climate science says is that global warming increases the probability of extreme weather events. Humans in general really suck at estimating probabilities. A change in probability of a hurricane arriving isn't tangible; even when the hurricane actually arrives, you still don't know whether global warming was involved in that, or whether it would have occurred even without climate change.

But if you have doubt about whether climate change is real, you could dispel that doubt with a simple, practical exercise: Inform yourself about the cost of homeowner insurance in Florida. It turns out that *some* humans are better at estimating probabilities than others; they are called actuaries and are mathematicians working for insurance companies. If you want to insure your house in a region that can be struck by hurricanes, an actuary will calculate the probability of this happening again, and the insurance premium will be calculated based on that. Yes, there are market inefficiencies, and yes price gouging by insurance companies can happen. But in the end a very large rise in the cost of homeowner insurance over time reflects a change of reality, a change in the probability of extreme weather events occurring.

The unbelievers are still fighting back. As part of the Agenda 2025, American conservatives propose to defund the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the crime of giving out severe weather warnings in record numbers this year. But while you could silence a federal agency, no government would be able to change the actuaries' numbers and make insurance companies deny climate change. The gods of climate change are here, smashing in our windows. Time to start believing!

Advertising works by persuading people to spend money. It has been shown that this even works somewhat beyond the point where there is no money left, into credit card debt. But at some point the credit card is at its limit. A consumer with no money left, and with his credit card getting refused already, becomes more or less immune to advertising. He might still *want* to buy stuff, but he can't.

We have data for that. McDonald's sales have been falling, globally. In other news, Tupperware filed for bankruptcy. There have been a ton of stories like this in 2024. And if you zoom out a bit, you notice that a lot of the companies that aren't doing so great are those that are targeting low- to median-income households as customers. But after a spike on inflation, in which prices (and profits) grew a lot faster than wages, the financial situation of many average families is pretty bad.

Henry Ford, who admittedly did have a lot of bad up to downright nasty ideas, at least understood one aspect of capitalism a lot better than most capitalists of his time, and even today: If you want the product of your company to be sold to the type of people that are your employees, you need to pay your employees enough so that they can afford your product. It's a win-win situation: The workers got their wages more than doubled from $2.34 to $5, and Henry Ford solved his problem of too much employee turnover, and gained a bunch of customers. It wasn't altruism, it was business acumen. Modern companies have lost that insight, and are hell-bent on screwing both their employees and their customers out of their last cent. But if every company does that, who will they sell their products to? The problem with inequality, from a capitalistic point of view, is that the rich are a lot fewer than the poor, and they spend a lot less of every dollar they earn. Different countries have repeatedly shown that raising the minimum wage is good for the economy, no matter the complaints from the business owners. Strong unions are good for the economy too. Trickle-down economics don't work.

Advertising doesn't generate wealth, like manufacturing does. If people had vast piles of unused money, advertising could accelerate the velocity of money, the speed at which money flows through the economy. But once the reserves are gone, advertising becomes a zero sum game: A consumer persuaded to buy product A now can't afford product B as well. Advertising remains a necessity, because nobody wants to be company B here; but thinking that AI or other technology could have a huge positive impact on the economy by improving advertising is a pipe dream. Firing Don Draper and replacing him by AI might be good for the bottom line of the company in the short term, but is a net negative for the overall economy.

The different versions of Dune: Imperium are different enough so as to require different strategies. For example in the first base game, rushing to get your Swordmaster is a very good strategy. In Dune: Imperium Uprising the same strategy would be much less good: Getting to the sandworms early is a lot more important than getting the Swordmaster early, as the added reward from the sandworms is higher than the added reward from a third agent; it could also be argued that getting to the High Council before the Swordmaster is a better strategy in Uprising, due to the higher importance of deckbuilding in that version of the game.

Due to only the first game and the first expansion being available in Dune: Imperium Digital, these are the two versions that I played the most. And of course over time one learns for example which cards are really good, so that the next time they turn up you know to pounce on them. But that knowledge is obviously useless if you play Uprising, where all the cards are different. However, the specifics are not the only thing one learns when playing; one also learns concepts, and how the different parts of the game interact with each other. For example, regarding the Swordmaster, I learned that getting the Swordmaster means revealing one card less, as 3 agents use 3 of your 5 cards before the reveal turn. Thus, while the 3rd agent in itself is very good, there is a price to pay with regard to the amount of persuasion available to buy new cards. And that remains true regardless of which incarnation of Dune: Imperium I am playing, and is the root of my insight about the High Council being potentially better in Uprising.

Another concept I learned the hard way was the importance of buying cards that give you access to the various faction spaces. If you don't, due to the Seek Allies card self-destructing, the single Diplomacy card in your deck is not sufficient to even get the 4 basic victory points from having 2 influence everywhere. Now the solution to the problem varies from version to version of the game, as for example the original game has the Foldspace option, which Uprising is missing. But the awareness that I need to look out for faction access cards remains as an universally learned concept.

Why did I start this post with Dune: Imperium Digital? Because I certainly would love to have Uprising available in digital format as well. I play this as a solo game against the AI, and that speeds a game up considerably. Dune: Imperium is a game which has a lot of interesting decisions, and human players tend to have to think a bit during their turn, especially if the move the previous player made just foiled their plans. Human players around a physical board also need to do a lot of other things, like shuffling cards and moving game pieces, which the digital version does a lot faster. The overall effect is that I have played a lot more round digitally than physically. And once you play the same version of the game repeatedly, you really appreciate a different version with different leaders and different cards.

For the physical version of the game, a similar consideration applies: If you have played the original Dune: Imperium many times, with and without expansions, Uprising brings you the joy of new game mechanics, new leaders, new cards, and the resulting new strategies. If you have played neither yet, and stand in your friendly local game store in front of the two boxes, trying to decide which one to buy, things get a bit more difficult.

At the most basic and neutral level, Uprising is a more complex game. On BGG the weight of the original Dune: Imperium is just a tad over 3, while the weight of Uprising is nearly 3.5. Right there, some players might prefer the more complex game, while others prefer the lighter version. My personal experience was that I brought both games to my weekly board game night, and I was able to set up, explain, and play the original Dune: Imperium within the 3-hour window of that event, while with Uprising we didn't finish the game in time and had to stop early.

On a subjective level, I prefer the original game over Uprising. I feel the original game had more alternative viable strategies; Uprising introduces sandworms, which double the rewards of conflict, and that makes it nearly impossible to win without them. As another example, the Research Station space in the original game gave you three cards, which is great if you are trying to win by buying The Spice Must Flow cards; Uprising changed the same spot to give you only two cards, and two troops. For me, Uprising often ends up to be more often frustrating: Because there is a more obvious "best" strategy, it becomes more frustrating if you draw a hand that doesn't support that one pathway; it also makes being the last player in the round a lot more frustrating, as the spaces left at the end of the round are less viable in comparison.

While I haven't had the opportunity to actually try it, I have my doubts about the viability of the Rise of Ix expansion with the new Uprising base game. It seems to me as if Rise of Ix had been designed to "fix" certain perceived shortcomings of the original base game, and Uprising does the same in sometimes similar ways. If you introduce both the Rise of Ix dreadnoughts and the Uprising sandworms into combat, that might be too much. And the Uprising spies seem a bit feeble if you already have the Rise of Ix cards that allow you to place an agent on an already occupied space. I could, however, imagine playing Uprising with the Immortality expansion to good effect.

The one area where Uprising is superior to the original version is the 2-player game. All versions of Dune: Imperium with all possible permutations of expansions are best played with 4 players. The 3-player game is still okay, but the solo and 2-player variants are only useful for getting familiar with the game. Uprising introduces "rival" cards, which makes playing against the House Hagal AI deck a bit more interesting, but I still wouldn't call it a good 2-player game.

Overall, both Dune: Imperium and Dune: Imperium Uprising are very good board games. If you like board games with a good amount of player interaction, and interesting decision making, both of these games are great for 4-player groups. I would recommend the original for new players, while Uprising is certainly a viable alternative for experienced players.

As an old MMORPG blogger, that all sounds eerily familiar. Sometimes the same large game companies two decades ago asked their development teams to "make me a game like World of Warcraft". With the same desire for big bucks, and the same incomprehension of what made WoW tick. If you think that Sony did badly with Concord, please note that Everquest Next (aka EQ3 / Landmark) died even before release. And while the gameplay of Fortnite and World of Warcraft is obviously different, on an accounting spreadsheet a MMORPG is nearly indistinguishable from a modern live service game.

The fundamental truth is that there is not an infinite number of possible customers for a "lifestyle" online video game that eats up much of your time and money every month. Network effects result in a handful of those games succeeding big, and everybody else failing. And because we lived through the death of the MMORPG genre, it is easy to predict how this story ends for the live service game trend.

One has to realize that every computer game from a large company started as a project, with some project manager having to persuade upper management to finance some idea for a game. It would take a project manager at Sony an unbelievable level of courage to go today to Sony's upper management and propose a live service game to them. And even if somebody dared, he would probably get laughed out or shouted out of the board room. Concord took 6-8 years to develop, cost about $100 million, and made about $1 million, which Sony is now refunding. This isn't something you try twice.

The long development time means that we will still see a bunch of live service games releasing and most of them failing, before every company that can make such a game has understood the message, and jumps on the next big trend instead. But as we still haven't got "a game like World of Warcraft" in terms of player numbers and financial success (although we got some with at least a reasonable level of success), we probably won't get "a game like Fortnite" either. Fortnite will live on, like WoW still lives on, but the hype will end, and game companies will try to make their mega-bucks with something else they don't really understand.

Imagine a game with a lot of different cards, tokens, and meeples. If you would just randomly dump them all into the box of the board game, it would take quite a while to sort them and set the next game up. So, many board games at least provide cheap little plastic bags into which you can sort the game components by type. But that is just half of the equation: I frequently replace those plastic bags by little plastic boxes, because then I can put that box open next to the game board, and have the tokens more easily accessible.

I currently have a weekly game session to play Agemonia, a long narrative campaign game. And that game came with custom plastic trays, including covers, which make setup and storage very fast. Unfortunately, that is an exception, and probably financially viable only for those expensive big box games. A more typical board game box for way under $100 is more likely to just have a few cardboard dividers, and those aforementioned plastic bags for tokens. As that isn't ideal, third party companies provide improved inserts for various popular board games.

I recently bought the classic version of Dune: Imperium. And then the online shop I bought it from sent me clever advertising and offered me the new Dune: Imperium Uprising version of the game for 25% off, so I couldn't resist and bought that one as well. Both boxes come with the tokens and meeples already in plastic bags, but the cards come shrink wrapped and by default all go into the same big compartment in the box, where they will get all mixed up. Thus I bought for both versions of the game two slightly different insert solutions from Folded Space. Folded Space makes inserts out of coated foam, which you have to assemble and glue together yourself. You end up with a bunch of trays that fill up the original game box completely, which more or less prevents game components from spilling. And the trays can be set up directly for use in the game.

My experience with this product is mixed. I found assembly less fiddly than the e-Raptor insert for Gloomhaven. But the overall experience stands and falls with the quality of the glue you are using. For the first insert I used a cheap glue, which was way too liquid, and hard to dose precisely. Inevitably the excess glue spilled into the trays. And then it turned out that even after drying, the glue remained sticky for a long time; that was really bad, because I had already put game components in the trays, and then had problems getting them unstuck from the trays without damaging them, especially the cards. I got better glue for the second insert, and this is easier to dose. But some excess glue inside the trays seems inevitable, and I'll have to dry the completed trays for several days before using them.

The positive point of the Folded Space inserts is that they are in a price range from $15 to $30, which is at the lower end of that particular market. For comparison, the Feldherr insert for Dune: Imperium doesn't need assembly, but costs €40. As the Dune: Imperium games directly from Dire Wolf cost between €50 and €55, a €40 insert seems somewhat excessive in comparison. For games without many cards, I often use the $15 Gamegenic Token Silo, but that is a generic product, and doesn't necessarily fit perfectly for every game and every box. Still, having a lid is good, and the outer tray holding the token trays can be used to roll dice in. Individual little plastic boxes from Amazon cost only around $1 per box, and can provide an even cheaper alternative. But usually I have to buy a complete set of boxes of different sizes and then pick out the ones that best fit in size for a particular game.

So, once I mastered the assembly of the Folded Space inserts and the glue problem, the final product is both pretty and useful. Set-up is sped up considerably, compared to the provided plastic bag solution with no containers for cards. As I am currently playing Dune: Imperium quite a lot, I don't regret having bought the inserts. I still wouldn't buy inserts for every game I own, just for the favorite ones.