A reader made a comment about this on my blog recently, and while you don't know my face or voice because I don't do videos, the parasocial quality of the interaction is similar. You feel you know *something* of me, while I know a lot less about you. I'm approaching 6,500 blog posts on this blog, so of course I revealed some part of me. But there are large areas of my life I don't talk about for various reasons, for example most employers wouldn't appreciate if a content creator would publish company internals on social media. Your feeling of "knowing me" is mostly an illusion.

Would you send a complete stranger 5 bucks a month? Probably not. A part of the business model of internet content creation is based on the parasocial relationship between the content creator and the viewer. As we don't consider the content creator to be a complete stranger, we are more likely to pay for a subscription to his channel, send a donation, or support him on Patreon. But if you consider what a monthly subscription to Netflix costs, and how much content you get for that, the subscription to a single content creator on YouTube or Twitch or Patreon is obviously a rather bad deal.

Still, at some point you probably had the nagging feeling that you "owed" the content creator something. I certainly did pay for some of those subscriptions, although now in retirement I cut down on that expense: I still pay for YouTube Premium, which gives some of my subscription money to content creators in proportion to how much I watch them. And I have Amazon Prime, which comes with one free monthly subscription on Twitch, which I tend to give to some channel I like and that doesn't already have a lot of subscribers. If an angel of karmic justice descends on me and wants to smite me for freeloading on what these content creators provide to me, I'll point out to him that I have been providing free content on the internet for 21 years, with minimal financial returns. My karma should be in the positive. :)

To be very clear, I don't think that you owe me anything, however long you have been reading my blog. Creating content on the internet is always to some extent motivated by the desire to express yourself, to share your thoughts with others. Others already reading my thoughts and being interested in what I think is already a reward. When I started this, the idea that somebody would make a living of creating content for the internet was laughable. I am still not convinced it is a very good idea, as tastes are fickle, internet content creator is the ultimate "gig" job, and it doesn't come with a lot of security or a pension plan. There is also something rather base and mercenary about the content which is created mostly with a financial motive, like the streamer telling you about the "best game ever", only to drop the game a few days later and never streaming it again. And even if I might piss some people off by saying so, philosophically you can draw a straight line from the financially motivated Twitch gaming channel, to the Twitch "hot tub" channel, to a channel on OnlyFans. The content creators do what they need to do to get their monthly income. And only very few of them make it on Twitch, the median number of subscribers on Twitch is between 0 and 1.

Note that I also don't think that I owe you something. I am trying to keep up a more or less steady stream of content, but that depends on my mood. When I talk about games that are currently "hot", that is mostly because I myself am often interested in current games. A good part of this blog is a personal diary in disguise, a journal of the part of my life that I don't mind sharing. I don't know if you ever were in a situation where you stumble across an older game and think "I played that, but I don't really remember it well enough to still know what I thought about it". Well, I know where to look that information up for myself.

The peak interest in my blog was around the time when YouTube just started and Twitch was still called Justin.TV. One could speculate in hindsight whether in a parallel life I could have made the move from gaming blogging to creating gaming streaming content and would have made a lot of money that way. In reality, the thought never crossed my mind, due to already having a well-paying day job I liked well enough at that time. Even now, my retirement is financially comfortable enough for me to not search for another source of income. I think I can live with the fact that nobody recognizes me at the Spiel in Essen and waves "hi" to me.

Besides some regional content on Byzantium, the main content of the Roads to Power DLC is the ability to play as a landless adventurer. You gather fellow mercenaries, travel around the map, and make money and gain favors by doing quests. This mostly uses parts of the CK3 engine that weren't even in the original game, the travel system of Tours & Tournaments. As a result, the landless adventurer gameplay feels very detached from the core game of CK3, as if a completely different game had been grafted on.

While your landless adventurer can gain favors leading to him becoming a count or duke, for example by marriage, and landed characters can become landless, this isn't happening all that often. Basically you play the landless part until you are tired of it, and then switch to the original gameplay. The transition isn't very smooth, and the landless adventurer part is clearly suffering from some limitations of the CK3 base game. Already the time scale isn't a good fit, you probably wouldn't want to play a mercenary group over the 600 years that a CK3 game can take.

I think a completely separate 30 Euro game about playing a landless adventurer in the middle ages would have worked better than a 30 Euro DLC that grafts this gameplay onto CK3. There seems to be very little synergy between the two game modes. And while I see why CK3 fans who got bored of the main game welcomed a DLC that is offering something very different, I wouldn't want games to become collections of sub-games with very different gameplay and little connection between the parts.

Arcs has 4 suits of cards. The 7 aggression cards together have 15 actions, the construction and mobilization suits have 19 actions, and the administration suit has 20 actions. The average number of actions per card is thus 2.6, and the average number of actions in a hand of cards is 15.6. However, to play all of those 15 actions, you would need to be the lead player in every round, or be able to surpass the lead player. If you have to pivot or copy, you only get 1 action per card, or 6 for the whole hand.

If, as the starting player, you lead with a low card, let's say a 2 with 4 action pips on it, the other players are likely to be able to surpass that. However, you still come out ahead: The cards higher than 2 have fewer action pips, so even the players that surpass you only get 2 or 3 actions to your 4. If you lead with a high card, you get fewer actions, but it becomes more likely that other players can't surpass you, and only get 1 action from a copy or pivot play. Declaring an ambition messes up this action advantage of the lead player: As declaring an ambition reduces the value of your lead card to 0, you can be surpassed even with a 1. If you use a 6 with 2 actions to declare the Empath ambition, other players can surpass you with cards having 4 actions and actually get more actions than you do. The higher the card you use to declare your ambition, the more costly in terms of action economy that becomes.

One might be tempted to think that a hand full of high cards is good in Arcs, but high cards have the lowest number of action pips. The best hand is thus actually a mix, where you have high cards with which you can surpass and get initiative, but also low cards that allow you to play a lot of actions. If you have a hand full of low cards, you might get lucky when another player declares an ambition and you can always surpass a 0. But you should also seriously consider seizing the initiative. If you would be reduced to pivot or copy every round and only get 6 actions per chapter, sacrificing a card costs you only 1 action, and then playing a low card gives you 3 or 4 actions.

Getting a lot of actions only helps you if you can actually use them. If you were the starting player of the first chapter and lead with a 1 in construction, getting 4 build or repair actions, you'd find that you can probably only build 1 starport and 2 ships, leaving the last action unusable. This is where the use of resources in the prelude step becomes very important: If in the above situation you had a fuel resource, you could first move a ship into an empty sector and have far more options to build.

A typical problem with a "bad hand" is having too many cards of the same suit. There are diminishing returns when doing the same type of actions several rounds in a row. If you influenced in the previous round, you would often be much better off with a secure action than with more influence. Being aware of such things helps you to identify the cards in your hand that are likely to not bring you much of an advantage. While many players shy away from sacrificing a card to seize initiative, you have to consider how good or bad the card you sacrifice actually is. Sometimes the advantage of becoming the lead player is well worth the sacrifice of a bad card.

Gaining an additional action card is extremely strong in Arcs (see my previous post). At the very least it would allow you to sacrifice a card and seize initiative without suffering the disadvantage of not being able to play in the 6th round. But it can also easily lead to situation where you are the only player left with card(s) in hand, you become the lead player by default, and get all the actions on the cards you play without your opponents getting even one.

In summary, being aware of the action economy is very important in Arcs. Getting more actions than your opponents is generally good. There is true skill in knowing when to sacrifice a card to seize initiative, and when it is better to hold onto all of your cards.

Competitive board games are best when all players have a similar level of knowledge of the game. While all 4 players of my game of Arcs were playing this for the first time, two players had only read the rules. I had studies the rules in more detail, as it was me was explaining them at the table, and had looked at some playthrough videos to see the rules in practice. And the last player was the only one who had a large experience with previous games from the same designer, like Roots. That experience showed, and by the end of the second chapter, he was leading with 16 points, while I just had half that, 8 points. With victory for a 4-player game happening at 27 points, I didn't think I still had a chance. But I underestimated how volatile Arcs is.

I started the third chapter being the only one who had captives on his player board, and managed to declare the Tyrant ambition, meaning this chapter those captives were counting for victory points. But the leading player had already scored Tycoon and Keeper in chapter 2, was still way ahead in the resources to win those, and managed to declare both of those ambitions, so he looked very much as if he would win. But I had a "Union" card from the previous chapter, which allowed me to reclaim a played action card, thus getting one more action that chapter. And then I managed to secure another "Union" card. And the Call to Action Vox card, which allowed me to draw yet another action card. So by the end of the 6th round of chapter 3, everybody else was out of cards, while I still had 3 cards in hand.

That proved to be absolutely devastating. Normally in Arcs, the lead player already has a big advantage in the action economy, while the other players often can get only 1 action that turn, unless they can surpass with a higher card of the same suit. But with 3 extra cards I had 3 turns in which I not only was by default the lead player, I also was the only one getting any actions at all. So I used the 3 cards to attack the leading player and raid him. Arcs allows you to steal another player's resources and cards. I had some luck in completely dismantling his defending ships with a good roll of the dice, and the raid dice roll also came out well for me. So I was able to steal enough resources and cards from him to have the lead for both the Tycoon and Keeper ambitions.

So at the end of chapter 3, I was leading in all three of the declared ambitions. As victory points go up with the chapter, that was already 15 victory points. But I also had 4 cities built, which gave another +2 victory points per won ambition, bringing my score for chapter 3 up to 21 points! With the 8 points I had from the previous two chapters, that got me to 29 points, way ahead of everybody else and above the 27-point threshold for victory. While we had taken 30 minutes to explain the rules, and 2.5 hours to play 3 chapters, that still meant that we finished the game in time before the store closed.

From what I have seen in those YouTube playthroughs, these events of one player making a huge amount of points in a single chapter aren't uncommon. I had never seen anybody do or suggest to do it with my particular strategy to accumulating several extra actions, but that isn't the only way a big score is possible. And while I see how these big swings make for interesting stories, I am not sure whether they are the best game design. I'm not saying I played badly, as I managed to see an opportunity and grab it, but still my win felt somewhat luck-based. I got lucky that so many cards turned up that allowed to get extra actions. And because none of us knew how strong those extra actions were, and everybody was busy with whatever he was planning, I was able to grab those three extra actions. I'm fine with a player succeeding a good move in a game, but I would argue that the ability to make 21 points in a good move out of 27 needed for victory, or 78% of victory in a single chapter, is a bit much. And that isn't even the maximum, I would have made 30 points if I had already built my 5th city.

So this is Arcs in a nutshell. Two chapters spent everybody maneuvering into position, and then an unexpected big win by one player who didn't even look as if he was ahead. Arcs is very much a tactical game, not a strategic one. You might think one player is winning after 2 hours, and then in the last 30 minutes another player swings the game. The game is swingy and unpredictable, and some people will love the game for that. The more strategically minded careful planners might not be so enthusiastic. The people I played with, including me, thought that it was an interesting experience, but none of us were raring to go for a rematch. I assume that if you play Arcs a lot with the same people, it somewhat stabilizes, as players learn to see things coming and preventing others from those big wins. But with one board game night per week with changing players, that is not the reality I live in.

Arcs, one of the hottest games this year on the BGG hotness list, doesn't follow this trend. Just the opposite. In many ways it resembles much older games, like Risk, in that a players progress to victory can become rather obvious, and the other players can band together and stop that leading player by destroying his fleet, raiding his planets, and stealing his cards. Arcs actually has a rule about what happens if a player gets completely wiped off the board. That obviously doesn't sit well with people who think the original Scrabble is too competitive. And thus there are YouTube videos on "why Arcs isn't for you", and BGG reviews calling Arcs "mean".

I much prefer board games that have a good amount of player interaction, whether that is cooperative or competitive. Sitting around the same table, players are naturally more polite to each other, even in competitive situations. The toxicity, fed by anonymity and distance, of certain multiplayer online games isn't present in board games. Being in conflict with each other over a game situation while staying civil around the same table is good, it teaches us a lot about reasonable conflict resolution. There is an evolutionary aspect to games as tools to teach us about real world situations in safety, which is why even animals play.

Conflict and competition is part of the real world. Most of us are lucky enough to not have personally experienced armed conflict and war. But even if you are just working in a perfectly harmonious company culture, you can find yourself in a situation where both you and a colleague applied for the same supervisor position, and one of you is going to "win", while the other "loses". Helicopter parents trying to bring children up without ever letting them come into contact with any risk or any conflict aren't really doing their children a favor. Learning how to deal with risk, learning how to handle conflict is an important part of life. I wouldn't want to eliminate all competitiveness from board games, I think we would be losing something in the process.

I would agree that Arcs isn't a board game for everybody. It is not a casual game. While it doesn't have the most complex rules, it has enormous depth. You can't win the game once and then apply the same strategy in the next game: The combination of unpredictable randomness from cards and dice with even more unpredictable actions from other players strongly impacting you makes it necessary to constantly think on your feet and adjust. And that for 2 to 3 hours, or more if people are playing slowly. Arcs also isn't a game in which a first time player is going to do well against more experienced opponents. But for me there is something special about that sort of game, just like with Dune: Imperium: I love to reach the point after a few games where I feel that now I am playing competently, even if I am not winning.

Now populist parties are generally bad news for democracies. They tend to latch onto protest movements, promising simplistic solutions to complicated problems. But if you believe that the Nazis are back in Europe and about to take control, you fell for a classic political misinformation maneuver: Political enemies tend to exaggerate the position of their opponents, trying to make them seem more extreme than they actually are. Thus Trump calls Kamala Harris a marxist, which is probably an endless source of amusement for actual communists and marxists.

The current success of right wing populist parties is solely due to their anti-migration stance. Giorgia Meloni, the right wing populist prime minister of Italy, has the exact same "stop the boats" at the heart of her political program that the UK conservative party had, which is essentially the same as the "build the wall" policy of Trump Republicans. If you look at the more detailed political programs of all these European right wing populist parties, they are all well to the left of US Republicans and Trump. Like Trump they want to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine with Putin, keep fossil fuels, and keep migrants out of their country; unlike Trump they don't want to lower taxes on the rich or decrease welfare payments. These are populist parties, and decreasing welfare isn't popular at all in Europe.

I think it is clear to everybody that if Trump gets elected in November, it will cause measurable damage to the United States of America and the world. The same thing is true for the European right wing populist parties: They could cause some real harm, for example by massively delaying policies against climate change. That doesn't mean that Europe is likely to soon all wear brown shirts and march in goose step towards World War III. While populist right wing parties certainly give a home to people with neo-Nazi beliefs, none of these parties is actually calling for the reconstruction of gas chambers. Their harshest proposed policies usually revolve around not letting any asylum seekers into their countries, and getting rid of some of those that are already in. Which again is very similar to Trump's proposed mass deportations.

The popularity of these right wing populist parties is based on the fact that the more mainstream political parties don't have good answers to the migration crisis. It is obvious to a large majority of Europeans that a large percentage of people coming into their countries "seeking asylum" aren't actually politically persecuted in their home countries, but are coming out of economic reasons. But as nobody knows how to sort them out, there is only a bad choice between accepting "false negatives" or accepting "false positives". Nobody really has a good solution, but the populist "close the borders" policy to many citizens sounds more reasonable than letting everybody in who asks for asylum. It is predictable that the political pressure will over the next decade globally lead to a diminishment of asylum rights, which is bad news for people actually persecuted. That doesn't mean that the people asking for this are equivalent to the Nazis.

In the local primaries to the US elections, one pro-Palestinian candidate lost against a pro-Israel candidate and promptly evoked a "threat to democracy", despite both candidates being Democrats. There is an inflation of rhetoric everywhere, and the consequence is that words become increasingly meaningless. Even Trump isn't Hitler, and the damage he did to democratic institutions during his presidency was rather limited, and would still be limited if he won again. It would of course be better for everybody if neither Trump nor the European right wing populist parties won. But if the only idea that left and mainstream parties have to achieve that is scare-mongering, they won't succeed. Migration needs better political solutions. Fighting climate change needs better political solutions that don't impoverish low- and medium-income earners. It is the absence of answers from the left and center that makes the right strong.

Our experience last year was that when arriving with a car an hour before the convention opened, it was very hard to still find a parking space anywhere. So this year we came in the afternoon of the day before and stayed at a hotel, which wasn't cheap due to the 200,000 visitors of the convention driving up the prices during that period. That turned out to be a lot more relaxing, and very easy for the parking. I hope that if I book a hotel even earlier for next year, I'll be able to get a better price, and stay two nights. We did the convention this time with only a lunch break, but were exhausted by mid-afternoon and left. If I had a hotel room booked for two nights, I could take more breaks for comfort and spread out my visit over two days. I hope it won't be that full next year, because the huge crowd made it very hard to interact with the exhibitors and get some explanation of games.

Ara: History Untold is not a Civ killer. It is a game with currently a score of 76 on Metacritic, and 68% positive ratings on Steam. Player numbers don't tell us much, because the game is somewhat overpriced on Steam, while having first-day availability on Game Pass: So a lot of people figured out that for an unknown game, playing it for $12 on Game Pass is a better idea than playing it for $60 on Steam. I don't think anybody at Firaxis is having sleepless nights over Ara: History Untold.

Having said that, Ara certainly has some potential. The general idea of combining the crafting and chains of goods from games like Anno 1800 with the civilization building genre is a good one. A lot of people are disappointed *because* Ara is fun to play in the first act, and then loses fun much faster in the mid- to end-game than Civ does. There are clearly two potential futures here for this game: One in which it receives great support, and by a number of patches and DLCs becomes a really good game; and another in which the project is somewhat abandoned and forgotten.

Another part of the general public disappointment is due to modern day influencer marketing and Steam refund periods: Ara looks graphically great in a streamed video of act I, and it takes way more than 2 hours of own play to realize its more serious long-term flaws. It doesn't help that not every streamer that is playing Ara is actually serious about it: I have seen far too many of them saying things like "oh, for my first building, I'll build a farm, to grow my starting city"; which simply doesn't work, as farms in Ara only give +3% to city growth. Putting a maximum of resources in round 1 into your Great Hearth to build a feast, which gives +25 city growth, is significantly more important at the start of the game. In fact, I don't build any building at all in the first region of my starting city early in the game, as these central spots are sorely needed later for dwellings and the palace. Building a scout, followed by a spearman, followed by a settler is a much better strategy. By the time you finished that, you'll have a second region, in which a farm on a wheat/corn/barley resource if you have it is probably the best move. That then enables you to build a granary and produce grain stores, which give another +30 to city growth.

One thing I like about Ara, but which is potentially already too demanding for the average player, is that it uses math quite cleverly: Buildings or resources can give a flat +X bonus, or they can give a percentage +Y% bonus. Over the course of the game, the relative value of these changes: In a city of size 12, the +3% bonus of the farm becomes as large as the +25 flat bonus of the feast, and with larger cities the percentage bonus becomes better, while for small cities the flat bonuses are better.

The same level of math knowledge is needed to understand how the crafting of goods works. Typically to produce a good, let's say fabric, you need a certain number of production points, in this case 500. The weaver building will give you a number of points each round, which depends on the city production value (which grows with city level and various bonuses), as well as on the supplies and experts of the weaver building. Let's say that all together the weaver building produces 50 production points, then it takes 10 turns to make 1 fabric. But the fabric has 3 slots to put in resources for accelerated production. And each slot gives +500 production points! If you fill all three slots, your fabric production goes up from 0.1 per turn to 3.1 per turn, which is a huge difference. Some slots can be filled with either a specific resource, e.g. fur, or replaced by putting in wealth. You can get +500 production on the first slot of fabric production with either 1 fur, 1 llama, or 50 wealth. These resources are used *every round*, so the more slots you fill, the cheaper the resource cost per produced item gets. If you have only fur, you can get 1.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur per turn. If you have fur, wool, and silk, you can get 3.1 fabric per turn for 1 fur, 1 wool, and 1 silk. Overall that means that without the correct input resources, producing a crafted good is slow and expensive, while it gets cheaper and faster when you have the right resources. Understanding how all of that works is the key to playing Ara well. Sorry for the math! It takes a lot of juggling, because for some goods the bonuses from resources are a lot smaller than for others. For example bandages at that same weaver have only 2 slots for accelerated production, and they only give +25 production points each, while 100 points are needed to make a bandage. It is a lot more viable to produce bandages without resources than it is to produce fabrics without resources. And while an expert giving +150% to base production of the building is quite impactful to bandages, it doesn't do very much for your fabric, as it doesn't increase the accelerated production points.

As I mentioned in a previous post, each city has 5 stats, and these stats receive a negative modifier based on city size, e.g. -10 at size 6 and -30 and size 12. But the size 6 city has only 3 slots for amenities, while the size 12 city has 6 slots. The game loop of Ara is growing cities to gather resources, crafting amenities from those resources, and compensating the negative size modifiers with the right amenities to keep everything going. That is fun in act I, and would be fun in acts II and III if Ara had the right UI tools to scale, bundle, and automate certain tasks. That isn't the case right now, so having 10 cities with sizes up to 30 in the end game is just too much of a chore to manage, and even fans of micro-management might give up way before that.

The basic game loop of Ara is significantly different from that of other 4X games, like Civilization or Millenia. If you are trying to play Ara like any other 4X game, you won't be very successful. You need to understand the resources and the crafting, and in many cases that only comes through playing; the game often doesn't tell you what exactly you need and how impactful a resource will be before you actually constructed the building. While I can tell you that if you build a farm on a non-resource space to just grow basic food will produce different amounts of food based on the fertility of the specific region and the city size, the math for that is so obscure that I haven't understood it fully.

If I'll start another game of Ara, I will probably just play until the end of the first act and then declare myself the winner if I am leading in prestige. Setting the difficulty right for this to be interesting isn't obvious. It is possible to set the difficulty for the AI to a different level than for yourself, and that might be necessary: If you apply the same high difficulty to both yourself and the AI, the AI becomes stupidly aggressive and unresponsive to diplomacy, as well as cheating to a frustrating level. Thus I might try a game with a high difficulty for myself to make the economy challenging, but lower difficulty for the AI to make the cheating and bad diplomacy less crippling.

For example in my current game, I am on turn 275, in the last era of the second Act. I have 10 cities, which have 130 regions, and each region has between 2 and 5 zones. The game tells me that I have 85 crafting buildings, but doesn't offer similar information about harvesting buildings and support building. But I'd guess I have around 200 total buildings to manage. Every turn I craft 70 to 80 items, which I know because the game insists on giving me a stack of 70 to 80 popups every turn, and there is no way to close them all at once. Crafting buildings are privileged in that there are tools to show, for example, all your weavers. Harvesting buildings don't have a UI like that, and if you are looking for all your iron mines, you need to cycle through the list of harvesting buildings of all your cities, manually. That is probably because harvesting buildings can only produce up to 3 different things, while some crafting buildings can produce a dozen different things. While there is an UI to display crafting buildings, there is no way to either automate them, or to issue bulk commands to all of them. If you want all your weavers to switch from making fabric to making rope, you need to do that manually. And for each individual building you need to not only set the produced item, but also the resources used. If you don't have specific resources, you can sometimes replace them with money, or you will craft much slower. It is an extremely detailed system, which is fun enough as long as you have a very limited number of buildings, but then gets rather tedious by mid-game.

Cities have 5 main stats: Happiness, health, knowledge, prosperity, and security. Some buildings add to these stats. But mostly the stats are falling whenever the city is growing. So much of the stuff that you are producing in all these crafting buildings are amenities, consumables that give a stat boost for 5 to 10 turns. It is complicated, but manageable in Act I. But by getting more cities, and having each of these cities growing to more regions, balancing your cities' needs with the production of amenities becomes really tedious. And the imperfections of the UI makes every action take more clicks than it should do.

And that is Ara in a nutshell, a game mostly about crafting consumables. This is the part the devs really cared about. In some instances you can get an excruciating amount of details on crafting, like for example how much production you are losing due to rounding errors. The other parts of the 4X game mechanics are much less informative. Combat still gets some interesting numbers shown, but the battle animations are useless. Diplomacy is nearly completely a black box. One AI opponent offered me an alliance, and when I accepted he denounced me a turn later and started a war against me. With zero information what would have caused this radical change of mind. You never get messages that you are settling too close, or that you should keep your troops away from his territory. You just get a meter that ranges from adversary to ally, and that can fluctuate wildly without giving you any reason.

I will stop my current game, because there is no victory condition I could fulfil early. The winner is the player with the most prestige, and I already have twice as much prestige as the next player. Setting the difficulty right is somewhat difficult in Ara: At the end of each act, the lowest third of the players in prestige is getting kicked out of the game. Unless you specifically disable human players getting kicked out, you need to set the difficulty level low enough to be at least in the middle third of the prestige ranking at the end of the first act. But if you do that, you probably top the charts by the end of act 2. The AI difficulty, like in all 4X games, is set by how much the AI players are cheating, and that tends to be much more impactful in the early game.

Overall Ara feels as if the devs got a huge budget from Microsoft and made a very beautiful game, which doesn't work all that well in the long run. Unless you absolutely love micromanagement and crafting, I don't think I can recommend Ara for $60. I can, however, recommend paying $12 for the Gamepass for one month and trying Ara out that way. You'll probably still have time to try out a bunch of other games that month.

On the other hand, later today Ara: History Untold is getting released, and it will be on the Game Pass from day 1. As this is $60 on Steam, and I probably would have bought it, I am keeping my Game Pass subscription for the moment. I also want to try out the recently released Frostpunk 2, although I never got around to play the first one.

Board games are frequently even more expensive than computer games, especially if you consider the larger crowdfunding projects. I just backed A Wayfarer's Tale: The Journey Begins for $82, and that doesn't include shipping yet. I just received Thorgal: The Board Game, and with shipping that cost me €111. I usually take just the core game with maybe a handful of selected extras these days, because I learned that going for the $200+ all-in pledge usually isn't worth it.

In spite of all these rising costs for entertainment and games, my overall annual spending for my leisure is way down. The reason for that is that I used to travel a lot more. But since the pandemic, I haven't taken a single flight anymore. First of course there were restrictions that kept me from flying, but I quickly realized that I wasn't missing traveling all that much. And a flight anywhere costs a lot more than a PC game or board game. A week in a hotel that isn't abominable is easily a thousand bucks. There are cheap package holidays, but they aren't only "cheap" in the sense of not costing much, but also often in the quality of the service. Cruises are not only even more expensive than other holidays, but also make me feel like part of a herd of cattle being prodded through various locations.

There is a general expectations for people like me in the early phases of retirement to travel a lot more. I am not convinced. I believe that the trip you take at 20 leaves you with a lot deeper experience and more memories than when you take the same trip at 60. At 60 you are more likely to notice that the mattress in that hotel wasn't all that comfortable, and due to memory loss you don't remember the voyage as intensively as a young person. Many locations suffer from serious over-tourisms these days, and aren't actually all that much fun when visited in a large crowd. Thus I have gotten a lot more selective in my travels. I prefer visiting spots that are closer to home, I prefer renting a holiday apartment rather than going to a big hotel, and I prefer city trips to some exotic tourist attraction or the beach. I also don't need 3 weeks of holiday just to relax from my 50-hour work week anymore.

Although I have financially provided for my retirement, the loss of monthly income is noticeable. Nobody wants to run out of money later in retirement, as you don't know how much care you will need later. Cutting down on big ticket items like travel is probably the wiser strategy for keeping my money together. It allows me to not worry about the cost of my games for the moment.