The better solution would obviously be to resell the game. But if the game isn't very good, isn't very rare, and isn't in pristine condition, that is not so easy either. If you sell it online, on a platform like eBay, you risk meeting obnoxious people with extremely high demands only wanting to pay bottom dollar. There used to be a shop in the area buying used games for a pittance, but even they stopped doing so. While international websites like BGG have a marketplace section, international shipping for a big box game is very expensive.

So I looked around for a national board game forum, checked whether they had a marketplace, and then asked on the forum whether their rules allowed me to a) give a game away (to avoid the discussion how little a used game is still worth) and b) limit that offer to people who would come and get the game by car (avoiding shipping cost and effort). That worked out pretty well. The game I mostly wanted to give away was Malhya: Lands of Legends. I had backed that on Kickstarter, it arrived over 3 years later, and by then it wasn't really a game I wanted anymore. Malhya is a game that would require a lot of effort to learn and play. If I am going to play a game of that complexity, it would have to be a top rated game like Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. It was obvious that Malhya isn't quite that good, and I didn't see me put that much effort into a just okay game.

On the forum I found somebody living an hour or so drive away from me who was only too happy to get Malhya for free. We chatted online, arranged to for a date where he would come and get it, and I asked him whether he would like some other games as well. He did, so I also got rid of 4 big boxes of Tainted Grail in different conditions from played to new; I had tried the main campaign three times and never finished playing it, so I had given up on that game. And I also gave away another big box campaign game, Artisans of Splendent Vale, where I hadn't realized on backing the game that it was in fact an attempt to bring the culture wars into board gaming and make a "politically correct" adventure game, with limited success. I threw in some smaller games which I had played and not liked all that much, like the recent Covenant.

This ended up feeling like a win-win deal: I gained two empty shelf sections, and the guy got a car boot full of games to play. As he clearly appreciated those games more than I did, that felt a lot better than throwing the games away. I do think that I will do further collection cleanup actions in the future. In the end, a board game I don't want to play is better off elsewhere than collecting dust on my shelf.

The Forest Shuffle games are a mix of luck and strategy. You can spend your turn drawing two cards, either blind from the stack, or picking up cards other players discarded. Many cards you want to play then have a cost of discarding other cards, with some cards giving bonuses when the discarded cards have the right color. What you are trying to do is to play cards that have synergies with each other. For example there are cards that give victory points for every bird you have in your habitats, or cards that allow you to draw a card every time you play a bird. If you have those, then bird cards become rather valuable for you, and you'll want to pick up the bird cards another player might have discarded, because for him they were of no use.

One flaw in this is that if you play against experienced players, they'll see what cards you need, and avoid discarding those. There are also tricks like discarding cards when the discard row is nearly full, at which point they will be permanently removed before the next player can pick them up. Unfortunately that means that if you play against less casual players, your chance of picking up a discarded card that is really good for you is slim, which then means that the game becomes more about luck, and less about strategy. The other big flaw of the Forest Shuffle games is that counting all the points at the end is a lot of work. Some people even developed apps to count the points faster, but those don't necessarily speed up the process all that much.

Forest Shuffle: Dartmoor is a game I would certainly recommend if you don't have any other Forest Shuffle game yet. The rules aren't much more complicated than the original, and the balance of cards is better. In the original Forest Shuffle, the player drawing two wolves or more won most of the time, while certain other strategies were much inferior. The expansions to the original Forest Shuffle somewhat diluted the wolf problem, but didn't solve it completely. In Dartmoor it is a lot harder to say which is the best strategy. Dartmoor is also a good game if you have already played a lot of the original Forest Shuffle and want more variety.

It is said that Recall is an evolution of a previous game, Revive, but I didn't play that. So I'll try to explain from the ground up. Recall is a game that is played over 13 rounds, with some other things happening in mini-turns in between. In each of the 13 rounds you can either insert a key in a slot in your player board or you can recall all your keys. You start with 2 keys, so if you manage to gain a key before turn 3, your first recall will be in turn 4. Then if you manage to get another key before turn 8, your second recall will be in turn 9, and the game will be over before the third recall. I got this very simple math wrong, thinking that I would have an advantage if I concentrated early on getting keys. But the reality is that it is simple to have only 2 recalls in 13 turns, and impossible to get down to just 1, so the keys are actually not all that important.

While your starting keys are blank, you can get keys with symbols on them during the game, either as new keys or from upgrading. If you insert a key in a slot of your player board, you then do all the actions shown as symbols on the key plus all the actions shown as symbols on the slot. As you can also upgrade the symbols on the slot, moves tend to be short in the early game and get longer over the course of the game. Still, 13 turns feels short to achieve everything you want to achieve, and we didn't even reveal all of the map tiles before the game ended.

Much of the game is played on those map tiles, which consist of 7 hexes, one in the middle, and six around. Two starting tiles are revealed at the start of the game, the other tiles need a special reveal action, at which point the revealer can choose the orientation. The hexes have different types of terrain, and the terrain determines what kind of building can be built on that hex. The overall map is elongated, and all players start at one end, exploring the map in roughly the same direction. Getting anywhere first is an advantage: The first building on a hex is cheaper than the second or third, some spaces have a single relic cube to collect, and excavation hexes only have 3 ability stones to excavate on. So while the player board has 6 slots to put keys in, 4 of these slots are some variation of moving your followers across the map and then interacting with the hex by building or excavating.

Every player starts the game with a tribe, that gives him an asymmetric player power. We followed the suggestion to distribute those randomly for the first game, but I had the impression that these powers weren't all that balanced, and one player got a lot more out of his power than the other two in our game. There are also three, initially hidden, neutral tribes in the game. A big part of the game is going up on three knowledge tracks, which reveals these three tribes, and then allows to use their powers. The player with the winning strategy concentrated on these knowledge tracks, and it turned out that they also score the most victory points in the end scoring. Tribes also come with random gadgets, and players can during their turn use ability stones to activate the powers of the tribes or the gadgets as a free action. Besides keys and ability stones, an important third resource are crystals, which come in three levels from white to pink to purple, and which are used to pay for some building or excavation actions, or to boost certain moves.

It is totally possible that if you add up all the symbols on your key, your key slot, and your free actions from tribes, gadgets, and crates you found, you will do 6 different things in a turn. Helpfully every player gets 6 green cubes, which are simply used to mark which symbol you already used, as you can use them in any order. But as you can imagine, doing many different things in a turn in any order makes this a rather complex game, and if you are the kind of player who tries to optimize things, you can well take a rather long time for your turn due to analysis paralysis. Recall isn't really a game for casual gamers playing intuitively, as they would score rather badly. There are six different scoring cards, plus a secret objective card per player, and players need to make decisions on the scoring cards and the objective card in those intermediate mini-turns. That creates quite a point salad, so by the time I realized that my strategy was bad, it was way too late to rectify.

Still, I had fun playing Recall. The long setup is due to lots of things being randomized, so the replay value is quite high. And Recall is clearly a game which I would need to play a few times before getting a solid feel of which resources and actions are more valuable than others. I can totally see a group of players that have the time for 4+ hour sessions regularly to have great fun playing Recall repeatedly. Unfortunately for my board game night time constraints, Recall disqualifies itself. It isn't really the optimal game for pickup groups, but would benefit if everybody had already played it a few times. For me it means I won't be able to get Recall to the table all that often, and that much diminishes the game's value for me.

In isolation, the reason for charity appears obvious: You give to Unicef, you save children's lives, and you make yourself feel better about yourself. Or you express your gratitude towards some community website or content creator for entertainment provided over the past year.

As soon as there is more than one demand for charity, things become more complicated. You have only a limited amount of money to give, so who is more deserving? Should you give to Unicef for the children, the World Wildlife Fund for the animals, or to the Red Cross for some specific catastrophe relief? What about political implications, of for example giving aid to Gaza and potentially ending up funding a terrorist organization? How does a donation for a website or content creator stack up against a donation for somebody in need? For any dollar you give to a charity, how much is actually reaching the charitable target, and how much is "lost" paying administrative costs, paying a first world secretary instead of feeding a third world child?

You obviously can't give to everybody. Which leaves you with two solutions, neither one being really good: Either you give to some causes, based on random encounters and gut feeling; or you don't give to anybody at all. I have to admit that this year I mostly went for nobody at all, seeing how much lower my pension is than my salary previously was, and feeling as if I first needed to see how my retirement finances are going to work out before giving money away. In the middle of a global cost of living and inflation crisis I don't blame anybody who decides to not give any charitable donations.

What I am extremely sceptical about is the growing percentage of the economy that is based on donations. Yes, part of the influencer business runs on sponsoring contracts or advertising revenue, but another part of it clearly runs on donations. One reason I pay for YouTube Prime is that part of that money is distributed to the channels I watch proportionally to how much I watch them, which makes me feel less bad about not donating to anybody's Patreon they remind me about in every video. A part of the gig economy is running on tips, with a potential big gap between what a delivery driver thinks he should get for delivering a $20 pizza, and what the recipient thinks would be a fair tip.

In the end everybody gets squeezed between some sort of social pressure to donate and tip, and the economic pressure of not really having money to give away. The amount of money the median household has left after paying for a roof over their head and a long list of life's necessities is shrinking, and the number of people who want donations and tips is growing. That doesn't look sustainable.

Technically, Tend is in the flip & write genre of games. That is to say that every round 5 cards are flipped over (actually 2 of them are flipped a round earlier, so you can see what is coming). Every player independently chooses 2 of these cards, and performs the action from that card. In round 1, there are only very basic cards, which contain the 4 fundamental actions the game has: Tending, fishing, chopping, and mining. Over time more and more cards with a second part are added to the game: First do a basic action, and if you fulfill a certain condition, you get an additional reward. As you see the upcoming cards in advance, and they get reshuffled with the basic cards once the deck is empty and thus come back, you can try to prepare and be able to fulfill the condition in order to have better turns in the future.

The "write" part of the genre means that you don't represent goods or items in the game with any sort of meeple or cardboard token. Instead you mark it with a pen on printed sheet of paper. There are a lot of roll & write or flip & write games in which that piece of paper is relatively simple, sometimes no more than a grid on which you then draw a map (Cartographers) or a network of railways and roads (Railroad Ink). But Tend is much more complex, comparable to games like Hadrian's Wall. But Hadrian's wall uses a mix of meeples and printed pieces of paper you write on, while Tend doesn't have any meeples at all (but it has dice you rotate to represent plants and animals).

Thematically, Tend is like a cozy game, a paper version of games like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. You collect resources, which you can either sell, or use to craft improved tools that make your actions better. Once you think your tools are good enough, you concentrate on shoving the resources in your cargo bay, where they will score you victory points. You also gain victory points by achieving intermediate objectives, which are different each game, and badges, which are not. As tools don't give victory points, the trick is to know at which point to switch from using your resources to improve your tools to producing cargo. The action selection mechanic, with just 2 actions per turn and just 12 turns, means you need to optimize to get as much done as possible.

The overall result is that the gameplay of Tend strongly resembles typical Euro board games that aren't flip & write. In fact, I am pretty certain that you could theoretically design an alternative Tend game that has exactly the same rules and gameplay as  flip & write Tend, but uses only meeples and tiles and cards as game materials, with no writing at all. Which brings me to the philosophical discussion on why Tend would choose to represent its game elements with paper you write on, instead of with reusable game components. Because the consequence is that Tend can't be played forever, at some point you'll run out of the preprinted sheets and scratch off cards. There are ways to replace stuff, even print sheets yourself, or use an app instead of a physical scratch off card. But out of the box Tend is a game in which you use up game components while playing and throw them away at the end. And some people strongly dislike that aspect.

If you think of our theoretical Tend the Euro game with meeples, tiles, and cards, and you look at the actual printed sheets used to play Tend, you realize that the printed version is smaller, and a lot faster to set up. For example for mining and chopping each player has a scratch off card with two areas of 7 x 8 squares. They are random, and you could achieve the same effect with tiles, but that would mean you need to set up 112 tiles per player randomly at the start of each game, which certainly would take a good amount of time. In the printed version, these squares are also just 8 mm x 8 mm small, which for cardboard components would be rather fiddly. Those mining / chopping areas and the cargo bay area in a game with cardboard tiles would probably have to be bigger. Drawing a shape on paper, or using the stamp side of the pens in the deluxe version, is also a lot faster than finding the correct cardboard tile. I recently played Covenant, a board game I bought at Essen, and really didn't like the long setup of cardboard components and meeples at the start of the game. Tend in cardboard is theoretically possible, but in reality impractical, expensive, and cumbersome.

But besides the practical advantages of sheets of paper to mark game states, there is also the haptics of it. The scratch off cards are fun because not so many games use them. In the deluxe version of Tend, the stamps on the colored pens are fun because not so many games use them. There is just an inherent pleasure in scratching off spaces or stamping shapes into your cargo bay in Tend that feels unique at this point in time. Having said that, the system certainly has disadvantages, and I'm not just talking you ending the game with colored pen markings on your fingers. The small size of the squares is sufficient for the player sitting in front of the sheet of paper; but in a multiplayer game, even just looking at the paper in front of the player next to you, isn't likely to give you a complete picture of his state of the game. And normally you could / should play Tend simultaneously instead of consecutively to not make the game take too much time. Which means you look even less at what the other players are doing, and Tend quickly turns into a multiplayer solo game, where everybody is just playing for themselves with very little interaction between players. Which is an inherent issue in roll/flip & write games. On the positive side, it makes Tend more suitable for solo play than many others of the board games I own.

I very much like Tend, both as a solo game, and for small groups. I am not very worried that I can't play the game forever, because (200 divided by player count) is still a large number, and I don't think I ever played any board game that often. It is possible that the haptic fun of scratch off cards and stamping with colored pens will fade over time, but right now it feels innovative and unique. Pricing of Tend is somewhat weird. I paid $99 for the deluxe version, plus another $50 for VAT and shipping. But with the standard version costing $69 plus VAT plus shipping, I feel that the deluxe version was well worth the slightly higher price. If you bought the standard version and than bought the stamp pens and extra sheets separately, you would pay a lot more. Admittedly there is an advantage of the standard version coming in a smaller and lighter box, as the deluxe version is rather big and heavy if you need to transport it. It is very possible that 100 copies of everything is enough, and the pencils last longer than the stamping markers. Well, I'm happy with my deluxe version. The only component I still upgraded was a longer scratch off tool with a smaller tip, but I had that already for a previous legacy game with scratch off components.

Regarding the latter, I observed a curious phenomenon in this holiday period, that apparently some readers are "catching up" and commenting on old posts. I just wanted to let you know that in that case your comment will not immediately appear. As many comments on older threads are spam, Blogger is set up so that I get to moderate these comments automatically before they are published. That can take a day or two. But don't worry, your comment didn't get lost or deleted, it is just delayed.

In a similar vein, I would like to apologize also to all readers whose comments ever got caught in the spam filter. False positives happen. Again, nothing gets lost, I can identify the comment as not being spam and then it gets published, just with some delay.

Europa Universalis V simulates a lot of things at a rather small scale. There are 28,570 locations, and in each location there are several population groups, and several buildings in which they work. If you were playing a country with 10 to 20 locations, you could already be rather busy to optimize the production of various raw materials, their further refinement in buildings, and their trade. But even Portugal, which I played in my last run, already starts with 67 locations. Hungary has 189 locations, and the Great Yuan in China have 1,855 locations.

Nations with over 100 locations have a lot more of historical content than small nations. EU5 offers a lot to you if you want to play let's say either England or France and experience the Hundred Years' War. But if you do that, you can't really occupy yourself with managing all your locations and economy at small scale. There is an additional problem with the time scale, for example if you wanted to trade manually, you'd have to adjust your trades every month; in a game that spans 5 centuries, that is 6,000 months of manual adjustment. In my Portugal game, where my number of locations grew due to colonization, I ended up using mostly the mass build button. That probably didn't give the best results, but my economy felt too big for individual fine tuning.

I would like to play something smaller, but version 1.0.10 of the game is getting into my way. Since release there has been a battle ongoing between people who thought that the AI was playing countries too passively and those who thought that the AI was too aggressive. Right now, the AI is very much on the aggressive setting. In some cases, safeguards have been installed in particular to make some countries playable: While in my Portugal game I used console commands to save me from being immediately conquered by Castile, that specific protection of Portugal has now been added by the last version of the 1.0.10 patch. But right now no such protection exists for small HRE states, and several people have shown time lapse videos in which the HRE patchwork practically disappears in the first century of the game. I'm just happy I played Holland and Mecklenburg in earlier patch versions, because right now these countries don't seem very viable anymore. Holland was always threatened by France, but now it is rather often also being invaded by England.

Players who like to play large countries appreciate if AI-controlled large countries are aggressive and pose an actual threat instead of being pushovers. But for players who want to play a small country, sitting between several large neighbors that frequently attack you feels pretty bad, as you can't really defend yourself against them. I felt as if Portugal was already more than big enough for me, and as I like the economic gameplay more than I like the military gameplay of EU5, I don't really want to play one of the big countries that then more or less automate their economy.

To which Larian Studios replied that, yes, of course, they are using AI placeholder artwork for the production of their freshly announced Divinity game. Causing more outrage from people who have no idea how games are made. To me, with my history as a dungeon master for roleplaying games like D&D, the idea is pretty obvious: The creative person that is designing a scene for a game is not necessarily the creative person that will ultimately provide the artwork. A game designer might decide that his game needs red barrels that explode when hit, and put a placeholder red barrel in. Later in the process, a person in a coordinating role sees that the game needs a final image for a red barrel that looks explosive, and then asks a graphic artists to draw that image, with maybe an art director checking the coherence of that image with the graphic style of the rest of the game.

Some people might remember having played alpha or beta or early access versions of some game, where not all placeholder art had yet been replaced by the final artwork. In older games that was often rather obvious, the placeholder being something like a purple cube. Those had the advantage of being obviously placeholders and easy to spot in quality control. But I can totally see the advantage for the game designer to use an AI generated placeholder artwork in the design process. Not good enough for release, but easier for game design and communication to already have art that somewhat resembles the object you want to depict.

As a DM, my creative output was the adventure, the story I was trying to tell. As I can't draw, I could only ever use "stolen" artwork when I felt a scene needed an illustration. And trying to find an illustration that more or less fit to the story I had created was cumbersome. I would have loved the ability to create AI art for that. I totally understand why the people who create the stories for games like Clair Obscur or Divinity might want to use AI art for these placeholders, as it makes it easier for them to see whether an idea for a scene works. For a computer game, for which the art is a selling point (which wasn't the case for my privately run D&D adventures), you then need an art director and quality control to make sure that any placeholder artwork is replaced by a better version created by an actual artist. You don't want the final customer to see the intermediate placeholder, for the same reason that you don't want your client to see all the drafts and sketches of everything. As Bismarck said, it's like sausages, it is better not to see how things are made.

I think that the Indie Game Awards rescinding the awards for Clair Obscur, or people complaining that Larian is using AI to make Divinity, is an exaggerated reaction and part of a general AI panic that is as unnecessary as it is unhelpful. It is like complaining that Rembrandt used coal drawings to make sketches for his oil paintings. Making a computer game with a large team is most certainly an iterative process, in which intermediate steps like sketches and placeholders are very necessary. One placeholder slipping by quality control is a minor error. Using that to create headlines that might make people think that the excellent art of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was produced by AI is disingenuous. And there won't be any AI art in Divinity either. Larian described their use of AI as "an optional tool for devs that want to generate a reference image for Larian's concept artists to use". I find that is a totally valid use of AI generative art.

If you read my posts from back when I backed Malhya in 2022, and when I finally received the game in October of this year, I was optimistic that this could be a good game. Since then my optimism had faded quickly. In part that is due to me looking at the game and the rules. In part that is to other people publishing their experience with the game. And I think the problems some people have with the game are rather important general criteria to judge a campaign game by.

The reason I was optimistic about Malhya is that it provides the things that I want a narrative campaign board game to provide: On the one side some fantasy story or fantasy world to explore and have adventures; on the other side some sort of system, combat and otherwise, in which board game mechanics are used by the players to have their characters perform actions and try to overcome challenges. I used to play Dungeons & Dragons, and these sort of board games are kind of "roleplaying games in a box" or "roleplaying games without a dungeon master". While I would say that a roleplaying game with a dungeon master is inherently superior to a roleplaying game without one, that advantage is reaped mostly by the players who aren't the dungeon master. Me, having mostly been the dungeon master in my roleplaying games, I have a lot less work and stress in a game without a DM.

And that brings me to the other side of the equation, which also applies to selecting the best campaign board game: How much work does setting up the game, learning its rules, and then playing it actually involve? The main reason I am less optimistic about Malhya now is that in an attempt to make the game less language-dependent, the developers decided to use hundreds of different icons on the cards and other game materials. That is a bit as if you had cards with text on it, replaced the text by translating it into hieroglyphics, and then asked of the players to learn those hieroglyphics to play the game. Many games use iconography to replace at least some text, but that tends to be a handful of icons, at maximum half a page in the rulebook. Malhya has an icon glossary that covers an astonishing 8 pages, and sometimes the differences between icons aren't all that obvious.

The game we are currently playing, Tidal Blades 2, has a rulebook of 35 pages. That might seem a lot compared to other board games, but these narrative campaign games tend to stretch over 50+ hours of gameplay. That is fundamentally different to games you can play through in a single evening, where you wouldn't want to have much more than 20 pages of rules even for a complex game. (And yes, number of pages is just an approximate measure, as some rulebooks have more illustrations and examples than others.) Malhya has 80 pages of rules. Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era has 98 pages of rules. And if a group wants to play such a campaign game, that is going to be in several sessions, going on for months. Reading the rules once isn't enough, all players are supposed to have at least a large part of the rules memorized, and only look up special cases when needed.

So why is Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era on our short list, and Malhya isn't? I have already played one session of Elder Scrolls: BotSE, and know that it is a complex masterwork. Chip Theory Games have been making successful games with similar combat systems for over a decade, and Elder Scrolls is the sum of all what they learned over the years about how to make this combat system interesting, combined with the very interesting Elder Scrolls universe and the closest a board game can get to open world adventure games like Skyrim. Malhya is the first game of a small group of 4 people; while they poured years of effort into this, according to the reviewers they haven't quite nailed it yet. To the best of my knowledge, Malhya would require a large effort to bring to the table for an okay result, while the Elder Scrolls: BotSE would require a large effort for a more likely also great result.

The other extreme from the shortlist would be Kinfire Chronicles. The initial rulebook is tiny. When you look inside the box of Kinfire Chronicles, you find a lot of other boxes representing the scenarios. The game is designed to be learned while playing, nobody has to read a long rulebook in advance or memorize pages of icons. Kinfire Chronicles is more like Tidal Blades 2 insofar as there is a main story being told by a sequence of scenarios, and much of that is just linear. There is no such thing as adventuring in an open world, and besides some minor branching or side quest options, there is no decision to take as to what to do next. In Elder Scrolls: BotSE you start by deciding in which region of the world to adventure, and what quest from what guild to pursue. In Kinfire Chronicles you start by opening box 1 for scenario 1. Kinfire Chronicles gives up freedom in exchange for accessibility and ease of bringing the game to the table.

And in the end, that is our decision to make. Do we prefer a game with more potential, but a higher barrier to entry? Or are we okay with less choice and a linear story in exchange for quick setup and better accessibility? How much tactical depth do we need, and how much work are we willing to put into learning the rules for more complex combat? Before actually playing a game, it is not always obvious to see how much effort a game demands, and even less how rewarding the experience from that effort is going to be. Especially if you buy a game years in advance via crowdfunding. It is totally possible to buy a huge box of game for $200 and then find that there isn't enough fun in there for the effort.

My colonial empire consisted of the southern half of the continent of Africa, the western half of Australia, and a Central American empire reaching from Florida to Peru, and from Venezuela to Mexico, including all of the Caribbean. I used to Columbian Exchange event to bring maize, potatoes, chilis and tobacco to Europe, and cocoa to Africa. I found out that the trick is to use Divert Trade from your colonial nations, giving you half of their trade advantage and capacity. Once Europe starts needing all those colonial goods, having the best trade advantage in all your colonial markets enables huge profits.

What I found disappointing was that without control over a market, trade doesn't really work all that well. I never managed to trade spices or tea from Asia, as I didn't conquer anything there. Especially tea was weird, as producing countries like China only produced enough of it for their own population needs. There was simply zero tea in any European market, despite the English actually having a "teatime" additional need in their country. With zero supply, I don't know how such a need would have historically developed.

Trade profit breaks the game, as cost in your economy are calculated on your tax base, not your overall income. I was able to manage to avoid the revolutions of the Age of Revolution by simply not taxing my commoners and burghers, and still had excess money. And I was able to put all expense sliders to maximum expenses, being able to afford a much bigger army and navy than my population would suggest. Although I never conquered much land in Europe, I ended up as a great power, and hegemon in multiple areas. So I stopped playing out of boredom. And I am not immediately going to start another game.

2025 is another year where, especially in the US, the headline figures of good economic growth don't appear to fit with what the average citizen is feeling in his wallet. The phenomenon has in the past been described as "vibecession", but that isn't really a good description. Instead we are looking at a failure of economic indicators like GDP being able to describe what is actually happening. Inequality is now so high that Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package is distorting GDP growth more than the economic reality of millions of Americans. It is perfectly possible for a country to have good GDP growth, while the majority of people get poorer, and a small elite gets much, much richer.

That is problematic in a context where globally in the long term GDP growth will at the very least slow down a lot, if not decline. That is in part due to the expected stagnation of population growth, as population growth in the past added a lot to economic growth. Another part is climate change, where GDP growth will either be hampered by climate catastrophes or by humanity having to spend global resources more frugally to avoid that catastrophe.

The political problem of economic indicators like GDP or stock market indices is that these increasingly only describe the economic situation of a rich minority, and don't reflect the economic wellbeing of the majority of the voters. That isn't to say that there is no subjectivity in the perceived economic wellbeing of the voters. Among all this discussion of economic doom and gloom on the internet are hiding realities like the enormous growth of the US self-storage industry over the past few years, because Americans have more stuff than they ever had. Even the global housing affordability crisis is a mix of a real lack of supply and a growing demand of living space per person, which has doubled over the past 50 years in the US. The fact is that a voters would be unhappy even if their situation just was stable and not improving. But today their situation is probably getting worse, our economic indicators are failing to reflect that, and there is only so much that politicians can achieve with culture wars smoke and mirrors to deflect attention from the economic reality.

Now I have unboxed the game, studied the rules, and prepared it for my board game nights of next week. I even played it in a mock 4-player game against myself to understand it better. And I am still very much enthused, and hope that the other players will equally like it. At least the game raised some interest: We often organize us on Discord to what we play, and I found 3 other players interested in just over an hour.

While Clank! and Dune: Imperium have a deck-building core, in Lightning Train that has morphed into a bag-building core. Which feels slightly different, but should be statistically the same, whether you draw a card from a perfectly shuffled deck, or draw a tile from a perfectly mixed bag. Just like in many deck-building games, part of what the tiles in Lightning Train do is provide a currency with which you can buy new tiles. There are ways to trash your starting tiles to slim your bag, so all the elements of a deck-building game are there.

Where Lightning Train is very different is on the board, in the railway building part. Some tiles are simply train segments, while other tiles (with a Lightning Train symbol) give you more new train segments. The train segments you can spend either to build a railway line, so the tiles are gone from your bag, or you can pay for other things on your player board, so the segments go to your discard pile and then back into the bag. The last important type of tile is the contracts, which determine in what region of the board you can operate. The board shows the United States during the 19th century, and one goal is to connect coast to coast with the Transcontinental Railroad. The contracts everybody starts with are on the east coast, but then you can buy other contract tiles that get you westwards.

There are several sources of points, and who has the most points at the end wins. One important part is two "mogul" cards, which either give you an upgrade or provide you with an objective that scores points at the end of the game. These are interesting, because you get them right at the start, and they can orient your strategy. If you get an objective to connect cities in the Rocky Mountains, that is where you'll want to be heading. Then you get points for building certain railway lines: The shorter and easier ones don't give points, but longer and tunnel lines give a few points, and some tile effects can double those. Finally players build stations all over the map, and these stations are the end points for goods deliveries. Goods pop up at the start of every round, and if you can transport them to the station that needs them, you get points for every of your rail lines you used, but other players also get points if you used their lines. While connections tend to be short in the early game, later there can be longer deliveries which can make quite a bunch of points.

Overall I quite like Lightning Train. But it is definitively less strategic than Dune: Imperium. The mogul and action cards, while welcome for the added variety they bring, also introduce more randomness into the game. A close game might be decided by who drew the more convenient mogul objective card. On the positive side, Lightning Train is a bit lighter than Dune: Imperium, although heavier than Clank!, and is very well suited for my board game nights in length and complexity.

Also today another $5 item I ordered from a smaller online shop arrived. It was something I couldn't get elsewhere, and so I bought it despite the rather outrageous $20 shipping cost. The parcel is small, less than half the size of a shoe box, and light, so I really don't see why shipping it would cost $20. I have a serious suspicion that this smaller online shop has made more money from me by fleecing me on the shipping cost than the profit margin on the $5 item was. It probably makes business sense for smaller operations to have a relatively high floor on shipping costs, so people rather do bigger orders.

Two $5 items bought online, shipping costs between $0 and $20. I wonder how much it actually costs to ship items for an online company. I guess Amazon has built their whole operation around having the fastest and cheapest logistics, and the same parcel costs them a lot less than it would cost me if I went to the post office.

As an European, I am very much used to prices being quoted already including value added tax. Earlier this week I got a board game I pre-ordered, Lightning Train, directly from the publishing company. The game was just below €50, but besides €14 in shipping I then also paid another €13 for VAT. So there is another trap that can make an online order unexpectedly pricier than I had thought. No wonder I end up buying stuff on Amazon whenever possible. They don't always have the lowest quoted price, but with the VAT already included and no shipping cost often end up cheaper than other offers.

My campaign board game group just finished scenario 17 out of 18 of Tidal Blades 2. After a break for the holidays, we will finish that campaign in January. Then we will have to decide what campaign game to play next. Due to my crowdfunding habits, there is an abundance of choice. Even after pre-selecting, there are still 4 candidates: Kinfire Chronicles, Oathsworn, Arydia, and Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. The first two are structurally similar to the campaign games we played before, in that there are a number of scenarios to play through, with very little branching. The latter two have an "open world" element to it, where you walk over a map, and have encounters, rather than a linear series of scenarios.

I haven't made much progress on my board game stack from the Spiel 2025 in Essen, having just played two more games since the last gaming status: The Hobbit - There and Back Again, and Railroad Tiles. EU5 is in part to blame, eating up time I could otherwise use to prepare board games. But also my board game nights have had an increased number of other people bringing their games, and so I have been playing classics like Dune: Imperium or Arcs rather than the latest games I bought.

Once you think of it, this also reveals an interesting fact: The pension crisis isn't the fault of today's pensioners. In fact, if all the money today's pensioners have paid in during their work life had been saved up in their name, their pensions would be a lot safer. It is a triumph of capitalism, where an individual saving system combined with compound interest over decades yields much better results as the "intergenerational solidarity" pay as you go systems.

The obvious problem is that it is hard to impossible to change from a pay as you go system to an individual savings system, as the currently working generation would have to pay both the pensions of the previous generation and their own. Many pension systems all over the world produced surpluses when the baby boomer generation was paying in, there being so many workers per pensioner. But politicians took those previous surpluses and spent it on other stuff, so the money is gone and can't be used to fix the system for the future. Not having locked the money in individual savings accounts also missed out on the compound interest that would have accrued.

In short, the pension crises all over the world are real, but they are self-inflicted. A sequence of larger and smaller generations doesn't cause a pension crisis if every generation pays their own pension.

Published Horrible Guild has over the past years been rather successful with the Railroad Ink series of roll & write games. So in September of last year they launched a Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles. It has the same idea of trying to build a network of rails and roads, but as the name says uses tiles instead of rolling dice and having to draw the network yourself. The Kickstarter delivered on time this year, and extra copies were available at Essen, where I picked up a "Kickstarter version" of the game.

In Railroad Tiles, 5 sets of between 2 and 4 tiles are set up. The first player takes a set, then the second player, and so on. The set not taken receives a star token as additional bonus, the sets are filled back up, and a new player order is determined. Basically, if you chose the 4 tiles set, you will play last, and the fewer tiles you took, the earlier you can choose next round. After 8 rounds, your network is scored, and the game ends, which takes about an hour with 4 players.

Placing you tiles in your network is a puzzle, as there are different things that score points. You will want to take tiles with placement spots for pedestrians, cars, and trains, and connect those. Each round you can place between 1 and 3 of those, and you score points in function of how many of them you connected, up to a maximum of 5 per placement. In my first game I totally underestimated how quickly that adds up and concentrated on other scoring objectives, ending up last in points. Other scoring objectives are the number of tiles in the biggest rectangle, rewarding you for building compact; number of clusters of 3+ cities; and avoiding loose ends of roads or rails leading nowhere.

I like Railroad Tiles better than Railroad Ink. The tiles are prettier and less messy than hand drawn networks, while the puzzle remains more or less the same. But still, this is a lighter and faster game than the average games I play, and so I consider it more as a filler, or for board game nights where we prefer to play a series of shorter games rather than one taking all evening. There are already a bunch of expansions out for Railroad Tiles, but I don't think I'll play this often enough to necessitate expansions.

Personally I don't regret having bought EU5 at all. Even the 85 Euro I paid for the premium edition means I only paid 50 cents per hour up to now, and I am far from finished with this. I can see myself playing this quite a lot more in the coming months, and when I eventually want to move on, I can see myself coming back repeatedly over the coming years.

Having said that, EU5 is an extremely slow game. On my computer a year on the fastest speed without any interruptions takes nearly 2 minutes, or 3 hours for a century and 15 hours for the complete five centuries. If you actually play, a full game takes at least 50 hours, and if you like looking and managing many details, it can easily be 100+ hours for a single run. A full game of a typical 4X strategy game would be a lot faster, so EU5 already isn't for everybody because of that.

My main purchase warning is related to this: While EU5 is perfectly playable as it is, the developers are currently very busy with patches, and those patches can massively change how whatever country you chose plays. For example, this week patch 1.0.8 moved from beta to live, and it messed in a major way with the loyalty of your vassals and the centralization / decentralization values. I was lucky that I started my game on the beta version, so now I just switched to the live version without any changes affecting me. But some people's ongoing games were seriously messed up by the changes.

If you combine frequent patches that introduce massive changes with a game that takes up to a 100 hours to complete, and people who might not like me have 40 hours per week to play, the risk of your game being messed up by a patch becomes rather significant. If that is something you dislike, and you don't want to play a game that feels a lot like early access with regards to devs still experimenting with major game mechanics, I wouldn't recommend buying Europa Universalis V. If you don't mind the changes and the potential chaos, then there is a lot of fun to be had here, and I recommend the game.

Please note that these massive and frequent changes also affect any content you watch on YouTube. If you see for example a video telling you that you absolutely must strive to maximize your centralization value, regardless of what country you play, that video was only correct until patch 1.0.7. Under the current 1.0.8 version the advice would be a bit different, depending on your number of subjects.

The reason I felt I needed to cheat was the current state of Europa Universalis V, where it is extremely difficult to keep peace with your neighbors. As a player, you tend to make your provinces rich, which causes neighbors over the centuries to start desiring your land. Unlike EU4, you aren't being told which lands, and there is no diplomatic action you can do against that. Even if they have been allied with you for centuries, they'll break the alliance and eventually attack you. The only thing that works is forming a defensive league, which the AI has less tendency to break (instead they needlessly keep voting on changing the rules back and forth). As playing Portugal is nearly impossible if Castile / Spain keeps attacking you, I used the console commands to form a defensive league with them at the start of the game.

Compared to my EU4 game as Portugal, where I ended up conquering most of Morocco, in EU5 I was actually weaker than Morocco, and only conquered Granada. I have a small vassal on Moroccan territory, but that is it. So most of my efforts have been directed towards improving my economy, and then using the gains to finance exploration and colonization. It is a sort of a cheat that I already know the Americas exist and can work towards discovering them, while the rest of the world is still ignorant about that fact.

In this game, this focus on exploration worked rather well in my first century. There are a number of islands in the southern part of the Atlantic, like the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde. In the Age of Discovery they become important staging point for discovering America. In this game, at the end of the Age of Renaissance, I control all of these islands, thus having an advantage for future exploration and colonization. I also managed to explore the way around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, discovering Madagascar. However, colonization is very slow before the Age of Discovery, and I don't have the colonial range to get there yet. The reason I was able to explore that much was some luck with events: You can send a character to explore somewhere, but normally don't have access to specialized explorers before unlocking them with an Age of Discovery technology. Explorers get a 0.5 bonus to exploration progress, which means that even the worst explorer is between twice and three times as fast as a non-explorer in the Age of Renaissance. But I was lucky to get an explorer by an event several times, and that really got my exploration much further than anybody else's.

Up to version 1.0.7, everybody always went for Centralization as one of the most important values of your nation. That increases crown power, which increases your income from trade and taxes, and keeps the estates in check. In version 1.0.8 Centralization comes with a huge negative impact on the loyalty of subjects. So I had to reverse course and am now trying to move towards Decentralization, as a centralized colonial empire doesn't really work anymore. Right now I can't even annex my vassal in Granada, as they are disloyal to me due to the Centralization penalty. It seems the idea is that countries with lots of colonies or vassals decentralize, while Centralization is better for playing tall without subjects.

I reached the start of the Age of Discover in good shape. And then the New World institution spawned in Lisboa, giving me a further advantage for discovering the Americas. I am having a lot of fun with this game, and am looking forward to see how all this colonization gameplay is going to work out.