On the plus side of playing Mecklenburg was a good start, due to a location right next to the Lübeck market. It also was a good experience of the reformation within the HRE. I didn't do any discovery or colonization. Absolutism was boring, I felt it was easy enough to push through. And the Age of Revolution was just annoying, with revolutions happening on a random 1% chance per month unless you lower all your taxes (which I did after the first revolution), and the revolutionary war being not very interesting.

I don't think I'll play much ironman in the future. I'm not really that interested in achievements, I just didn't want to have none of them. It was more a proof of concept that the game *can* be played on ironman from start to finish.

My next run is probably going to be Portugal. However, I might need to use some console commands for that. Paradox is still tuning their AI, as people tend to complain both if it is too aggressive and when it is too meak. The problem is that an AI that acts okay in one region of the world might end up with unwanted outcomes in another region of the world. The current AI is made in a way that results in Castille almost always attacking and crushing Portugal. That is already true for AI Castille against AI Portugal, and then gets worse for player Portugal, as players tend to make their country richer, and thus more desirable for aggressive neighbors.

Now you might say that the historical reality of Portugal resisting being taken over by Castille and later Spain is an abnormality. But EU4 managed to make that at least a possibility, while EU5 hasn't gotten that far yet. So if I want to play a game in which I don't expand in Europe and concentrate on exploration of the new world and colonization, I will need to cheat a bit. It should be possible to force Castille into an early alliance / defense union they wouldn't accept without cheating, and go from there.

Offering free bus passes or childcare is very far away from the communist ideas of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Opposing genocide in Gaza is very far away from 9/11 jihadism. And wanting to deport harmless illegal immigrants is still very far from fascism and the Holocaust.

The incorrect use of these words by politicians and the media then leads to even more use of them in social media. People describe themselves as victims of fascism for any minor administrative inconvenience they had to endure, indecently trying to elevate their hardship to that of somebody who survived a concentration camp. The 1881 welfare reforms by Otto von Bismarck, a staunch conservative, would be called communist if proposed in 2025 in the USA. In the end you have different versions of Godwin's Law, always calling everything in the most extreme term, and completely eroding the meaning of words.

I'm still on my Mecklenburg run, my overall second game of EU5. It is an ironman run to be able to get achievements, and I plan to play until the end in 1836. But bugs and changes to the game did have some weird consequences to my game. For example there was a now fixed bug in which the HRE emperor with the "demand unlawful territory" ended up getting random provinces for himself. In my game that gave Bohemia a north sea harbor, and it is now rivaling England in the colonization of North America.

Having quit my first run after becoming emperor of the HRE without wanting to, I maybe should have made some different strategic choices as Mecklenburg. Instead, in between the player country having a tendency to expand faster than AI countries, and my decision based on history to make Mecklenburg protestant, I found myself leading the protestant side in the religious war of the HRE, won, and ended up as the emperor again. At least this time I wasn't just elected randomly.

In hindsight, I found out that in my first game with Holland, I had by chance avoided a country specific disaster, the hook and cod wars, which frequently triggers if the ruler dies in the plague and the heir is weak. In my second game, I made it to the Age of Absolutism, only to find that by choosing absolutism over liberalism I was hit by another brutal disaster, called court and country. I must say, I'm not impressed with the design of disasters in EU5. They consist of a series of punishing events, and don't feel as if you as the player can do much about them. If a good game is a series of interesting decisions, the EU5 disasters don't live up to that standard.

I am not the richest country in my game of EU5. But I am the 5th richest, despite my country just being a mid-sized duchy in a historical poor part of Germany with no valuable resources. My economy is five times the size of France's. I'll be punching well above my weight in the coming religious wars. That is also because EU5 has a built-in transition in the 16th century from peasant levies to regular armies. Peasant levies are limited by your population. Regular armies are limited by your ability to pay them. EU5 has a helpful indicator on the military tab of your country, telling you how large the game thinks your regular army should be, given the size of your country. My actual army is three times the suggested size, but even in war I just spend a 6th of my income on army maintenance, and thus could easily afford a much bigger one. I'm just waiting for the next technological advance, which will make peasant levies obsolete.

A lot of weirdness is stemming from the fact that there are costs in the game that scale with the size of your economy, and others that do not. The size of your economy is the size of your tax base plus the sum of all purchase costs of your trade. So when doing a big purchase that depends on economy size, like embracing an institution, I can simply stop all trade and suddenly pay a lot less. Meanwhile costs like growing a town into a city aren't changing much over the course of the game, so the around 1500 ducats that costs were prohibitive in the early game, while now I make enough money in a year to do it twice. Why would I want to do that? Well, if you have enough money, the size of your army is then limited by your manpower, and you need towns and cities to build more of the buildings that increase that manpower.

On the one hand, it is quite fun to play this way. The the other hand, economic success leads to some outcomes that are ahistorical, unbalancing for gameplay, or both.

The early positive reviews for Arc Raiders, generally above 90, were tanked by a review from Eurogamer, which gave the game a dismal 40. Not because the game wasn't fun, or had technical problems. Arc Raiders simply had one single feature, AI voice acting for text-to-speech chat, that the reviewer objected against. Which is funny, because the reviewer actually reported positively on an encounter with other players who told him "we are looking for lemons", and I can't think of any way other than AI that would have enabled the game to have voice chat for such a phrase. Pre-recorded human voice chat is all nice and dandy, sounds better, gives work to human voice actors, and all that. But you can't possibly have a recording for everything one player might want to say to another. And if you let players just talk to each other via microphones, you get into all sorts of problems, because you are unable to moderate harassment and other unwanted behavior.

Now I don't mind a reviewer mentioning such a pet peeve in his review. But a professional review giving a game an unusually low score because of such a pet peeve is rather unprofessional. And in the early days around release date, when there are not many critics reviews available, a single very low review can skew the picture on review aggregation sites like Metacritic by a lot. And gamers notice, which ultimately just accelerates the movement away from relying on professional critics. Political activism disguised as a review is just shoveling the grave for professional game criticism.

EU5 achieves a lot of things by simulation, or as the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun said: "Geography is destiny". Unlike EU4, in EU5 your control over your provinces is strongly influenced by proximity to the capital. As a coastal country you can project that proximity by sea, but a landlocked country like Hungary can only build roads, and is limited by the technology for that, with railroads only arriving close to the end of the game. With mountain ranges limiting proximity and thus control, and slowing down your armies, limitless expansion has become a lot more difficult in this version. The simulation works reasonably well in motivating AI controlled countries to behave similar to what they did historically.

On top of that, there is historical content in the game, much of it country or region-specific. There are one-off events, and longer situations, like the Black Death or the Hundred Years' War. These usually change a number of parameters, rather than being totally fixed, e.g. I've seen the Hundred Years' War end after 30 years, because France reached the victory condition for it early. There are also country specific disasters that can happen when certain bad situations happen in the simulation. Plus there are country- / region- / religion-specific entries in the tech tree. The technology system is also much influenced by the institutions that unlock parts of the tech tree, and these appear in a historically accurate time frame and region. Not exact location, in my first game the printing press appeared in Leuven, Holland instead of Mainz, Germany, but there is a list of possible spawning locations, so it can't spawn for example in Beijing.

AI countries don't always behave historically. Sometimes they simply can't, because players don't behave historically. While the mechanics are in the game for Brandenburg to form Prussia, they won't do so in my current game, because I am playing neighboring Mecklenburg and took a lot of Prussia's future territory. In my first game, my Holland discovered and settled North America before the English ever got there. But again, geography is destiny, and with the New World institution spawning on the Iberian peninsula, and the distance simply being smaller, Spain and Portugal are more likely to colonize South America than other countries are. Some players delight in uncovering hidden ahistorical possibilities in the game, for example you can revive the Carolingians in Europe, or Carthage in North Africa.

At the start of the game, when you select a country, you will get information about how many country-specific events and bonuses are in the game. A lot of lesser countries have none, but historically important countries like England already have over 200. And while in EU4 patches also contained new game mechanics, EU5 follows the concept of other newer Paradox games of putting game mechanics in free patches, and country-specific content in DLCs. For example the first DLC announced for Q1 2026 is Rise of the Phoenix, with additional content for the Byzantine Empire.

In the end, all of this makes Europa Universalis V a historically flavored simulation game, with plenty of alternate history mixed with historical events. And there is some randomness in the simulation, so letting the game run in pure AI mode won't result in the same outcomes every time. I like this middle ground, but of course there are people upset about something historically important not happening in their game, or on the other side something historical happening and messing up their game.

Unlike other roll & write games, where all players get to use the same rolled dice, The Hobbit is a dice drafting game. First player rolls 5 dice and picks one, then the other players in turn pick their dice. This continues as long as there are dice left, so in a 4-player game the first player gets a second die, while in a 3-player game the first and second player get 2 dice. The player who is the first who didn't get another die will be start player the next round.

From the 5 dice, 3 are showing between one and three spaces with paths, e.g. a straight path followed by a corner. You can rotate or mirror that as you want and then draw those paths on your map. Paths can overlap or cross existing paths to form connections. The other two dice have 3 different symbols, breads, swords, or wizard hats, representing different resources. You can also often get the same resources by drawing a path over the same symbol on your map.

What makes The Hobbit a rather interesting game is that your map is in a booklet with 8 different scenarios, giving 8 slightly different games. In each game the goal for your paths can be different: For example in the first scenario you need to connect 12 dwarves to Bag End, while in the second scenario you are drawing a path from Bag End to Rivendell. The different resources also work somewhat differently in each scenario. That gives the game a very good replayability.

The Hobbit: There and Back Again takes under 1 hour per scenario, and has very little setup. If you have a bit more time, you can play several scenarios one after another, and the game remains interesting enough. There isn't much player interaction, other than objectives that score extra points for the first player to achieve them. For example, getting Gandalf to Bag End in the first scenario while having enough bread to feed him gives 10 points, but the first player to do so gets 12 instead. The worst thing a better player can do to a less good player is finishing the game early, and the less good player will still have had some fun pursuing his goals.

While I am usually not a huge fan of roll & write games, because I find they got boring quickly, I really like The Hobbit for the greater replayability and variations in scenarios. I'd give it a 8 out of 10 score.

Less than 2 hours later, my bug report got a reply of "Hello there! With your help, we have now confirmed the issue and added it to our database!". Given that EU5 this early after release still has a lot of bugs, and the bug report forum is full of posts, I was impressed by the speed of response. Even if fixing the bug still might take some time, I got the feeling that I made a positive contribution and was heard. Now that is good community management!

I was motivated to stop because I was a bit too successful: I had become the 2nd ranked great power in the game by accident. The Holy Roman Empire had simply chosen to elect me as their emperor, although I wasn't an elector, and had done absolutely nothing to curry the favors of the electors. That felt weird to me, ahistorical, and not actually that much fun. The other success that was ahistorical was that I had already discovered North America, and had colony growing in Maine. With England nowhere in sight, mostly because the Hundred Years' War had dragged on a bit over a century, it seemed that I was the only colonial power in North America at that point.

The other reason that I didn't want to play on was that I do like to check on YouTube and Twitch what content creators are doing to get some advice. But I'm not the only one for who the first century took so long, and thus content for the Age of Discovery and beyond is actually hard to find. Florryworry has a Twitch stream on Holland, but that is because he plays extremely fast, and thus explains a lot less. What I did learn from him was that there is a sort of exploit, where you do take locations you don't actually want in peace negotiations, and then sell them for thousands of ducats to the great powers. That boost your own economy and hobbles the economy of the great power, as these locations aren't actually worth that much to them.

So I started a second game now, with ironman and achievements enabled, playing Mecklenburg. That country has a nice location right next to the Lübeck market center, and a lot of smaller neighbors you can gobble up quickly at the start of the game to grow into a duchy. I won't do any exploration and colonization in this run, and hope that I don't get elected emperor of the HRE again. I just want to play a mid-sized country through 5 centuries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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