Progress in Prosperous Universe

Prosperous Universe is a game about economics. You don't play a hero, you play a company. As a result, progress is not something measured in levels, but in cash, assets, and profit. The game suggests some starting careers and provides you with the materials to build your first base on one of the starting planets. For example I chose Victualler, and the game provided me with enough stuff to build a base consisting of a core module, 2 pioneer habitation, 1 rig, 1 farm, and 1 food processor. Where you go from there is up to you. The idea is to take the remaining cash and the profits from the operation of your starting base to buy the materials to build more production buildings and make more profit.

Prosperous Universe (PrUn) is a very slow game. It took me days to build my first additional building. Now you could play PrUn by just building whatever strikes your fancy, only logging into the game once or twice per day for 10 minutes or so, and not spending much time on planning. But for me the actual "playing" of PrUn is in planning to optimize your economy. And because a lot of players do that, there is a whole page of tools, apps, and spreadsheets available as Community Resources. So instead of just watching from day to day whether my money goes up or down, I use a spreadsheet to calculate how profitable my base is, and what I should do to maximize profit.

In my case the starting base with the recommended buildings produces 2.5k profit per day. That went up to a bit over 3k when I bought some luxury consumables for my pioneers. Pioneers are the lowest class of workers in PrUn. Every class of workers has a number of "essential" consumables, and if they run out of those, they stop working. And then there are luxury consumables that boost their morale and thus productivity. The tricky thing is that you buy and sell everything to other players, and prices fluctuate. So even a simple question like "should I give luxury consumables to my pioneers?" needs a spreadsheet to answer, as it depends on the prices for those luxury consumables and the value of the goods those pioneers are producing.

Then I had to make a decision on what building to do next. Looking into that made me understand something rather fundamental about the economics of Prosperous Universe: You will want to strike some sort of balance between self-sufficiency and profit. My food production base wasn't the most profitable venture out there, but it does have one fundamental advantage: It produces two of the three essential goods that pioneers need, drinking water and basic rations. As I had chosen to start on a planet that wasn't in the immediate vicinity of a commodity exchange, it takes a bit of planning to keep a large enough stock of consumables on the base. Anything you produce yourself and don't have to ship in helps. But once those basic needs are covered, there are more profitable options out there than food production.

In my case I am on a planet that other than being fertile and having water, two essential requirements for food production, also has one other resource: It is rich in oxygen. So it turned out that the most profitable option to build one more building to increase profit was a collector. That increased my profit from 3.1k to 4.7k per day. The collector "pays for itself" in 12 days, as it costs around 25k. But given that I also make profit from the food production, I could afford another collector in about a week. However, the game is a little more complicated than that: With one collector I am already using 170 pioneers, and a second collector gets me up to needing a total of 220. But my habitation modules only house 200. So if I build another collector, I run with reduced efficiency due to lack of workers, and need another habitation to fix that.

I think by now you get an idea of the initial progress path in Prosperous Universe: Build a starting base to make some profit, invest the profit to expand that base with buildings that make more profit. And all those profit numbers I gave here only apply to my particular planet and with the market prices of today. I see for example that oxygen prices are falling. So maybe I don't want to build another collector, but expand by food production instead, if the rations become more profitable than the oxygen. And I discovered that rations have one additional advantage:  There is a local market for them. Apparently some other players on the planet I am on just built a base to extract oxygen, without bothering with a food production. So I can sell basic rations and drinking water to them.

And that is just the big stuff. You don't add another building to your base every day. But you can fiddle with the smaller optimization stuff as well. For example the production of basic rations needs three different agricultural products, I am using beans, grain, and vegetables. But it turned out that on the market beans are cheaper than grain and vegetables. So I increased the profitability of my farm by only growing the two more expensive crops, and importing the cheap beans. That also means that I overproduce agricultural products, and am accumulating a stock. Which could be quite helpful if I decide to invest in a second food producer, but don't have the money to buy another farm yet.

Every additional building on your base takes up space, and your initial space is limited to 500. Not a problem for me yet, I only use 112 out of that now. But at some point I need to think about investing in my headquarter to raise its level, which gives me more "permits". And with a permit I can either add another 250 area to my existing base, or I can build a second base on another planet. But a second base is a huge economic project, as I would need to buy a new core module and habitation modules as well as production buildings. And then not all planets are very hospitable with good temperature and pressure. If I want to build a new base on a planet with inhospitable conditions, I need additional materials like insulation foam. I calculated the total cost of such a base to be something like 300k. That is still quite a way off for me at my current profitability, but you can see where the path of progress in Prosperous Universe is going. It is a game to be played over months. Up to now I am having a lot of fun, but we have to see how it holds up in the long term.

Trading, Shipping, and Pirating in Prosperous Universe

Many years ago, in 2009, I wrote a blog post about MMO economic systems. In that post I mentioned that the instant travel many MMORPGs have make the concept of buying something cheap at one location, transporting it to another location, and selling it more expensively there impossible. Space games generally don't have instant travel, because space travel tends to be an important part of those games. And so trading and shipping is more often part of the game. But one can handle space travel in many different ways, so in this post I want to have a look at trading, shipping, and pirating in Prosperous Universe.

Space travel in Prosperous Universe has two principal "costs": Time and fuel. Even a short hop from one planet to another of the same system, or to an orbital station in the same system, takes several hours. For flights between space systems, there is a STL (slower than light) component and a FTL (faster than light) component. The STL part is small if you for example fly from one orbital station to another one in another system; it gets big if you need to land on a planet. Because the FTL part is fast, as the name says, the time requirement between having to jump 1 system and having to jump several times isn't going up enormously. You can set the fuel consumption of both the STL and the FTL part. Using more fuel gets you to your destination faster. But quite often I set the FTL fuel usage to minimum, and the STL fuel usage to a bit over minimum, because the cost of flying faster goes up a lot quicker than the time goes down.

Because it takes a day or so to get from one commodity exchange to another, and it costs fuel, it is possible that goods have different prices in different markets. And you could, if you were so inclined, play Prosperous Universe exclusively as a trader. Just sell the materials you are given at the start to build a base and use the capital to buy cheap and sell high. Of course, if you buy a good and ship it, by the time your ship arrives, the price at the destination might already have changed.

Because of the fuel cost, it is recommended that new players choose a planet in a system with an orbital station / commodity exchange. The obvious disadvantage is that all the planets in those systems are very crowded. So I took a calculated gamble and chose a planet 5 jumps from the nearest station. Which means that at low fuel usage it takes me a day and a half to get from my base to the commodity exchange one way, and it costs me 2k currency each way for the fuel. As my starting base only makes about 2k a day profit, I won't be shipping my goods to market all that often.

One of the two advantages that a subscription has (this is very much not a Pay2Win game) is the access to so-called local markets. Which means that the rations I make I can sell directly on my planet to people who have a base without food production there. Or I can take a shipping contract to carry cargo for a fee from my planet to the station, and if that cargo doesn't take up all of my hold and the offered fee covers the fuel cost, I can piggyback my goods transports with that.

So why did the devs make access to shipping contracts only for subscribers? Because Prosperous Universe has absolutely no combat, but it does have "pirates". Well, I'd rather just call them thieves. "Pirates" in Prosperous Universe are people who picked up a shipping contract and never deliver it. If the player who posted the shipping contract doesn't prolong it repeatedly, the contract lapses at some point, and the "pirate" gets to keep both the shipping fee (if paid in advance) and the cargo. It is easy to see why you would want to have that feature behind a paywall.

Prosperous Universe

After quite a while of staying away from MMOs, I just started playing one again. The game is called Prosperous Universe, first alpha release in 2017, now reset and available in Early Access on Steam. It is basically EVE Online, just without the combat and all the pretty parts. :) In other words, a spreadsheet simulator. A game that is all about producing things in a fictional galaxy, and then shipping and trading these things. It is one of the slowest games I know, with everything you do taking hours or even days in real time. It is an extremely niche game, and I love it!

I can see how to some gamers Prosperous Universe doesn't even look like a game at all. There is very little in the way of graphics, and absolutely no action. You're not mashing buttons on a controller to achieve your goals; instead you carefully plan for your goals days ahead, and very slowly put things into motion. You start out with a company that is given some starting assets, and as far as I can see now, it will take me about a month just to double the value of the assets from that starting point. On the other hand, the amount of hours that I would need to be online in the game during that one month is limited. Yeah, I have that habit of letting slow games like this run in the background all day, but after the initial planning is done I could probably log into the game just once or twice per day for a few minutes and be fine.

For me, the lack of need for reaction-based skills is an advantage. But I guess that everybody enjoys the kind of game that he has a talent for. I didn't get the full enjoyment out of Elden Ring, because I don't have a talent for pressing the right buttons on a controller within a time window measured in milliseconds. I do have a talent for careful long-term planning, and planning an action that takes a day in real time, where getting it wrong means you have to wait another day or two for a redo, doesn't scare me. I can see myself playing this game for many months to come, because simply playing Prosperous Universe just for a few days wouldn't even make sense. You can do most things in the game for free, but I did pay 7 Euro per month for 3 months ahead for a "PRO license" which gives me access to local markets.

While you can develop your company to do anything you like, there are different starting packages available in Prosperous Universe. I took a very basic one, the Victualler, specialized in growing and processing food. So my starting base consists of two pioneer habitations to house my workers, a rig to extract water from the planet, a farmstead to use the water to grow crops, and a food processor to transform for example these crops into basic rations. Pioneers are just the bottom class out of 5 classes of workers. Every class of worker needs different goods, which affects their satisfaction and thus efficiency. For pioneers, two of those goods are basic rations and drinking water, both of which I can make myself with my setup. That makes the Victualler a good choice for starters, as you are unlikely to run out of these very basic goods you need, and there is always a steady market for them from others. The game also tells you whether there is currently low, average, or high demand for this starting class, and there weren't any classes in higher demand.

However, I made some other choices at the start that aren't what the tutorial videos and other help documentation recommends. There are planets that are suitable for farming which are in the immediate vicinity of a station with a commodity exchange, allowing you to get your goods to market with something like a 2-hour flight of one of your space ships. I figured that the recommended planet would be full of people following that advice, and prices at that commodity exchange would be low. So I chose a planet that is much farther away from the next station, with no farming planets very near to that station. Ergo, better prices for the basic rations I produce. But at the slowest possible speed (which is the most fuel efficient) it takes me a day and a half to fly to that station. That takes more careful planning of my shopping trips. There are over four thousand planets in the game and they all have different conditions and resources for different industries. So the possibilities are nearly endless. And everything you can make is used by yourself for further processing, or can be sold to another player in a huge player-driven economy. To me, that is a lot of fun.

I also like the completely editable user interface. You can create a series of screens, and on each of these screens you can place a number of tiles of varying sizes. Then you can fill each tile with the command that gives you the information you are looking for. At the start you have one screen for your base and one for your financials, but you can easily create a whole series for different functions, from different chat windows to an overview of local market contracts. It takes a bit of work to set up, but in the end you get exactly the user interface you want.

I don't expect many of my readers to be enticed by this sort of very slow game being played over the course of months. But if you do play Prosperous Universe, you can use the "USR Tobold" command in game to find me, with the option to chat with me.

This could go horribly wrong

Making a triple A video game costs a lot of money. And you need to spend nearly all of that money before the game can first be played by people who could tell you whether it is actually any good. So game developers are constantly looking at how well other games are doing, trying to identify the "secret sauce" of success, and applying it to their own games. That can ruin a whole genre, like all the games who thought they could copy World of Warcraft's success and create the "WoW Killer", but only managed to stifle all creativity and kill the MMORPG genre in a flood of WoW clones.

It is only April, but the video game of the year is probably already determined: Elden Ring. It sold 12 million copies in the first 4 weeks, putting it into a rather small club of best-selling open-world games ever. It is easy to imagine the CEO of some major video game company rushing into the office of his creative director and demanding "make me a game like Elden Ring!". I'm afraid we are in for a lot of pain, because "making a game like Elden Ring" could easily go horribly wrong!

A lot of memes have been made since the release of Elden Ring comparing it to typical Ubisoft open world games. There is definitively some truth to the idea that an Ubisoft-style open world game (not all of them are actually made by Ubisoft) tends to give the player too much information, thus lessening the joy of discovery. However, just imagine any one of these games that you played, and try to mentally subtract all this information, the quest markers, the mini-map, the HUD, and all that: Does this simple subtraction turn that game into a master piece? It obviously does not. So while it is easy to identify some features that less good games have that Elden Ring doesn't, it is a lot harder to identify the "secret sauce" features that Elden Ring has that makes it such a successful game. And no, difficulty isn't it either. The less successful games wouldn't have gotten any better if they had been made brutally hard and no choice of difficulty level given.

The other big problem is that "10 out of 10" scores suggest a perfect game without flaws. That is not the case. Elden Ring is a deeply flawed game, but one which has a certain appeal to a large number of gamers to a degree that these gamers are more than willing to overlook these flaws. If a lesser game would turn up with less genius, but the exact same set of flaws that Elden Ring has, critics would completely rip that game for its flaws.

The final problem is history, or you could call it lineage. Elden Ring works *because* of its history as a Dark Souls game. If Ubisoft had released the exactly same game under the name Assassin's Creek: Lands Between, the reception would have been very different. There are aspects of Elden Ring which are objectively speaking painful, but if you approach the game expecting exactly that pain in advance, these hurt a lot less.

I think in order to create a new open world game with a big success, you would need to study a set of successful open world games, including at least Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Skyrim. And even that would not be a success guarantee. But if you only take Elden Ring as a template to make the next multi-million player game, the result more likely than not would be a complete disaster.

Saltmarsh - Session 1

We started a new D&D campaign, with a nautical / pirate theme, loosely based on the Ghosts of Saltmarsh adventure book. The characters are:

• Bubu, a tabaxi, who in consequence of trying to eat a golden fish that granted wishes was cursed to shrink to half the usual size of a tabaxi. He is a wizard with an unhealthy obsession with fish.
• Gris, a sea dwarf who has lived for years alone on a deserted island after a shipwreck. He is a cleric of nature, and fey-touched by the faery that helped him survive all alone.
• Nordak, a dwarf, and captain of the crew. He is a bard, and his instrument of choice is the drum. That works well on a ship, but frequently not so well when trying to perform in a tavern.
• Shayla, a kalashtar, a human whose body is also inhabited by a spirit from the plane of dreams. She is a cleric of life. Shayla is looking for the Guardian's Tear, which was shed by her god, Helm, when he had to destroy Mystra, the goddess of magic, during the godswar. The tear crystallised into a large elongated gem with strong anti-magic powers, but was lost at sea.

Through various circumstances these four characters have found themselves as minor pirates in the pirate realm Hold of the Sea Princes, in the capitol Monmurg. During a sea battle against a merchant ship (which we played in session zero to explain the sea battle rules I am using), Shayla saved the life of Edgar 'Four-Eyes' Keetes, the scribe of Admiral Arjan Mon. After their return to Monmurg, the players are called into the Sea Princes council chamber and told that they "earned" a special mission. One of them is named captain of the keelboat "Insinkable II", with the other players acting as the crew. They are given orders by the Prince of Monmurg himself, Admiral Arjan Mon, to sail on the next day to a location 80 miles northwest, north of Jetsom Island, and wait there in the vicinity of a small island with a lighthouse for another ship that will bring them a chest of goods to transport back to Monmurg.

However, before they set sail, they are contacted by Four-Eyes, who warns them that the mission is in fact a trap. Admiral Arjan Mon has made a deal with the Krakolich Slarkrethel to provide him with the group as a human sacrifice, so that Slarkrethel would leave the other pirate ships alone. Four-Eyes recommends that instead of sailing northwest, they should sail northeast, remove their pirate flag, and find refuge in the town of Saltmarsh in the kingdom of Keoland, because King Skotti of Keoland is an enemy of the Sea Princes.

So they set sail from Monmurg in a small keelboat. At sea they encounter a group of sahuagin, riding sharks, but manage to defeat them with the help of the ballista on their boat. The sahuagin carry wooden shields with a holy symbol and some writing on it, which suggests that the Guardian Tear of Helm is resting in their underwater city of Akriloth. Sahuagin hate magic, and they worship a lawful evil aspect of Helm as slayer of Mystra and defender against magic.

With the help of a map provided by Four-Eyes, the group makes it to the small fishing town of Saltmarsh. The map also shows a building 7 km further on along the coast, marked with a gold bag, but the group doesn't know whether that indicates a buried treasure or just a business. In Saltmarsh the boat is searched by guards for contraband. Apparently King Skotti of Keoland some time ago introduced a tariff on alcohol and tobacco, and now some people are smuggling these goods.

In Saltmarsh the group rents rooms in The Wicker Goat, a tavern frequented by dwarven miners. There they meet the wizard Keledek, who lives in a nearby tower. They learn that the building on their map is an abandoned mansion, which is said to be haunted, with lights and spooky white ghosts having been seen around it at night. They visit the haunted house and find that the "ghosts" are giant weasels, who apparently have been dunked into white paint. They search the house and find mostly vermin, like swarms of spiders and stirges. They find an upstairs room, with signs of a lantern having been used to send light signals from the window. They also find a man locked in a room, bound and gagged in his underwear. This is Ned Shakeshaft, who tries to persuade the group to escort him back to Saltmarsh immediately. But the group insists on continuing to search the building, so Ned joins them. However, at the next fight (against the stirges in the attic), he tries to backstab Bubu, and then escapes. Having searched all of the upper floors of the house and being seriously wounded, the group retreats back to Saltmarsh. [There they level up to level 2 between sessions.]

An experience in trading

In hindsight, me pledging for the Bardsung crowdfunding turned out to be a mistake. Let's call it a mistake in two parts: Part one is that Bardsung objectively has a number of flaws that make playing it less fun than it could be; part two is that at its best it still isn't the game that I thought it would be or wanted. My error of judgement stemmed from the fact that the crowdfunding campaign talked a lot about the story aspects of the game, with famous guest writers and support for an app with voice-acted narration. I love games like Sleeping Gods (the crowdfunding for the sequel Distant Skies starts tomorrow), with a strong "choose your own adventure" gameplay part. Bardsung isn't that. Narration in Bardsung is reading one paragraph at the end of each 1-hour dungeon crawl, and often there aren't any interesting choices to make. Bardsung is a game of randomly creating dungeons, and slaying monsters those dungeons in a not overly difficult (but sometimes fiddly) combat system. If that is all you want, it is an okay game. If you'd get easily bored by fighting your ways through random dungeons with not much purpose, like me, this game might not be for you.

Buying a game you end up not liking much happens all the time, whether board game or computer game. For computer games, under some limited conditions, you can get a refund on Steam, if you bought the game recently and didn't play it much. To me that pretty much never applies, because I tend to buy Steam games during sales, and then play them much later, when the refund period has already expired. Reselling a game on Steam is not an option. But other than "sitting in my Steam library", which takes up no physical space, and maybe some regret, there are no negative consequences of having bought a Steam game that I later discover to not like.

Board games *do* take up physical space in my library. And typical Kickstarter games with a lot of miniatures tend to take up a lot of space. Not to mention that if you went for the all-in pledge, you'll end up with several boxes from core game to expansions to stretch goals. So the interest in getting rid of an unloved board game is somewhat higher, as board game collectors always tend to be short on shelf space. And unlike a digital downloaded computer game, a physical board game box has some value. Maybe somebody else would like the game better than you did. So selling the game is quite attractive, you get some money towards another game, liberate that premium shelf space, and get rid of the big boxes reminding you of your error of judgement.

However, selling board games is not that easy. Remember the stack of big boxes, which can be quite heavy? Sending that by mail can be rather expensive. And selling a board game locally is complicated, because this is such a niche hobby. The Bardsung Kickstarter had 10,000 backers, which is already one of the bigger ones, but 10,000 people distributed all over the world is not much. The relatively small number of existing copies of a Kickstarter board game also creates an opportunity for scalpers, who buy games to resell them at a profit without ever opening the box. In comparison, a played copy of a board game significantly loses in value. And you run into all the possible problems of selling something over the internet to a complete stranger.

Now recently I was at a local comic convention, which included some board game vendors. And I discovered that less than half an hour away from me there is a shop that buys used board games. And since the last time I got rid of board games I donated them for free, I thought that I should try this instead. The experience was a mixed one: On the positive side I got rid of Bardsung and two other small games, and got two new games in exchange. On the negative side, they weren't paying cash, just store credit. And they paid only 30% of the MSRP, which didn't really surprise me, having watched some reality TV series like Pawn Stars. The shop can't sell a used game for much more than 60% of MSRP, so he is paying me half of that, because he has to pay the running cost of the store, and carries the risk that nobody wants to buy that game. The good news was that the MSRP of Bardsung is twice of what I had paid via Kickstarter, so I still got 60% of my money back.

Well, Bardsung was a really big box, and I am happy that I got rid of it. But I will not make a habit of trading used games. The kind of board game I like is a niche within a niche, and even in a shop full of used board games I didn't see all that many games that were interesting to me. But I still preferred this option to paying shipping for a huge and heavy box sent to a complete stranger. I think the internet damaged my trust in humanity.

Succeeding backwards

One of the advantages of board games over computer games is that a board game (without using an app) can't hide its game mechanics. As it is you who has to execute the game mechanics, you will always see what exactly is going on. And thus it was interesting to see that Roll Player Adventures not only has frequent uses of "failing forward" mechanics, where the story at least continues if you fail combat or skill checks, or you might even get extra rewards on failing; it also has what I would call "succeeding backwards" mechanics, where if you do exceptionally well in combat, you will lose progress.

For example, at the end of adventure 10 (the penultimate adventure in the campaign), you will have to fight a rather powerful monster. The "normal" outcome of the fight is to win it, but only after 2 or 3 rounds of combat. In that case the story simply continues. If you are defeated, the story also continues, but you will get additional stat bonuses and an increase in combat dice limit. But if you kill that monster in a single turn, your combat dice limit and bonus play limit will be reduced. In other words, if you are too weak, you will get a boost, but if you are too strong, the game will make you weaker.

From a game design point of view, the interest of such game mechanics are obvious: That fight is a check whether you are too weak, just right, or too strong for the next adventure, with the consequences trying to some degree to fix the situation towards "just right", for maximum enjoyment of the end. However, the "succeeding backwards" part is not something that games usually do. Many games don't even have fail forward mechanics. If in Elden Ring you can't beat Margit at the level that you are, the game expects you to turn back and level some more, until you can beat him. But Elden Ring certainly doesn't prevent you from completely overleveling content.

The usual video game mechanic is that you are rewarded for success, and punished for failure. The obvious problem with that mechanic is that it can snowball if the game has some sort of campaign without a possibility to catch up. I have played some games that were series of tactical battles with only a main campaign and no optional side battles or random battles. If in such a game your units get "veteran status" and other rewards for surviving, while dead units need to be replaced by expensive and inexperienced troops, it is easy to see how a good start will make that game easier and easier, while bad luck or error committed in the early game can lead to a situation where the game is basically unwinnable later.

Getting progress taken away from you because you are too strong is something that many players would find inacceptable. So perhaps the best solution is the one that a good DM would apply to Dungeons & Dragons campaign: If your players turn out to be exceptionally strong, make the enemies stronger than originally foreseen; if your players made a bunch of "fun" characters for roleplaying, but not very good at combat, make the enemies weaker. However, some attempts of that in computer games have been too simplistic, where the enemies simply scale with your level to a point where leveling loses all interest. And then, some people like to grind early in a game in order to be able to roflstomp the rest.

Do platform exclusives still make sense?

I played Horizon Zero Dawn in 2020 on the PC for about 60 hours. I liked it well enough. Thus, theoretically, I would have been a possible customer for Horizon Forbidden West. Unfortunately that game is still "exclusively" playable on Playstations. And while I also am a possible customer for a Playstation 5, I'm sure not paying a scalper a thousand bucks to sell me one. Which means that I, and everybody else who would buy a PS5 but can't, am excluded from certain games by their "exclusivity".

Now, in previous generations of consoles, that might have made sense. I pretty much bought a Switch to play Breath of the Wild. Some games clearly can drive console sales. However, that argument goes out of the window if a console is permanently sold out. Sony is already selling PS5s as fast as they can make them. They are not making any more money by having attractive exclusives on their console. And the companies that make the games are limited in their sales to the people who managed to get a PS5. There are a lot of potential customers out there who will not buy those games, because of the supply situation of the console.

So I am wondering how platform exclusive games can still make economic sense. Is Sony still giving the game companies a lot of money to make their games exclusive for the Playstation? Is that money sufficient for the game companies to make up for the lost revenue from all the potential customers they missed out on?

D&D acquires D&D Beyond

Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast, makers of Dungeons & Dragons, are buying D&D Beyond, a large online D&D digital toolset and library. And the first thing they had to do was a press release that this was not done to shut the site down. Dungeons & Dragons has a terrible history with the internet in general, and digital D&D toolsets in particular. For decades the company tried to keep their content off the internet, for fear of piracy, but of course that only hurt themselves. And repeated attempts to make digital toolsets for various D&D editions were all deeply flawed and frequently abandoned after a short while. It was only with 5th edition that D&D finally seemed to embrace the internet. And that turned out to be a huge success: Videos of people playing D&D on YouTube get millions of viewers, and catapulted D&D back to the top of the pen-and-paper RPG market, having previously lost that spot to Pathfinder.

Now, a Dungeons & Dragons game ideally has 4 to 5 players plus a Dungeon Master sitting around a table. Which is a bit of a problem if a pandemic prohibits you from gathering 5 to 6 people around a table. But just like business meetings moved to Teams or Zoom, so did a lot of D&D games move to virtual tabletop platforms like Roll20. Now I use both Roll20 and D&D Beyond. Roll20 to actually play D&D, and D&D Beyond as a database and library for rules, items, monsters, and the like.

But D&D Beyond isn't all that clear about what it actually wants to be. It continues to add features that push it closer towards a virtual tabletop platform, without ever really getting close. You can make character sheets, roll dice, and run a bot on Discord that provides macros that combine the dice rolling with the numbers on the character sheet. But D&D Beyond does not provide the most important part of virtual tabletop platforms: Battle maps and tokens. Yes, if you are running a "theater of the mind" style of D&D game and combine D&D Beyond with Discord, you can make that work somehow. But that is still a long shot from full virtual tabletop programs like Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry.

So I am wondering what Wizards of the Coast wants to do with D&D Beyond. Just keep it as it is? Or turn it into a full VTT software? Given their track record, I am not overly hopeful.

Too lazy to read

I backed another Kickstarter board game, The Dark Quarter. It is a game using much of the same system as last year's hit game Destinies, but in a 1980's New Orleans detective noir setting with supernatural elements. A bit like the movie Angel Heart, although I don't know if we will get Robert De Niro peeling an egg. Like in Destinies, an app will be a large part of the game. And app-driven games are a divisive topic in board games.

My favorite board game app is Forteller. It provides voiceovers for the story text of a game. As I refer jokingly in the title, that saves me from having to read the text in a solo game. But in a game with multiple players, it also saves somebody from having to read the text aloud. Plus, professional voice actors are unsurprisingly much better at reading text aloud and making it sound good than the average board game player. For the Dark Quarter it isn't yet completely clear to what degree we will get voiceover of the story, in Destinies unfortunately only a relatively small part of the text had voiceover. Forteller recently sent me a mail in which they announced an upcoming announcement. Bleh! But fortunately they spoiled it by putting an image in that mail which is the cover image of the upcoming Sleeping Gods - Distant Skies. Oh, wow, I hope they do the original Sleeping Gods too, because that already brilliant game would be even better with voiceovers, there is so much text to read.

Using an app to voice-act the story has another big advantage: As long as you still get a book as well, the app is completely optional. Thus if for some reason the app is being discontinued, you would still be able to play the game. That is one of the points where apps in board games get controversial: If you *need* the app to play, then you need to worry about the perennity of the app. On the other hand, if the text is only in the app, and not printed in a book, the production cost of the game can be lower. For Dark Quarters I went for the €59 basic pledge, which isn't too bad a price for a game with a handful of miniatures these days.

While I am not that worried about perennity, it does bother me that in Destinies the app is used to hide information from players. Like when you have to do a skill check, the app doesn't tell you how many successes you need on your roll; you can only enter the number of successes into the app and then see whether you succeeded or failed. The Destinies app is also used to scan QR codes on item cards, which allows for a "use crowbar with door" kind of point-and-click adventure game gameplay. Which can be fun sometimes, but on other occasions it gets really annoying when you never realized that you should have used your credit card on that door, while for some reason the crowbar does nothing.

Hybrid games between board games and apps are becoming more frequent. The Teburu "smart boardgame" system wasn't exactly a hit. So it seems as if developers still have to work out which parts of a board game would benefit from app support. I guess there will be interesting things to come!

Demeo

I have been playing the PC edition of Demeo. Demeo started its life as a very well regarded virtual reality game, and recently released the "PC edition" which can be played with mouse and keyboard. Steam sells the game only as a bundle, so I could play the VR version too, if I had a headset. But given the fact that there are a few PC games (e.g. the Far Cry series) which already give me motion sickness on a regular screen, I don't think VR is for me. Fortunately the mouse and keyboard controls of the PC edition of Demeo work quite well.

Demeo simulates a "dungeon crawler" type board game. There are up to 4 characters, which you can control solo, or with friends in multiplayer. The game is turn-based, and on each turn each character can do 2 actions, for example move and attack. Each character also has a handful of cards, but only one of them is reusable every turn. So if your mage uses his fireball card, he'll have to wait until he finds another one of them before he can do that again. You can get new cards by either filling up a card meter through your actions, or by looting chests. You can also find gold, and buy cards between the dungeon levels.

An "adventure" of Demeo consists of three randomly generated dungeon levels. You have to find the key to the next level in the first two of them, and then kill the boss mob in the final level to win. But mostly you fight a large number of respawning monsters, trying to build up a strong hand of cards. The rewards for winning an adventure are cosmetic, there is no character progression between adventures. Which is useful if you want to play multiplayer, everybody is always the same strength. There are currently three different adventures, with different monsters. But each adventure has a lot of replayability, due to the randomly generated dungeon levels. I like it!

Now I recently received a Kickstarter board game called Bardsung, which I already mentioned here. Bardsung is a game in which a group of adventurers explore a randomly generated dungeon. It is turn-based, each character has 2 actions per turn, and the abilities of the characters are on cards. In short, Bardsung is very similar in many aspects to Demeo. But Bardsung is a lot more fiddly: You need to handle every aspect of the game yourself, the random dungeon generation, wounds and statuses, controlling the monsters, and so on. Demeo is a lot more fluid, because the computer handles all that stuff for you. At least for solo play, Demeo is a lot more fun than Bardsung.

Messy, but interesting

Since 2010 the USA works slightly differently than other western democracies. Since the supreme court decision on Citizen United vs. FEC, companies have very few restrictions on using their money for political campaigns. That used to favor Republicans, who used to be the party of business, but now things are turning around, leading to some spectacular GOP vs. company fights. The biggest of which currently is of the Republican governor of Florida, DeSantis, vs. Disney. And it is interesting to see how that fight came this far.

Democracies with only two parties aren't very conductive to compromise. While many other democracies have situations where the largest party still doesn't have an absolute majority, and needs to form coalitions and do compromises to govern, in a two-party system the party that is ahead automatically has the absolute majority. With the majority party having no reason to compromise, that can put the minority party in a situation where they simply can't achieve anything by normal political means. If the Republican party in Florida decides on an anti-gay education bill, there isn't much the Democrats can do.

However, if you look at demographics, there tends to be a correlation between older people being more conservative, and younger people more progressive. That is especially important in Florida, which has 21% of its population of age 65+, while California only has 15%, and Texas 13%. So the working age population is more progressive than the voting population. It is easy to see how at a company like Disney in Florida, progressives might have a solid majority *inside the company*. And because these progressives can't achieve much through other political channels, but Citizens United makes it possible for Disney to wield a large amount of political power, the most viable way of progressive employees of Disney to wield political power is to pressure their own management to act politically.

Besides the progressive employees, companies also tend to market to customers primarily in the 18 to 34 age group, which again is more progressive than the voting population. Have you seen much marketing for the great senior citizen experience at Disney World? Instead, what you see is that even companies with conservative managers in conservative states make an effort to look progressive, up to a recent wave of name changes of brands away from racial and cultural stereotypes of the past.

In the past, companies had a long history of playing both sides. If the goal of political donations is ultimately political favors that bring financial benefits to your company, then you need to give money to different parties at different levels of government; for example the mayor of Orlando is a Democrat, even if the governor of Florida is Republican. But the extreme political polarization of US politics might put an end to the possibility of playing both sides. Disney initially tried to remain non-committal about the education bill proposed by DeSantis, until their employees walked out and Disney was forced to choose a side.

Of course the Republican party liked the Citizens United ruling only as long as that meant money flowing their way. And companies liked the Republicans only as long as they pursued business-friendly policies. When companies decide that their is no profit in them financially supporting Republican policies that don't help businesses, and instead companies are looking out more to keep their progressive employees and customers happy, then the political impact of Citizens United might swing leftwards. And the GOP isn't happy about that. But of course Republican politicians with authoritarian streaks lashing out with punitive measures against "woke" companies is only likely to further sour the relationship between the party and business. This is going to be messy, but interesting.

A pre-campaign review of Bardsung

I started out with a rather positive impression of Bardsung: The Kickstarter had delivered two months early, which is very rare in this industry, and on unboxing my basic "hero pledge" I had the impression that I had received a lot of gaming material and miniatures in two boxes for just around a hundred bucks including shipping. So I set out to discover how the game is.

Bardsung is a typical dungeon crawler, which can easily be played as a one-off, although it isn't really advertised as such. You can also play it as a campaign, but that basically still means playing a dungeon crawl session, possibly making some decisions at the end, and then resetting the board and playing the next dungeon crawl session. Every dungeon consists of rooms and corridors in strict alternation: Rooms are always only connected to corridors, and corridors to rooms. The dungeon is created randomly while exploring, by drawing room or corridor cards when passing through a door. Every room or corridor card also tells you whether to draw a battle or challenge aspect card, which describes what is happening in the room. And cards can be marked with runes, which you can cross-reference with the scenario you are playing to find out what monster or terrain elements they correspond to.

Heroes typically have 2 actions per round, which must be used for different things. They could move and use an ability to attack, or use 2 different abilities. Attacks are handled by rolling 1d20 and adding a stat modifier to it, just like in D&D. And like in that game, you sometimes have "advantage" or "disadvantage", which means you roll 2 dice and take the higher or lower one. If your attack roll plus modifiers equals or exceeds the target number of the monster, you land a hit. Somewhat confusingly you then roll an attack damage die, for example a d6, but the result you roll is *not* the damage you deal. Instead you compare the value to the monster's toughness, and if it equals or exceeds that, you have landed a critical hit. Every ability tells you the result of a regular and critical hit, with some abilities having results on a miss as well. But regular monsters only have 2 health, so a typical damage-dealing attack might do 1 health damage for a regular hit, and 2 for a critical. "Complex" monsters aren't dead on receiving two damage, but flip over to their other side, with different stats, where you will need to deal another 2 damage to kill them. Not all abilities are only about damage, you can also have results that move the enemy, or inflict him with some status.

The sequence in which heroes and monsters act are decided randomly each round by shuffling all the initiative cards involved. You need to learn the skill of shuffling without looking, because the cards have different color backgrounds, and some monsters are double-sided. There are also abilities that modify the initiative order. When it is the monster's turn to act, they follow a simple AI. Different monsters can have different AI cards, but there is no randomness involved and no "AI deck". Boss monsters have more than one initiative card, so they act several times in a turn and do different things. Monsters never roll dice; when a monster attacks a hero, it is up to the hero to make a defense roll, failing which he will take a wound.

Each dungeon crawl is a reasonably short affair, thus the short playing time listed for this game. Once the heroes find the exit staircase, they can use the gold and xp found in the dungeon to improve their characters, before they go back in for the next dungeon crawl. Heroes can spend gold on upkeep or to buy treasures. They can use xp to upgrade stats or existing abilities, or they can buy new abilities. Interestingly heroes can buy abilities of other classes for an increased cost; unfortunately every ability card only exists once, so I would be careful before buying the ability of another player's hero. Gear in Bardsung is relatively unexciting: You always keep your starting gear, but you can upgrade it once by flipping it over, and add additional bonuses with gems or runestones.

Overall the dungeon crawl and combat is relatively simple, once you got the hang of it. The rulebook is structured in the form of one combat tutorial and one exploration tutorial, so after you followed both you have a good first idea. Unfortunately this structure makes it a bit hard to look up rules afterwards; there is a table of contents but no index.

I am now at the point where I know how to play, but haven't started the campaign yet. But I do have some first impressions on gameplay and game content. Up to now, this is a mixed bag. For example I do like the inclusion of GameTrayz to hold the cards, tokens, and miniatures; however, there are only 2 trays for tokens, and a lot more tokens of many different types for that to be adequate. The trays used for player boards aren't overly well designed either, and have no room for attached cards, or sleeves. On the dungeon tiles the developers decided to "keep them pretty" by not showing too clearly where the borders between the different zones are, which then necessitated the addition of a tile reference sheet showing how many zones there are supposed to be. The game board is 3' x 3', which takes up the whole width of a typical 3' x 5' table, so you need to either stack the player boards on a section of the game board foreseen for something else, or put them to the side of the board, which is less practical. Overall I think the game could have been more elegantly designed to improve the usability of the components.

As I said, I can't judge the quality of the campaign story yet. But the general gameplay up to now appears relatively simple, with not a huge amount of tactical options or tactical puzzles to solve. It also is inherently random, with not a huge amount of dice mitigation, and swings in difficulty depending on lucky or unlucky streaks of the dice. There are some interesting innovative gameplay elements, like the "echo token" creating wandering monsters in the already explored parts of the dungeon, and doors that are by default open and can be closed to protect the group from monsters left behind.

While I am still happy enough with the game for the 100 bucks I paid for it on Kickstarter, it has to be pointed out that there was a huge inflation in board game prices since 2020, and the MSRP of Bardsung on the Steamforged Games website is now $199.95, shipping and stretch goals not included. I wouldn't necessarily recommend Bardsung at this price point. It is an okay dungeon crawler, but in my opinion not an exceptional game.

A case of stolen identity

The Washington Post this week posted an article about the COVID breakthrough risk in "pregnant people", without using the word "women". Theoretically, a person born with a female body could "identify as a man" but still get pregnant and then get offended by being referred to as a "pregnant woman". The strange alliance that exists between conservatives and feminist progressives found that this political correctness went too far. If somebody who is pregnant can't be called a "woman", then who can?

For the 99.5% of the population that don't identify as transgender or intersex, it tends to matter a lot who is a "man" and who is a "woman". Large parts of culture and literature deal with the relations between a man and a woman. Netflix's current most viewed show, Bridgerton, would not be possible with a gender-neutral cast of "persons". And with feminism being one of the earlier forms of identity politics, both the options of completely erasing the "woman" identity or making it accessible to everybody are not acceptable to many feminists. Nobody wants to fight for "person's reproductive rights", because that could be interpreted very badly.

Whether out of prudery (in the case of locker rooms) or out of a sense of fairness (in the case of sports), society has decided that for certain activities or locations it would be preferable to separate men and women. And while some of these separations, like men and women gathering separately after dinner, have been abandoned over time, others have been found to be so essential as to keep them. Abandoning any sensible definition of "woman" makes separation impossible. And it makes feminism impossible: If you can't define what "a woman" is, then how can there be any "women's rights"? And if there are no "women", then there are no "men" either, which is inconvenient for those who tend to blame men for everything.

What I find a bit weird is the dissonance here between science and politics. While an extremely small number of actual mixed cases exists, generally science has no problem to identify a person as either a man or a woman. On the other hand science does not have a binary method to identify somebody as either black or white. Imagine the strange plan to introduce reparations for slavery would be implemented, and every "white" person would need to pay reparations, while every "black" person would receive money. There would be a huge number of people declaring themselves to be "black", with no way for science to say otherwise.

For the average person, who tends to be not 100% politically correct, the sexual attraction that exists between heterosexual men and women is an important part of their lives and thus of the definition of what a man and a woman are. And I think that this is the ultimate barrier that will prevent the identity theft of the term "woman". While a trans person can "identify as a woman", that doesn't necessarily make this person sexually attractive to a heterosexual man. Nor does it enable that person to become pregnant. A "pregnant person" is a woman, whatever the Washington Post says.