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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having said that, I am also in favor of democracies regularly changing governments, swinging from left to right and back, with each government providing some counterweight to the other. If you leave one government in power for too long, things always degenerate. Democracy is served by letting the other side try to do better. Democracy is also served by that other side failing to do better. There are some parties in Europe that are in permanent opposition, and I find it far too easy for them to criticize the people who govern, while never taking on that responsibility for themselves.

Effective opposition to me is basically a running commentary on a) what the government is doing wrong, and b) why the policies of your side would lead to a better result. Unfortunately, effective opposition is rare these days. Some opposition parties just refuse to do anything at all, just waiting for the next election. Other opposition exaggerates in the other direction: Constant outrage and hyperbole at anything the government does, conveniently leaving out the part how to do better. The worst is opposition by political violence.

I do not subscribe to the idea that the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th were freedom fighters, while the people throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships are domestic terrorists. But neither do I subscribe to the reverse position. I would even say that it is dangerous to try to either justify one with the other, or to try to relativize one form of political violence by pointing at another and saying "they are worse". The burning Tesla cars generally do not belong to Elon Musk, and a lot of people bought a Tesla or opened a Tesla dealership long before Elon went crazy. I totally support boycotting Tesla, and generally smile when I hear about Tesla's drops in sales in Europe, and corresponding drop in share price. Publishing a database of all Tesla owners and encouraging activists to seek these private citizens out and light their cars on fire to me is not valid political protest, and morally wrong, because it hurts innocent people far more than it hurts the purported target. Political violence to me is also the exact opposite of effective opposition, as it creates sympathy for the victims instead of underlining what they did wrong.

It seems to me as if the Trump administration is doing a great job of sabotaging itself. Effective opposition would be running a split screen of the story of how the government is using non-classified public social media platforms to discuss war plans side by side with Republicans shouting to "lock her up" at Hillary Clinton. Showing Republican hypocrisy talks louder than Democrats now expressing outrage.

On other subjects, I do believe that even for an American it is hard to understand the exact ultimate consequences of some of the decisions of government. I don't think it is a good political platform to claim that every single federal government employee is necessary and doing a great job, as that runs counter to the experiences of the citizens (and not just in America, but pretty much everywhere else). To foreigners, some of the discussion is simply incomprehensible: For example the government wants to cut 80,000 jobs in the Department of Veterans Affairs; such a department doesn't even exist in many other countries, and non-Americans might well scratch their heads when they hear that this is the largest part of the government, and that the US has more employees in the VA Department than it has active serving soldiers. It took me some research that this is because the VA Department is basically running a completely parallel national health service for 3% of the population, which tells you a lot of what even the US government thinks about the health service for the other 97%. To me that appears to be a bigger problem, one that can't be solved either by adding or subtracting any number of employees to the department.

I also personally don't believe that tariffs are going to revive the US manufacturing sector. Even if working as intended, tariffs at best make a US company competitive again by raising the price of the goods of foreign competitors. Whether they buy foreign or US, the customer will always end up paying more for the same goods, and ultimately end up with less goods for his money. While it will take time to see how all this plays out, it will take considerably less time than 4 years. Again, effective opposition for Democrats might be to just show old Republican footage. Ronald Reagan's "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" question comes to mind here. And sometimes effective opposition means realizing that the other side has a winning subject, and stealing it; I would believe that Democrats would be better served by coming up with their own plans on how to make government more efficient or how to create jobs in the US economy, than just blindly promising to reverse all changes.

In short, I believe that Trump is clever enough to correctly identify what the day to day problems of average citizens are. But his solutions to those problems are just populist hogwash, or based on flawed ideology. It doesn't seem an insurmountable obstacle to come up with better plans for the Democrats, or to point out the various failings. But voters clearly were also unhappy with the situation before, so going back isn't an option either.

And then Hasbro / WotC promised a bright new future for D&D. They were going to make another edition of D&D, *not* called 6th edition, and they were going to create the mother of all virtual tabletop programs for that, called Sigil. Instead of having a tabletop software that moved tokens over flat maps, Sigil would be fully 3D, run with the Unreal engine, and provide a spectacular game with 3D miniatures in 3D dungeons and landscapes. So at some point I was thinking that I'll wait for that, and then when a lot of new people would be attracted to D&D by that software, I could find new groups to play with.

Sigil launched this month. The launch was so successful that Hasbro fired 90% of the development team two weeks later and basically abandoned the project, just keeping it on life support as an addon for D&D Beyond. It wasn't just that the software wasn't running very well. It also turned out that Hasbro hadn't had a clue what their customers wanted, and how they played Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is a game of infinite creativity, and every table has its own house rules or homebrew creative additions. But the goal of Hasbro for Sigil was to maximize monetization, which meant that everything cool should be created by Hasbro and then sold to the players for extra money. There is no room for creativity from third parties or players in such a monetization scheme, you can't allow a DM to create something really cool, because you can't charge him for that. As one of the vice presidents of Hasbro announced: "After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a large, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week."

The inconveniently named "Dungeons & Dragons—5th Edition, 2024 version" didn't tempt me either. Not just that I don't have a group to play with; but I spent a huge pile of money on the 5th edition, 2014 version, and don't want to buy the whole bunch again, for just some minor changes. Hasbro tried in various ways to make the new edition necessary, for example on their D&D Beyond platform, by creating artificial incompatibilities between the 2014 and 2024 editions. That only led to them losing more customers, forcing them to backpedal. Personally I think that they should have made more changes and done a 6th edition, as their approach of simultaneously keeping the successful 5th edition *and* making people buy all the books again clearly didn't work.

If you look into the history of Dungeons & Dragons from a corporate point of view, you'll find 50 years rich in corporate mismanagement. D&D is a product that was successful *despite* the various companies making it and the various owners, not because of them. 5th edition was particularly successful due to the creativity of third parties, like Critical Role, or Larian Studios with their Baldur's Gate 3. And Hasbro managed to treat all of these creative people so badly, that none of them want to continue working with them. The fundamental truth is that the D&D intellectual property isn't necessary to achieve most of the fun of role-playing, and that excessive IP monetization only kills the product. Right now, the future of D&D doesn't look very bright. And that makes it difficult for people like me to find other new people to play with. It's a negative network effect.

As a result, I don't think there will be many more posts on this blog with the Dungeons & Dragons label. Sorry if you enjoyed those. But I can only write about what I live, and D&D just isn't part of my life anymore. Except for maybe having a look at patch 8 of Baldur's Gate 3, when it comes out.