Tobold's Blog
Saturday, August 30, 2025
 
A n00b's preview of Europa Universalis V

I have 200 hours played of Europa Universalis IV. It is a special characteristic of Europa Universalis that with this amount of playtime, I am considered a n00b. On the positive side, that gave me more time to play other strategy games, from Paradox and other companies. So I hope to be well placed to answer a simple question: If you have played little or no EU4, should you buy EU5?

Whether any Europa Universalis game is fun to you depends on how much you like or dislike the basic game loop: Pause the game, fiddle around with a huge number of settings for the country you control, unpause, and wait what happens. Of course, if for example the setting you changed was a war declaration on your neighbor and you sent an army his way, things will happen rapidly. Then you pause again, adjust your orders, and unpause again. In other phases of the game, you will only do minor adjustments, and you might let the game run unpaused at higher speed for a while. This is the gameplay of EU4, of other Paradox grand strategy games like Crusader Kings or Victoria, and it will be the gameplay of EU5.

Somewhat more particular to Europa Universalis games is another cycle: While you aren't absolutely forced to play that way, in many cases you will want to grow your country by military expansion. This is a cycle, because once you have conquered some land, there are game mechanics that will stop you from further expansion for a while: You will have a truce with other countries, neighboring countries will be angry about your aggressive expansion, and you will need some time to integrate the lands you conquered into your country. After some in-game years, the truce will have run out, the neighbors calmed down a bit, and you dealt with internal unrest, so you can start expanding again. This cycle will most certainly exist in EU5, just as it existed in EU4. But the detailed game mechanics that rule that cycle will be different.

That gets me to a probably controversial hypothesis of mine: If you have played EU4 100 hours or less, you will possibly enjoy EU5 more than if you played EU4 1,000 hours or more. My argument for that is that pretty much everything you can learn by playing EU4 for more than 100 hours is specific to EU4, and will not apply to EU5. It does not help you to know that at the start of EU4 it is a possible strategy to give away all your crownland to the estates in exchange for one monarch point per category per month, as EU5 doesn't even have monarch points. It is very likely that EU5 will have some systems in place that address the same fundamentals, e.g. a system that prevents you from having too many alliances. But knowing the details of how that works in EU4, and how to increase your possible number of diplomatic relations, is probably not going to be relevant in EU5, as the system will be different.

So my advice to other EU4 n00bs is that you shouldn't worry about not being an expert in EU4 when deciding whether EU5 is a good game for you. It will be the EU4 experts that will complain the loudest about EU5 after release, because they feel the changes more deeply, and might prefer certain game mechanics from the previous version.

I am looking forward to installing EU5, choosing some country more or less at random, fiddling with some settings of my country with very little expertise, and the unpausing the game and seeing what happens. From the very fact that I can choose a tiny country or a major power, I know that this isn't a balanced strategy game. Conquering the world isn't the only possible goal, and steering a small or middle sized country safely through the centuries might actually be more interesting. A good part of the fun is not knowing how everything works at the start, and finding out through your own experience. If you are open to the experience of Europa Universalis V, and you aren't too stressed about not knowing everything from the start, this might be a game for you.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:34 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Thursday, August 28, 2025
 
What took the loot boxes so long?

Loot boxes have first appeared in video games over two decades ago. We know everything there is to know about their psychological effects, and how they are extremely profitable for companies due to easily inducing customers into overspending. In some jurisdictions, like here in Belgium, loot boxes are even illegal because of that. So when I watched some reporting about the Labubu craze, my only question was "what took them so long?".

The blind boxes in which Labubu are sold are obviously functionally identical to loot boxes. And yes, you could say that trading card games have been sold in loot boxes for three decades now, but that was still in a gaming context. Gachapon are even older, but again were toys. Why did nobody think before to sell fashion accessories in loot boxes?

While I don't think that I'll have to buy my groceries in loot boxes anytime soon, I could see loot boxes spreading from fashion accessories to actual fashion. What if you were guaranteed that a loot box contains a T-shirt, but only had a 1 in 144 chance to get the "secret" T-shirt with the most desirable print on it? The possibilities are endless.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:43 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
 
Sandboxes, Vantage, and EU5

A lot of games which people think of as being sandboxes in fact aren't. Games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom have relatively open worlds, but still provide the player with a clear path of progression and a main story line. That might actually be an optimum. If you get much more open, the player is increasingly likely to feel somewhat lost and aimless. It is a lot easier to follow a set of goals that is prescribed by the game than to set your own goals and follow those.

I very much like the board game Vantage that recently came out. Having a lot of fun playing that occasionally with my wife, played some solo, and brought it several times to board game night. But Vantage sure isn't for everybody. Dice Tower made a video review, in which 2 of the 4 reviewers rated it very highly, while the 2 others didn't want to play that game again. As a game in which you follow the goals set by the game to win, Vantage doesn't work very well. It is more of a very open sandbox game in which you have to pursue your own goals, and the missions and destinies are just sprinkled in as optional content. If you get the concept of "winning" out of your head, Vantage becomes a much better game.

I was thinking about that when reading the Reddit discussion on Europa Universalis V. One of the big changes from EU4 to EU5 is that the mission trees that are currently in EU4 have been abandoned. People liked the mission trees, because they provided a clear path to victory. On the one side they gave you specific goals to pursue, on the other side they rewarded you with bonuses, often in the form of permanent claims, that helped you on the way to the next goal. The downside of that is that the mission tree turns a country into a nearly linear experience towards winning the game. And winning Europa Universalis isn't much fun to begin with.

I recently had a very weird game in which I wanted to try to play France for the first time. But having played countries nearby, and watched some videos, I was well aware of the two major events that happen to France, and the French mission tree. So by maximum use of the advance knowledge and a bit of luck I first exploited the Surrender of Maine event to crush England, and then finagled my way into the Burgundian Succession. Then when the Holy Roman Empire demanded the lowlands, I refused, and crushed Austria. Shortly after Marie of Burgundy had her "riding accident" event, and Burgundy got integrated into France. I also integrated all the apanages. Before I even reached the year 1500, my main problem was that the game couldn't find any other rival than Spain for me, I had simply grown too strong too fast. I stopped playing, because it got boring. I know that some people play EU4 with a goal of world conquest, but once you are already the strongest nation, that is just boring to me. I might play France again and just pretend I don't know about the events that will happen with England and Burgundy.

With the EU4 mission trees telling you how to win and helping you with it, the devs from Paradox decided to not provide such a clear path towards victory for the countries in Europa Universalis V. From all I see, I believe that EU5, like Vantage, will best played without thinking of winning. It could be a lot of fun as an alternative history simulation game. But the different countries you can choose are clearly not equally strong, and very soon people will learn how to conquer the world, especially when starting with a stronger nation. I'm not sure that will be fun to me, I don't rate the combat system of Europa Universalis high enough that I would want to play it as a war game.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:25 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Monday, August 25, 2025
 
World of Gamescom Announcements

I saw in a video about Gamescom that the 11th expansion for WoW will be called Midnight and releases next year. I stopped playing WoW about 8 years ago, and the last time I even started the game was for the beta of the 7th expansion, Battle for Azeroth. I have played well over 10,000 hours of WoW, but at some point just got bored of it. But I know that if for some reason I would feel an urge to return, I could play the 10th expansion, The War Within, tomorrow and have no problem playing that. As long as I stay out of raid content and maybe some harder dungeon modes, there isn't much of a skill barrier to World of Warcraft. I'd be a bit disoriented at the start, but feel rather confident that I would be able to catch up quickly, regardless of how much WoW might have changed over the last 8 years.

Also announced at Gamescom, World of Tanks 2.0 launches in a week, September 3rd. I haven't played World of Tanks since summer 2020. While I did play WoT a lot less than I played WoW, I have over 15,000 battles played, so also thousands of hours. I had also gotten reasonably good at the game in 2020, after playing WoT frequently for a year and a half. But of all the computer games I have ever played, World of Tanks is the most skill-based. If I restarted playing this, it would take me hundreds of hours to just get back to the skill level I had 5 years ago, if ever. And because the game is so skill-based, playing it at a lower skill level would not feel good.

So I wouldn't go back to World of Warcraft, because I think I would be bored. And I wouldn't go back to World of Tanks, because I think I would be ashamed of my lost skill. I think WoW has the easier problem there. Wargaming, the makers of World of Tanks, also announced World of Tanks: Heat, which is basically a console hero shooter with tanks that move unrealistically fast. I don't know how well that will work. World of Tanks 2.0 I don't think will turn the fortunes of Wargaming around. The 2.0 label is fake, the new game still is 90% the old World of Tanks. There is new content, a new map, a new play mode, a new tier of tanks, and a controversial mode to "see" how thick or thin the armor of an enemy tank is at a given location. But most of the tanks, most of the maps, and most of the gameplay will just be the same as before.

The problem is, you can't actually change a skill-based competitive game too much, otherwise many of your existing players would quit, because the skills they trained thousands of hours for became obsolete. New players, or potential returning players like me, still can't compete in WoT 2.0, against the veterans. And World of Tanks isn't really a game you can play casually. So the release of WoT 2.0 will give a short-time influx of returning players, but I really doubt it will do anything to stop the slow decline of this game. Meanwhile World of Warcraft still has millions of players, because it is easy enough for a new player to pick up, and for most of the game it doesn't matter if somebody else is more skilled than you.

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- posted by Tobold @ 7:20 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments
Saturday, August 23, 2025
 
My gaming status - August 2025

Yesterday I was at a different friendly local games store for a board game night. That brings me up to 3 different locations where I can play board games on three different evenings per week. That does consume a big chunk of my gaming time, because in addition to game night itself I very often prepare and bring a game myself, or at least study the rules for a game available to play at the store. Very few people want to start reading a rulebook on game night, so games that nobody prepared rarely get played.

So over the past few months I have spent less time with computer games. I played a lot of Tears of the Kingdom, but am now pretty far in exploring everything, for example I have 119 out of 120 lightroots unlocked; there is a limit to what I can still do without just doing the main quest, which I am a lot less interested in, having already done that once. I also started another game of Europa Universalis IV, while waiting for the release of EU5 in November. Not that I think anymore that it would help, but more experience some more countries and see how different EU5 will be.

Between all that, I had very little time for other computer games. The only negative point about that is that I am still paying for a XBox Game Pass for PC subscription every month, without actually using it. I should decide in the coming weeks to either play the most interesting games there, or cancel the subscription for a while.

One effect of age that I have to admit is that it isn't as easy anymore to get into a new game. And when I stop playing a game for too long, I also forget things, and am not as competent anymore. I am more often tempted these days to play a game I know well, rather than climbing the barrier to entry of learning a new game. Especially PC strategy games these days get a steady flow of patches and DLCs, so that it is often easier to try out the latest patch of a known game, rather than trying something completely different. For board games, I know that people get bored if I turn up with the same game more than twice on game night, so I am more often forcing myself to learn a new game.

While I hear a lot of people complaining about the computer games industry, one has to admit that the number of games on offer is phenomenal. Maybe one needs to be my age to remember a time where you played certain games because they were all you had, and you wouldn't get a new one before Christmas. Over 18,000 games got released on Steam last year, so I have long ago given up on the idea of "keeping up" with releases. And while my board game library contains fewer unplayed games than my Steam library, I still have a rather large collection and honestly more than I can play. I mostly stopped backing games on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Gamefound this year, but I still regularly get parcels with the games I backed in previous years. And I will go to the Spiel 2025 in Essen in October. So, overall I live in an abundance of games, and even with retirement I can't keep up with everything new, and need to be rather selective.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:51 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Friday, August 22, 2025
 
Is board game IP an investment?

The board game crowdfunding economy is in a bit of a downturn. That has several reasons: A regression to the mean after the pandemic caused an economic boom; rising costs through inflation and tariffs meeting lowered disposable incomes; and finally a general feeling that crowdfunding has lost its "new and shiny" luster. One big company that made millions with crowdfunded board games, CMON, is now in serious financial trouble. So they sold the IP for previous successful games to other companies to stay afloat. And I am starting to wonder whether the people who bought that IP knew what they were doing.

Tycoon Games bought for example the IP of Blood Rage from CMON. Blood Rage is a 2015 game which ranks currently on place 60 in popularity of all board games on BoardGameGeek. So Tycoon Games quickly produced a reskinned "new" version and started a new crowdfunding campaign for it. It didn't go well. CMON had huge experience and skill in launching crowdfunding campaigns, some people even said that their crowdfunding campaigns were better than the games they made. Tycoon Games pretty obviously was lacking that experience. The video for Blood Rage Valhalla was widely ridiculed for being a low-cost production. The crowdfunding campaign contained some weird elements, like a $1 payment that would reserve you a special miniature, for which you would then have to pay another $15 via a different payment system. And in an unfortunate design decision, the designers now imagined Valhalla to be some sort of manor, which makes the game board look remarkably like Clue. Colonel Mustard with the pipe in the library is attacking a group of bloodthirsty vikings!

As I write this, Blood Rage Valhalla has a dismal 4.4 out of 10 rating on BGG due to some people expressing their disappointment with advance review bombing. On YouTube several board game channels decided to express their own disappointment, rather than getting paid to promote the game. The only good news is that Blood Rage Valhalla already made $660,000 in pledges from 2,389 backers on name recognition alone. Not quite as much as the 9,825 backers of the original game, but those back then spent a lot less per backer, and collected only $905,682.

I don't know how much Tycoon Games paid for the Blood Rage IP. But to me it seems their crowdfunding campaign for the successor was rushed. I am not sure that is a good business decision. Board games, especially the crowdfunded variety, are a small market. You can't just produce junk with a popular IP like in the mobile game market and rely on nobody remembering. People who have a bad experience with one crowdfunded game from a company tend to remember and stay away from that company, I certainly already have a handful of companies I wouldn't back anymore. What good is it to buy a board game IP if you can't make a better game out of it, and aren't as good at crowdfunding campaigns?

I am currently keeping an eye on the upcoming crowdfunding campaign for Brass: Pittsburgh. Brass: Birmingham is the top 1 game on BGG, and a favorite of mine. Brass: Pittsburgh is done by the same company and developers as Brass: Birmingham. And still I am not sure whether I want to buy it. While Brass: Birmingham is widely considered an improvement over the original Brass, it isn't obvious that every new version of a game is better than the predecessor. Sometimes new game elements are added, just to justify the new game, but they make the game more cumbersome and less elegant. If the new game stays too close to the original, then why buy a new version? If the new game is too different, then maybe it loses what made the original attractive in the first play. Reimplementing a beloved and well-known board game is no easy task. And unlike computer games, you can't just take advantage of better graphics cards and CPU to generate automatic interest in the reimplementation.

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- posted by Tobold @ 10:14 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
 
The value of a DLC

So I pre-purchased the premium edition of Europa Universalis V. It cost €25 more than the standard version, and comes with one small cosmetic pack, one smaller DLC, and two larger DLC. There is no exact price information about what each DLC would cost, but as they promised 20% savings, it should be something like €6 for the small DLC, and €12 for the larger ones.

What is unique for this DLC situation is that there will be some quantification possible for the value of the DLC. When selecting a nation in EU5, you already get a display of how many unique dynamic historical events come with that country. For example France comes with 176, and Scotland with 48. So when the last DLC of 2026 is released, which is about The Auld Alliance between France and Scotland, we will see exactly how many dynamic historical events are being added that way.

It seems that in EU5 the DLC will only have such country-specific added content, while any changes to game mechanics will be in free patches. Huge improvement over EU4, where you had for example to buy the Cradle of Civilization DLC if you wanted to use the army drill game mechanic. Country specific DLC are a lot fairer, as you can more easily skip them, if you for example aren't interested in the region they add content to.

But if the DLC contains mostly or only added dynamic historical events, then you can do the math. How many new events for a €6 DLC? How many for a €12 DLC? If The Auld Alliance adds 50 events each to France and Scotland, that would make a bigger difference for Scotland, which had far fewer events to begin with. If it added only 20 events each, would people consider it worth the €12 price tag?

The biggest discussion point will probably be how "complete" EU5 is without the DLC. That is the same discussion we always get when a game releases with the DLC for the year to come already announced. Is that content that has been "cut" from the game, to be sold to you later? Or is it a real addition. If a country like France already has plenty of such content, why would it be necessary to buy more? If a country like Scotland has relatively fewer, does the DLC then become considered a must have? That all will remain highly subjective, but at least this times there will be some numbers behind the amount of added DLC content.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:43 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Monday, August 18, 2025
 
For-profit fascism

I would situate myself politically in the center left. Which means that I don't care much for the extreme right. And as I find that I see already far too much hate on the internet, I consciously stay away from extreme right YouTube channels. Having said that, it turns out that I might have been a bit naive about those. I thought that this were good old-fashioned skinhead nazis with strong political opinions against migration and the like. As it turns out, the internet can even make that worse than in real life.

It started with a news story that had gone mainstream. A German comedian on state TV had used his TV show to doxx a right-wing YouTuber, publishing his name and profession in order to get him into trouble. As the extreme right is often attacking mainstream media, I could see where this was coming from, but I can also see how others thought that this wasn't what investigative journalism on mainstream media should look like. Anyway, in the reporting about that story, I came across a comment, where somebody centrist said about the right-wing YouTuber in question that "at least he seemed to post videos out of conviction, and not about the money".

As it turned out, several of the more popular extreme right-wing YouTube channels in German have weird names related to financial services and investing. And it turns out, that these channels were created for maximum profit as financial channels, until their owners realized that spewing right-wing hate got them considerably more clicks and advertising revenue than talking about investing. The German right-wing YouTube scene is dominated by for-profit fascism. Video titles and thumbnails are created for maximum controversy as clickbait, and of course a lot of the things that neo-nazis say are perfect for that purpose. Only that the owners of these channels don't actually believe in the populist nazi crap they are spreading, they just do it to attract a maximum of advertising revenue. I'm not even sure that a lot of the companies paying for that advertising realize where their money is going.

The whole thing depressed me that much, I wasn't up for the challenge to see how it is in other countries. I saw glimpses of that in the stories around the bankruptcy of Alex Jones' Infowars, where far-right conspiracy theories were peddled in order to promote food supplements. But then, those court cases showed that he was believing his own bullshit. Somehow I find a greedy guy who doesn't believe in anything and makes up nazi propaganda with the help of AI to make a profit even worse than the idiotic true believers. 

- posted by Tobold @ 6:51 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Sunday, August 17, 2025
 
Not so Universalis

There is a German YouTuber, Steinwallen, who is producing a lot of long play content of strategy and role-playing games, which I like to watch. As his channel started with Europa Universalis content, he has several EU4 campaigns you can watch there, stretching for over a decade. I've been watching some of those videos, and I realized that EU4 has undergone massive changes over the years. The various patches and DLC didn't just add content, they fundamentally changed several important game mechanics, e.g. how the estates in your nation are handled. Somebody who learned EU4 on release and is now coming back to the game will barely recognize the game.

When I started playing EU4, I thought that EU5 would be released "soon". That seems increasingly unlikely. In fact, it isn't even guaranteed that EU5 will come out before 2027. But even more importantly, my general ideal of "let's play some EU4, so I'll have an easier time getting into EU5" seems very flawed. From all I know about EU5, the core system is so dramatically different, that applying lessons from the previous game is probably not helping at all.

What I learned from watching those videos of different versions of EU4 is that much of the Europa Universalis gameplay is actually about managing various restrictions, and that these can change a lot even between patch versions of the same game. The current (and probably final) version of EU4 is very much about the management of monarch power points (administrative, diplomatic, military). In EU5 these have been replaced by monarch abilities in the same categories, and the progress of technology is now a more classic tech tree with research points, rather than using monarch power points. In fact, in some respects of game mechanics the previews of EU5 resemble Victoria 3 more than they resemble EU4. Maybe I should play that again, only that Vic3 unlike EU4 doesn't have the possibility to subscribe for some months and get access to all DLC content.

What I find remarkable is how little the gameplay of Europa Universalis 4 is based on anything "universal". There is a lot of "gaming the system" going on, and that very much depends on minor details of the system. When the system changes through a patch, or a new version of the game, there is no value anymore in knowing how to game the previous system. On the positive side, this probably added a lot to the replayability of EU4: Over time the devs have added a lot of local systems. The game mechanics applying to the Holy Roman Empire apply only there, and for example the Ming Empire has a completely different set of rules. So you are learning new systems and new ways to deal with those systems every time you play a new game somewhere completely different.

I'm still planning to buy EU5 on release, and am looking forward to playing that. But I don't think anymore that playing EU4 helped. And there is a strong possibility that learning to play EU5 at release will already mean a lot of those learned skills become obsolete by the time patch v1.1 is released.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:49 PM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Saturday, August 16, 2025
 
Is every illustration art?

I received another parcel today with a board game I crowdfunded, called Foxpaw. I'm not expecting much of it, it's a lightweight worker placement board game playing in a magical school. But as I was updating my collection on BoardGameGeek, I was surprised that the game had been review bombed to hell. The two main complaints were the use of AI art, and the "stolen IP". The stolen IP part made me chuckle, because that looks very much like a no win situation: Paying for the Harry Potter IP gets you in even more trouble than making a generic magical school game.

But the AI art complaints got me thinking. I understand the recent uproar about Google's interpretation of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. Pictures created by generative artificial intelligence in my mind aren't "art", in the traditional sense of the word. They lack artistic expression, and are by definition derivative. Having said that, having played role-playing games for decades, I have seen a great many illustrations of let's say an orc that were derivative, and very few that had any artistic value. I liked for example the Paizo interpretation of the common goblin, although not everybody agrees. But at least the Pathfinder goblin is artistically distinctively different from the D&D goblin. Meanwhile many other roleplaying and board games have illustrations of common fantasy heroes and monsters that are extremely generic. Even D&D itself has some "artwork" that looks more derivative than artistic to me. And many of the D&D book simply fill different pages with different illustrations from different "artists" with no common style, overarching artistic expression, or narrative.

Which gets me to the question whether a game that needs an illustration of a generic hero or monster does actually need "art". If something is meant to represent a generic wizard or a generic orc, isn't the illustration bound to be generic too? And if that is the case, what's wrong with using AI to create it?

It seems to me that some people can draw a recognizable wizard or orc, and others simply don't have the drawing skills. Calling everybody who can draw an orc an "artist" is probably stretching the definition. That drawing on a card representing an orc enemy isn't necessarily "artwork", it is often simply an illustration with no artistic merit or even aspiration. And while I certainly don't want to see the artists that are filling our museums with beautiful artwork replaced by AI, I don't think that simple illustrators working freelance on Fiverr should be protected from competition by AI. Just like the "online journalists" that produce SEO slop shouldn't be protected from competition by AI slop. If generative AI can produce work as well as you do, it is time to question the value of your job, not time to ask for protection.

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- posted by Tobold @ 1:04 PM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Thursday, August 14, 2025
 
Today's value of a college degree

Imagine a friend helped you get through college. You were sometimes busy with other stuff, or tasks were too hard for you, but your friend did some of the assignments for you, and helped you with the rest. Now you got your college degree, and find you and your friend applied for the same job. Would you be surprised if the employer preferred hiring your friend?

According to the latest surveys, over 90% of students use AI these days to help them get through college, and some of them let AI do their assignments for them. Now AI is taking their entry level jobs, and these same people are expressing shock and anger about the situation. Wasn't this development predictable? If AI can do or help with everything you need to get a college degree, why wouldn't AI be as qualified as you to do the job that needs that degree?

If you are currently studying for a degree for which you find that AI isn't much of a help, because for example generative AI isn't adequate to solve complex engineering problems, you should count yourself lucky. The same is obviously true for any sort of trade that requires some degree of manual labor, or face to face interaction with humans that can't be moved online, e.g. much of health care. If AI can't do your degree for you, it won't be able to take your job either.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:02 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
 
Think of the children and hate speech

This blog has comment moderation. It is possible that you weren't aware of that, because these days 100% of all deleted comments are spam messages advertising products unrelated to the subject matter of the blog. While readers do sometimes disagree with me or with other readers, we manage to keep the discussion civil enough to not necessitate comment moderation. That is unusual. This month the news I read, which cover a lot of gaming topics, but also general world events, had a rather high amount of stories about various forms of censorship. So I wanted to mention some of these news stories, to explain what is bothering me about them.

On BoardGameGeek two games this month, Codenames: Back to Hogwarts and Ace of Spades, have led to heated culture war discussions. And the comment moderation on that seemed to me politically biased, and sometimes unfair. On the one side one poster just remarked that he would like not to get embroiled into politics when reading a board game forum, for which he received very hateful comments demonstrating Godwin's Law, claiming that not supporting the boycott against the game was equivalent of not speaking out against Hitler in the Third Reich. With some very nasty personal attacks in that thread, it would have been something I would have moderated. On the other side, somebody made a thread which probably was meant as a joke, or a test how unpolitical you were still allowed to be on BGG. The thread simply contained short messages like "I am looking forward to this game", with no political messages and no attacks on anyone. Maybe the thread was secretly meant to "own the libs", but it formally complied with all forum rules. But with the automatically generated Hotness list on BGG pushing Codenames: Back to Hogwarts to the top, some people really couldn't stand any positive reporting about the game, so the thread saying nice things about it was deleted by moderators, and then they tried to hide that moderation action. It looked to me like a trap, with some moderator with a political bias falling right into it.

On the other political side, censorship efforts this months were mostly directed against "adult" content. Thousands of adult titles disappeared from Steam and Itch.io, apparently after a conservative group pressured payment processing companies like Mastercard, which then threatened the game platforms. At the same time, the UK Online Safety act came into force, meant to enforce age verification for adult content. That was rife with problems, from the ridiculous ways to bypass age verification by using an image from Death Stranding's photo mode, to protests that online privacy of the system wasn't guaranteed, as foreign companies that weren't subject to UK data protection laws had been hired to run the system.

What bothered me about all these stories was not that both left and right are trying to censor things they disagree with in the gaming sphere. What bothered me was the frequent use of emotional arguments designed to then censor any rational discussion of the issues. In the adult content censorship case the Think of the children argument was repeatedly used. While on the BGG forums I read the astounding argument that comments arguing against the boycott were not allowed, because they by definition constituted hate speech. In summary, if you argue against censorship from the right, you are a supporter of child rapists, while if you argue against censorship from the left, you are Nazi spouting hate speech. No debate, no compromise, no moderate position is allowed. Pointing out that your local toy store has a lot of Harry Potter merchandise is morally equivalent of going out at night with a baseball bat to kill trans people. Pointing out that the most harmless adult game removed from Steam was pretty tame and didn't involve children at all is morally equivalent of being Jeffrey Epstein.

The fake moral equivalence arguments to stifle debate are now increasingly used to justify comment "moderation" on various internet platforms. That isn't "moderation", it is downright suppression of any counter arguments. People like me, who are centrists, open to listen to arguments from both sides, and trying to find compromises, end up being persecuted by both left and right extremists. But if we can't solve conflicts by debate, what other option is there?

- posted by Tobold @ 9:38 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments
Monday, August 11, 2025
 
More on Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic

My wife and me are still playing Clank! Legacy 2: Acquisitions Incorporated – Darkest Magic with another couple about once per month. But in game 2 last month we ran into a unique problem of legacy games: Having to perform rather massive changes to the game. In Clank! Legacy that is mostly done in the prologue, and we very much regretted doing it that way.

I brought the game to our friends' house and we set the game up normally, which already takes a while. Only then did we read the prologue, which is what the rules tell you to do. But in the prologue we had to take out several sheets of stickers, some of which were used to add new rules to the rulebook, others which were used to modify the game board. As the stickers are hard to remove once applied, you have to work really carefully to make the result look straight on the board. Add some other administrative tasks, like adding new cards to the game, and the overall time from opening the box to playing the first move got extremely long. As there were more administrative tasks to change the game that popped up during play, overall we all ended up feeling as if it had been too much work, and too little play.

Game 3 was this weekend at my house. And with the experience of game 2, I decided to ignore what the rules said, and go through the prologue in advance. We still did the story part of the prologue during play, but I did all the parts related to changing the rulebook and board with stickers before the other players even arrived. That meant we could start playing nearly immediately, which was a much more fun way to do things. It also helped that game 3 introduced a game element that made the game a bit more dynamic by removing cards from the adventure row. All deckbuilding games can get into a state where nobody actually want the card on display and is happy if there is some renewal. Game 3 ended up being a great success, where we all had much more fun. Needless to say, I already applied all the stickers for game 4 next month ...

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- posted by Tobold @ 12:03 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments
Sunday, August 10, 2025
 
Overtourism and local minima

I visited a tourist destination half an hours drive from my home this week. It was an interesting limestone cave featuring the "longest navigable underground river in Europe". You took a walk about 1 km through the cave seeing all sorts of limestone formations, and then a boat trip back to the entrance. The village in which the cave was situated didn't have anything else to see, but one could notice the tourist restaurants and shops built for tourist traffic. Only, despite this being on a sunny day in the middle of the local summer holidays, there were very few tourists around.

This summer there are a lot of stories about overtourism, with tourists complaining about long waits for attractions, and locals complaining about tourists ruining their cities. Dubious tour guide companies buy up tickets for attractions like the Eiffel tower or the Acropolis, and then basically operate like ticket scalpers, with the guide just handing you the ticket for a multiple of the price and no added tour guiding value. So, how come that some tourist attractions are overcrowded, and others stand empty?

Once you look at it, there are a lot of other areas in life, where you could ask the same question. Why is it impossible to find housing in some areas, while other houses stand empty? Why do some people get hundreds of offers on dating applications, while others get none? The answer to all of these questions has to do with the disappearance of local minima.

A local minimum is a point on a graph where the function's value is lower than at the surrounding points, but not necessarily the lowest value overall. If the graph is a surface of energy of a chemical system, the system is trying to reach the lowest point, but might well get stuck in a local minimum. The same is true for other sorts of optimization problems. For example in dating, everybody is looking for the perfect partner. But in earlier times, you simply couldn't get into contact with too many other people. Thus you ended up with a local minimum: Maybe it wasn't the perfect partner, but it was the best you could find among the people in your location that you were likely to meet. In tourism, when air travel was still relatively expensive, you ended up visiting places closer to home, even if they didn't have the most interesting tourist attractions in the world.

An increased mobility of people, and especially increased mobility of information globally, has changed that. That dating app shows you a lot more possible mates than you could ever have met at some local function. You can find a dream job in a big city without having to travel there first blindly. Your Instagram feed is showing you the best tourist attractions in the world, and low cost airlines bring you there at an affordable rate. The problem with all that optimization is that the local minima are now empty. The reasonably attractive mate you would have met at the church ball looks unattractive compared to the hottest people on that dating app, but might have been a better chance of finding love. The dream job in Silicon Valley isn't so dreamy anymore once you deduct the increased cost of living from your paycheck. And standing 4 hours in the queue in sweltering heat to see the Acropolis ends up being not a great holiday after all, even if it did get you that selfie you wanted for your Instagram.

For tourism these days, I am deliberately seeking out the moderately interesting tourist places. I can find such places closer by, and going somewhere where it isn't totally overcrowded is usually a lot nicer than going to the places everybody goes. For housing I moved out of the city, and ended up with a very nice house for the same price as my previous city apartment. Call me contrarian, but there is quality of life gains to be had when leaving the crowd.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:48 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments
Friday, August 08, 2025
 
Justway - 3D printing service

This is a sponsored post, that is to say I accepted a free product and agreed to write about it. I don't normally do that. But when Justway offered this, it coincided with me needing a 3D printed part for a board game. The reason I haven't been writing anything about 3D printed game components since 2022 is that in 2023 I moved house, and I never unpacked my 3D printer. I used it too rarely, and the at home 3D printing technology is still relatively fiddly, and prone to problems if you use it rarely. Thus a service that prints your 3D objects for you is actually quite useful, even for somebody like me, who still has a 3D printer in a box in the attic. In addition, the part I wanted to have printed was player boards for Vantage, which are relatively flat, but nearly 300 mm x 200 mm large. That is larger than the print bed of my 3D printer, and thus I couldn't have possibly printed them myself.

Justway is a manufacturing service, which offers 3D printing, but also CNC machining, sheet metal forming, injection molding, and urethane casting. You upload a typical 3D CAD file (the .STL files for many 3D printable objects are readily available on the internet), state the process and material you want to have used, and Justway gives you a first estimated quote. If that is okay for you, an engineer validates that quote and technical feasibility, and you get a final quote including shipping cost. Once you paid that, they'll manufacture the item for you, and ship it to you from China. The whole process from .STL uploading to holding the part in my hand took 9 days, which I found surprisingly quick. But then, 3D printing is probably the cheapest and fastest option. And the one most likely to be useful to a regular person. You wouldn't want to do injection molding unless you needed hundreds or even thousands of identical parts.

By ordering 4 player boards 3D printed, I had the opportunity to check quality and consistency, and they are good. I can see that the industrial 3D printers Justway uses are a lot higher quality than a typical hobby 3D printer one might have at home. The 4 player boards are totally identical, no flaws, no warpage. Having had problems with 3D printing of large flat pieces before at home, I appreciate the quality.

For most people, the number of times they need a 3D printed part is probably low. I enjoyed my 3D printer as a hobby, but if you use it only rarely, the cost per piece is pretty high. When I was still playing D&D and printed lots of miniatures for that, the cost of the printer divided by hundreds of miniatures was a lot lower, and the material cost per print was also relatively low. Justway isn't terribly cheap, but it is cheaper than buying a 3D printer for a few items. Shipping cost becomes relatively important if you just need a few small items sent via Fedex from China. My application of 3D printed items for board game pieces is not really a cost efficient one for this service. But I can totally see the use of Justway being economically favorable for prototype production, or other applications where you need something manufactured occasionally.

- posted by Tobold @ 3:37 PM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Thursday, August 07, 2025
 
The middlemen economy

On my bathroom sink there stands an electric soap dispenser. I like it, because it not just dispenses the liquid soap, but also turns it into a thick foam, which is easier to wash your hands with. I bought the soap dispenser on Amazon for €16. I wasn't terribly surprised at that price when after over a year of use the motor malfunctioned. But I noticed when I was looking on Amazon for the same soap dispenser to get a replacement that the brand name was different. And the brand name wasn't on the actual packaging or product. So I searched for the model number that was on the packaging on Temu, and found the exactly same soap dispenser sent directly from the producer from China for €12. That took a few days more than Amazon does, but why would I want to pay 33% more to some dropshipper for something I didn't need urgently?

Wherever you look on Amazon, there are Chinese goods being sold by dropshippers. Middlemen who don't actually contribute anything to the economy. They just buy stuff in China, often on Temu or Alibaba, have it sent to an Amazon warehouse, and then they let Amazon handle all the work of selling and distributing the item. A great number of "how to get rich quick" videos on YouTube describe exactly that process. Getting rich quick is an euphemism for an activity that makes money, while not actually contributing anything useful to an economy.

After some tariff chaos, the US tariff on China has now landed at 30%. That is a problem for the dropshippers. As they don't do anything where they could increase productivity or lower costs to "eat" the tariffs, they have no choice but to add any tariff directly onto the price of the items they sell. And much of the attractiveness of the dropshipped items is that they are cheap, so price increases lose you a lot of potential customers. And tariffs are only part of the problem: Customers like me have increasingly realized that we are paying dropshippers for nothing, and that we can just as easily order the exactly same goods directly from China via Temu. Temu has been growing in the US and Europe at an astounding growth rate, and much of that growth came to the detriment of the dropshippers that used to sell those same goods. Temu simply takes a smaller cut than the combined cut of the dropshipper and Amazon. Nothing changes in the quality of the goods you receive as a customer; instead of getting cheap Chinese junk from Amazon, you get the same cheap Chinese junk for even less money from Temu.

Another middleman business is likewise under a strong threat of disruption: Advertising. Individually, advertising appears like a necessity for any business, getting people to buy your product. At a macro-economic scale, the use of advertising is a lot more dubious. Due to growing inequality most consumers, especially in the US, are already spending all the money they have, and sometimes more. Thus more advertising can't get them to spend even more, collectively, because there simply isn't more. Advertising only determines what exactly the money gets spent on, it doesn't increase the size of the economy or produces anything useful.

The fundamental problem of any advertising is that you know how much you spent on advertising, and you know how much of your product you sold, but you don't know the link between the two. How effective are different channels of advertising? By how much would you increase your sales if you would increase your advertising budget? Is that rise in sales actually due to effective advertising, or was there some other reason?

Internet advertising at first sounded like a great idea, not only because people spend so much time on the internet, but also because you can better measure how many people have seen your advertisement, and how many people clicked on it. Which then pretty quickly led to the next get rich quick scheme on the internet, which basically consists of scamming advertising companies: Fake engagement. Content creators just creating garbage content, and then with the help of AI chatbots or other bots clicking on advertising links creating the illusion that they are very good at advertising your product. This has gotten so bad, that on some social media platforms you can now find AI chatbots being engaged in endless discussions with other AI chatbots over some content that is just AI slop, with no actual human in sight. As economic activity, that makes absolutely no sense at all, if it weren't for the advertising money. Advertising budgets have grown much faster than the economy has grown, but that is obviously not sustainable. Sooner or later the companies paying for the advertising will realize that this is a very bad return on investment, especially if the economy turns sour and heads into a recession. Maybe AI chatbots get so good that we can't tell them apart from actual people actually engaging with content on the internet. But those chatbots sure don't buy any of the advertised products.

To me, all get rich quick schemes are a sign of economic inefficiencies. Whether it is economic value on the internet measured by engagement, then leading to engagement being faked, or it is online shopping platforms enabling dropshippers to insert themselves into the supply chain without contributing anything to it. It all results in some people paying more for no value, and in the long run this isn't sustainable. Amazon shoppers wisen up and buy at Temu instead. Advertisers wisen up and reduce budgets for channels that don't seem to increase sales. Famous internet commerce specialist Abraham Lincoln remarked that "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time". An economy that has too many middlemen that don't actually contribute anything economically is vulnerable to shocks, as downturns make people watch closer where their money is going.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:00 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments
Tuesday, August 05, 2025
 
Frosthaven might have been a mistake

I am beginning to think that buying Frosthaven Digital might have been a mistake. I had thought that buying it for 10 times cheaper than the board game meant I couldn't go wrong. But even that might be too much money if I end up not playing the game.

My experience with Frosthaven Digital up to now is that I did play the tutorial, which felt as if I didn't need it. I played Gloomhaven Digital. I also played both the original Gloomhaven and Jaws of the Lion as physical board games. I know the rules, the digital UI isn't overly complicated, no problem there. Then I played the very first scenario with 3 characters, and promptly lost. And that was at "standard" difficulty, which is the second lowest difficulty provided by the game. Basically I was trying to play a game with 3 characters I didn't know yet, and the difficulty was such, that without a better knowledge of these characters the first scenario on standard was already rather hard.

Now I know how to fix that. I can go to YouTube and watch guides for all Frosthaven characters, which will tell me how to play them well. But a typical Frosthaven character video is an hour long, so it would require several hours of study before I master the characters sufficiently well to beat the first scenario. The Frosthaven Digital game doesn't ease you into the game, doesn't explain the special abilities of each character at all. And the Frosthaven characters are more complex than the Gloomhaven characters. This is not a new player friendly game. That explains in part why the Steam rating is currently just mixed.

Frosthaven is the kind of game where the challenge aligns with my skills. If I wanted, I could certainly "git gud" at Frosthaven, while I can't "git gud" at Soulslike games. But it still feels very much like work. I'm not sure I want that. The Gloom/Frosthaven system has inherently very little randomness, which means every scenario turns into a puzzle with a perfect solution. You succeed in function of how close to perfect you are playing. I much prefer games that give me a sense of exploration and adventure. Having to replay a puzzle I failed at the first try to do it better at the second attempt (and with some added knowledge of information that was hidden in the first attempt) isn't all that attractive to me.

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- posted by Tobold @ 9:42 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments
Sunday, August 03, 2025
 
Shopping therapy, crowdfunding, and board game permanency

Occasionally I feel like buying stuff not because I need it, but because it makes me feel better, shopping therapy. However, as I am not very interested in fashion and clothes, and game stores tend to be small and few, I sometimes end up doing my shopping on a crowdfunding platform, backing some interesting looking game on Kickstarter or Gamefound. It was probably in a mood like that, that about a year ago I backed A Wayfarer's Tale - The Journey Begins. That is a relatively lightweight roll and write game, in which you try to connect all towns on a map while avoiding being eaten by monsters.

With the bouts of feeling the need for shopping therapy usually being short, and crowdfunding fulfilment delays being long, the result is a string of surprise parcels months and sometimes years later. Often after having forgotten completely about the game I backed. Especially if the game, as so often happens, comes out much later than promised. Kudos to Wayfarer Games, who promised A Wayfarer's Tale - The Journey Begins for August 2025, and my parcel arrived on August 1, 2025. Couldn't have organized that better.

Apparently a year ago I felt I needed the deluxe edition of the game, and then still paid extra for laminated maps. Unpacking the game I am wondering what I was thinking. I like the deluxe components, but the game comes with 5 pads of maps (the regular version has only 4 maps), and each pad has 30 pages, which are printed double-sided. I could thus play this game 300 times before running out of map sheets. That is extremely unlikely. I have 155 board games currently, if the database I keep on BGG is correct, and I play every game only a few times before switching to the next game.

Having bought the laminated maps, that can be used repeatedly with dry erase markers, I will most certainly use that version, and not the paper maps and permanent markers that come with the game. But I do realize that this is mostly due to a very theoretical need to be able to replay a board game an unlimited number of times. In reality I'd get bored of the game long before that. On the other extreme, I have legacy games that I played through completely, and which have now been permanently altered with stickers and the like to make it impossible to reset them. I should just throw away the box, but as I remember fondly playing those games, I have trouble bringing myself to just chuck them out.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:29 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments
Friday, August 01, 2025
 
Frosthaven Digital is out

Frosthaven Digital came out yesterday, and I bought it unseen. Well, unseen other than having played Gloomhaven Digital. Which might still turn out to be a mistake, because both the publisher and the developer are different on Frosthaven Digital than they are on Gloomhaven Digital, although the game company for the two board games is the same.

Gloomhaven as a board game is too much for me. Too many components, too many scenarios, too much time to set up and store, too much of everything. Which is why I didn't back or buy Frosthaven, which is basically more Gloomhaven, with a bit of city builder added. To me it was very clear that I would have huge problems getting Frosthaven on the table and play through the campaign, because it would just be too much work. My experience from the Gloomhaven Digital game is that it keeps most of the good things of the board game, takes away a lot of the hassle, and makes the whole experience so much better. Thus my hope that Frosthaven Digital will end up doing the same.

Having said that, Frosthaven Digital is only in early access, and currently has a mixed rating on Steam. If you never played Gloomhaven as a board game or digital game, this is probably not a game for you. It has all the negative traits of an early access game, bugs, warts, and all. And the whole game series is actually rather difficult, having both complex rules and complicated gameplay. Even if the early access version had been better, this would never have been likely to be new player friendly. Gloomhaven - Jaws of the Lion is probably a better starting point, both as a board game and digital.

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- posted by Tobold @ 11:45 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments
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