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On top of that, there is historical content in the game, much of it country or region-specific.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.

One interesting fact about my first 31 hours in the game is that I am still on my very first run, having started with the recommended country Holland; and this first game is now on January 1, 1437, the start of the Age of Discovery. One century played, four still to go, which means I'll probably take over a hundred hours for my first game. Nobody ever accused EU4 to be a particularly fast game, but EU5 is significantly slower.

Part of that slowness is technical: If I set the speed to maximum, it takes me nearly 2 minutes to run through 1 year, so that is already 3 hours for a century without actually playing. And mine is a comparatively fast computer with 32 GByte of RAM, others have reported a century taking 6 hours of computing time. Another part of the slowness is of course this being my first game, and me needing a lot of time to learn. Some of that learning takes place without advancing played time, for example by watching YouTube videos and Twitch streams. Holland turned out to be an inspired choice for a first country, because the fact that it is the smallest of the recommended countries means that there is a lot of content available already.

But the main reason for me taking so long to finish the first century is the huge scope of the game. Unless you automate everything, which I find a bit silly because I want to play the game, there is just so much stuff to constantly track and try to balance. The large majority of those 31 hours were spent while the game was paused, and I was fiddling with the thousands of parameters in the game. There are a lot more game systems than in EU4, and everything you do affects a lot of other things. That is not only hard to wrap your head around, but also very time consuming. Which ultimately isn't a bad thing, because I am having fun during all that time spent. But I do hear the people complaining about the pacing, and I get their point.

According to SteamDB, EU5 had a peak concurrent player base of 77k. Which is nearly twice as much as EU4 ever had. With this and the "very positive" Steam rating, I would say that the launch was a success. This is nearly as much as Civilization VII, a game that is a lot less complex and was deliberately trying to be more accessible. Europa Universalis V is uncompromising in its inaccessibility and difficulty. It is the Elden Ring of grand strategy games. If you try to extrapolate from the player count to sales numbers, you end up with between 200k and 400k of sales, or around $20 million. With an estimated development cost for 30 people during 5 years being up to $15 million, EU5 is already a financial success, and that is before Paradox spends another decade of releasing DLCs.

What kept the launch from being an even bigger success is the fact that the game still has a number of bugs, with the first patch already being out, and even more importantly feels rather unpolished. Most of the roughness is in the user interface. While it is prettier than the UI of EU4, and does improve some things, there are also a number of areas where EU5 has less good UI systems than EU4. For example the notification system is absolutely abysmal. For example I was allied with France, and at some point France broke that alliance. Would have been nice if they would have notified me of such an important event, but they didn't. I tried to fiddle with the messaging system, but couldn't even find an option to either get messages of broken alliances, nor for getting notifications about a specific important country. You can click on a little star icon on the country panel of France, but all that does is to pin it to your quick access bar on the right.

Another atrocious part of the UI is the tech tree. It can't be fully zoomed out to get an overview, and if you zoom in enough to be able to read the text, there is far too much empty space between the tech advances, so you need to scroll around a lot. And UI problems like that can be found everywhere in the game. In many menus it isn't obvious which sections are just giving information, and which sections are actually buttons allowing you to dive deeper. Of course there are already mods out there, including one that lets you zoom out the tech tree, but that brings me to the weird policy of Paradox on achievements for Europa Universalis games.

I am not the world's greatest or most experienced player of EU4, far from that, I only started this year. Nevertheless I have an EU4 achievement "Just a little patience" for playing through a full game, and only 9% of EU4 players have that. The reason for this is that you only can get achievements in Europa Universalis games if you play on ironman, with no mods or other help. In EU5 that policy is so extreme that even if you turn on the tutorial and/or mission tree for helpful guidance, you can't get any achievements anymore. Yeah, right, a game that still has crash to desktop bugs and takes 100 hours wants you to play it only in ironman mode, that sounds like a really great idea! Use a mod to improve visibility of the tech tree, and you are excluded from achievements for cheating. So the vast majority of people just plays without the achievements in non-ironman mode. Which has the added advantage of actually allowing you to cheat if you want, by starting the game in debug mode and using various console cheat commands.

The gameplay systems of Europa Universalis V mostly work. There are a few weird things, like my 14th century peasants in Holland wanting exotic foods like rice and olives to be satisfied. I didn't even know the Dutch invented the paella that early. Where things get confusing is usually when the actual EU5 gameplay mechanics are either unhistorical, or different from how the same thing was handled in EU4. For example in EU4, you had the option of making your ruler a general, but that didn't do much other than saving you the cost of that general, and it increased the chance of your ruler dying. In EU5, I can't find out whether my ruler dies faster if he is an admiral or general, but I do know that giving him that additional role increases my crown power, which is very important.

While I love the much expanded options and game systems that EU5 has for the economy, I am still struggling a bit when the game is too good at proving the efficient-market hypothesis: Trading is very profitable at the very start of the game, but becomes increasing unprofitable over time, because the combined trading activity of you, your burghers, and the other countries results in all opportunity for arbitrage being traded away. If goods are plentiful in one place and rare in another, the price difference will quickly disappear due to trading.

But up to now, the positives of EU5 for me largely outweigh the negatives. And I have hope that bugs will be fixed, and the rough UI will be improved over the years. The underlying core of EU5 is solid, and because it is highly complex, it has the potential of keeping me engaged for a very long time and a great many number of hours. The meme is that for a Europa Universalis game it takes a thousand hours to finish the tutorial. That probably isn't for everybody, but I am fine with that.

In board games, my campaign of Tidal Blades 2 is in full swing, and we finished scenario 11 out of 18 yesterday. We usually get 2 scenarios played per session, and currently play about twice per month, so we will probably finish this campaign around the end of the year. My other regular board game campaign is currently on hold, as the couple we are playing with just had their first child.

One highlight of my board game life last month was the visit to the Spiel 2025 in Essen, the world's largest tabletop games fair. I was rather pleased with my logistics organization for that, including parking near the fair a day early, as you can't get parking there during the event. But while the organization went well, the event itself left me unsatisfied. It was extremely crowded, and so, in spite of me being there all day, I had very little opportunity to get some game explained to me. That resulted in me buying games based more on a quick look or on what was considered hot by BoardGameGeek. And then the first hot game I actually played after the fair, Covenant, turned out to be not that great, at least not for me. As I can't optimize my fair visit any further, I currently think that I won't be going next year.

When I wasn't away for the fair, my regular board game nights continued. From the games I brought, we played Dune: Imperium and Steam Power. From other people's games I played 7 Wonders Dice and Finspan; while it was interesting to see the evolution of the "X-span" series, I didn't like Finspan very much, and find that the series is moving into the wrong direction, with decreasing player interaction. I might not have been the only one thinking that way, as we finished Finspan in an hour and a half, and would have had time to play another round, but nobody even proposed that.

In video games, I cancelled my PC Game Pass subscription last month. Not really because of the price increase, but also because I won't be needing it much when I play EU5. Before that subscription ran out, I played both Endless Legends 2 and Metaphor: ReFantazio. Both of which I rated "I'm happy I didn't pay for this". Endless Legends 2 looked a mile wide, and ended up being an inch deep. In Metaphor: ReFantazio, I was missing player agency, with both the endless cutscenes and dialogue and the time limit getting in the way of me playing the game the way I wanted. So, yeah, this is exactly what I had the Game Pass subscription for, and I'll probably return at some point, but I'll play EU5 and other Steam games first.

Master of Command covers The Seven Years' War, which was one of the first more global wars, and resulted in the rise of Prussia to a great power. In the game, you can choose between 5 nations, each of which have 3 campaigns (you need to finish the first one to unlock them all), and each campaign has 3 acts. In each act you are moving a single army around a procedurally created map, and interact with map points like settlements or forts. You have only a limited time until you need to face the main enemy on that map, so you need to gain strength by fighting, looting, and various map events. Every battle involves a Total War like real-time fight, which you mostly win by breaking enemy morale. You have usually a lot of infantry, some cavalry, and some artillery. Some fighting is done by lines of infantry firing muskets at each other, but there is also melee combat.

In each act you both grow your current army in quantity, but also in quality. Battles give experience, which allows upgrading of units. You can gain items as loot in battles, from map events, or buy them in cities, and those items give bonuses to your regiments. The scale remains reasonable, with a brigade having up to 4 regiments, and you typically growing from one to three brigades in act I. Learning how to play is easy enough, learning how to play well isn't, and you might actually want to start this one on easy (Lieutenant), or with at least the "Early Campaign Season" bonus modifier active.

Different nations focus on different things in their armies, quality or quantity, infantry or artillery, and so there is some replayability. But this game is also fine to just play one or two campaigns and be done with it, if you don't want to go deeper.

In many of the video games I play, especially in roleplaying games, my options at any given moment are limited, and restricted to the situation I am in. I might be in a dialogue and have dialogue options, I might be in combat and have different attack options, or I might be on an overland map and have different options where to go. But when I am in a dialogue, I can't fire a magic missile at the person I am talking to (unless that is a foreseen dialogue option), and when I am in combat, I can't talk to my enemies. Europa Universalis is different to that. All the buttons of the game are available all the time. The game doesn't tell you that you are now in a dialogue and should pursue diplomatic relations with your neighbors, and while some diplomatic options might be impossible during war, the diplomatic menu never goes away completely.

And unlike most other games, choosing one action doesn't necessarily prevent you from doing something else. In most games, if you choose for example to cast a spell, that is your action for that turn in a turn-based game, or for so many seconds in a real-time game. Even in a real-time game with pause you might at best be able to give a series of commands that will be executed sequentially. In Europa Universalis and similar grand strategy games, you can pause and then give dozens of commands in different parts of your menu.

All the buttons being available from the first moment of the game and simultaneously creates a bit of an accessibility problem. Paradox published a video today called Here's Everything You Need To Know Before You Unpause Europa Universalis V, because there is a whole game you can play to go through all the menus and understand your chosen country before unpausing and letting anything happen for the first time. Different countries have very different starting situations regarding their economy, their population, their estates (power groups), their military, and their diplomatic relations. I will certainly take a good amount of time on my first game on Tuesday to just go through everything and see where I stand, and whether there are actions I need to take early. In EU4 I once played a game as the Teutonic Order, and there is a specific disaster looming over you, which will very much mess up your game unless you know about it and address the problem from the start. For a new player, having all the options and not knowing what is important to do now, and what can wait, can be really overwhelming.

But of course there is also the option of just letting the game run and see what happens, treating it more as a simulation than a game. In the past weeks, EU5 has garnered some criticism based on somebody showing a time-lapsed video of the world without the player doing anything. Some people felt that in that situation, the AI wasn't aggressive enough, and countries didn't expand enough. Especially some nations, like the Ottoman Empire, appeared un-historically weak. For that you need to know that EU4 starts in 1444, at which point the Ottoman Empire is already large, while in EU5, starting in 1337, the Ottomans still have a rather small country. While historically the Ottoman Empire was a huge threat to Christian Europe, sieging Vienna twice in 1529 and 1683, and EU4 reflects that, in EU5 it isn't a given that the Ottomans grow into a large empire at all. In fact, if the player chooses to play Byzantium, they will almost certainly stop the Ottoman Empire from happening.

There are several interesting design questions involved here: One is how much you tune the AI towards aggressive expansion and huge empires. Historically, global empires are rare, world conquest (which is something some EU4 players like to do) never happened, and regional empires had a tendency to break apart over the centuries. The way EU5 AI is programmed now seems to be in line with both history, and the player expectations of how the world would look like after the first 107 years, from the start date of EU5 to the start date of EU4. If in a typical game of EU5 in 1444 for example the Holy Roman Empire would be largely united, or consist only of a handful of countries, that would be both unhistorical and somewhat weird as well.

Which gets us to the second big design question, which is in how far designers just let the simulation evolve countries, or in how far they add scripted events. EU5 starts less than two months before the historic start of the Hundred Years' War and nine years before the Black Death. These are events that will most certainly be scripted to happen in EU5, as will the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Other big historical events, like the discovery of the New World, has been left to happen "naturally" in EU4 and EU5, controlled only by naval technology. Which means that I have seen EU4 games in which AI Denmark colonized Canada and North America, rather than the English or the French.

The big problem with scripted events is that players quickly reverse engineer those scripts, and exploit them when playing in a region where they happen. Read or watch any guide on how to play France in EU4, and it will tell you how to deal with the Surrender of Maine or the Burgundian Succession, both of which are important scripted events. I don't even know whether these events will be in EU5, because with over a century of an earlier start, how likely is it that England will hold Maine in 1444, or that the Burgundian ruler dies in 1477 without a male heir? Which gets us back to the rise of certain empires in history, like the Ottomans, or Prussia, which historically involved some element of chance, and thus in a pure simulation have a good probability of not happening at all. In EU4 there was a game mechanic called "lucky nations" (which you could turn off), in which certain nations got bonuses that made it more likely for them to become important and play their historical role, but the devs decided to not do that in EU5.

Fortunately for me, none of this is a problem. I am okay with EU5 as leaning a bit more towards a simulation, and being a bit less game-like. I never liked world conquest gameplay in EU4 anyway, and am okay if it is strongly hindered by problems of large empire stability, as that is historically realistic to me. I'm also okay if certain things in my game don't happen as they did historically, as long as they seem somewhat historically realistic or possible. And I realize that the number of historical events and scripts added to EU5 is very much a function of time, as they take time to program, and much will be added via DLC. That doesn't stop me from playing the game on release, with a bit less of all that.

While it took me months to write my thesis, and years to prepare, modern generative AI can produce a very similar looking book with an afternoon's amount of work of somebody prompting it. It would be equally incomprehensible to most people, but look nicer, and appear to be much better written. Only a detailed examination by a specialist would reveal that the document holds no scientific value at all. By definition, something written by generative AI is either copied from somewhere, or hallucinated. It is work slop, like Deloitte's AI-written report for the Australian government. Looks good, until you verify the data and the citations, at which point the hallucinations become obvious.

Most of my life's work resulted in written documents: My thesis, several scientific publications, countless technical reports, and 32 patents. Arguably I would have loved an AI to help me write the fluffier parts, but the value of those documents is all in my data and my work they report. You can get generative AI to write you a patent for a perpetuum mobile, but that doesn't mean that you'll have a valid invention on your hands. Scientific documents, legal documents, engineering documents, everything where the value lies in facts being reported correctly, can be faked by generative AI. But unless you only let the generative AI write the prose and let the expert write the data and conclusion from those data, the AI document is worthless.

I am pretty sure that all my patents have been verified and checked by an expert, because as an inventor you get the comments from the patent office examiner back. Scientific publications are peer reviewed, and a committee verifies any thesis before awarding a degree. With my technical reports I wrote for internal use at the company I worked for, I am not so sure. Most people probably only read the cover page, and detailed scrutiny by another expert is unlikely. If Deloitte dares to deliver an AI-written report to a government that paid them, I can easily imagine somebody in a company writing his reports with AI without making sure that all the facts are correct. Work slop looks nice, it just doesn't hold any actual value. Just like AI generated images are getting harder and harder to spot directly, AI generated written documents aren't immediately obvious. If somebody got through college with AI-generated essays, why wouldn't he deliver AI generated work slop in a company, when his supervisor asks him to quickly produce some report or other document? Management might actually encourage the use of AI, not understanding its limitations. How likely is the employee to apply critical thinking to the AI generated sales report? Would he spend hours verifying, when the computer produced the documents in minutes? Work slop has the potential to do serious harm to companies that end up following hallucinated conclusions, because nobody bothered to verify how they got there.

Our first game of Covenant with 4 players took about 3 hours. Of that, 45 minutes were spent to set up the game and explain the rules. There are over 30 different types of tiles and tokens to set up, and the rulebook is 40 pages. This isn't a game that is quick to bring to the table, and it is also quite a table hog. I used several Gamegenic Token Silos to keep everything sorted, but as the game box is on the small side and very tightly packed, the token boxes then don't fit inside. You can keep everything in the box if you use the provided plastic bags, but that makes setup or storing take even more time.

Every action in Covenant has several steps, and some of these steps can then trigger additional steps as a reward. As a result, this is a game that requires a huge amount of concentration. We were constantly asking each other things like "did I take the victory points for this?" or "did I get the reward for this tradition?". Each move being so complicated also makes it rather hard to find the best move and optimize your actions towards victory. I mostly play casually, and Covenant isn't a game well suited to be played casually. While the rulebook isn't bad and has lot of examples and pictures, it is missing an index, and we had to look up rules questions all the time.

The strongest point of Covenant is its replayability: A great many things in Covenant are working via tiles, of which you have a larger stack, but only have something like 4 of them laid out. At the end of each turn, removed tiles get replaced. So from the start each game is different, and ever changing. Again that makes strategy difficult: Whether one strategy is better or worse than another might very much depend on which era objective tiles are laid out, and what personal objectives you drafted. My strategy in my first game, which was all about growing the strength of my dwarves and killing goblins, orcs, and trolls, ended up not being very successful, as I had neglected other things that brought more victory points. I placed only third out of four players, with the first two players being significantly ahead of me. Covenant rewards more hardcore gamers, who are able to calculate several complicated moves ahead.

That makes Covenant a good game if you play repeatedly the same game with the same people. After a game or two the game flow should improve, unless you have players suffering from analysis paralysis, for whom this would be the worst game possible. For my purposes, with board game nights in public spaces, where some of the players are more casual and groups change, Covenant is less ideal. I also dislike how Covenant is complicated due to so many different game mechanics, game pieces, and rules. I prefer games that create complexity more elegantly, with fewer moving parts, and shorter rules. Overall I am giving Covenant a 6 out of 10 rating.

First of all, what actually *is* a good investment? Of course there is no universal definition of "good" and "bad". Usually the best measure is return on investment, ROI, which is the annual profit generated by an investment divided by the cost of the investment. A typical "good" ROI for a capital investment project is between 10% and 20%, with tech industries usually in the upper range, while very old industries without much innovation might have lower, but safer, ROI. So, let's say that AI data centers, being new tech, would be a good investment at 15% ROI, so 15% of $5.2 trillion means we are looking for an annual profit of 780 billion dollars.

Where do investors believe this money is coming from? Mostly from replacing white collar workers by AI. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 70.7 million workers in the US categorized as "Management, professional, and related occupations", which would be the ones most likely to be replaced by AI. Especially if we just talk investment in AI data centers, as replacing a plumber by AI obviously would need additional investment in robots, and this is rather unlikely to happen by 2030. So how much profit could an AI company make by offering services that replace such a white collar worker? Obviously companies would not pay more for such a service than the current cost of such a worker. That cost, as total labor cost, not just salary, is on average about $70 per hour, for 1,800 hours per year, or $126,000 per year. So let's say that a company is willing to pay $100k for an AI worker, and that the AI company has a great profit margin of 50%, so makes a $50k profit per human worker replaced by AI.

So we know that the AI industry needs to make $780 billion annual profit to be a good investment, and does so by making $50k per human worker replaced. Which means that the AI investment is based upon an assumption that over 15 million office workers will be replaced by AI. That is over 20% of the existing white collar employees. The US has currently about 7.4 million people unemployed, an unemployment rate of 4.3%. If AI is a good investment, we would triple the unemployment, which except for a short spike during the pandemic would be the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression. And that would have serious negative consequences to the rest of the economy.

So there are basically just those two alternatives: Either AI investment is a bubble, leading to a financial crisis, or AI is a good investment, leading to an economic crisis. The AI bubble bursting might be the preferable outcome, despite the serious effects it would have on the S&P 500, all sorts of index funds, and 401k pension plans. It also is the more probable outcome, because it is hard to imagine 20% of all white collar workers becoming unemployed without that causing serious social unrest and political fallout.

The obvious disadvantage of this plan was that I then had to get myself and my suitcase to the hotel by subway, but with my suitcase having wheels that was okay. In exchange I gained a strategic HQ for my foray into the fair, allowing me to store games there quickly, and to access stuff I didn't want to carry around with me all day.

I previously said that buying games at Spiel 2025 isn't great. The smaller stands of the developers sell only a few games, and are relatively accessible. But many games are sold at larger stands from the publishers, and those have queues where you can easily wait for 1 hour before you actually bought the game you wanted. However, Thursday morning I found that just walking around the Spiel was quite difficult as well, as it was very crowded. So I decided that if I was just shuffling in a crowd anyway, I might as well queue up for some games. As a result of that and the car parked nearby to store, I ended buying a whopping 10 full games, plus 2 smaller card games (Forest Shuffle Dartmoor and Innovation 4th edition). Here is what I bought:

1. Abroad
2. Altay
3. Covenant
4. Emberheart
5. Fromage
6. The Hobbit: There and Back Again
7. Kingdom Crossing
8. March of the Ants
9. Railroad Tiles
10. Recall

The one game I would have bought but couldn't was Feya's Swamp. On the BGG Spiel 2025 preview that game got over 1k thumbs up, but the publisher brought only 160 copies of the game to the fair, so it was sold out at 10:20 am on Thursday, with no additional copies for the other days reserved. The game comes from a smaller Chilean publisher, who hadn't predicted the hype that game would cause, and was thus woefully unprepared for the demand.

I had several great moments at the Spiel 2025: Buying a game I wanted and that won't be available in stores for months to come; getting information about a game I was interested in but not sure whether I should buy it; chatting with a developer for a game I had backed on Kickstarter; chance meetings with people I know. But the sad reality is that these great moments were diluted with a lot of boredom and hassle. For example I would have loved to get explanations on many more games, but typically each game was set up on just one or two tables; with 55,000 visitors per day, you can see how my slim my chances were to get an explanation for the more popular games. The games I bought, I mostly bought blind, based on previous research, as just seeing them set up on a table from a distance didn't really give me any more valuable information about them. Getting from one point to another at the Spiel meant shuffling slowly with the crowd. I stayed on Thursday until nearly closing time of 7 pm, and it was a bit better in the evening. But overall I had the impression that at the Spiel 2025 I couldn't see the games for the players.

I stayed in the hotel for another night, and had another day ticket for Friday, having planned to drive home in the afternoon. But in the end I decided to not use that ticket and drive home in the morning already. And I decided to not go to next year's Spiel in Essen, and instead just visit the much smaller Spiel Doch in Dortmund in April. While it is nice to get a stack of games early, and I now have enough for several months of board game nights, the cost per game this way is excessive, if you count in the cost for the hotel and drive. It was an experience, but not one I plan to repeat anytime soon.