Tobold's Blog

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

Menace first impressions

I played Menace for 18 hours now, and have formed a first impression. That impression is basically that Menace is a good game with an accessibility problem.

You start Menace with 4 squad leaders, chosen from a pool of 8. During the game you can hire additional squad leaders randomly, including those you didn't initially chose, out of a total pool of 16. Squad leaders come in two flavors, infantry or pilot. Pilot squad leaders don't actually have a squad, but have a vehicle like a jeep, armored personnel carrier, or walker mech instead. Infantry squad leaders have between 2 and 8 squaddies; they also have a squad weapon, which is carried by every member of the squad, and a special weapon, which is only carried by the squad leader. Thus when using the squad weapon, the damage output is multiplied by the total number of squad members, but when using a special weapon, the squaddies are just meat shields.

The interest of Menace lies in the huge amount of possible combinations this system allows. Squad leaders have a tech tree that has both generic skills, and skills only that particular squad leader has. For example, there are special weapons that usually need to be deployed to be used, but one starting squad leader looking suspiciously like Mr. T can fire them from the hip. For every mission you need to consider which squad leaders to bring, what squad weapons and special weapons they should use, what accessories like grenades or ammo pouches would be useful. The sniper rifle with the high armor piercing might be great against strong single / small group enemies, but relatively useless against large swarms.

What you can bring is double limited: You start out with crap equipment, and neither need to find better items, or barter other loot on the black market to buy some. But every mission also comes with a supply point limit, so even if you have a lot of different squad leaders and good equipment, you can't bring them all. Squaddies are also a resource, so you can run low on those if you have too many casualties. And the supply cost of your squad weapon and armor is multiplied by the number of squaddies (+1), so if you bring a squad leader mostly because of his special weapon, you might consider giving him fewer squaddies.

In addition to all that, Menace also has three friendly factions on the three different planets you can currently visit. Doing operations for them gives you trust with those factions, which unlocks special equipment for your spaceship. That can be some support stuff, like getting new squaddies, or repairing vehicles, or additional combat options like orbital bombardment. While at the start of the game you are fighting just two different types of enemies (pirates or aliens), a third type of enemy (rogue) appears after a few operations, and a fourth type (the cyborg Menace the game is named for) comes somewhere later.

And this is just early access. You currently have already great replayability, with different squad leaders, using different weapons and skills, fighting different enemies on different biomes (forest, desert, snow). And the strategic map suggests that more planets with more factions might come in the future, and there will probably be more enemies and more gear as well. Menace thus has a great potential longevity, and is already good value for money.

Having said that, it isn't easy to get into this game. Menace has three difficulty levels, normal, challenging, and expert. That there is no "easy" difficulty level is not just to protect the easily bruised ego of the average gamer, but also an accurate description: Menace is not easy on normal difficulty. The tutorial doesn't teach you much about the game other than basic controls. And in your first games you are constantly surprised by what the enemies can do, and that can easily result in major losses. Menace also doesn't appear to have any fail forward systems. Your combat missions are part of an operation of usually 3 or 4 missions, and there are limits to how much you can recover between missions. So if you are doing not so great, later missions can become increasingly hard. Or you could end an operation with more losses than gains. Which is bad, because while you have more supply points for your next operation, so does the enemy. If you don't manage to progress your team faster than the enemies do, things can go downhill quickly.

The lack of information can also lead to you taking wrong decisions with very bad consequences. For example you might have decided to stick your original squad leaders and make them stronger, instead of hiring additional ones. Then suddenly the game springs the "weary" debuff on you unannounced, and you learn that you need to rotate squad leaders in order to keep them operating a full strength. If at that point in time you don't have the resources to get new squad leaders, you are royally screwed. With various points in the game like that, where you get punished with a bad consequence for a decision you didn't have the information for to know better, Menace is one of those games which I restarted after reaching mid-game, just because I thought I could do a lot better after knowing more about the game.

The good thing in all that is that it confirms my suspicion that it is worth buying Menace, instead of having time-limited access to it on Game Pass. Menace is still very much early access, and often a bit rough. It is fun to play now, but if you are allergic to unpolished games, it will probably get better in the future. This is something I am having fun playing now, but can easily see myself playing again in the future, when there is more content and more quality of life additions.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:53 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Monday, February 09, 2026

Insulation

It is a cold winter in the US and large parts of Europe. While that seems surprising for first world countries, there is a significant amount of energy poverty, and people are dying from cold and cold-related illnesses in cold winters. It would obviously be better if everybody's living was adequately heated. But in the current situation, that requires a lot of energy.

So how much energy does one need to heat a house to let's say 20°C when the outside temperature is let's say -10°C? The scientific answer to that is "it depends"; and what it depends upon is mostly insulation. Just imagine under these conditions you would leave your windows wide open, it is obvious that it would be nearly impossible to heat a house like that. Basically the energy in form of heat that you need to provide to a house to keep it at a certain temperature is equal to the heat energy leaving the house. And that depends on how permeable the surfaces of the house like walls and windows are to heat, and the temperature difference between inside and outside.

The good news is that while perfect insulation is impossible (it would suffocate you), it is totally possible to insulate a house to a very high degree, so that even if there is a big temperature difference to the outside, very little heat needs to be added to the house to keep it warm. If you ever hear terms like "zero energy building", that mostly is about that sort of insulation. That is somewhat easier in Europe, where even basic houses are mostly built out of bricks, than in the US, where many houses are built out of wood. But zero energy buildings do exist even in the US. And in more climate change conscious Europe, building standards are evolving to require better and better insulation.

A well insulated house means that even if energy costs are high, heating is still affordable. And even in cases of extreme events, like winter weather resulting in long periods of electricity outages, you could keep a well insulated house warm with just a propane heater. As most people heat with some form of fossil fuel, widespread improved insulation would also significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions from heating. And insulation works both ways: If the outside temperature is cold in winter, but hot in summer, it is also easier to keep an insulated house cool with less energy. As a personal note from living in a zero energy building, insulation is also not limited to heat, and also works well against noise from the neighbors.

So why aren't we all living in well insulated houses? Because insulation is expensive. A lot of young people are complaining about how housing was a lot more affordable for previous generations. That is supported by graphs showing an increase in the average cost of a median house divided by the median income. But if you look at the data closer, you will realize that "a house" bought in 2026 is both larger, and built to higher building standards, including insulation, than a house built in 1976, which explains at least part of the higher cost. In most places, building a house to 1976 standards today would be simply illegal.

The biggest problem with insulation is the large existing housing stock. Well insulated houses obviously have much thicker walls than less insulated houses. But if you plan on insulation while constructing the walls, that is easily manageable. Adding insulation to an existing wall is a lot harder, and needs thicker coats of insulation materials added. You don't want to add those on the inside, as it would very much shrink the rooms, but adding them on the outside isn't that easy either. You can improve things for existing houses, but it would be very hard to get to the same degree of insulation as a newly built zero energy house.

So the world is moving towards better housing insulation, but slowly. It is something to think about if ever you are in the situation where you would construct your own house. Insulation makes the house more expensive, but the payout for reduced energy cost of heating and cooling in most places makes this an investment with a very good yield.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:57 AM Permanent Link (2) comments

Sunday, February 08, 2026

Kingdom Crossing

Another post in my series of board game reviews from the stack of games I bought at the Spiel Essen 2025. This week I played Kingdom Crossing twice, and it immediately became my favorite game from the Essen haul.

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg is a math problem from the 18th century, which mathematician Leonhard Euler proved was impossible to solve. Kingdom Crossing is based on this problem, and we are playing anthropomorphic beavers on a board with 4 areas, connected by 7 bridges. Every turn we move to another area to get a card on display there, but in the 4 turns that make one round we can cross every bridge only once. A hot air balloon helps in solving this otherwise impossible task.

You don't have to do any math to play Kingdom Crossing, but I found the mathematical background interesting. Ultimately, Kingdom Crossing is a game of set collection, where you try to maximize your victory points over 4 rounds of 4 turns by collecting cards. The movement restriction, and the bonus points you get if you cross all 7 bridges, make this a lot more interesting. Every card comes in one of 5 colors, and you want to collect sets of all colors to build houses. But you also get points for the number of cards of each of the first 4 colors, but only if you also gathered the corresponding resources, and decorated that row of resources with flowers and beaver statues. And each card also gives you an immediate bonus. You can also collect building cards, which provide an income each round, but don't add to your color sets.

The rules of Kingdom Crossing are quickly explained. But making the most of your move isn't easy, so the game took us 2.5 hours with 4 players, mostly due to people having to think about their moves. Of course, if you play with people less prone to analysis paralysis, or people who played the game before, the game becomes quicker. What was interesting in our two games was that the different sources of points seem to be rather well balanced, so there isn't a huge difference in final player scores. Which had the advantage that nobody felt that he wasn't in the competition anymore.

The game components are of good quality, with lots of painted wooden meeples. Only the resource counters on the player boards are a bit small. Other than the rulebook, there is no text, so the game is language independent. Artwork is nice, and there is even art in the inside of the box and box lid. Excellent value for money at 40 Euros.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

Thursday, February 05, 2026

Recalculating and changing my mind

In direct contradiction to what I said in my previous post, I bought Menace on Steam today, on release day. That was basically because of the price. Menace is a €40 game, but for the first two weeks after release it only costs €30, a 25% reduction. Now once upon a time, the PC Game Pass was €10 per month, so for €40 I would have gotten 4 months of PC Game Pass. These days, the PC Game Pass is €15 per month, and given the discount, Menace costs the same as only 2 months of PC Game Pass. Also, it will presumably be quite a while before Menace is discounted by more than 25% in a Steam sale, so I might as well buy it right now.

An additional consideration for me was that I expect Menace to have several patches and content additions for a year or so, and then a release version. Buying the game now means I can play now, stop, and play again when there are additions or changes I like. While I still don't technically "own" my Steam games, I do at least have access to them unlimited in time. If I had paid the same €30 for two months of Game Pass, I would have to worry about timing, doing some research at what state the game is in at the moment I "rent" it for 2 months.

But I would say that this is a borderline case. If Menace had been a €60 game with 10% discount, I would probably have gone the PC Game Pass route. For €30, I don't regret adding it to my Steam library for a longer time.

- posted by Tobold @ 4:10 PM Permanent Link (1) comments

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

Unmenaced

If you are following news about strategy games, you are probably aware that tomorrow Menace is going to be released. It is a Sci-Fi tactical battle games by the makers of Battle Brothers, Overhype Studios. Nomen est omen, as the Romans said, I do have the feeling that Menace is overhyped.

I played the demo, but it didn't grab me. I played over 80 hours of Battle Brothers, but called it a quite well reviewed pain in the ass. Unfortunately, Menace is missing two major features that made Battle Brothers good: The oversized character heads on the battle map (characters in Menace are too tiny to recognize at all), and the map exploration part of the game. Menace does share the lack of accessibility of Battle Brothers, but that obviously isn't a good thing.

I really wonder if the game would have received any hype without that Battle Brothers pedigree. Honestly, just look at some screenshots: The game looks awful, the UI is all wrong, there is too much unnecessary tiny text all over, and the buttons are too small. In actual use it turns out that a lack of tooltips often results in information you can't understand or easily find out about. This is one of those games in which you would have to do hard work for hours before having any fun at all. Menace certainly is deep, and has a lot of replayability, but the learning curve is steep and painful.

I played the Menace demo on Steam. But then an instinct I required over the past few years kicked in, and I checked whether the game will be available on Game Pass. Yes, it will, from day one. Which means that I will absolutely not buy the game on Steam. I don't have a current Game Pass subscription, due to a money saving scheme of mine where I don't pay for subscriptions I am not currently using much. But I'll probably be subscribed to Game Pass for some months later in 2026, and I might have a second look at Menace then. There is also some suggestion that on release Menace will still be a bit rough around the edges, and waiting a few patches might actually be a good idea.

- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Sunday, February 01, 2026

Enshrouded

Recently, I wrote about having selected an open world survival crafting game to play, Enshrouded. Ten days later, I have already played 85 hours of that game, more than 8 hours per day. It is fair to say that I like Enshrouded a lot. Once upon a time, I was a MMORPG blogger. And the early games of the MMORPG era, like Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies, conjured up a future of the genre with player housing, resource gathering, crafting, and a world that was changed by the actions of the players. That turned out to be a pipe dream. But Enshrouded plays like the MMORPG I've been dreaming about 20 years ago. Obviously that is only possible because it is *not* massively multiplayer, so nobody is spending hours mining a mountain to sculpt it into a giant penis. But Enshrouded does achieve the goal of feeling as if I am interacting with a world, and not just doing endless quests like in World of Warcraft.

Enshrouded is voxel based. And while small areas can't be built upon or destroyed, most of the world can. While Enshrouded doesn't have climbing like in Legend of Zelda, you can use your pickaxe or explosives to cut a staircase into the mountainside and get up that way. Or you can place an altar and build a staircase up. While every altar only covers a certain area in all three dimensions to build on, you can build a nearly endless staircase by building a second altar at the top, and then removing the altar below, repeatedly. I have one altar in the middle of the map above the highest point, the pillars of creation, which allows me to use my glider to get to a lot of places.

But Enshrouded isn't just a resource gathering and crafting game. It is also a role-playing game with action combat, in which you have quests to do, and dungeons to crawl. Your weapons are mostly found by looting various chests or boss monsters, while you armor is mostly crafted. So there is a nice back and forth between a RPG adventuring part, where you go into a new region to do quests, kill monsters, and gain xp and levels, and a crafting / building part, where you see a new mineral vein in that new region and start mining it, or chop a new sort of tree for a new type of wood. In some cases it is up to you whether you would like for example to harvest plants in the wild, or whether after finding the first plant you turn that into seedlings and start getting that resource by farming. Even animals can be tamed and put into a barn in your base, which makes getting wool from yaks easier than hunting them.

Your base can be rather simple: You need a roof over your head, some beds for crafting NPCs, some chests for storage, and some machines for crafting. You can make it fancier, and some decoration adds to your comfort, giving you a nice buff after leaving your base for some time. But you can make it even much fancier with purely decorative stuff. Sometimes at the bottom of a dungeon the reward isn't just some weapon, but a new type of building block. While your first base will be a log hut or rough stone building, as that will be the first building blocks you get, you will get a huge variety of those blocks over the game. That allows you to build anything from medieval city houses to haunted castles to marble palaces. It just depends on how much time you are willing to spend to gather the necessary resources and build the base of your dreams.

There are two major progression systems in Enshrouded. One is a classic xp and level system, giving you skill points for a skill tree, in which you can specialize. Do you want to be a mage? A barbarian? A ranger? A warrior? An assassin? There are lots of possibilities, and you can easily respec if you aren't happy with the result. The other progression system is the level of your flame altar. Parts of the world are covered in a poisonous fog of different intensity, becoming stronger the further from the start you go. The higher your flame altar level, the higher intensity fog you can enter, and the longer you can stay inside. The fog that is too high level for you is very clearly colored red, and kills you within seconds. So you need to increase your flame altar level, which works by providing a mixture of gatherable resources and boss monster heads.

What I personally love about Enshrouded is that it has variable difficulty, which you can fine tune to your needs. I don't like action combat very much, but I can increase my health and damage output and decrease the strength of the monsters, so the point where combat is neither trivial nor too difficult for me. Other players might like the combat but might want to increase the resource yield from gathering, so as to make that less of a grind for them.

While Enshrouded is technically still in early access, it is a far more finished and polished game than several other games that are officially already released. The full release version is planned for autumn of this year, but there will be another large content patch before that, and the game has had multiple large content patches in the past two years since early access started. The last big content patch added water to the game, with everything from diving for treasures, fishing, or building a water wheel powered machine. The amount of content Enshrouded had, and the rate of addition of new content, are great. It isn't an endless game, but it is easy to spend 100+ hours in Enshrouded. Recommended!

- posted by Tobold @ 10:47 AM Permanent Link (3) comments

Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Abroad and Fromage

I am making good progress on my pile of loot from the Spiel Essen, and we played 2 more games from that pile: Abroad and Fromage.

Abroad offered some light fun, but the current BGG weight of 2.7 is an overestimation, the game is a lot less complex and strategic than that. While there is a huge stack of different cards, these cards don't combine into any engine. But as the cards usually give more victory points than other aspects of the game, what cards you draw and in which round you draw them makes a huge difference. So there is very little planning ahead, you just make the best out of the cards you are dealt every round. To me that felt a bit too random, but then I came last in both games I played, so maybe that is just my excuse.

The quality of the components of Abroad is a mixed bag: The cards with the photos of the various tourist spots in Europe are nice and good cardstock. They carry the travel theme very well. The main board is functional, but not pretty. And the player boards look and feel as if the game was still a prototype.

Fromage was a surprise, as it demonstrated the power of parallelization. Normally, a game of this medium complexity takes easily 2 hours, when one player plays after another, and everybody is waiting for their turn. In Fromage, the round game board is divided into quarters, and turns. With each player playing simultaneously in parallel on their own quarter, not needing to check what the others are doing, the whole game is over in 45 minutes, with very little waiting involved. Other games that take less than an hour are considerably less deep.

The component quality of Fromage is very good. After playing it once, I spent $10 on an upgrade with a neoprene mat and a plastic part that makes the board turn easier. It isn't strictly necessary, but helpful. Fromage comes with two cheese wedge shaped plastic trays that hold the resources, and the neoprene map fits between those diagonally in the box, so somebody obviously had thought things through. I didn't buy the luxury resource upgrade, as I found the cardboard resources practical enough.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 9:22 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Protests and political violence

Sometimes I regret that I stuck with outdated medium of blogging, and never made the move to creating video content on YouTube. Right now, I could make a great video overlaying footage of the events of the killing of Ashli Babbit with politicians and officials making comments about the killing of Alex Pretti, and vice versa. The reality of things is that one man's freedom fighter is another man's domestic terrorist, and what politicians say about a person's action depend mostly on which "side" that person is on, more than on what that person actually did.

The second amendment of the US constitution says that "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." That is in obvious contradiction of the state's monopoly on the legal use of force. At what point exactly does a crowd of armed civilians become a well regulated militia? Several of the January 6th protesters were charged with carrying firearms, so right wing politicians suggesting right now that protesters don't have the right to carry arms sounds very hypocritical.

Not that I believe that the protesters in Minnesota have a lot of moral superiority here. What they are protesting against is after all a legal law enforcement operation. A flawed law enforcement operation, certainly. But if one day the French police would decide to go to the Banlieu of Paris to arrest everybody there with an outstanding warrant, the scenes on the street would resemble very much what we are seeing in Minneapolis.

The underlying problem is a decade long lack of political courage from both sides. An estimated 14 million people, or 4% of the population of the US, is illegal immigrants, with many of them living in America for many years, even decades. I consider both possible views as politically valid: Either illegal immigrants should be pardoned and turned into legal citizens by some pathway, or they should be deported. Instead, politicians went with I call the cannabis approach: Keeping a widespread reality illegal on paper, but deciding not to let law enforcement take care of it.

A number of studies have shown that once you correct for socio-economic factors like poverty, immigrants are no more likely to be criminals than natives. There are millions of immigrants in the US whose only crime is to have entered the country illegally. The incarceration rate of the US is at around 0.6%, and that is one of the highest in the world. No state can have 4% of its population living outside the law. You end up in situations where people are "technically" illegal, but still pay taxes, and have driving licences. That is pretty stupid.

What needs to happen, and what is happening in many other countries, is that there is some sort of administrative procedure, even if it takes years, by which it is decided whether somebody can stay in the country, or whether he has to leave. The US has made it difficult on itself by sleeping on that, and accumulating the problem. Even if the administrative procedure would just cost $1,000, multiplied by 14 million that ends up being 14 billion dollars. And for $1,000 you probably only get a not very thorough check, where some decisions are arguably wrong, one way or another. But make the check more thorough, and it will cost even more, and take even longer. Germany currently has 175,000 administrative procedure deciding on asylum seekers, and it already takes a full year for each; the exact cost is unknown, but the "on paper" cost per procedure is €5,000. Now multiply that problem by two orders of magnitude, and you can see the size of the accumulated problem the US faces.

It would probably be a lot faster and cheaper to work with a general pardon and accelerated citizenship procedures for all illegal immigrants, but that option is politically difficult. America's politicians are doing their utmost to avoid American realizing that the US has a class problem, and so immigrants are a convenient scapegoat for low wages. Not to mention that illegal workers are potentially cheaper than legal ones, and can be denied various rights.

There is a lot of hypocrisy here on both sides. The left favors making illegal immigrants legal, while the right favors deporting them, but neither side has done very much about it in the past decades. So now we are at a point where a right-wing government enforcing existing law, admittedly heavy-handed, is seen by left-wing protesters as fascist. And even this heavy-handed approach in 2025 led only to about 400k deportations, which is potentially not even enough to keep the number of illegal immigrants in the US from growing. The solution proposed by the left, defunding ICE instead of solving the legal limbo problem of the illegal immigrants, isn't much better than the approach of the Trump administration. You can't have a rule of law based on non-enforcement of existing laws; laws that don't work or are considered unjust need to be changed, not ignored.

- posted by Tobold @ 11:31 AM Permanent Link (21) comments

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Open world survival crafting base building

I got bored of Sengoku Dynasty relatively quickly. I liked the first 20 or so hours of the game, but when the task turned towards building multiple villages in different regions, while I was gathering and crafting less and less, my interest waned. So I looked at the tags that Steam described Sengoky Dynasty with: Open world, survival, crafting, base building, and looked what other games are out there that might be better suited to my personal preferences.

Now there are dozens of this kind of games, but a closer look revealed what the tags didn't tell: That there are a number of games which combine crafting and base building with some sort of automation, and there are other games which have no automation, and it is you who has to do all the gathering and crafting. To keep them apart, one has to look for clues: Games that have villagers, or other creatures living with you (e.g. Palworld), or factories (e.g. Satisfactory) are more likely to be of the automation kind of base building crafting games. Games in which you are all alone, or where the only other people in your base are other players in multiplayer games, are usually of the non-automation variety. Right now, I am looking for the latter.

So I was looking at the huge number of games that have come out over the last years, and looked at other criteria: Which games were hyped at release and then forgotten, abandoned by both players and developers? Which games kept their players and received continued development? By looking at that, one game stood out: Enshrouded, which was released two years ago, has received various patches, updates, and content additions, and has kept a good number of players over the years. While still technically in early access, the full release is planned for 2026, and the last mayor content update in October 2025 was well received.

Looking at the gameplay, Enshrouded has no automation. Instead it has a much bigger exploration and roleplaying part than Sengoku Dynasty has. It has real-time combat, which I don't love, but has very detailed difficulty settings, where you can set the monsters to hit harder or less hard, so I should be able to find a difficulty that isn't too frustrating for me. The game is only $30, and I checked that it isn't available on Game Pass. So I bought Enshrouded and am currently installing it. Hopefully, this is the open world, survival, crafting, base building game I have been looking for.

- posted by Tobold @ 2:41 PM Permanent Link (7) comments

Monday, January 19, 2026

Waking Europe

From an American perspective, especially when combined with a lack of historical knowledge, it is easy to consider Europe as some sort of has-been power. Europe is clearly playing second fiddle in the NATO alliance, and doesn't throw its weight around internationally like the US does. Once you study European history a bit more, and especially post-war history, a more nuanced picture becomes clear: European weakness is by choice, and part of a post-war deal with America. Europe has tried imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism, and they all actually didn't work out that well for them. America offered a deal, in which it offered security in exchange for Europe neither joining the communists, nor trying to become an independent superpower. Europe, disillusioned by two world wars, accepted the deal. The post-war decolonization made Europe even happier to leave the job as world police to the US.

Voluntary weakness isn't the same as structural weakness. Change the conditions, remove security guarantees, add security challenges from both Russia and America, and with sufficient prodding, Europe will wake up. It will take some time, decades, and at first Europe will concentrate on being able to defend itself without help, rather than being able to project power to other continents. But Europe has nuclear missiles, and enough population, money, industry, and science to grow its military significantly. Europe is weak out of a belief that military strength isn't terribly useful anymore; shattering that belief will probably have unintended consequences. European powers were global superpowers for centuries, and that was with them fighting each other constantly. External threats could accelerate European unification / collaboration and remilitarization to a point where it would easily surpass Russia, and rival the US and China as a global superpower. Europe is weak because its military spending as percentage of GDP is small; raise that to 1938 levels, and Europe is suddenly bristling with guns.

The Trump administration despises Europe, and hates international treaties. To me that suggests they don't understand what a treaty like NATO actually was made for, and how much it actually favors the US who dictated those treaties. Turning Europe from their most loyal ally into their rival isn't going to make America great again. If anything, it diminishes American capacity to project power globally.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:38 PM Permanent Link (12) comments

Saturday, January 17, 2026

First thoughts on Arydia

After finishing the campaign of Tidal Blades 2, my campaign game group voted to play Arydia. I had made a shortlist of 4 games I proposed to play next; all players had found two games on that list that they were interested in, and Arydia was on everybody's list. So this weekend I am preparing the game, and we'll start playing next weekend. In theory, Arydia can be played with minimal preparation, as there is a Quick Start Guide that leads a group through the start of the campaign, while explaining every rule for every step. In practice I prefer to read the full rules, and think about how to organize the game.

Arydia has been relatively well received by the community of BGG, with over 2k ratings and an average of 9.0 out of 10. But while looking at reviews on YouTube, I was left with the impression that it was less well received by some of the people who review board games for a living. The main points of contention by some critics were that the game was fiddly and boring. So in my preparation, I was looking why those critics thought that way, and if there is anything that can be done in preparation to mitigate those problems.

The "boring" point in my opinion is actually a question of genre. Arydia is a game in the low fantasy genre. Our group won't be saving the world this time, as we did in Agemonia or Tidal Blades 2. Instead we are exiles, tasked to help regular people in a region, and collecting squills, a sort of scout badges for good deeds. Some of the stories are rather generic fantasy tropes, like hunting rats in a cellar. We will see how my group likes the stories, but I can see how somebody who is new to roleplaying games in general might have a better time here than a veteran, which would explain why the users rate the game higher than the critics. What interests me about Arydia is that the story allows for a less linear narrative, with a more open world feel, and NPCs and locations that can change in function of your actions. There are no changes caused by the progress of time, and the time limit for the main quest is 88 days, which is very generous, so some people complained about a lack of urgency. To some extent that is the price one has to pay for a more open world structure, because if you need to take an optimal path through a game in order to make it in time, that path becomes increasingly linear.

What I also noticed in the videos of the critics is that they either completely ignored, or mocked the roleplaying system of Arydia. Meanwhile the people who praised the game often expressed that roleplaying was fun. In Arydia, there are 165 NPC cards. The idea is that the player to the left of the active player is the "guide", who plays the NPC. The NPC card gives a description of the NPC, some mannerisms, and a text. Some words in that text are written in bold, and if the player interacting with the NPC asks about these words, the NPC gives a response with more information. Of course some people play this solo and have no other choice, but even some of the people who played in multiplayer just revealed the NPC and directly pointed out the possible keywords, with zero roleplaying. I think it is obvious that if you play a "roleplaying game in a box" and skip all roleplaying aspects, you are missing something. So I'll encourage my group to play this as intended, although different people might put more or less effort into roleplaying those NPCs, or make the keywords more or less obvious. It is clear that the system isn't a full roleplaying system, and can't deal with players asking questions about things other than the keywords. But I don't think that is reason enough to completely dismiss it, especially since talking to NPCs to gather bits of story is making up a major part of the exploration gameplay.

The fact that many of the YouTube critics played the game solo might also explain the "fiddly" complaint. I have heard similar complaints about all games that use boxes full of index cards to create and populate a world, e.g. 7th Continent or Vantage. I happen to be a person who doesn't mind dealing with index cards. But more importantly, if you play a campaign game with multiple players, you can massively decrease the feeling of too much administrative work by distributing the tasks. I think with 4 players, one of us will handle the index cards in the 3 boxes, one of us with handle the 4 boxes of map tiles, one will handle the boxes of figurines and other tokens, and the fourth one will be tasked with taking notes about the bits of information we receive. That should significantly speed up the game, and feel a lot less fiddly than a solo player doing it all.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:23 PM Permanent Link (0) comments

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Emberheart

I played another board game from my Spiel Essen 2025 haul this week, Emberheart. It is a medium weight worker placement game with a bidding component, that increases player interactivity. Thematically you are collecting dragons and heroes, to defend the island of Emberheart against dragon poachers. Practically you have 5 rounds in which you place stacks of workers to bid for various cards, trying to achieve the highest amount of victory points through the best combination of cards.

The worker placement mechanics of Emberheart are interesting. You don't just place a worker, you place a marker plus a stack of workers. Most locations on the board have 3 cards, and 5 spaces you could place your party on, numbered 1 to 5, and in general you need to put as many workers there as that number is. Players take turns to place their stacks, and after up to 5 turns the round ends. Then the player who occupies the highest spot on each location gets first choice among the 3 cards there, followed by the others in decreasing order. If there are more than 3 stacks placed, the 4th and 5th player get no card, but a consolation prize. The workers you can put in each stack are either grey grunts, which at the end of the round would go back into the general supply, or colored specialists, which at the end of the round would return to the player. But the grunts can be placed in any location, while the specialists can only be placed in the locations of their color. One resource in the game is gear, which can be used to change a grunt into a specialist, or vice versa, or a specialist into a specialist of a different color.

The different locations have cards with different functions: There are hero cards that, when combined with dragons, give special abilities and end game points. There are tavern cards that reward you with a mix of grunts and specialists. There are two different types of dragon cards, poached and free. Preserve cards also combine with dragons and give your dragon companion additional abilities. Garrison cards also give dragon companion abilities and end game points, if you fulfill their placement conditions. There are 6 locations in the game, with 5 spaces each, but as there are a maximum of 4 players with a maximum of 5 stacks each, not all locations will be full at the end of a round. Thus you need to think carefully where you want to place your stacks. If you always go for the 5 space, you will have first choice guaranteed, but run out of workers quickly. If you always place grunts, you won't have workers left next round, but if you transform them into specialists that limits where you can place them. Sometimes you can get a card with a lowly 1 bid, as not enough other players were interested.

I played two games of Emberheart this week, both with 4 players, two different groups. Each game took between 2 and 2.5 hours, including setup and rules explanation, so this is perfect for my usual board game nights, which have a 3.5 hours hard limit. Emberheart is the type of game that is great for pickup groups, as it doesn't take too long to explain. I am less sure that it would be great to be played repeatedly with the same people, as all cards except the hero cards are limited to exactly the number you go through in one game, so you will always see the same cards, just in different order. Only the hero cards have about twice the number needed, so there is more variability and replayability there.

Emberheart is also great value for money. The regular retail price is $39 or €35, and for that money you get a good amount of game components in good quality. Comparable games can easily cost $20 more these days. From the games I bought at Essen and tested up to now, Emberheart is the game I had the most fun with, and one of the cheapest.

Labels: Board Games

- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link (0) comments

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