The first part of this review isn't actually about the game, it is about corporate greed. I have been in games long enough to remember a time where games were mostly being made by people passionate about games, trying to maximize value for the player. The overexpansion of the games industry during the pandemic has led to there not being many passionate development studios left, if any. Civilization VII adds Firaxis to the studios that have gone over to the dark side. Corporate greed shows up in 3 major points: Abandoning the PC as a standard platform for the Civilization series in order to chase console sales, aggressive monetization, and lack of quality control. Thus a month after release, Civ 7 has "mixed" Steam reviews, with less than half of them positive. This isn't a few review trolls, but the opinions of 27,500 players, which is now more than the game's Steam concurrent user peaks on a weekday. Firaxis certainly tried to maximize shareholder value instead of maximizing value of the players, but even without knowing console sales I have my doubt that this was a business success. I think it is more likely that you'll have a financial success if you concentrate on making a great game, while concentrating on making money is rarely a winner.

Between the redesign for console controller and the bugs, the user interface of Civ 7 is now just plain bad. The user interfaces of the two big 4X history games of last year, Millennia and Ara: History Untold, have their peculiarities, and there were certainly complaints. Nobody would have guessed that Civilization VII manages to do worse here. The series that usually *sets* industry standards is now not even conforming to the more basic ones of them. All of the mods I am currently running are just there to fill in the blanks, give me the information that the game itself refuses to tell me. I started my review with corporate greed, because if the bugs weren't there, and if the UI wasn't so bad, people would have been less shocked when Firaxis asked them to shell over another 30 bucks for the first DLC just 4 weeks after advance access release. Creating monetizable content instead of fixing rather obvious shortcomings is just a very bad look, regardless of whether you believe that content had been deliberately removed to be sold back to you, or whether it had been created in those 4 weeks.

Having said all that, I like Civilization VII more than I liked the predecessor. I have played all the games in the series when they were released, including outliers like Colonization or Alpha Centauri. Civ 6 to me felt tired, as if all the graphical improvements, the bells and whistles, were finally unable to make me forget that this was a game that simply wasn't fun to play to the end. Civ 7 is still not fun to play to the end, but the era resets *do* help, and it is visible how a better balancing of legacy paths and victory conditions could actually turn this into a game I would want to play until the end. And Civ 7 is more satisfying to stop playing at the end of an era, rather than stopping to play Civ 6 at some vague point where the fun has run out. I play antiquity twice as often as I play the explorations age, and that twice as often as modernity. But the fundamental feature of era resets is very, very welcome, and for example the scouting at the start of the exploration age is nearly as much fun as at the start of the overall game.

200 hours of Civilization VII played means I am well past my usual 1 dollar per hour quality yardstick, and that although I upgraded to the $130 founder's edition. I am having fun with Civilization VII. I am cursing about the shitty interface *while* having fun, but I am having fun. Paying $130 is me succumbing to the realization that I won't get a complete Civilization experience for just $70. We will see about the DLCs of next year, but this year's DLCs I consider to be the necessary stuff, the stuff that was in the game and then got cut out to be resold later. Civilization VII isn't going to be complete until they added the 4th age, and traces of that atomic age are already in the game files. And maybe that fixes the age of modernity, where the current victory conditions feel somewhat artificial, probably because in the final game they will just be regular legacy paths, not victory conditions.

Civilization VII is not a finished game, but it is a game with a good bone structure. Having played a lot, I tried out a variety of different things. The experience tends to be similar: There is a designed way to play this game, and if you deviate from it, things tend to go wrong. Civilization VII is not yet a robust game. This is why I am thinking of giving it some more time: The long-term replayability is suffering when you try an unusual strategy and either that is an absolutely unexpected success that instantly wins the game, or some unexpected consequence totally ruins the game. Also, "I tried something fun, and then they nerfed it", isn't a great player experience either, it reminds me too much of my MMORPG days. Civ 7 is fixable, and as Firaxis only had two major brands, Civ and XCOM, and they abandoned XCOM, so they can't afford not to fix this one, eventually. At the point where it is, I consider Civ 7 better than Ara, but worse than Millennia today. But Millennia's ugliness problem can't be so easily fixed, and Firaxis has deeper pockets, so there is a good chance that next year, Civ 7 will be the best game.

I understand that for many people this will not be enough. Not everybody wants to pay $130+ and wait a year to get all the parts together that finally will make a good Civilization VII. If you paid $70 and expected a good game now, you only got a flawed version instead, and are understandably angry. There is fun to be had in the current version of Civ 7, but only if you are willing to cope with some shit that you shouldn't have to cope with. So this is certainly not a general recommendation from me. My general recommendation would be to check back in next year.

The AI isn't great with exploration. While I prepare a maximum of army commanders, settlers, and scouts to cross the ocean as soon as cartography is researched, the AI usually just explores with ships first, and doesn't do much else until they got shipbuilding. By that time, my aggressive move into religion has given me a huge boost to science, so the AI is way behind in shipbuilding. And I have already most of the new continent mapped, and treasure resources secured either by settling or by conquest, before the AI even sets foot there.

The modern age is even easier. Even after the patch, the culture victory is still relatively easy, although now the economic victory is sometimes faster. The game tends to be over before even all AI has chosen an ideology, which makes a military victory not really feasible. And the cultural or economic victory are so fast, that I never get around to a science victory, although I am leading in science as well.

In short, the challenge of Civilization VII is currently ending in the antiquity age, because the AI is so bad at the other ages. So I was wondering whether the AI was doing anything at all. So I played a game deliberately badly: I played an extremely isolationist Carthage with a strange special rule: None of my units every left the area of the city, never got more than the 3 spaces away from the city center. That meant no scouts, no merchants, no contacts with city states, no conversion of other cities with missionaries. Just relatively fast moves, because most of the map was covered in fog of war until the very end. The only really interesting thing was that if you are weak like that, all AI players are going to declare war on you with no reason in modern age, probably to try and gather ideology victory points. But defense is very strong in Civilization VII, so with a bunch of guns behind city walls I was able to beat back all AI players at once, until they gave up and made peace. Finally some AI actually won.

What that single settlement game showed me, was that the main problem with not expanding is that you need additional towns for gold, and additional cities for more science and culture. You do have enough production to build every building you research, but progress in technology and civics is slow. You can easily defend against any aggression, but that is mostly because the AI is so horribly bad at warfare.

For my next game, I plan to do the antiquity normally, and then play the age of exploration without religion. Or rather, without missionaries, as you can't really avoid researching piety. That is obviously sub-optimal, but that way I don't crush the AI with a runaway success in religion in that age, and that makes the game maybe a bit more balanced. Unlike Millennia, there doesn't appear to be any negative consequences if you let the AI convert your cities. And the whack-a-mole later gameplay of missionaries is boring and annoying anyway.

To me it appears as if one of the fundamental balance problems of Civilization VII is that features like religion or archeology give such huge rewards for rushing them. As the AI isn't good at throwing all their resources at a single issue, that massively favors the player. After a couple of games, the player knows which game elements he should rush to, and then winning becomes trivial.

In the 15th century some scholars argued against the printing press leading to a degradation of knowledge. It is easy to see their point, after observing the internet as a logical conclusion to the development of letting everybody publish whatever they want. And there are signs that the advent of large language model AI isn't going to help, as AI can not only hallucinate, but also unearth that one Reddit post about eating rocks, rather than giving the consensus view that eating rock is bad for your stomach. Fact-checking on social media is in decline, mostly for cost reasons, but in part also because there were at least some examples of "fact-checking" being used as a method of censorship against opinions that were more clearly unpopular than false.

The reasonable and educated, and thus all of my readers, deal with misinformation in media and on the internet with media literacy skill. We learned to detect biases, and to identify sources that are more likely than others to tell the truth. We know that just because "it is written on the internet", it doesn't mean it is true. And that "do your own research" is basically telling people that because they can find any weird theories by doing a search on Google, those theories must be right. There simply isn't any available internet tool where you could search for something like "was the coronavirus produced in a laboratory?" and you'd get a percentage number of the probability of that theory being true or false, or some other sort of indicator of how far out or not that idea is.

But given that misinformation on the internet is now many decades old, I find it surprising how few people seem to have this sort of media literacy skills. Shouldn't this be something taught in primary school, right after being taught how to read? We might need a bit more time to all realize that photos aren't proof of anything anymore, but shouldn't we all know by now not to trust the written word on the internet? Why would anybody believe something he read on the internet anymore than he would believe something he heard some bloke say in the pub?

While there is discussion of a future feature that lets you "reroll" your start with the same selected leader, civilization, and settings, right now you need to go a slightly more complicated way to do that: Under the "Confirm" tab of the "New Game", after selecting your leader and civilization, you need to go to "Advanced Options". There you find your current Game Random Seed and Map Random Seed. What I do to search for a good starting position is set both of these seeds to something easy, like 1. Then I use the "Save Config" button, save that configuration, and then "Launch Game".

You can either play a few turns to see how your starting positions is, or alternatively you can enable the debug console and use the "Reveal All" button under "Debug" and "Map". If you are happy with your starting position, just reload the autosave from the start of the turn. If the position is bad, you quit to main menu, go to "New Game" again, but this time just go directly to "Confirm", "Advanced Options" and "Load Config". There you can change the map seed (which determines basic geography) and game seed (which determines AI opponents, but that can change your starting position). I then usually save the configuration again to keep track of it, and then launch the game again. Repeat until you have a good starting position. You might consider that cheating, but believe me, playing Carthage with a bad starting geography will be no fun at all.

As I mentioned earlier, Civ 7 has a bit of a problem that consecutive games can feel a bit the same, even if you play with different leaders, civilizations, and focus on a different aspect. Unlike for example Millennia, the different ages in Civ 7 are always the same, and the legend points / victory conditions very much railroad you into a specific playstyle. One thing that helped with replayability was mementos. Finding a good combination of mementos with good synergy with your other powers could change the feel of the game. But mementos sure weren't balanced, and while some that were good were really very good, others were unremarkable and boring. Yesterday's patch changed that, and strived to make *all* mementos unremarkable and boring. That is not an improvement.

The patch caught me in a game where I was using the memento Imago Mundi, which increases scout view range on searching, with The Travels of Marco Polo, which gives you 50 gold for every 100 revealed tiles. I have been using Imago Mundi in combination with other mementos frequently, because while good scouting isn't game breaking, it is rather helpful in making good decisions. The All-T'oqapu Tunic memento gave another +3, as long as you were doing that search action next to a mountain. That was fun, because it allowed you to scout the shortest paths to the second continent already during the antiquity age. Now both of these mementos have been nerfed to death, and the combination of Imago Mundi and All-T'oqapu Tunic together now only gives as much view range as Imago Mundi was giving all by itself before. The Eagle Banner memento now gives a +2% bonus instead of +5% Science for Great Works. On the other side, while some mementos were improved, they still weren't improved enough to be actually interesting.

A perfectly balanced game is perfectly boring. Civilization is mostly a single-player game (and Civ 7 multiplayer features are lacking), so players having fun with unbalanced combinations of abilities is part of the appeal, not something that needs to be patched out. I find patch notes that mostly contain nerfs to be very disappointing. The devs said that the mementos had to be nerfed because they were "overshadowing leader and civ abilities". Which is a problem, if your monetization strategy is DLCs that sell new leaders and civilizations. Next up, DLCs that nerf all free mementos, and hide powerful mementos behind a paywall.

A life annuity is a sort of an insurance against longevity. It is somehow the opposite of a typical life insurance: In a life insurance, you (or rather your family) financially gain when you die early, but you lose money if you live long. In a life annuity, you get a monthly payment until you die, but the moment you die the capital disappears. The monthly payment is higher than if you had put the same capital into a typical financial instrument with a typical yield, because the insurer is basically betting that you won't live all that long, and that he'll get your capital. You're betting against that, and if you live longer than your statistical live expectancy in current actuarial tables. I'm currently 60 years old, so my statistical life expectancy is a bit over 20 years. If I die with 70, the insurance company offering the life annuity gains money, if I live to 90 or 100, it is I who win. A life annuity literally has me gambling on my life.

Life annuities are not the world's most popular financial / insurance product. Worldwide the share of women between the age of 40 and 44 that do not have children is around 20%. That is to say that around 80% of people have children, and the large majority of these people would rather like that on their death their children inherit their money. In a life annuity, there is nothing to inherit, as on the death the capital goes to the insurance company, not the heirs.

On the other side, consider the extreme of providing for your old age by stacking enough money to last for 20 years under your mattress: When the money runs out, you're in financial trouble, and you're too old to do anything about it. Putting the money in a bank is obviously a better idea, but you still need to consider the drawdown percentage: If you only live of the yield, your capital will remain untouched until you die, but the yield is lower than if you take both the yield and a percentage of the capital, with the percentage calculated as to last a certain time. Either you continue to live frugally until you die and your heirs inherit all of your capital, or you live a bit better by drawing down on your capital, and risk running out of money if you live longer than expected.

The reason I am considering the life annuity is because I do not have children. I have a wife, but there are life annuity products that insure both persons in a couple. In my situation, dying rich would be kind of stupid, especially since I live in a country with relatively high inheritance taxes, especially if your heirs aren't your wife and children. Thus a life annuity could insure me against the "risk" of living a long life. Something to consider.

If you play a single game of Civ 7 with a standard Continents+ map and standard settings, the game design guides you through a relatively standardized experience. You'll compete with your neighbors for good settling spaces in the antiquity, then leave the old world behind to explore and exploit a new world in the exploration age, and finally choose and pursue a victory condition in the modern age. There are 10 to 20 hours of solid fun to be had in such a game, despite some obvious shortcomings in matters of bugs, user interface, and balance.

But the more fundamental problem is that Civilization as a series isn't about playing the game once. Civ 6 was a game that managed to consistently have between 50k and 100k concurrent players for over 8 years on Steam, up from 30k players 6 months after release. Civilization is not only the "one more turn" game, it is the "one more game" game. But right now, Civ 7 isn't providing a lot of that. If you play a second or third game of Civ 7, you'll feel a bit railroaded into the same experience as your first game. If you experiment with the game settings and try to play in a very different way, you feel as if the non-standard options are somewhat unbalanced and half-baked. And if you try to play in "house rule" / challenge mode, setting yourself limits against exploiting some of those imbalances, you'll feel as if the game is punishing you harshly on several levels, but especially on the meta-progression level.

What is especially annoying for replayability is how brutal Civ 7 sometimes is in twisting your arm to play the game in a standard way. Civilization VII has only 3 ages, compared to Millennia's 10. But Millennia basically lets you keep everything from one age to the next, and just changes the rules for the next age. Civ 7 goes through a very harsh reset on changing ages, totally nerfing your current buildings, and reshuffling or even deleting your current units, while replacing them with new ones. After you have become familiar with how exactly age changes work in Civ 7, the last 20% or so of an age become a weird exercise of avoiding things that don't carry over, while concentrating on a narrow set of age "victory conditions" and things that do carry over. If you keep crises turned on the settings, you'll also never know what is going to hit you, as specific crises can hurt enormously if you have pursued a certain play style, while other crises are rather harmless in the same conditions.

Sid Meier is famous for having said that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. Of the whole series of Civilization games, Civ 7 is deviating the most from providing interesting decisions. Decisions are interesting if they are all viable. Civ 7 frequently offers you to either play in a rather standardized optimal way, or to deliberately choose suboptimal decisions, which are thus a lot less interesting. A decision becomes less interesting if you feel that the game is punishing you strongly for taking that decision. Sometimes Civ 7 doesn't even give you a choice, which I feel most strongly when creating maps. More often it is things like your selection of enemies in the exploration age: The civilizations on the old continent do not give you any military progress, while all the age progress and meta-progression in military is linked to fighting the civilizations in the new world. That doesn't really feel as if you had a choice at all.

It seems as if Civilization VII was designed to appeal to a larger group of customers, but that some of the fundamental design decisions when going that way limit the lifespan of the game. It remains interesting for the typical lifetime of a typical console game. But I don't see the upward curve of player numbers from the initial dip a few months after release to 8 years later being possible in this iteration. And even a bunch of patches and DLCs aren't going to help all that much there.

Democracy is in danger. Not by democratically elected parties that do exactly what they promised to do in their election campaigns. But by opposition parties in a constant state of moral outrage claiming that everything they don’t support is “fascist” and thereby illegitimate. I like neither the style nor the intentions of the Trump administration, but I do not doubt for a second their legitimacy. In some cases they tried things that were not legitimate, and were immediately shut down by various federal judges. The checks and balances of the US political system are working as intended. What isn’t working as intended is the political opposition. The democrats have become weaker in the polls since the election, because their response to the flurry of executive actions has been so feeble, and they have been unable to present a better alternative. In the American public mind we now have one party that vigourously does things, and an opposition that is reduced to crying about it.

If you look at it in detail, it is highly likely that the Trump administration will fail the basic Ronald Reagan test of “are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”. Democrats would not have to do very much to win the 2028 elections on several levels. But just constant moral outrage and verbal hyperbole isn’t going to achieve that. If half the population is “fascist”, then fascism loses all meaning. Parties of the left in several countries need to start arguing sensibly why their countries need immigrants (and how to better integrate them), or why pursuing the Ukraine war into its 4th year would be preferable to peace negotiations.

To me it seems that Trump and Musk know exactly what they are doing. Triggering the left isn’t a side effect of their policies, it is the main means of keeping the republicans in power. By being constantly triggered and overreacting instead of mounting an effective opposition, democrats make themselves unelectable. If democrats constantly moan about the style in which Trump and Musk are reducing the US federal workforce, they’ll never get around to explaining to the voter why these federal employees were necessary in the first place, and why the voters will be worse off without them. Right wing parties being in power is a chance for left wing parties to show voters that simplistic populist solutions don’t actually work. But that requires concentrating on the substance, and not being constantly distracted by crying over the style. Moral outrage doesn’t win votes, having better policies than the other side does.

Imagine the amount of money you spend per year is X, and you are currently earning (after taxes) twice that, 2X. So you spend half your income, and save the other half. Even if those savings didn't yield any interest, you'd have 25X in savings after 25 years. With 4% interest yield you'd reach 25X in 18 years, thanks to the power of compound interest. If you have 25X money in the bank, you could stop working, and as long as you continue to get 4% interest, that would give you X per year, and you could live at your usual standard of living forever.

Calculations like the above paragraph are the basics of the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement. However, a savings rate of 50% is nearly impossible to achieve for most people. As long as you want to be at leased basically housed, eat regular meals that don't make you sick, and wear clothes good enough to go to work with, there is something like a minimum standard of living depending on local conditions; and not everybody earns twice that minimum. Due to that minimum, it is much easier for high income individuals to have a higher saving rate than for low income individuals.

But much of the difficulty of achieving a high savings rate is psychological. 36% of Americans who earn over $200,000 a year say they live paycheck to paycheck. As there are obviously other Americans with annual incomes of half that living in the same area, it is proven that these people could live on half their income; but they either have an inflated idea of how their living standard should look like, or they are trying to "keep up with the Joneses", and spend due to social pressure.

If you have a savings rate of zero, retirement will come as a shock. Wherever you live, old age pensions tend to be only a fraction of your last salary. On average in Europe pension levels are less than half of final salaries, but there is a distribution to that: If you already live of welfare, your retirement welfare check won't be much different from your current income. If you have an income from work, you have to pay a percentage of that into the pension system, and get a return based on what you paid in. The more you earn, the more you pay in, and the more you get out, but it doesn't scale perfectly. Various caps and rules result in the pension as a percentage of your final salary getting lower and lower, the higher your salary is. For example in the USA your pension benefits calculate as 90% of your monthly earnings below $1,226, 32% of your earnings between $1,226 and $7,391, and just 15% of your earnings above $7,391. If you do the numbers for an American with an annual salary of $200,000, he'll end up with social security benefits of only a quarter of salary. That'll be rough, if he previously thought he couldn't even live on half his salary.

For most people, neither the FIRE idea nor zero savings are financially viable. The good news is that with a moderate savings rate plus the state pension you'll be able to hold you standard of living. For example if you save 15% of your annual income every year for 40 years, and then retire with a state pension of half your previous salary, the interest on your savings should be able to make up for the other half. The real live calculation is complicated, as your annual salary over 40 years is probably going up, stock market returns aren't constant, and life has its financial ups and downs that make a constant savings rate difficult. The other complicated factor is that you can withdraw more of your retirement savings every year than just its interest yield. If you knew how long you will live, you could get both the interest rate and withdraw an amount of the capital at the rate that the savings run out the day you die. Not knowing when that is, and possibly wanting to leave money to your children, complicates that.

The important idea is that you can't spend all of your annual income on your living expenses. You need to be at least a bit frugal during the working portion of your life. If you don't, the pension system will impose a much more drastic frugality on you after retirement. The higher your savings rate, the more comfortable your retirement will become, and at some savings rate even retiring before working 40+ years becomes financially viable.

Civ 7 has 5 possible game speeds: Online, quick, standard, epic, and marathon. What this parameter does is mainly changing the cost to produce anything. Online halves the cost, while marathon makes the cost three times higher. So if for example on standard it would take a given city 6 turns to build a settler, at online speed it takes only 3 turns, while at marathon speed it takes 18. Other costs, for example influence costs for diplomatic actions, scale the same way.

Now at first glance that seems like a parameter which only speeds up or slows down your game. Until you realize that movement isn't affected by the game speed parameter. If on standard speed it took you 6 turns to build a settler, and another 5 turns for the settler to reach the spot where you want to build a new city, it will still take the settler 5 turns from the same city to the same build spot at any other game speed. Playing at epic speed, the settler now took 10 turns to build, but still reached his destination in 5 turns. In relative terms, that speeds up unit movement. It makes everything that is related to movement, from settling, to waging wars, to getting treasure fleets home faster, relatively speaking.

That had some weird side effects: In my game the random map generator had created the second continent a bit smaller than the first one. So, in spite of the first continent holding 5 civilizations and the second continent holding only 3, by the time I arrived at the new continent in the exploration age, it was already nearly completely settled. Imagine an alternative history of earth where the Aztecs send out exploration and colonization ships in 1519, land in Spain, and find the continent already too densely settled and developed for any colonization to take place. Not every epic or marathon game will go like that, there were other factors like Xerxes with his higher city limit living on the second continent. But with my epic game speed slowing down production, exploration and settling for the AI had been sped up relatively to my speed of getting to the new world.

I have now played over 100 hours of Civ 7, but there are things that are getting repetitive. While different AI leaders and civilizations in some respects behave differently, in other respects all AI takes the same decisions in every game. For example, if you are the second player who reached the mysticism civic and get to choose a parthenon, you'll find that the first AI player always took fertility. In the exploration age, the AI opponents are always slow to found a religion and send out missionaries, so the beliefs that give you science for converting foreign cities, and relics for converting new world cities, are completely overpowered. I would have wished that certain AI leaders would have a different focus. In the modern age, you can always rush explorers and get to a cultural victory quickly. You basically need to deliberately play sub-optimally, or all of your games progress in very similar ways after the antiquity age.

It would be wise for me to stop playing Civ 7 now, and wait a few balance patches and DLCs to change things. But I did that for Civ 6 after 40 hours, and then never restarted. Once I stop playing a game and play something else, it is often very hard to find the motivation to return. So I think I'll still play a few games and try some other game parameters, like longer ages, or a fractal map.

Now the Imago Mundi is not much of a problem, as it only needs the Foundation Path meta progression at level 7, and you get foundation points regardless of what and how you are playing. The tunic however requires you to level Pachacuti to level 5, and depending on game parameters and success, that might well require playing him for two games. I did that, but I didn't like it. Civilization shouldn't be a game in which you grind for hours to get a bonus you want. Especially since a game of Civilization can take 10+ hours, while other rogue-lite games with meta progression have 10+ minutes games. Some mementos require you to level a leader up to level 9, and that requires some serious time investment.

Not only does the meta progression "force" you to play a leader you didn't necessarily want to play, it also messes with your player agency on the other game parameters. The quickest way to get points is to fulfill the most victory conditions (legacy paths) possible at the end of an age. Thus playing on easier difficulty and faster game speed setting gives you the most meta progression per hour. Of course the game still lets you challenge yourself with higher difficulty and choose a slower game progression speed, but it feels bad when the game basically punishes you for those choices by slower meta progression.

So not only isn't Civilization the best series for meta progression in general, the system is also badly designed in Civ 7. Many other games with meta progression scale that with difficulty, rewarding you for playing at higher difficulty rather than penalizing you for it. I really don't want to grind a leader with a couple of low difficulty, online speed, uninteresting games, just to get access to some cool memento combo.

The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era (BotSE) can trace its roots to a previous Chip Theory Games board game called Too Many Bones, which has very good ratings on BGG. In comparison, BotSE has an improved adventuring part, the combat on hex maps is somewhat better than the previous square grid, and character development is a bit more gradual and thus easier to understand. But both games are close to 4 in the BGG weight / complexity scale. If you look for BotSE rules videos on YouTube, you'll find that people need over 1 hour of video to explain the game and it's 98-page rulebook. As a result, our first session was a lot slower than expected, and we spent a lot of time trying to solve rules questions. A 4-player session of BotSE is supposed to be 4 hours, and we needed about 7, including rules explanation and playing the tutorial. I think we can get that time down to 4 hours, once we are all solid on the rules, but at the start the rules are quite a hurdle.

Complexity isn't the same as difficulty. BotSE is sometimes scary, as the enemies scale with the player XP multiplied with player count, and that goes up quickly. But with a group of players who have some notions of role-playing games and their tactics, like having a tank, a healer, and some damage dealers, we didn't really get into too much trouble even on our first session. It felt a bit like a game that was hard to learn, easy to master, at least to master to a level where you win without problems. Well, the same could be said about most role-playing games, whether pen & paper or on the computer, so that isn't really a big negative. But it is important to be aware that what you are getting in BotSE is more of an experience, a fun adventure game, rather than a tactical puzzle. As long as you don't completely waste your XP on skills you never use or unlearn, and you have characters that can work together, you will normally be fine.

The interesting part of BotSE is its campaign structure. Other campaign games need a lot of sessions to play through the game once, we just finished two campaign games in around 20 sessions each, and Gloomhaven needs something like three times that. If your group can meet at best twice per month, that means the campaign game is a commitment for a full year. BotSE needs only 3 sessions for one campaign, but each campaign is a combination of one of 6 regions (including the first expansion region) and one of 9 guilds that have quests in each region. So you play a "quick" campaign of three sessions, and then reset, choose fresh characters, and start in a different region with a different guild. With each region having region-specific events, monsters, and quests, that is a lot of replayability.

Overall The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era is quite a good game and great fun, once you mastered the rules. But I would say that you can get equally fun campaign games with less complex rules, without losing too much on tactical variety and interest. There is a certain aspect of "this is complex for the sake of being complex" to this game, instead of "this is complex to add to your tactical options". On the positive side, BotSE has a much better long-term replayability than other campaign games, which are more scripted. There is more randomness in BotSE, from random encounters, to random monsters, and of course lots of random dice rolls. That can result in great adventure moments, but necessarily is less tight than a more scripted campaign.

You can get a copy of The Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era directly from the Chip Theory Games store, and if I just select the base game and the expansion I have, it adds up to €284.90 including shipping, which is pretty much the same price I paid when crowdfunding. I ordered the premium health chips for another €40 there too. I don't think the other deluxification options make much sense, as the component quality is already so high. €85 for a black and white neoprene battle mat? Not worth it, in my opinion, as the 3' x 5' (90 cm x 150 cm) format then places a lot of restrictions on how to set up the game on your table, especially if the table isn't much larger than that. In the end, regardless of what options you take, this is a luxury game. If you love board games and have sufficient money, you might consider this worth it, but it certainly isn't for everybody.