Published Horrible Guild has over the past years been rather successful with the Railroad Ink series of roll & write games. So in September of last year they launched a Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles. It has the same idea of trying to build a network of rails and roads, but as the name says uses tiles instead of rolling dice and having to draw the network yourself. The Kickstarter delivered on time this year, and extra copies were available at Essen, where I picked up a "Kickstarter version" of the game.

In Railroad Tiles, 5 sets of between 2 and 4 tiles are set up. The first player takes a set, then the second player, and so on. The set not taken receives a star token as additional bonus, the sets are filled back up, and a new player order is determined. Basically, if you chose the 4 tiles set, you will play last, and the fewer tiles you took, the earlier you can choose next round. After 8 rounds, your network is scored, and the game ends, which takes about an hour with 4 players.

Placing you tiles in your network is a puzzle, as there are different things that score points. You will want to take tiles with placement spots for pedestrians, cars, and trains, and connect those. Each round you can place between 1 and 3 of those, and you score points in function of how many of them you connected, up to a maximum of 5 per placement. In my first game I totally underestimated how quickly that adds up and concentrated on other scoring objectives, ending up last in points. Other scoring objectives are the number of tiles in the biggest rectangle, rewarding you for building compact; number of clusters of 3+ cities; and avoiding loose ends of roads or rails leading nowhere.

I like Railroad Tiles better than Railroad Ink. The tiles are prettier and less messy than hand drawn networks, while the puzzle remains more or less the same. But still, this is a lighter and faster game than the average games I play, and so I consider it more as a filler, or for board game nights where we prefer to play a series of shorter games rather than one taking all evening. There are already a bunch of expansions out for Railroad Tiles, but I don't think I'll play this often enough to necessitate expansions.

Personally I don't regret having bought EU5 at all. Even the 85 Euro I paid for the premium edition means I only paid 50 cents per hour up to now, and I am far from finished with this. I can see myself playing this quite a lot more in the coming months, and when I eventually want to move on, I can see myself coming back repeatedly over the coming years.

Having said that, EU5 is an extremely slow game. On my computer a year on the fastest speed without any interruptions takes nearly 2 minutes, or 3 hours for a century and 15 hours for the complete five centuries. If you actually play, a full game takes at least 50 hours, and if you like looking and managing many details, it can easily be 100+ hours for a single run. A full game of a typical 4X strategy game would be a lot faster, so EU5 already isn't for everybody because of that.

My main purchase warning is related to this: While EU5 is perfectly playable as it is, the developers are currently very busy with patches, and those patches can massively change how whatever country you chose plays. For example, this week patch 1.0.8 moved from beta to live, and it messed in a major way with the loyalty of your vassals and the centralization / decentralization values. I was lucky that I started my game on the beta version, so now I just switched to the live version without any changes affecting me. But some people's ongoing games were seriously messed up by the changes.

If you combine frequent patches that introduce massive changes with a game that takes up to a 100 hours to complete, and people who might not like me have 40 hours per week to play, the risk of your game being messed up by a patch becomes rather significant. If that is something you dislike, and you don't want to play a game that feels a lot like early access with regards to devs still experimenting with major game mechanics, I wouldn't recommend buying Europa Universalis V. If you don't mind the changes and the potential chaos, then there is a lot of fun to be had here, and I recommend the game.

Please note that these massive and frequent changes also affect any content you watch on YouTube. If you see for example a video telling you that you absolutely must strive to maximize your centralization value, regardless of what country you play, that video was only correct until patch 1.0.7. Under the current 1.0.8 version the advice would be a bit different, depending on your number of subjects.

The reason I felt I needed to cheat was the current state of Europa Universalis V, where it is extremely difficult to keep peace with your neighbors. As a player, you tend to make your provinces rich, which causes neighbors over the centuries to start desiring your land. Unlike EU4, you aren't being told which lands, and there is no diplomatic action you can do against that. Even if they have been allied with you for centuries, they'll break the alliance and eventually attack you. The only thing that works is forming a defensive league, which the AI has less tendency to break (instead they needlessly keep voting on changing the rules back and forth). As playing Portugal is nearly impossible if Castile / Spain keeps attacking you, I used the console commands to form a defensive league with them at the start of the game.

Compared to my EU4 game as Portugal, where I ended up conquering most of Morocco, in EU5 I was actually weaker than Morocco, and only conquered Granada. I have a small vassal on Moroccan territory, but that is it. So most of my efforts have been directed towards improving my economy, and then using the gains to finance exploration and colonization. It is a sort of a cheat that I already know the Americas exist and can work towards discovering them, while the rest of the world is still ignorant about that fact.

In this game, this focus on exploration worked rather well in my first century. There are a number of islands in the southern part of the Atlantic, like the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde. In the Age of Discovery they become important staging point for discovering America. In this game, at the end of the Age of Renaissance, I control all of these islands, thus having an advantage for future exploration and colonization. I also managed to explore the way around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, discovering Madagascar. However, colonization is very slow before the Age of Discovery, and I don't have the colonial range to get there yet. The reason I was able to explore that much was some luck with events: You can send a character to explore somewhere, but normally don't have access to specialized explorers before unlocking them with an Age of Discovery technology. Explorers get a 0.5 bonus to exploration progress, which means that even the worst explorer is between twice and three times as fast as a non-explorer in the Age of Renaissance. But I was lucky to get an explorer by an event several times, and that really got my exploration much further than anybody else's.

Up to version 1.0.7, everybody always went for Centralization as one of the most important values of your nation. That increases crown power, which increases your income from trade and taxes, and keeps the estates in check. In version 1.0.8 Centralization comes with a huge negative impact on the loyalty of subjects. So I had to reverse course and am now trying to move towards Decentralization, as a centralized colonial empire doesn't really work anymore. Right now I can't even annex my vassal in Granada, as they are disloyal to me due to the Centralization penalty. It seems the idea is that countries with lots of colonies or vassals decentralize, while Centralization is better for playing tall without subjects.

I reached the start of the Age of Discover in good shape. And then the New World institution spawned in Lisboa, giving me a further advantage for discovering the Americas. I am having a lot of fun with this game, and am looking forward to see how all this colonization gameplay is going to work out.

On the plus side of playing Mecklenburg was a good start, due to a location right next to the Lübeck market. It also was a good experience of the reformation within the HRE. I didn't do any discovery or colonization. Absolutism was boring, I felt it was easy enough to push through. And the Age of Revolution was just annoying, with revolutions happening on a random 1% chance per month unless you lower all your taxes (which I did after the first revolution), and the revolutionary war being not very interesting.

I don't think I'll play much ironman in the future. I'm not really that interested in achievements, I just didn't want to have none of them. It was more a proof of concept that the game *can* be played on ironman from start to finish.

My next run is probably going to be Portugal. However, I might need to use some console commands for that. Paradox is still tuning their AI, as people tend to complain both if it is too aggressive and when it is too meak. The problem is that an AI that acts okay in one region of the world might end up with unwanted outcomes in another region of the world. The current AI is made in a way that results in Castille almost always attacking and crushing Portugal. That is already true for AI Castille against AI Portugal, and then gets worse for player Portugal, as players tend to make their country richer, and thus more desirable for aggressive neighbors.

Now you might say that the historical reality of Portugal resisting being taken over by Castille and later Spain is an abnormality. But EU4 managed to make that at least a possibility, while EU5 hasn't gotten that far yet. So if I want to play a game in which I don't expand in Europe and concentrate on exploration of the new world and colonization, I will need to cheat a bit. It should be possible to force Castille into an early alliance / defense union they wouldn't accept without cheating, and go from there.

Offering free bus passes or childcare is very far away from the communist ideas of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Opposing genocide in Gaza is very far away from 9/11 jihadism. And wanting to deport harmless illegal immigrants is still very far from fascism and the Holocaust.

The incorrect use of these words by politicians and the media then leads to even more use of them in social media. People describe themselves as victims of fascism for any minor administrative inconvenience they had to endure, indecently trying to elevate their hardship to that of somebody who survived a concentration camp. The 1881 welfare reforms by Otto von Bismarck, a staunch conservative, would be called communist if proposed in 2025 in the USA. In the end you have different versions of Godwin's Law, always calling everything in the most extreme term, and completely eroding the meaning of words.

I'm still on my Mecklenburg run, my overall second game of EU5. It is an ironman run to be able to get achievements, and I plan to play until the end in 1836. But bugs and changes to the game did have some weird consequences to my game. For example there was a now fixed bug in which the HRE emperor with the "demand unlawful territory" ended up getting random provinces for himself. In my game that gave Bohemia a north sea harbor, and it is now rivaling England in the colonization of North America.

Having quit my first run after becoming emperor of the HRE without wanting to, I maybe should have made some different strategic choices as Mecklenburg. Instead, in between the player country having a tendency to expand faster than AI countries, and my decision based on history to make Mecklenburg protestant, I found myself leading the protestant side in the religious war of the HRE, won, and ended up as the emperor again. At least this time I wasn't just elected randomly.

In hindsight, I found out that in my first game with Holland, I had by chance avoided a country specific disaster, the hook and cod wars, which frequently triggers if the ruler dies in the plague and the heir is weak. In my second game, I made it to the Age of Absolutism, only to find that by choosing absolutism over liberalism I was hit by another brutal disaster, called court and country. I must say, I'm not impressed with the design of disasters in EU5. They consist of a series of punishing events, and don't feel as if you as the player can do much about them. If a good game is a series of interesting decisions, the EU5 disasters don't live up to that standard.

I am not the richest country in my game of EU5. But I am the 5th richest, despite my country just being a mid-sized duchy in a historical poor part of Germany with no valuable resources. My economy is five times the size of France's. I'll be punching well above my weight in the coming religious wars. That is also because EU5 has a built-in transition in the 16th century from peasant levies to regular armies. Peasant levies are limited by your population. Regular armies are limited by your ability to pay them. EU5 has a helpful indicator on the military tab of your country, telling you how large the game thinks your regular army should be, given the size of your country. My actual army is three times the suggested size, but even in war I just spend a 6th of my income on army maintenance, and thus could easily afford a much bigger one. I'm just waiting for the next technological advance, which will make peasant levies obsolete.

A lot of weirdness is stemming from the fact that there are costs in the game that scale with the size of your economy, and others that do not. The size of your economy is the size of your tax base plus the sum of all purchase costs of your trade. So when doing a big purchase that depends on economy size, like embracing an institution, I can simply stop all trade and suddenly pay a lot less. Meanwhile costs like growing a town into a city aren't changing much over the course of the game, so the around 1500 ducats that costs were prohibitive in the early game, while now I make enough money in a year to do it twice. Why would I want to do that? Well, if you have enough money, the size of your army is then limited by your manpower, and you need towns and cities to build more of the buildings that increase that manpower.

On the one hand, it is quite fun to play this way. The the other hand, economic success leads to some outcomes that are ahistorical, unbalancing for gameplay, or both.

The early positive reviews for Arc Raiders, generally above 90, were tanked by a review from Eurogamer, which gave the game a dismal 40. Not because the game wasn't fun, or had technical problems. Arc Raiders simply had one single feature, AI voice acting for text-to-speech chat, that the reviewer objected against. Which is funny, because the reviewer actually reported positively on an encounter with other players who told him "we are looking for lemons", and I can't think of any way other than AI that would have enabled the game to have voice chat for such a phrase. Pre-recorded human voice chat is all nice and dandy, sounds better, gives work to human voice actors, and all that. But you can't possibly have a recording for everything one player might want to say to another. And if you let players just talk to each other via microphones, you get into all sorts of problems, because you are unable to moderate harassment and other unwanted behavior.

Now I don't mind a reviewer mentioning such a pet peeve in his review. But a professional review giving a game an unusually low score because of such a pet peeve is rather unprofessional. And in the early days around release date, when there are not many critics reviews available, a single very low review can skew the picture on review aggregation sites like Metacritic by a lot. And gamers notice, which ultimately just accelerates the movement away from relying on professional critics. Political activism disguised as a review is just shoveling the grave for professional game criticism.

EU5 achieves a lot of things by simulation, or as the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun said: "Geography is destiny". Unlike EU4, in EU5 your control over your provinces is strongly influenced by proximity to the capital. As a coastal country you can project that proximity by sea, but a landlocked country like Hungary can only build roads, and is limited by the technology for that, with railroads only arriving close to the end of the game. With mountain ranges limiting proximity and thus control, and slowing down your armies, limitless expansion has become a lot more difficult in this version. The simulation works reasonably well in motivating AI controlled countries to behave similar to what they did historically.

On top of that, there is historical content in the game, much of it country or region-specific. There are one-off events, and longer situations, like the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War. These usually change a number of parameters, rather than being totally fixed, e.g. I've seen the Hundred Years' War end after 30 years, because France reached the victory condition for it early. There are also country specific disasters that can happen when certain bad situations happen in the simulation. Plus there are country- / region- / religion-specific entries in the tech tree. The technology system is also much influenced by the institutions that unlock parts of the tech tree, and these appear in a historically accurate time frame and region. Not exact location, in my first game the printing press appeared in Leuven, Holland instead of Mainz, Germany, but there is a list of possible spawning locations, so it can't spawn for example in Beijing.

AI countries don't always behave historically. Sometimes they simply can't, because players don't behave historically. While the mechanics are in the game for Brandenburg to form Prussia, they won't do so in my current game, because I am playing neighboring Mecklenburg and took a lot of Prussia's future territory. In my first game, my Holland discovered and settled North America before the English ever got there. But again, geography is destiny, and with the New World institution spawning on the Iberian peninsula, and the distance simply being smaller, Spain and Portugal are more likely to colonize South America than other countries are. Some players delight in uncovering hidden ahistorical possibilities in the game, for example you can revive the Carolingians in Europe, or Carthage in North Africa.

At the start of the game, when you select a country, you will get information about how many country-specific events and bonuses are in the game. A lot of lesser countries have none, but historically important countries like England already have over 200. And while in EU4 patches also contained new game mechanics, EU5 follows the concept of other newer Paradox games of putting game mechanics in free patches, and country-specific content in DLCs. For example the first DLC announced for Q1 2026 is Rise of the Phoenix, with additional content for the Byzantine Empire.

In the end, all of this makes Europa Universalis V a historically flavored simulation game, with plenty of alternate history mixed with historical events. And there is some randomness in the simulation, so letting the game run in pure AI mode won't result in the same outcomes every time. I like this middle ground, but of course there are people upset about something historically important not happening in their game, or on the other side something historical happening and messing up their game.

Unlike other roll & write games, where all players get to use the same rolled dice, The Hobbit is a dice drafting game. First player rolls 5 dice and picks one, then the other players in turn pick their dice. This continues as long as there are dice left, so in a 4-player game the first player gets a second die, while in a 3-player game the first and second player get 2 dice. The player who is the first who didn't get another die will be start player the next round.

From the 5 dice, 3 are showing between one and three spaces with paths, e.g. a straight path followed by a corner. You can rotate or mirror that as you want and then draw those paths on your map. Paths can overlap or cross existing paths to form connections. The other two dice have 3 different symbols, breads, swords, or wizard hats, representing different resources. You can also often get the same resources by drawing a path over the same symbol on your map.

What makes The Hobbit a rather interesting game is that your map is in a booklet with 8 different scenarios, giving 8 slightly different games. In each game the goal for your paths can be different: For example in the first scenario you need to connect 12 dwarves to Bag End, while in the second scenario you are drawing a path from Bag End to Rivendell. The different resources also work somewhat differently in each scenario. That gives the game a very good replayability.

The Hobbit: There and Back Again takes under 1 hour per scenario, and has very little setup. If you have a bit more time, you can play several scenarios one after another, and the game remains interesting enough. There isn't much player interaction, other than objectives that score extra points for the first player to achieve them. For example, getting Gandalf to Bag End in the first scenario while having enough bread to feed him gives 10 points, but the first player to do so gets 12 instead. The worst thing a better player can do to a less good player is finishing the game early, and the less good player will still have had some fun pursuing his goals.

While I am usually not a huge fan of roll & write games, because I find they got boring quickly, I really like The Hobbit for the greater replayability and variations in scenarios. I'd give it a 8 out of 10 score.

Less than 2 hours later, my bug report got a reply of "Hello there! With your help, we have now confirmed the issue and added it to our database!". Given that EU5 this early after release still has a lot of bugs, and the bug report forum is full of posts, I was impressed by the speed of response. Even if fixing the bug still might take some time, I got the feeling that I made a positive contribution and was heard. Now that is good community management!

I was motivated to stop because I was a bit too successful: I had become the 2nd ranked great power in the game by accident. The Holy Roman Empire had simply chosen to elect me as their emperor, although I wasn't an elector, and had done absolutely nothing to curry the favors of the electors. That felt weird to me, ahistorical, and not actually that much fun. The other success that was ahistorical was that I had already discovered North America, and had colony growing in Maine. With England nowhere in sight, mostly because the Hundred Years' War had dragged on a bit over a century, it seemed that I was the only colonial power in North America at that point.

The other reason that I didn't want to play on was that I do like to check on YouTube and Twitch what content creators are doing to get some advice. But I'm not the only one for who the first century took so long, and thus content for the Age of Discovery and beyond is actually hard to find. Florryworry has a Twitch stream on Holland, but that is because he plays extremely fast, and thus explains a lot less. What I did learn from him was that there is a sort of exploit, where you do take locations you don't actually want in peace negotiations, and then sell them for thousands of ducats to the great powers. That boost your own economy and hobbles the economy of the great power, as these locations aren't actually worth that much to them.

So I started a second game now, with ironman and achievements enabled, playing Mecklenburg. That country has a nice location right next to the Lübeck market center, and a lot of smaller neighbors you can gobble up quickly at the start of the game to grow into a duchy. I won't do any exploration and colonization in this run, and hope that I don't get elected emperor of the HRE again. I just want to play a mid-sized country through 5 centuries.