Yesterday the whole dashboard of my wife's electric car crashed due to an unknown bug. And it took us two days to find somebody to fix it, with the fix being to "reboot" the car. The first guy who had tried that did disconnect one battery, which didn't work. Apparently there are two separate batteries in the electric car, and you needed to disconnect both for 5 minutes to get the car to reboot. The first guy was an experienced road assistance mechanic, but the skills he had acquired during his career obviously weren't all that helpful when dealing with a computer bug in an electric car.

This week the organization giving out the Spiel des Jahres awards apologized for their award ceremony of last Sunday. This time it wasn't a frog, but a watermelon. One of the authors of the game Daybreak had worn the symbol on his T-shirt during the award ceremony. And only later somebody spotted that it was a symbol showing Greater Palestine "from the river to the sea", having thus eliminated the state of Israel, in Palestinian colors and disguised as a watermelon. It is a rather clear symbol of a goal that is very obviously genocidal, which goes way beyond reasonable demands for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people. I think it is one of the biggest moral failures of the progressive left to fully have adopted anti-semitism, weirdly including spray-painting swastikas on Jewish synagogues, as part of their understandable support for Palestinian civilians. A survey among various university protesters in the USA found that the overwhelming majority of the people chanting "from the river to the sea" could neither name the river nor the sea in question, and weren't fully aware of what that would mean for the 7+ million Jews living in the state of Israel. Wishing the power situation was reversed, and it would be the Jews instead of the Palestinians who lived in rubble and died to bombs and tanks, can't be the solution to a complicated crisis.

Having said that, I agree with the quote describing the thinking of Voltaire as "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". The organization of the Spiel des Jahres is free to allow or disallow certain political expression during their award ceremonies. But I would not boycott Daybreak, which is an excellent game about climate change, just because I didn't agree with the political beliefs of one of the game's authors.

The more it goes on, the more the culture war that originated in the USA and is spreading over the rest of the world, is taking on the historic characteristics of a religious war. “Dei" is the dative and ablative singular of the latin word for “God”, and DEI is becoming more and more a religion. There is some irony to the fact that Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is increasingly about treating people unequally and excluding them for having the wrong beliefs, while Christianity is also ripe with with very un-Christian treatment of unbelievers. Excluding each other, cancelling each other, banning each other will only make things worse. The world has experimented for centuries with religious persecution in the name of what is "right" and "holy", but it never ended well. Religion, for all the good it does, also always had an aspect of being a way to show moral superiority and looking down on others. If we took the tenets of old and new religions and belief systems literally, we would be a lot nicer to the people we don't agree with.

That is even more true when an author with an extreme political opinion creates a work that does *not* in itself constitute an expression of the extreme opinion. There is absolutely nothing anti-semitic about the board game Daybreak. There are no overt transphobic references in the Harry Potter books. Pretty much any book written, film made, painting painted before the 21st century has an author who grew up in his time and shared beliefs common to the time he was born in; and some of those beliefs are today considered unacceptable and morally wrong by some people. The loss to humanity of of banning thousands of years of human creativity and expression would be infinitely greater than any possible gain. It is better to annotate works of the past where they aren't conform with modern beliefs, rather than banning them or editing them. When you hear of a call for a boycott, ask yourself whether the person demanding that isn't just virtue signalling to demonstrate his own moral superiority, rather than actually wanting to prevent any harm.

Over 30 years ago, I was part of a student organization that organized once a year a long weekend in a house in the Austrian alps for first year students and older students to get together and get to know each other. At the time I frequently brought the board game Junta, because it best plays with 7 people, and outside of a large group weekend getaway it is hard to get 7 people together for a 4-hour game. But Junta is a game that is not only competitive, but also somewhat evil about it: There is a lot of negotiation, and you can't really win without betraying somebody. The game had a lot of success at these weekends, but I know of at least one case where among the players were a couple, and one of them felt an in-game betrayal was so serious, that the couple split up afterwards. It isn't always easy to separate feelings and trust from outside of the game and inside the game.

The biggest trend in making competitive games less hurtful to others was an increase of games where there was less "take that" player vs. player interaction, and more of a parallel race for victory points. It partially solved the problem of better players crushing less good players, because at least the less good player could still in repeated plays improve his personal score and feel good about it, even if better players had far more points. A huge percentage of Eurogames these days work with victory points. The more thematic American style games had a different solution: Cooperative games, with all players together playing against the game. You can win in Gloomhaven, but you can't win *against* another player, only *with* him.

The question is, if you want to make a competitive game, how do you let players interact with each other? A typical answer of those Eurogames in which you compete over victory points is that players interact with each other by competing for in game resources. There is a whole style of worker placement games, where the fundamental rule is that only a limited number of workers can be placed on a spot, so that the players who goes there first can block others. In card-based games there are often drafting mechanics, where again you drafting a card means that somebody else doesn't get it. Good players often are able to understand not only their own situation in game, but also that of the other players, and sometimes placing a worker to strategically block another player, or "hate drafting" a card so somebody else doesn't get it, is the winning move.

But there is a growing trend to make it even less likely that one player upsets another, by limiting player interaction even further. For example Wyrmspan removed some player interaction, like the competition for food dice, from its predecessor Wingspan. I played one game this year, Imperial Miners, which had gone all the way to remove *all* player interaction. There is nothing you can do in Imperial Miners that would influence another player at all. It is a "multiplayer solo" game, where playing it with other players just means you play the same game simultaneously and compare you scores, without one player being able to help or hinder another.

As some cooperative games had an alpha gamer problem, with better players telling other players what to do, the trend towards less player interaction even exists in cooperative games. Congratulations to Daybreak / e-Mission for winning the Kennerspiel des Jahres 2024 award, but the one thing I don't like about this otherwise great game is how limited the interaction between players is, with only a few cards specifically allowing you to help another player. They probably wanted to prevent alpha gamers from bossing around other players by having each player keep his hand of cards secret and building his own tableau, but if nobody makes an effort to actually cooperate you can end up with a game in which everybody does his thing completely alone. The only positive thing is that once players decide to cooperate, they'll see that it is more likely to win that way.

While consistent with modern trends, I am not absolutely certain that preventing players from "hurting" each other in game is really such a good idea. A "game", by definition, is a safer environment, which can often be useful for learning about interactions without real harm. Maybe somebody who got betrayed in Diplomacy will learn a valuable lesson about trust, and then not so easily fall for the next online scam. The real world isn't free from conflict and aggression, so learning how to deal with it in a competitive game is maybe not such a bad idea. Having no player interaction at all certainly can't be the right solution, as then what is the purpose of gathering players around a table at all, if they don't get to interact?

A War of Whispers had a Kickstarter in 2018 which funded, but with only 639 backers. At the time, the Kickstarter price for the standard edition was $49, while the price for the deluxe edition was $69. It seems that today the suggested retail price for the standard edition is still $50, while the deluxe edition went up to $99. However, I was able to grab a copy of the deluxe edition for the suggested retail price of the standard. Which leads to the question of whether buying a deluxe edition of a board game is worth it.

The answer to that is, "it depends". It turns out that for this particular game, the deluxe edition is a) not very luxurious, but b) a whole lot more playable than the standard edition. A War of Whispers is an area control game, in which players don't control the 5 empires at war, but 4 shadowy secret societies that have bet on the outcome of the war. As each player can possibly control several different empires during his turn, being able to quickly see what is going on everywhere on the map is rather essential. But in the standard edition the cities, towers, and farms are just printed on the board, and that sometimes in not very visible colors; the deluxe edition has the cities, towers, and forts as plastic miniatures, which are massively more visible across the table. While the level of detail on the miniatures isn't great, looking at images of both standard and deluxe version one can clearly see the deluxe version having a much improved table presence, and better playability through that better visibility.

On the other end of the scale are products like the 3D version of Settlers of Catan. The 3D terrain isn't really adding anything to the game, in my opinion. The product isn't even available anymore, probably because very few people wanted to spend $300 for a $60 board game. A very common thing these days on crowdfunding options is the standard version having cardboard standees, while the deluxe version has plastic miniatures. That is probably important to those people who can and like to paint miniatures. But as I can't, I'm frequently better off with a color cardboard standee than with a grey miniature, in terms of table presence and visibility.

Chip Theory Games makes games in which chips the size of poker chips are frequently used, thus the name of the company. Now authentic casino poker chips are compression molded from clay, and weight about 10 grams. Many chips in games from Chip Theory Games are likewise heavy 10 gram chips (not sure how they are manufactured, might be plastic filled with metal), but standard versions of some games come with health chips that are just 4 gram plastic chips, and the deluxe upgrade is getting those as heavy 10 gram chips. Visibly there is hardly a difference, especially when viewed from a distance, but it is surprising how much of a tactile difference this upgrade makes. I also don't regret having bought plastic chips to replace cardboard chips for my copy of the board game Agemonia, even if those are just the light plastic version. And I also bought some generic metal coins for use in some games that otherwise use cardboard coins, because it just feels nicer. I backed the deluxe version of FLOE, because it contains storage solutions from Game Trayz, making the game a lot easier to set up and store.

The A War of Whispers deluxe edition also contains additional cards, bringing the deck size per empire up from 8 to 12. That is a pretty significant change to gameplay. It is another reason why I would consider the deluxe edition of the game to be the "standard", while the standard edition is just a subpar version of the game. Gameplay expansions are best sold as expansions, and not as part of a "deluxe" upgrade to a game. Fortunately more and more crowdfunding projects come with not just a choice between standard and deluxe versions, but with a wide selection of individual component upgrades, for example replacing the cardboard game board with a neoprene mat. Which is an upgrade about which I have mixed feelings: For some games a neoprene mat is a great upgrade, especially since it prevents game components gliding over the board when somebody bumps the table, and makes cards on the board easier to pick up. But I have had neoprene mats that were delivered folded instead of rolled up, and I ended up never using them, as it is extremely difficult to get the crease out.

All this to say that one has to be aware that some games exist in different versions, or with optional deluxified components. With some general experience with such components one figures out which ones are actually useful for playing the game, and which ones just increase the price for no added value.

One very fundamental feature of the tactical battles is the various structures your units, or enemy units, can occupy. I am talking of towns, bridges, watchtowers, catapults, but also placeable features like mantlets. Hovering over the feature gives you a list of advantages that occupying it will give you. Maybe the most universal and most important is that a unit occupying such a feature won't use stamina to fight or assist. That is especially important on the highest difficulty, where it usually takes several fights to kill an enemy squad, which quickly depletes your squads' stamina. If you are approaching a big fight against several strong enemy units, and there are no features in which you can put your assists, consider placing a mantlet either in the back for free assists, or at a choke point in the front to occupy with your strongest squad.

The enemy usually makes great use of watchtowers for ranged, magical, or healing assists. As long as the enemy units occupy the watchtower, they can provide those assists endlessly, and the watchtower increases the effective range. The trick here is to use provoke, either from a warrior like Lex, or from a "beckoning" item. It makes the enemy leave the watchtower and run towards you to attack. A group of archer attacking you is easier to deal with than trying to capture overlapping watchtowers. Provoking doesn't work on garrisons of towns. Towns are very important features to occupy, as stationing one of your units in such a town will slowly heal it, including resurrecting fallen units and replenishing stamina. You can also deploy units there, and even withdraw units on one side of the map to redeploy in another town for a quick "teleport".

Outside of battles, in the overworld, one shouldn't underestimate the importance of resources. Right after the tutorial, when arriving in Cornia, you can already explore most of that kingdom and gather all the resources and divine shards. You can either dodge the enemy units that are running around on the overworld, or you can quickly skip the battles with them. As long as you technically "win", that is deal them more % damage than they deal you, they get stunned for a while and you can continue exploring. If you are strong enough to one-shot kill them, you get a bit of honor. If you ever lose a fight, you only get thrown back to the last town or battle spot you visited and can try again from there. You need resources to do deliveries for towns you conquered, which will unlock features like boats, and the ability to station guards. Each delivery also gives you some honor and money. Stationing guards in every town will auto-collect the resources around the town, plus money, giving you a nice passive income after each battle.

That brings us to sigils, which are the repeatable battles of Unicorn Overlord. Besides being a great way to level up units, and to farm honor, every sigil battle, even trivially easy ones, will respawn the resources on the overworld map. Thus if you are in desperate need for resources, you can just quickly do a few easy sigil battles and get resources both from the towns you already stationed guards in, and from respawns on the overworld map. Somewhere mid-game you will start conquering towns faster than you get new story characters. It is well worth then to hire cheap soldiers from forts for a few honor points and use them as stationed guards. Even if you completely conquered a kingdom, you'll still want guards stationed in every town there. Besides the money, the resources that accumulate will also be useful, because you can always go back and make more deliveries for money and honor.

Later in the game, tactics become increasingly important. It is impossible in the scope of this blog post to tell you everything about tactics, as it is a complete system of "programming" your units for the auto-battles. Just one important tip is to check the order for both the red and the blue tactics each of your units has. You will want to have conditions set for the higher priority orders. If a higher priority order has no condition, or a condition that is always fulfilled (like "prioritize"), you will *never* get to the tactics lower on the priority list. Thus you will typically want to start with something conditional, like for example an attack that hits a whole column only if there *is* a full column, followed by another type of attack when there isn't.

Once you liberated Baumratte with the level 14 quest "Another Prince", you can start visiting the coliseum (sic). The important part here is the possibility of online battles. Even if you can't win a single one of them, you get 200 coliseum coins just for doing 10 online battles every day. And as there are some absolutely great weapons for that level you can buy for 500 coliseum coins, this is well worth doing. Note that you can select who to fight, and without cost renew the list of 5 enemies on offer, until you find somebody you can beat. Winning battles online gives you even more coliseum coins, and allows you to farm the prizes faster.

I keep my eyes open on what is going on in board game development. I follow YouTube channels, read newsletters, hang out on Boardgamegeek, etc., so that I am aware of what the games are that are currently considered to be very good. BGG actually has a hotness list, which shows the games that are most talked about. As I am writing this, number two on that hotness list is a game called Arcs, a sci-fi strategy game. There is a lot of buzz around it, although the Kickstarter is only now being delivered, and the game won't be available in retail before autumn. I am mentioning Arcs here, because there are two versions of it, and they differ a lot in the amount of commitment required.

The basic game of Arcs takes about 30 minutes per player. This makes it perfect for my Wednesday board game nights at the friendly local games store. I can bring the game, find 3 other players on the spot, set the game up, explain it, play it, and pack it up within the 3.5 hour window of that event. Then there is a campaign version of Arcs, which takes around 30 minutes per player per act, and there are 3 acts. The campaign game uses all the rules of the basic game, and adds additional layers of rules and components on top of it. It is highly recommended by the developers to first play several games of basic Arcs, and only try the campaign game with people who have a solid grasp of the basics. The campaign game looks really cool. But I ordered only the basic game, because I would probably never play the campaign. I would need a group that plays the basic game of Arcs with me one weekend, and is willing to come back the next weekend to play the campaign version; or better several weekends, to justify the purchase of the expensive campaign expansion. I can understand the enthusiastic reviewer on Shut Up & Sit Down saying that he has been playing Arcs up to 3 times per week for the past few months and still loves it. But who has a group with whom he can play the same game 3 times per week for several months? Getting a group together once per week is a challenge, and my current Agemonia group is pausing for 3 weeks due to some people being on summer holidays.

I have a lot of campaign games in my collection, and even more that I backed on Kickstarter in previous years and that I am now waiting to deliver. But these days, when I see another long campaign game advertised on Kickstarter or elsewhere, I walk right past it. All of the games I bought this year are games that can be played in an evening, without an ongoing commitment. It doesn't matter how "good" a board game is, if I can't get it onto the table.

The interesting result is that on expert difficulty I play the game somewhat differently. The desired effect is that at higher difficulty I play a tighter game, taking more care to optimize. But I also noticed that I am less willing to start a battle when my army feels too weak for it, and so I use optional repeatable content to grind an extra level and feel more ready for the challenge. In the end, the difficulty is somewhat self-adjusting: The added grind makes the higher difficulty level easier again. Playing the same battle under-leveled at tactical difficulty is not so different from playing it over-leveled at expert.

In the end, I decided to continue my main game on the tactical difficulty. Raising the difficulty mostly affected the time it took me to do something, and not so much my enjoyment of the game.

Surviving a shooting has always helped political candidates. It motivates the existing supporters of the candidate to turn up on election day, it gets him some sympathy votes from the independents, and it has some more moderate opponents hang their head in shame.

It is often said that the crowdfunding campaigns for modern board games run on FOMO, the fear of missing out. Unlike video games, of which Steam can produce an unlimited number of copies, board games tend to have print runs, and some games might only get printed in a single print run of a few thousand copies. Thus it happened to me that I heard of a board game that is supposedly great, but either I can't buy it anywhere, or I can only find it on eBay for some outrageous price that isn't worth it for me.

But curiously print runs can also work in my favor. I just ordered a board game printed 5 years ago, and I got it at such a big discount that I bought the much nicer looking deluxe edition for the previous price of the standard edition. Probably they printed too many of the deluxe version, and didn't manage to sell them. And as board games, unlike video games, take up storage space, companies are even more willing to sell you unwanted inventory at a nice discount.

That also works at a personal level. A board game collection takes up a lot of shelf space. Fortunately I now have a board game room, with a bespoke board game shelf from wall to wall, which isn't full yet. But many board gamers resell their older board games, for reasons of space, or to get some money back. If you bought a board game, played it only a few times, and it turned out to not have been the best fit for you and your group, you might well want to sell it. There are specialized shops for used board games. I just picked up a couple of older games in shop I just found, used but complete, for about half of their original price.

There is an evolution in board games, sometimes older games actually *feel* old, in spite of not having the graphics evolution of video games. But other board games age quite well. And games from let's say 5 years ago are often just forgotten due to the flood of newer games, rather than being actually outdated. With a bit of knowledge, one can sometimes find real treasures in a used games shop.

2024 internationally is a year full of important elections. We consider many of these elections, in countries like the UK, France, or the USA, as free and fair. However, each of these countries has very different methods on how to translate the "will of the people" as expressed by votes in an election into an actually working government. And each of these systems has its own flaws.

In the US presidential elections, an estimated 99.5% of votes aren't important, because due to the choice being binary we already know how most states will vote, and we also know how most people in the few swing states will vote. That leaves just a rather small number of undecided voters in a small number of swing states that will actually determine the outcome of the election. It is the exact opposite of the hypothetical case from my first paragraph, with voters having the least possible choice of candidates. It is very likely to end up with a country in which about half the population is unhappy that their candidate lost, and the other half is only slightly less unhappy with their candidate who won.

In the UK general election this year, there were a lot more parties, of which 5 got more than 5% of the vote. But the UK electoral system isn't designed to be representative, but is a "first past the post" system, in which the strongest party receives far more seats in parliament than their popular vote share. Labour got 63% of the seats with 34% of the votes. The system can also result in extremely different outcomes for smaller sized parties, so for example the LibDems got 11% of the seats with 12% of the votes, while Reform got 0.8% of the seats with 14% of the votes. But while the lack of representation has been widely criticized, the clear advantage is that the one party who got the most votes also has a parliamentary majority and could at least potentially achieve the will of the people who voted for them.

The elections in France are more complicated, with a two-round system, in which there was a rather large difference between the results of the first and second round. That of course made the party who came first in the first round, but only third in the final results after the second round, rather unhappy. Which of the two rounds *is* the will of the people? Nevertheless, the French result is probably more representative than the US and UK examples. But if you compare the cases, a very clear trend becomes obvious: The more representative the system is, the less likely it becomes to result in a workable majority. None of the parties got more than a third of the vote, and it isn't obvious yet how a government will form.

That isn't unusual for electoral systems that try to achieve good representation. If you have lots of different parties, you end up with no party getting more than half of the votes. The current German government consists of 3 parties more busy fighting each other than governing, while the recently formed Dutch government has 4 parties, with the prime minister being an independant. Belgium from December 2018 to October 2020 had no government at all, because it took them a record 589 days of forming one, after an election in which no party emerged as a clear winner.

I do believe that Democracy is the best system, and a Republic governed by elected representatives is the best form of government. But it would be hard for me to point at any one country of the ones discussed here and declare that their electoral system is superior to the others. What is more important, an effective government or an election being as representative as possible? It seems impossible to have both. And a growing concern in all of these systems is that more and more people think that Democracy is only a good thing when their side wins, and start acting in seriously undemocratic ways when their side is losing, preferring an Autocracy of their side to being the losing side in a Democracy.

Before Unicorn Overlord, I would have said that an important feature I like about these games is the turn-based tactical combat. But it turns out that Unicorn Overlord's weird combination of real-time with pause tactical movement and auto-battler combat is just as much fun. What makes the auto-battling fun is that you can "program" your characters: You can set the conditions under which they should attack particular enemies or use particular skills, and what they should do when none of the specific conditions apply. As every character class in the game has one or more other character classes that work well against it, every battle becomes a bit of an interesting puzzle. You don't just brute force to victory (unless you are overleveled and the difficulty is too low), you set up your squads to be able to deal with the specific enemies of that particular battle.

Unicorn Overlord is quite a big game. Even the demo lets you play a full 4 hours, and that isn't counting the time spent setting things up in menus, so in reality it is more like 8 hours. If you rush just the main story, you can beat the game in just under 50 hours, but if you take your time you can spend way over 100 hours in this game. The downside of that is some repetition, like quests you can do in every one of the five regions. And good luck remembering the rock/paper/scissors unit strengths and weaknesses when there are 41 classes in the game.

Unicorn Overlord is also one of the few games where I am considering switching to the highest available difficulty level, after doing quite well at the second-highest level. That is probably because the real-time part is slow enough for an old foggy like myself to have time to pause and give commands. There is nothing in this game which requires sub-second reaction time. On the other hand, it is quite an intellectual game, where bringing the right unit with the right programming and the right equipment makes all the difference. Fortunately there are many opportunities for mock battles to try things out.

As an aside, I still have my original Nintendo Switch, that I got Christmas 2017. But for Unicorn Overlord I finally bought a new set of Joycon controllers. The original ones had drift, which I managed to temporarily fix several times using instructions from the internet, but that was never a permanent solution. From all I read I have good hope that more recently produced controllers don't have the drift problem anymore, so I bought a set in colors that weren't available at release. Overall I am quite happy with my Switch, and am considering buying a Switch 2 when it comes out in 2025 or 2026. On the other hand, I am less and less inclined to buy a new Playstation or XBox, because there are now fewer and fewer console exclusives on those, and I can play all the games I want on my PC.

Getting paid for a fake Facebook or X/Twitter post with fake bot engagement seems like a victimless crime. Of course, nothing ever is. Advertising money isn't free. Companies pay for advertising, as long as they feel that it increases their sales by more than what the advertising costs. If somebody uses AI to create clickbait, but that clickbait results in a lot of real people watching that content and being reached by attached advertising, that is okay for the company. But if they pay "per thousand views", and 900 of those 1000 views are from bots, which never buy anything, the economics of added sales by advertising stop working. So companies will stop advertising on that platform, and look for other pathways of advertising where they reach more real people. The real content creators on the platform that is swarmed by bots first see their income dwindling because money goes to bots, and then see it drying up completely, because advertising goes away.

Different internet platforms are hit by this in different ways, due to the state of AI technology. Creating a Facebook post or tweet on X by AI with text and images is easy, thus they are the most affected. YouTube videos are a bit harder to create by AI, and I don't think any AI already manages to play a game on Twitch while live commenting. But even YouTubers and Twitch streamers are increasingly battling bot comments these days.

Ultimately somebody in advertising will come up with a better measure of advertising efficiency. The "attention economy" of paying per clicks / views isn't sustainable, if you can't prove that the view is coming from an actual human being. And because people follow economic incentives, I am pretty certain that the internet will look very differently ten years from now. We will not get a dead internet in which all content is created by bots and interacted with by bots, because there is no inherent economic benefit to that. Bot economics are based on advertising inefficiencies, and those simply aren't sustainable.