Tobold's Blog
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
 
The Hogwarts Legacy debacle all over again

Board game publisher Czech Games Edition since 2015 published games in the Codenames series of games, a party game where players are trying to identify agents based on single-word code names. The game is relatively cheap and quick, and thus selling well. So the publisher over time released various variations and branded versions: There is the Disney version, The Simpsons version, or the Marvel version. And now there will be a Harry Potter version.

There are millions of items with Harry Potter branding that nobody cares about. There are already a lot of Harry Potter branded board games. But for some unknown reason suddenly some activists decided that this was the one game too far, and that the whole Czech Games Edition company should be boycotted because JK Rowling apparently exclusively uses her Harry Potter merchandise income to finance death squads hunting and killing trans people. Don't buy Codenames Harry Potter, because you would be financing the evil lady's secret underground villain lair, from which killer drones will hunt and exterminate every last trans person!

Of course it is the same storm in a teacup has the Hogwarts Legacy boycott debacle, only that the teacup is a lot smaller. Hogwarts Legacy sold 34 million copies. Codenames Harry Potter would be lucky if it sold 34 thousand, and it is a lot cheaper than Hogwarts Legacy. The idea that JK Rowling could be financially hurt by this boycott is ridiculous.

The only good thing about this is that I finally realized what bothers me about these activists. It isn't that most of them aren't trans, and they often hurt the trans community more than they help. It isn't the virtue signaling. It isn't the lies and comical distortion of the facts. It is that every other social justice activist group is demanding rights *for* an identity group, while the trans right activists aren't actually demanding any trans rights. They demand punishment for everybody who disagrees with them.

- posted by Tobold @ 7:26 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments
Monday, July 28, 2025
 
Who should play Vantage?

[Previously posted on BGG - Vantage - Forums - Reviews]

This isn't technically a review. The word "review" suggests some sort of quality standard to which a product is then compared. I don't think that it would be useful to do that with Vantage. Vantage is an experience first, and a game second. So I would rather talk about Vantage in terms of who should or shouldn't play this game.

If you wanted to put Vantage into a category, you could call it an adventure game. The focus of the game and your actions in the game is to experience small adventures. Oh, look, there is something shiny, let's interact with it and see what it does! With some luck and imagination, the small adventures you experience everywhere coalesce into some sort of emergent personal story. That works extremely well as a solo game, and also in small groups as a shared experience. While technically Vantage can be played with up to 6 players, you'd end up with 6 emergent personal stories in parallel, which would be confusing, and less fun because of the downtime.

Vantage is fun in a group of players who are curious and open to surprises. I would not necessarily recommend it to people who prefer hard Euro games in which you have to think several turns ahead and where outcomes are calculable. In Vantage there will be many times in which you choose an action without being certain of the result; however, there is a certain common sense logic usually, so if you decide to pluck a fruit, chances are that you'll end up with a fruit. You just can't know what that fruit does in terms of game mechanics in advance. And if you were on a mission to gather several fruits, it often wouldn't be obvious in which direction you'd need to go to find the next one. While Vantage has missions and destinies, and you'll want to keep them in mind if you want to keep playtime within reasonable limits, you would not want to be too fixated on those goals, as there isn't necessarily a sure way to progress them. You might get hints or vague maps towards your goals, but for some goals it works just as well to walk the world randomly until you stumble across something that looks like it corresponds to that goal.

Every action you do in Vantage succeeds. You roll dice, but those aren't like skill checks, where you could succeed or fail. Instead, the dice represent something like the effort you need to put into the action. The more dice you roll, the more likely it becomes that you end up losing resources like health, time, or morale. Running out of one of these resources is technically the fail state of the game. The game mechanics part of Vantage is all about risk mitigation, with the cards you collect over the course of the game allowing you to prevent resource losses by storing the dice on the cards instead. The game resets the dice every time they run out, and once you have lots of cards it isn't very hard to deal with most dice rolls. There is also an interesting aspect that cards are often specific what dice they can store, being limited to a certain color of action, or even a very specific action. If you have a card that makes it less risky for example to enter somewhere, you'll be more tempted to try the enter action when it becomes available. To enjoy Vantage, you must be okay with the inherent randomness of dice rolls. And if you are looking for very deep game mechanics, this might not be the best game for you. Vantage also isn't terribly difficult once you added a few cards for your grid, as the number of dice in the pool remains constant, while the number of locations to store dice increases.

On the box it says that Vantage is for players age 14+. I do think you can play it in a family context with children younger than 14. But Vantage involves a lot of reading, and it involves a good amount of administrative work, looking for cards in an index, so it probably needs one responsible adult. Between adult players, it helps if at least one of them doesn't mind doing the index card work, searching for cards of specific number, and potentially later putting them back at the right location in the index.

If you compare Vantage to other narrative games, it has to be pointed out that it is closer to games like Lands of Galzyr or Sleeping Gods, and less comparable to games like Tainted Grail or ISS Vanguard. That is to say that Vantage contains a multitude of small stories, with some connections, but not really an epic overarching main story. There is no campaign in Vantage. The obvious advantage of that is that it is easier to find people who don't want to commit to a long campaign and just want to play one session, and that if you play with the same people repeatedly, the replayability is still very good. There are 126 different starting locations, and the rules prohibit you from doing too many of the possible actions in one location in one game, so even encountering the same location again isn't boring. The disadvantage of this is that the various story bits you experience can feel a bit disjointed. It helps if players are creative and fill in the gaps themselves. Players are told to not show their location cards to other players, and rather tell the other players what they are seeing. A roleplaying approach works extremely well here, where you tell the other players what you see, and what makes you decide to go for a specific action. Yes, you could say "I take the yellow action because I have yellow skill tokens and a card that lets me store dice from yellow checks", but maybe "I see an alien merchant, who looks quite rich. I think I'll try to pickpocket him, using my sneaky boots" is technically the same action and more interesting to the other players.

If you enjoy open worlds, emergent storytelling, and a bit of roleplay, Vantage can be a fantastic experience in a small group, and offers a great many hours of entertainment. For people who play games to win, or at least to try to optimize their turns, Vantage might feel a bit shallow and random. Don't be surprised if the reviews you see on Vantage are all over the place, this game simply isn't for everybody.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:04 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, July 26, 2025
 
Vantage

BoardGameGeek, the biggest database / forum on board games, has a section called The Hotness, where games are ranked by how much buzz there is currently around them, as measured by user engagement and activity. And the hottest board game right now is Vantage, from Stonemaier Games. As I had pre-ordered that game, copy 11,457 out of 50,000 of the first edition arrived here yesterday. Nice to have that printed on the box, although I doubt this will one day have collector value. I haven't played it yet, but I studied the rules and watched videos about Vantage on YouTube. And as this is a bit of a weird game, I'm not sure yet when and with whom I am going to play it.

Vantage is not a campaign game. That is to say that at the end of any game, there is no information retained about your characters. They don't level up, they don't retain any items, and you could very well play a different character in the next game. However, Vantage is a game in which you are exploring an alien world, and you can potentially learn things about this world which still will hold true in the next game you play. The best description is probably that Vantage is an adventure game, allowing you and some friends in parallel (with some limited interaction) to explore that new world. Vantage has "missions" and "destinies", and a game ends when you fulfil either or both.

Vantage is trying to emulate something like an open world. There are nearly 800 locations, and what a player does during his turn is to look at the image and description of the location he is in, and choose one possible action. For example you might come upon a huge dragon skeleton, and be offered actions like climbing on top of it, or crafting something from dragon bone. There are 6 different skills in the game, and in general a location has one action on offer for each of those skills. There are also actions on you character card and on the mission card that aren't linked to a specific location. Interestingly, you can only do one action at a location, which means that if you climbed the dragon skeleton, you won't be able to craft something from the bones in this game. You might find the same location again in a future game and then try another action, but 800 location cards time 6+ actions would take pretty much forever to complete.

With each player starting in a random location (and potentially never even meeting), and the outcome of each action not being very predictable, the whole game has a lot of randomness to it. If you don't do the mission-specific actions, which are obviously designed to nudge you towards the mission goal, you might play for hours without reaching a victory or defeat condition. The game tries to nudge you to an end, by giving you a destiny card once you collected 8 cards to fill the 3x3 grid around your character card. But a typical question about board games, "how long does it take to play one game with X players?", can't really be answered for Vantage, other than "it depends". You can potentially finish it in an hour or less per player, or potentially play much longer.

I don't think this randomness is for everybody. It reminds me of the way that I am currently playing Tears of the Kingdom, ignoring the main story, and exploring corners of the world to gather shrines and korok seeds. As far as I can tell, there is no epic overarching story to Vantage. Epic overarching stories in games require a certain amount of player railroading, so they follow the story. The more any game is truly open, the more freedom it offers to the player, but that comes at the expense of intensity. You can't have epic events happening at every corner. Vantage only has the option to explore a somewhat interesting world with somewhat interesting stuff at every corner, while in Tears of the Kingdom or Baldur's Gate 3 you can always stop exploring and decide to now pursue the epic but more or less linear main story.

Besides the exploration, Vantage has a dice and resource management system. Actions only have one possible outcome, there are no skill checks that decide about success or failure. Instead each action has a difficulty, and you need to roll that many dice, and then deal with each of the dice by either being able to place them on some card on your 3x3 grid, or losing the respective resource (like health or morale) if you can't. Every time the dice pool gets emptied, you remove all the dice previously placed on your grid, and the cycle starts over. Which means that the start is always the most difficult, as you only have your character card, and the more cards you add to your grid up to the maximum, the more likely it becomes that you can deal with dice by placing them on a card without losing resources. The game ends if any resources of any player drop to zero. There is a good amount of dice manipulation, so the whole system looks interesting, but maybe not extremely difficult. This certainly isn't a game for people who mostly love complex Euro games with intricate but predictable game mechanics. When you make that decision of whether to climb the dragon or carve his bones, either option might result with you getting a card, but you can't know which one, or in which way it will improve your character. You need to make the decision based on gut feeling and "oh, that sounds interesting", not calculable game mechanics.

I think I'll actually play Vantage as a solo game (possibly playing multiple characters) before suggesting it to any game group. One possible negative for this game is that it appears to not play very well with too many players, as every player is mostly active during his own turn, and then needs to sit around and wait until everybody else has done their turn. While technically up to 6 people can play, the community recommends 1 to 3, with 4 players being already not recommended by half of the reviewers. I'll have to see whether the interaction with other players is actually fun, at least in a smaller group, because interaction with other players in board games is important to me.

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- posted by Tobold @ 12:26 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Friday, July 25, 2025
 
Welcome to your new job in middle management

A study released this week found that software developers using current AI tools are actually 19 percent slower than without AI. I am not surprised. I have done an experiment for myself, just like many other content creators on the internet, where I ask ChatGPT to produce a text written in my style. The result is a text that for somebody who doesn't read my blog regularly at first glance appears to have certain similarities to my writing. But if I actually wanted to use that text, I would have to spend a lot of time rewriting and editing it, before it would be up to my standards. For my particular kind of content, the AI version is simply lacking coherence and the text doesn't have the logical flow needed, where I try to make a point and support that point with arguments or examples.

The AI study found that software developers using AI tools then spend more time rewriting the code or fixing mistakes than they would have spent just coding it themselves. That sounded familiar too. In my previous post, where I was talking about my career, I concentrated on the technical part of that career. But in the second half of that career, besides doing technical things, I was also a middle manager. And for a middle manager, giving somebody a task, reviewing the result, and potentially explaining him what he should have done better, is pretty common work, and often takes longer than doing the task yourself. You do it, because training other people is part of the job. And training somebody is often still the less boring part.

Middle manager is an often ridiculed job, be it the pointy haired boss in Dilbert, or the manager in The Office. Very few people actually know what a middle manager does, and very often senior management hasn't got a clue what their own middle managers are doing. I've seen reorganizations with the goal of delayering, that is taking out levels of middle management, which then ended in much chaos, because certain tasks nobody had thought about suddenly weren't done anymore, as the middle manager positions that did those tasks suddenly didn't exist anymore. To explain it simply, middle management exists because senior management doesn't trust employees. A flat organization necessitates total trust that employees neither mess up, nor try to cheat the company. If you don't have that total trust, you need to hire somebody who supervises employees, checks their work is up to standards, and assures compliance with all those rules senior management invented. But senior management tends to forget all the compliance rules they put into place, and are then surprised how much effort it takes to comply with all those rules.

Some years ago, when cleaning up our internal rules, we found an old document that said that if for example Joe from sales wanted to send something in the name of the company, e.g. a price quote, he would have to get it typed up by a secretary, sign it, and then get it countersigned by his supervisor, before he could send the letter away. In the age of e-mail such rules sound pretty silly, and today Joe from sales is sending that price quote by e-mail, without approval from his supervisor. That sometimes goes wrong, like Joe quoting a too low price, and the customer then insisting to get the goods at that quoted price, but that happens rarely enough that most companies have long ago trusted their employees to send e-mail messages to other companies without supervision. Still, companies don't trust their employees with everything. Pretty much everywhere a middle manager has to approve things like holiday requests, business travel requests, reimbursement requests for business lunches, or purchase requests for tools from employees. That is just boring busywork most of the time, but some of those rules are actually in compliance with regulations from outside, e.g. against corruption. Many others, as I said, are basically mistrust from upper management, who feel better if somebody checks that nothing goes wrong, whether by incompetence of malfeasance. If a company issues an official report or other document, you can be sure that a number of people checked that document for errors.

With artificial intelligence, companies gain virtual employees that can do work like writing mails or coding software. But these virtual employees aren't very reliable. Sometimes they just deliver shoddy work which isn't up to whatever high standards there are. Sometimes they simply hallucinate, and get stuff very wrong. Also in the AI news this week was the story of an AI tool deleting a company database and then (wrongly) claiming it couldn't be recovered. So the question becomes in how far management is going to trust Joe, the sales AI app, to send out official price quotes to customers without supervision and control. Management is just learning that they can't trust their AI lawyer to send out legal documents. I pray to god that management of architectural firms isn't trusting unsupervised AI to do static calculations for bridges or buildings. If Grok can be made to praise Hitler with clever prompting, then managers might well be weary about letting an AI chatbot talk for their company.

I am very sure that various AI tools will be increasingly used in all sorts of companies for all sorts of tasks in the coming years. But unless the output of a task is really not important to the company (e.g. most customer service calls), companies will need to hire humans just to check the work of AI agents for compliance with rules and standards. Maybe AI is less prone to deliberate malfeasance than humans, but as long humans still give the prompts on which AI acts, the result might still necessitate control. Of course a need for control then makes "faster than human" AI responses impossible. And the need to hire "middle managers for virtual AI employees" means a lot less savings on labor cost than expected. Your coding job might be gone, but welcome to your new middle management position supervising AI coding bots.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:35 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
 
My professional career

In over 20 years of blogging I barely talked about my day job. Probably generally a good idea to keep your private hobbies and your professional activity apart, especially on social media. But as I am officially retired now and it isn't as if I could get in trouble for posting about my job anymore, I feel less restricted in that respect. And a recent question by mbp on retirement prompted me to look back at my professional career.

You could divide my professional career into three phases: Study, Job, Retirement. You can say that about many professional careers that require years of study. Mine is a statistical outlier in as far as my study phase took a whopping 10 years. This is mostly due to me having developed a passion for chemistry rather early in life, and then deciding to go for the pinnacle of that profession, a Ph.D. in chemistry. All Ph.D. degrees take longer than master degrees or bachelor degrees, but Ph.D. in "hard" sciences take even longer. At the time I started (in the 80's in Germany), the absolute minimum requirement was 8 years from entering the university at 18 or 19 to a Ph.D. degree, and my 10 years were actually an average length. Note that there is a potential trap there, where it is in the financial interest of a professor and a university to keep people at the end of their Ph.D. degree or beyond working, e.g. in a postdoc position, because you basically get a highly qualified person for a fraction of his market value. I'm happy I avoided at least the postdoc trap.

A long study phase comes with the obvious drawback that for all that time you don't earn much money. I actually was technically living below the poverty line, because my university wasn't well financed, and had to divide teaching assistant salaries between several people. I lived for some years on a third of the salary of a teaching assistant, which later "improved" to half a salary. I had no car, and no place of my own. I was either living in apartments shared with other students, or in furnished rooms. But basically that was the financial deal of studying for a high academic degree: Once I had finished the Ph.D. and managed to get a job in line with my new qualification, my day one starting salary was already higher than the median salary in the country. And it tripled over the next 30 years until I retired, which means that it grew faster than inflation.

This used to be the general rule worldwide for graduate level jobs: You defer earning for the time of your studies, but earn more later, and end up ultimately making more money over your lifetime. This probably still works in most European countries, where tuition fees are still low (albeit already higher than my non-existing ones, I paid only a hundred bucks a year to the university in fees). In the USA the cost of tuition has risen dramatically over the time period of my career, and colleges and universities are basically now demanding a larger share of your expected future higher earnings. So if you add the years of lower earnings, the tuition fees, and the interest cost of student loans, and look at the oversupply of graduate level employees in the US labor force, it is now completely possible in the USA to get a college degree that actually leads to lower lifetime earnings than if you had gone into a trade. The current drop in entry level graduate jobs due to AI is only adding to that problem.

For me it still worked out, financially. 10 years of study, nearly 30 years of work, and then still a relatively early retirement. With the middle 30 years being enough to make up for the lower earnings during study, and leaving enough money for a comfortable retirement. However, it also means that if I think of work / life balance, that only exists for me in the balance of the three phases. During the study phase I was studying and working, but also had an enormous degree of freedom to pursue various interests. I regained much of that freedom in retirement. In the middle 30 years, my work / life balance wasn't great. I worked at least 50 hours every week, and I was traveling a lot, sometimes even weekends. Fortunately Europeans get much longer holidays than Americans, and I did obviously find time to play games and blog about them. But generally I would say that I worked pretty hard. Luxuries like working from home only appeared at the very end of my career, and only due to the pandemic.

There is a meritocratic aspect to this. I fully understand people who demand a better work / life balance. But if you look how large companies are organized, and how things like promotions and pay rises are distributed, even if none of those systems are perfect, performance still does play a role. I didn't have a meteoric career, but I worked my way up the ranks over three decades to a good level. And I watched as some people who had started in the company at the same entry level and the same qualification worked less hard and had less of a career. It isn't popular to say so anymore, but there is still a link between how hard you work, and how much money you make.

The last decade of my career was great! My company had decided to invest heavily into the research of carbon dioxide and climate change, and I was lucky enough to have already some qualification in that domain, having worked previously on other carbochemistry subjects. So I ended up as a team leader and senior scientist in one section of the huge carbon dioxide research project. I led research programs internally and at various universities, held talks and discussed climate change at scientific conferences, for example with people from the IPCC, worked with the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and flew all around the world, visiting places like Qatar or California for various high-profile research collaborations on carbon dioxide. I felt I was doing something important and useful. And that is beyond my basic belief in capitalism which makes me believe that if my company was paying me a certain salary, my work to them must have been worth at least that much.

If my job had continued like that, I probably wouldn't have retired early. But the early retirement offer was part of a larger reorganization of the company, with a goal to rejuvenate. I couldn't have stayed doing the same job, they needed my job for somebody younger. Being pushed aside as a dinosaur came at the same time as a generous offer for early retirement. Thus my mixed feelings about my retirement. Financially it was a good offer, and with regards to my family life it enabled me to leave for retirement at the same time as my wife, which was great. But emotionally it wasn't easy, there was a real sense of loss of purpose involved. I still believe that companies, especially larger companies, don't manage age well. People get booted out early, there isn't enough done to transfer knowhow between generations inside the company. So we end up with companies pushing people into early retirement while simultaneously complaining about the lack of skilled workers. We don't pass on torches, we are told to just drop them, and later somebody else has to pick the damn thing up from the mud and try to get it burning again. That can't be the most efficient way.

On a personal level, my career has worked out rather well for me, especially financially. Yes, sometimes my wife and me look back at our time at work and think that we should have worked a bit less, and enjoyed life a bit more. But financially speaking, one has to remark that the work / life balance also has financial consequences. The work part earns money the more you concentrate on it, and the life part spends money the more you concentrate on it. An imbalance towards work ends you up with more savings. Right now we are in a very good part of our retirement, where our health is still good, and we also have the financial freedom to do what we like. We moved out of the city that was getting on our nerves with the traffic problems and the like. We built our dream house (we have modest dreams, it isn't a McMansion) in the country, without even needing a mortgage. While transitioning from a 9-to-5 job into retirement is a cultural shock, weirdly enough the pandemic helped with the transition, because we weren't working 9-to-5, 5 days per week in the office anymore anyway at the end of our careers, and my traveling part of the job had stopped. Over the last two years we have found new things to do, new purposes, new activities. And while I would have wished for a smoother and more dignified exit, I don't regret having left my work life behind.

I don't know if there are any life lessons in this post. People my age tend to look back, see how "get a degree, work hard, retire comfortably" has worked out well for them, and think they should recommend that to younger generations. But economic conditions have changed over the last 40 years. I still believe that there is a link between working hard and earning well, but there certainly isn't a guarantee. And at least in the US, the value of getting a degree is increasingly questionable, at the very least for some of the degrees that don't translate well into a high labor market value. Demographic decline threatens pension systems world wide, although I need to point out that this is a design fault, where the current working population is paying for the current retiree population; the boomers paid a lot of money into the system, and politicians then took the surplus and wasted it for other stuff instead of saving it for the retirement of that large generation. I could live to a hundred and not get as much money back from the pension system as I paid into it. If there is any life advice I can give, it would probably be: "take decisions while considering the consequences, then assume those consequences". It's okay to work less hard, if you are okay with less money. It's okay to work harder, if money is more important to you. Just don't believe that life owes you anything, that belief will only end up depressing you.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:25 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments
Tuesday, July 22, 2025
 
Player interaction and hybrid board games

In five hours from when I write this, the Gamefound campaign for Teburu Dungeon: Sword & Sorcery will start. And I have extremely mixed feelings about that. Is this the electronically enhanced future of board games, hybrid games that are half board game and half mobile game? Or is the electronic part destroying what makes board games great? This post is probably going to be lengthy, because first I have to go back 4 decades ...

I went to university between the second half of the 80's and the first half of the 90's. Due to this accident of history, I had access to the early internet years before most people even knew what that was. I was on a mainframe computer with a text-only screen, but I was using Bulletin Board System and Usenet, the social media of the day. And I was even already playing LPMud, one of the first online multiplayer games. Then I also was relatively early having internet at home, and played Ultima Online on a dial-up connection (which was an extremely bad idea leading to a very high phone bill). I started this blog in 2003, had some success for some year, and was basically an early "influencer", with a specialization in online games. And from these decades of experience, my conclusion is that playing online sucks. Which is why today I have two to three face-to-face board game nights / afternoons per week, but I don't play board games online, and really rarely play anything online anymore.

There are two main factors to that, which are connected. The first is that the social interaction with a person online is diminished, compared to the social interaction you would have with that same person if he or her was in the same room with you, sitting around the same table. The second is that the diminished social interaction leads to people behaving less good online than they behave face to face.

Of course there is a whole spectrum of online interaction. Some social media are so toxic, that most of the exchange is rare in face-to-face situations, because it would lead to somebody punching somebody in the face. Early Ultima Online was full of "player killers", who had fun ruining the game for others. On the other hand, a lot of the people I met in online games were nice enough; but still they didn't feel the same engagement and the same social pressure to comply with rules of politeness that they would have felt sitting across the table from me. A typical example would be a player leaving early: Happened a lot to me in games like World of Warcraft, with one player dropping out of a dungeon run, and the other 4 struggling to continue or find a replacement. It would take some really serious event before a player at my board game night would get up and leave early.

All in all, I feel a lot more connected to the other players around the same table than I feel connected to people I play with online. It is that human interaction which is a big part of my interest in board games. Which now leads to the question of when a board game stops being a board game. On the one side I can see the advantage: We had a not so great board game session on Sunday with game 2 of Clank Legacy 2, because there was just too much administrative overhead. We spent hours finding sheets of stickers, peeling the stickers off the sheet, adding new rule stickers to the rulebook, learning new rules, in addition to doing all the non-legacy administrative tasks of moving around cards and tokens. I have a classic Sword & Sorcery board game, and it is administratively heavy, so I can clearly see how a computer might help. There are board games like Gloomhaven, where I rather play the digital version solo, because setup and play as a real board game is so much work. But if I play Teburu Dungeon: Sword & Sorcery, and all 4 players are constantly looking at their phones, because that is where their character sheets are, and where they interact with the game, is that still a board game? How much does the electronic part take away from the valuable real world interaction with the other players?

I think I will have to just try it, even if obviously a hybrid electronic / board game will be a lot more expensive than a classic cardboard only board game. I didn't buy the first two Teburu games, but knowing that Sword & Sorcery is fundamentally a game I like, I am willing to try the hybrid version of it. This being a crowdfunded game, it is good that I am not in a hurry, because I don't know how long it takes before I actually get the game delivered. I also hope that the Teburu system is still ongoing technical improvements, because some of the comments about the first two Teburu games reported on technical problems. Some people don't play any board games that use apps, because they are afraid that the app might stop working and their game become useless. I very much like apps in narrative games, because professional voice actors are so much better than players having to read long walls of text aloud. But I do feel as if there could be a point where the digitalization of a board game goes too far, and a real life social interaction suffers from it.

[EDIT: 5 hours later. In the end, I decided against Teburu Dungeon: Sword & Sorcery. The reason was that the cheapest option consisted of a conversion kit for my existing Sword & Sorcery: Immortal Souls game, and that would have cost €70 for the conversion kit, plus €100 for the Teburu board, plus €29 shipping, plus €41 VAT. That's a total of €240 for zero added game content, just turning my cardboard game into a hybrid board / electronic game and possibly enabling me to play it faster. If I wanted expansions, I would have to add another €100 for those, another €10 for shipping, and another €23 for VAT. That is a lot of money for a system I am not even sure I will like, and far too much for "I'll just try it".]

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:04 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Monday, July 21, 2025
 
The Epstein Files, reasonably

Like to many people with left-of-center opinions, to me it feels like karmic justice when Donald Trump gets in trouble over the Epstein files. Trump has frequently used conspiracy theories to further his politics, and now he is in trouble with the sort of conspiracy theorist loonies that he encouraged in his base. Having said that, to me it appears that the Department of Justice is doing the only thing that is both reasonable and legal, and it feels strange to criticize them and the administration for that.

The fundamental problem of the "Epstein Files" is that it is very, very unlikely that a document exists in which an important person is a) named as a "client", b) the illegal sexual services provided to that "client" are described, and c) it is described for what that "client" was then blackmailed. That is not to say that there were no important people who got invited to Epstein's private island, had sex with minors there, and were later asked to do something for him. It is just that no criminal in his right mind would make a list of these things and document them in a was that would be valid evidence in a court. Because obviously these things incriminate the provider of underage sexual services and blackmailer even more than it incriminates his clients.

It is also extremely likely that there are a number of important people who received invitations to Epstein's private island, without "underage sex" being advertised beforehand on the invitation card. There are a number of likely scenarios where somebody rich or influential accepted an invitation of "hey, do you want to hang out on my private island this weekend", and then there turned down any offer of sex. Some people probably simply weren't into sex with minors, others probably smelled a rat. Thus even if the DOJ has a list of all contacts of Jeffrey Epstein, or flight logs to and from the private island, that doesn't constitute proof of sexual misdeeds, and even less of these contacts having subsequently done illegal things to help Epstein.

All of this makes documents like the "little black book" dubious. Most of us have one or more of various forms of lists of contacts, without necessarily specifying the nature of that contact. If I go through the contacts on my own phone, I find friends there, family, but also my plumber. If Jeffrey Epstein ever had plumbing problems in the mansion on his private island and had a plumber come in, that plumber's name might be on his contacts list, and even on flight logs if there is no local plumber there. That plumber might then reasonably object to his name being released as part of the Epstein files.

Even conspiracy theorists would hate it if there was clear cut evidence of "the truth". If "the truth" is out, and nothing is left to imagination, the very activity of the conspiracy theorist disappears. What these people want is ambiguous raw data, e.g. all the flight logs, where you can then spend years speculating what exactly this or that important person that visited the island might or might not have done there, and how that might or might not have affected his later relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. If they can't get that, they'll probably prefer the absence of proof, which can be milked for speculation, to the presence of proof.

With any given criminal, it is extremely likely that images exist of that criminal on the same photo with somebody else who was *not* actually involved in any criminal activity. I am pretty certain that Donald Trump did a lot of horrible, even illegal, things during his lifetime. Him being on a photo with Jeffrey Epstein or writing the guy a salacious birthday card for me doesn't constitute proof of Donald Trump a) having had sex with minors on Epstein's private island, or b) having somehow used his influence to protect Jeffrey Epstein, or c) having had Jeffrey Epstein killed in jail. It only proves that rich people are chummy with each other, which shouldn't actually surprise anybody.

Of course, if there had been any photo of Epstein with Biden, Donald Trump would have used those for his political ends (and some of his followers actually used artificially created ones). So we are back to karmic justice. But this definitely isn't Michelle Obama's "If they go low, we go high". Instead, we are in a race to the political bottom, where it turns out that innuendo and conspiracy theories are more harmful to Trump than proven truths of actual misdeeds.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:53 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Saturday, July 19, 2025
 
A two boxes board game

Having finished two campaign games in the last 2 years (Agemonia and ISS Vanguard), I am going to start playing a third campaign game, Nova Aetas: Renaissance, with that group. So I am currently unboxing the game, learning the rules, watching some how to play YouTube videos, etc.

While this process is far from finished, one thing already became clear: I will need to organize a second box for this game. Basically I can divide board games into three categories regarding their "reboxing", putting all the components back in the box between sessions: The best category is the one that both Agemonia and ISS Vanguard were in, where the original box comes with trays and containers that are designed to easily store all the components between sessions in the original box. The second category is the most common one: All the components fit back in the box, but I need to either buy an insert, or provide smaller containers to keep the tokens from mixing all together, which would make setup a nightmare. Gloomhaven was probably the worst offender in this category. Nova Aetas: Renaissance falls into an even worse, third category: Not only do many of the unpacked components not have a tray or container to go in, they don't even fit back into the original box.

In Nova Aetas: Renaissance, one reason for this is 3D components: You assemble things like houses and trees out of cardboard to give 3D components for your battlefield. That really adds to the table presence of the game, and adds tactical options like sniping down from the roof of a house, but also has its disadvantages: You really don't want to disassemble everything at the end of the session. Cardboard components easily fray if assembled and disassembled repeatedly, and the process would add a lot of time to setup and reboxing. In addition, it isn't just the 3D components. The box of Nova Aetas: Renaissance is tightly packed to start with, when are the tokens are still needing to be punched out. Once you punched out all the components and put them into some sort of container, that increases the volume, and they don't really fit into the box anymore.

So now I have to basically get another box, in which I store the 3D components and token containers between sessions. Fortunately we are playing at my place, so I don't have to lug around two boxes somewhere when I want to play. But I sure prefer games in which some thought has gone into the design of the box and the trays, so that there is a place for everything.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:32 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments
Thursday, July 17, 2025
 
Death of the link

I like to keep myself informed about what is going on in the world, not just locally, but globally. I use sites like Google News a lot. However, my user experience over the years has deteriorated. These days, more often than not, if I click on a link to a news story on Google News, I hit a paywall. Now if that was a Google News paywall, and I could pay some amount of monthly subscription to read all the news I wanted, I might actually do that. But instead it is a thousand different paywalls from a thousand different news organizations. First of all, it would be prohibitively expensive to pay for all of them, or even just a decent selection. But second, every news organization has its own bias, and by subscribing to one and not to another, I'd be locked into that specific bias. I prefer to read different views of the same story, which means different news organizations, which means different paywalls. So the links from Google News are becoming decreasingly useful to me.

At the same time, a lot of my other use of Google is asking Google a specific question. And the main Google search site has changed in the last years too: Google now very often gives me an overview powered by AI, and very often that overview already answers my question. Yes, this isn't 100% reliable and sometimes the AI answers are just plain wrong. But especially in the domain of questions about video games, following the link to the article is a lot worse: SEO-optimized web pages that bury the answer to your question somewhere near the bottom of the page, so you scroll through all the advertising. The AI overview extracts the actual short answer I need, and is a lot more useful. It is only a question of time that Google News will display an AI overview of all news stories, and I won't have to follow links there anymore either.

Of course this follows the course of events that Cory Doctorow described as enshittification: First a platform like Google News offers a great service for free and lots of people sign up; second the service becomes less good for the users, in order to enable business partners to make money from those links; and finally Google decides to screw the business partners too, and just steals their content for their AI overviews without sending customers their way. AI has the potential to break the fundamental business proposition of search engines and the link.

I don't think that AI bears the sole responsibility for this. It isn't AI's fault that if you search today for "best product" in any given category, you'll only see ads and sponsored content, and honest reviews are increasingly hard to find. Google doesn't give an AI overview if you ask a question like "What is the best 42 inch OLED TV?", just advertising and links to articles that are clearly sponsored content. Just for giggles I asked the question to ChatGPT, but as ChatGPT uses the internet as a source, it also comes back with an answer that recommends the brands that have spent the most amount on ads and sponsored content.

But through AI we are clearly in the middle of a major development of how the internet fundamentally works. And while right now AI is giving free answers that are sometimes more useful than links, I don't think this is going to last forever. News organizations and other websites are either going to find ways to block AI scrapers, or are going to come up with new technology to create AI paywalls, so that AI companies have to pay something to use the content. Right now the AI companies have the upper hand, and content creators are somewhat flailing with ineffective lawsuits, but anti-AI technology for content protection is sure to arrive.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:31 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
 
Citizens of the Spark

I had a parcel in the post today, a board game that I supported on Kickstarter, Citizens of the Spark from Thunderworks Games. Now I get Kickstarter fulfilment parcels frequently enough, as I have still 17 board games backed that haven't delivered yet. But I wanted to give a thumbs up to Thunderworks Games for two reasons:
  1. The estimated delivery date of Citizens of the Spark was July 2025, and I received my game in July 2025. That really rarely happens. The last game I received had an estimated delivery date of October 2023, and I received it in May 2025. The large majority of Kickstarter board games I received were at least 6 months late.
  2. I paid $40 on Kickstarter for this game, plus $18.40 for VAT and shipping. That included the small "Transmission" expansion pack for free. If I bought the game now, it is $54.95 + $10 for the expansion, plus shipping. The game also didn't go for sale on retail before the backers received their copies. I thus feel as if I got good value for money by backing this game.
Now, if you aren't backing many Kickstarter board games, you might think that all this is perfectly normal. Backers get good value for money, and receive their promised rewards on time. Sadly, that isn't the case. I'm still waiting for Steam Power from Wallace Design, which was already for sale for the general public at last year's Spiel 2024 in Essen in October, but hasn't been delivered to backers yet. I could get the game by mail order from several different suppliers already, and sometimes for cheaper than what I paid for backing the project. Those are the situations where you feel that you have been taken advantage of for your willingness to back an unfinished game. Guess what company I would be willing to back more games of, and what company I wouldn't.

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- posted by Tobold @ 3:05 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
 
Fantasy Life i: The Game that steals time

Since getting the Switch 2, I have mostly been playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again on that, with all the added stuff from the Switch 2 upgraded version. And then I recently moved on to play Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. And it is kind of a weird game, where I play a lot, without being really sure I like it.

At its core, Fantasy Life i (and yes, it's an "i", not an "I") is an "everything game". There is a part that is a bit like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, another part that plays like a pale copy of Breath of the Wild, and some elements that remind me of Palworld, where I collect creatures to help me in my crafting. The general game design of Fantasy Life i is to be extremely wide, while being rather shallow. Nothing is really difficult, this is the one game where in spite of the action combat and the quick time event crafting I have no problems whatsoever with my slow reaction speed. That is mostly because all these systems only to a small part depend on you pressing the right button quickly, but depend a lot on your stats. If you want to craft an item with recommended stat of 150 while having only 100 stat, that would be challenging. But it is easier to just get your stats up to 200, at which point the same item is nearly trivial to craft.

On the one side I would say that Fantasy Life i has a lot of grinding. On the other side, even the grind is wide and shallow. You never have to grind one thing very long, the rewards come hard and fast. But you do have to grind a *lot* of different things. While you only need one combat "life" (aka profession), you need all of the 4 gathering and 6 crafting lives to advance, each of which goes to level 100, with 10 ranks to achieve. That is because of some sometimes curious design elements, where for example in a dungeon crawl a path is suddenly blocked by a tree, and if you haven't leveled your woodcutting skill far enough, you can't proceed. When the game at the start asks you to choose one life, that is extremely misleading. You choose 1 or more combat lives, and then end up doing all 10 non-combat ones.

Thus the title of my post, Fantasy Life i is a game that steals time. There is always something to do, and usually you have something to do in several different lives at once. While there is a main story to follow, you can also end up playing for a day or two while completely ignoring the main story. It is only after a lot of time that you then need to return to the main story, because that unlocks access to new places. You can somewhat play this as a kind of cozy game, and it keeps you occupied for a long time, without ever stressing you out. And sometimes a not so exciting game can be good.

What isn't good is that Fantasy Life i often feels as if it had bought a collection of other games from Temu and assembled them. The Ginormosia part is definitely a copy of Breath of the Wild, having towers to remove the fog of war, and shrines with puzzles. But where the shrines in Breath of the Wild are interesting, the puzzles in Ginormosia are far more mundane and repetitive. You can climb mountains and swim oceans in Ginormosia, but without a stamina system that is rather trivial, and without the glider the verticality doesn't add much to the gameplay. The crafting part of the game is marred by all 6 crafting lives working exactly identical, so you are playing the same mini game, regardless of whether you are tailoring, cooking, or smithing. The gathering lives also work nearly identical to each other, although fishing is a minor variation, and farming is a bit different. If you admired the brilliant game design of the various games that Fantasy Life i is copying, you won't find that same brilliance in here. Fantasy Life i is about quantity, not quality. It isn't downright bad, each system works okay, but it isn't something to write home about.

As a summer holiday game, Fantasy Life i works well enough. If you are looking for a game just to pass time, without having to get too involved or applying yourself too much, this is it. If you are looking for a new and great experience that moves and excites you, you'd better look elsewhere.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:02 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Monday, July 14, 2025
 
Finished ISS Vanguard

I have a regular gaming group for campaign board games, which meets about twice per month. We played Agemonia from June 2024 to February 2025, and then started playing ISS Vanguard. We finished ISS Vanguard yesterday, 5 months later, so it was a bit shorter than the Agemonia campaign. But then, while Agemonia is designed so that in one playthrough you see nearly all locations, in ISS Vanguard in one playthrough we just saw 60% of the available locations. In theory one could play the game again, but I don't think I'll want to.

While it was interesting to play a Sci Fi game instead of Fantasy for a change, I generally prefer Fantasy as a genre. But apart from that, I also found ISS Vanguard to be a less good game than Agemonia. ISS Vanguard does have a rich story, with good voice acting in an app if you want to, and a good number of scenarios that can have exciting moments. But it felt a bit more scripted, with the challenge often being that there was just one way to solve a planet, and you just had to find it by trial and error. While the ship book was an innovative take on the administrative tasks needed to run a campaign game, the administration part could get a bit heavy sometimes. And character development stalled about half way through the game, with every player having a limited number of sleeves to put characters in, and once they are full, you don't really progress much anymore.

I wouldn't say that ISS Vanguard is a bad game, but Agemonia was an excellent one, and ISS Vanguard just paled a bit in comparison. Still, we played ISS Vanguard from start to finish, and didn't regret it.

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- posted by Tobold @ 7:34 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, July 12, 2025
 
Investing is hard

I should probably precede this post with some standard disclaimer of "this is not financial advice". But it is more a personal post about my feelings regarding investment. I am now officially retired. The good news is that I live in a mortgage-free house, and my state pension alone would allow me to survive at a moderately comfortable level. For anything beyond that, let's say going on a nice holiday somewhere, buying a new car, or dealing with unexpected expenses like for health, I have to rely on my savings. Again, the good news is that I *have* savings, which already puts me ahead of many others. But how to invest those savings so that they last a long time is a difficult question.

The general rule for retirees is the 4% rule, that is you can spend 4% of your savings per year, adjusted for inflation, and it is likely that the money will last for 30 years. The history of that rule is that it comes from a study of historic stock and bond returns. But historical averages are very different from the specific current situation. For example, right now bond returns are very bad, with 2022 having been the worst year ever for U.S. bonds. On the other side of the coin, global stock market indices, from the S&P 500 to MSCI World, are all at an historic high. Which is great if you have your money already invested, but not so great if you are looking to invest. One should "buy the dip", not buy the peak. The probability that a stock market which is already at an historic peak keeps on rising without a major correction for years is low.

If you look at financial news discussing global financial risks, this month of course there is a lot of talk about a possible U.S. debt crisis, due to the "big, beautiful bill" adding so much more U.S. national debt over the coming years. But that crisis might still be years away, it is very hard to say how much national debt is "too much", and it varies from country to country. The last big stock market correction was caused by Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, but since then the market has come to the TACO conclusion, "Trump always chickens out", and doesn't believe in a real major trade war anymore. Still, Trump is obviously a factor of volatility to the global stock market and investment returns.

Personally I believe there might be a next financial crisis which would be somewhat similar to the dot com crash of the early 2000's, just replacing the dot com bubble with an AI bubble. Note that this is independent from whether you believe that AI has huge potential. History shows that the internet in the late 90's had huge potential, and companies like Amazon obviously made billions from that. The financial crash was that investors were made to believe that the gains would come a lot faster than they actually did, and from investment flowing to some companies for which the financial gains through the internet were actually a lot lower than promised. With AI, where we don't even fully understand how it works, it is extremely difficult to predict how fast this technology is going to make how much money and to which companies. And examples like Builder.AI show that just like in the dot com crash, a lot of investment has been going to the wrong companies. There is some evidence that the still high valuation of Tesla, based on AI being able to turn every single Tesla into a fully self-driving Robotaxi, is too optimistic. And DeepSeek this year has shown that not all AI development supports the very high valuation of Nvidia. It is relatively easy to see how a series of events might turn investor sentiment on AI sour, burst the bubble, and lead to a major global stock market correction, especially with stock market indices like the S&P 500 being over 40% tech these days.

A standard financial advice from a few years ago would have been to buy an ETF of the S&P 500, and just let it sit for decades, and you'd easily get those 4% return you need for your retirement savings to last. But if you add the potential weakness of the dollar due to debt, the potential of an AI bubble burst stock market correction, and section 899 of the big, beautiful bill adding retaliatory taxes on foreign investors, it is far from clear that this is still good advice for Europeans.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:41 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments
Tuesday, July 08, 2025
 
Finished Europa Universalis IV

Since last week's post, I played another 40 hours of Europa Universalis IV. I played Switzerland in ironman mode from 1444 to 1820, which increased my achievements from 1 to 18 out of 373. It also concluded the series in which I played every Paradox grand strategy game as Switzerland. Why Switzerland, and with "house rules" that I mostly stay within the historical borders and don't expand much? Because by not concentrating on military and expansion, you get a much better understanding of the rest of the game, the underlying resource management and economics that in other games is an important background to expansion.

In Europa Universalis IV, you can't wage war and expand all the time. There are a number of game mechanics that will stop you: Unrest in the provinces you took, overextension, other countries counting your "aggressive expansion" score, war exhaustion, manpower depletion, etc. Thus a normal game of Europa Universalis IV is dominated by a cycle: Wage war when the opportunity is rife, take some provinces, and then spend some years to integrate the new provinces, and calm down your population and the neighbors, until you wage the next war. Playing as non-expansive Switzerland, I only had to wage war early to grow into the later historical borders, and the mission tree for Switzerland gives bonuses that avoids most of the expansion problems you'd otherwise have. And then, in "only" 40 hours, I could play at relatively high speed through nearly 4 centuries of history. I learned a lot about playing "tall", finished most of the mission tree of Switzerland, and had quite a successful game. It was fun. And it got me to the point where I am thinking that I won't be playing Europa Universalis IV again.

A decade ago or so, I made a tragic mistake: I considered Europa Universalis IV to be too complicated, and never played it until now. Instead I tried other Paradox grand strategy games, didn't like Hearts of Iron IV, but played a good amount of Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings III. In hindsight, I actually like Europa Universalis IV better than Vic3 or CK3. While EU4 certainly has problems with accessibility, it turns out that the stronger focus of the other games (economy in Vic3, characters in CK3) is actually less fun than the all-encompassing EU4. Europa Universalis IV is also a lot "easier", as in the player having a higher chance to succeed and grow into a large empire, even if he doesn't understand all the details. I had several games in Victoria 3 where my economy somewhat unexpectedly went south, or my kingdom in Crusader Kings 3 split up into several parts just because I had had too many children randomly. In Europa Universalis IV the details are often confusing, but I usually had a good grasp of what was going on, and what to do to succeed.

But Europa Universalis V is on the horizon, so with the UI and quality-of-life features of EU4 being distinctly lacking, there not being any more patches or content additions, and EU4 requiring a subscription to use all DLCs, I will most probably play the sequel EU5, and never look back to EU4.

The only weird thing about the transition from EU4 to EU5 will probably be that much of what I have learned in EU4 isn't applicable in EU5. A lot of playing Europa Universalis IV is not about grand strategy considerations, but dealing with very detailed and very specific rules. When playing as Portugal I learned that for example the game handles a colony in South America very differently from a colony in Africa. There are fewer universal rules, and more local rules, than in other grand strategy games. With the engine of EU5 being much different, I suspect that all those specific rules will be different, and I'll have to learn them all over again.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:49 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Saturday, July 05, 2025
 
Stop Killing Games

It seems to be the silly season in gaming news. For the past weeks a huge fight has been raging violently about nothing much. The "important" question is whether people should sign a petition called Stop Killing Games, which aims at asking the European Union to impose some restrictions on game companies when they want to switch off servers for games that require online services to run. Realistically speaking, game companies don't shut down live service games unless most people have left voluntarily anyway; and signing a petition is at best a very weak signal, with a large possibility of either nothing happening, or at best some toothless regulation happening many years in the future.

At one point in my career I was working on a chemical process developed in the 1920's and bought the original antique book from a hundred years ago in which that chemical process was first described. My ability to do so didn't require the publishing company from a hundred years to still be around. Once a book is printed, under proper care it can last centuries; and if a sufficient number of copies have been printed at the time, availability of that book a hundred years later is still very possible. To some extent the same is true about movies, where old rolls of films are still being found and restored. Books and movies are then also often digitized, to preserve them even longer. I can see the interest in treating games a media, and preserving them in a similar fashion. But one has to admit that there are some fundamental differences.

Games very frequently have a very strong link to the hardware for which they were published. If I feel nostalgic for the Amiga games of my youth, a fundamental problem would be getting hold of a still working Amiga computer. There are emulators, which are a bit similar to the digitization of films and books in preserving games for a longer time. But it all gets a bit trickier when we talk about modern live service games, which require connecting to an online server to run. I don't think many game companies would shut down such servers as long as the revenue stream from people still playing exceeds the cost of running the servers. But any law requiring them to run the servers for longer would create a liability for the game companies. In the extreme case it is theoretically possible that the Stop Killing Games initiative would actually kill games, before they are even released, because game companies wouldn't want to take the risk of running servers at a loss for years to come. If the regulation doesn't require servers to keep running, but requires code to be made open source in order to enable private servers, that would also be a liability for game companies, because they might have wanted to keep that code proprietary for their next game. I do believe that meaningful regulation on the issue is possible, but my confidence in the European Union working out a sensible regulation is limited, as they have a strong history of over-regulation.

While it would certainly be possible to have a meaningful debate about the merits, advantages and disadvantages of the Stop Killing Games initiative, the sad news is that reality just showed that we can't have meaningful debates on the internet anymore. Instead of debating, people were just shouting at each other, insulting each other, threatening and harassing each other, and telling lies about each other. And a bunch of people pretty obviously just jumped on the bandwagon for one side or the other not because they believed in the importance of the issue being "discussed", but because a flame war drives clicks, which drive revenue. Social media with ad revenue have turned the internet into a much bigger version of the Jerry Springer Show, in which fake controversy is presented for commercial purposes.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:07 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Thursday, July 03, 2025
 
Europa Universalis IV achievements

I have exactly 1 out of 373 possible achievements in Europa Universalis IV, "That's a Great Army", for building up my army to the force limit. 27% of players have that achievement, and just under 29% of players have "Until death do us apart", which you can literally achieve on day one of a game. The reason why so few people have even the easiest achievements is that in EU4, you need to play in ironman mode to get any achievements at all. Very few people do that. Only 9% of players achieved "Just a Little Patience", playing a game until the end in ironman mode.

That suggests to me that the majority of players of Europa Universalis IV isn't interested in achievements at all. Achievements are a game design element which is somewhat "meta", designed to "gamify" the rest of the game. But the numbers would suggest that at least for three quarters of the players, EU4 is more a simulation than a game. Traditional game elements like winning and achievements aren't important. Probably because they aren't even all that challenging. Although I am a complete noob with "only" 132 hours played, I can turn a small country into a huge blob long before the game ends. I don't think that all that many people play EU4 until 1820, because usually you feel as if you have won centuries before that.

Which means that quite often I don't start a new game of Europa Universalis IV with the plan to win it, but rather with some other goal. For example to explore the game concept of colonization: I played a game with Portugal as traditional colonizer, then another as Brunei to see what happens if a non-traditional nation builds up a colonial empire. I stopped the latter game when it turned out that if you get 5 core provinces in an American region as a European, you get nifty features to found a colony, while you don't get the same if you perform the same action as an Asian nation. EU4 is full of very specific game mechanics that only apply to certain nations in certain situations, and aren't universal. That definitely feels bad sometimes, but it avoids the opposite effect one can observe in Victoria 3, where sometimes it feels as if it doesn't matter what nation you play, as they all play the same.

The most interesting games of EU4 are those where you put some house rules and restrictions on yourself, like not expanding beyond a historical area, or pursuing a very specific goal other than global conquest. I am toying with the idea to continue my series of games as Switzerland in Paradox grand strategy games, not expanding beyond the historical area you get a core claim on early in the game. I might even play that in ironman, and get some more achievements, just for giggles. But it is also true that like most games, EU4 becomes less interesting when you have seen a lot of it, and events start to become repetitive.

And ultimately, that is my main goal and achievement that I had when starting Europa Universalis IV: Become sufficiently familiar with EU4, in order to be able to appreciate EU5 when it comes out soon®.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:05 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
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