Since my retirement, board games have become a major hobby of mine. To just give you an idea, just in 2026, I already played 131 board game sessions, and that isn't even counting online or digital board games. I now live just 90 minutes drive away from the Essen fair, so it would only be natural for me to visit the world's largest exposition of my favorite hobby. The problem is, it is the world's largest exposition of that hobby: It is expected to have 230,000 visitors this year, and has been growing every year. But the available space has only grown marginally, meaning the event is now much more crowded than it was let's say 10 years ago.

If you follow YouTubers doing Vlogs on this year's Spiel, you'll notice a lot of footage from Wednesday. Only "press" gets in on Wednesday. But as their definition of "press" is fairly generous towards people with a few thousand followers on YouTube, you can already see quite a lot of folks on those Wednesday videos. "Press" also gets into the halls at least half an hour before the regular public, so again a good opportunity to produce footage of a nicely set up game on a table without too much distraction. As soon as you go to footage of the regular convention days with the regular public, you can see all hell having broken lose. Especially Hall 3, where most of the medium to heavy weight games are shown, is completely overcrowded. You can see footage on YouTube of people trying to move through the crowd while filming, but even just advancing through the hall is difficult. Getting a good view of a table is hard, hearing an explanation of the game over the noise of thousands of people even harder. And that was exactly my experience of Essen in the past few years.

On paper, there are some fantastic opportunities at this year's Spiel in Essen. Paul Grogan, who has one of the bigger YouTube channels and is famous for explaining games well is demoing the board game adaptation of Diablo every morning. But then you realize that he probably can't explain a relatively complex game in person to more than about a hundred people in 4 mornings, which compared to 230,000 visitors is nothing. Vlaada Chvátil and Tomáš Holek, two famous Czech board game designers, are at the Spiel dressed up in medieval costumes, presenting Kingdom Come: Deliverance together with a developer of the computer version of that game. Good luck getting anywhere near that event, with this being one of the most anticipated games of the convention.

Last year I pretty much failed to get any good game explanation for the whole day I was there. Most games are set up only on one single table, and with thousands of people interested, that is an experience not unlike going shopping on Black Friday. So last year I decided to do less exploring of new games, and more buying of the latest games, which are often sold at the Spiel way before you can get them in shops or online. I managed to buy 12 games, but at the cost of spending most of the convention standing in one queue or another. And then it took me months to actually play all those games, in fact I only got through 11 of them up to now.

So what I did this week, instead of going to the Spiel, was looking at videos about the Spiel, many produced before the fair even started, or during the time regular people weren't yet allowed in. I could see the games better from those videos than last year in person, and the explanations of what the games were about was a lot better audible. I then decided which of those games I wanted, and pre-ordered them online. Yeah, so I'll get the games a few months later than if I had gone to the Spiel, but in exchange the process was a lot more comfortable.

Still, watching Spiel videos makes me simultaneously happy and sad. When I see the crowds, I'm happy that I am not stuck inside that crowd. But still sad to miss the greatest event of the hobby.

I fully admit that my decision to back this game was partially fuelled by nostalgia, which generally isn't a good criterion. On the other hand, from what I can see on the Kickstarter page, this is a medium weight game about pickup and delivery, with some economic elements like fluctuating prices and shares. That is something I would like to play, although of course with a Kickstarter game you never know how good the game actually is before it finally arrives. But then, I only backed the €49 early bird base game pledge, which even with shipping and VAT added will not be too expensive to risk.

This is a smaller Kickstarter campaign for a smaller game, not one of those large board game crowdfunding campaigns for $200 games with lots of marketing. On the other hand, they really thought about the timing: Today is the first day of the Spiel 2026 fair in Essen, the largest board game fair in the world. As people will be able to play a demo of the game there, launching a crowdfunding campaign now is perfect timing. On the other hand, I think they missed an opportunity, at least until now, to hand out a few free prototype copies of their game to YouTube board game channel creators; that tends to be rather effective marketing for a comparatively low cost, and can really boost a crowdfunding campaign.

The general problem in the relation between young people and the government is that for various reasons most governments tend to give priority to other population groups. Older people are more reliable voters in a democracy. Richer people are better at lobbying or gaining political influence through donations. Revolutions on the other hand are nearly always fueled by the anger of younger and poorer parts of the population. Reminding governments of that is actually a clever move by these younger and poorer people.

Many people in government are not only old and rich themselves, they are also isolated from the real world and have a hard time understanding the current desperation of younger people. Rising inequality results in aggregate numbers like GDP being increasingly misleading. A trillion dollars more for Elon Musk or a trillion dollars evenly distributed among all US citizens would be the same in terms of GDP, but have vastly different outcomes in the real economy. Sometimes the young and the poor need to remind governments that things are not going well for them. In Europe these reminders often come in the form of more people voting for parties on the extreme left or right; America is rather handicapped by their two-party system, that doesn't allow that sort of expression. While the US government will get a rough reminder in the midterms, the Democrats will get a very wrong impression that they are doing the right thing, when in fact they are equally at fault for the current bad economic conditions (which was why Trump got elected for a second term). 

Young people having a generally negative outlook towards their own future is causing a lot of harm. Birth rates decline, some people simply opt out of participating in the economy, and in poorer countries a lack of hope leads to people emigrating. Some of the natural excesses of capitalism, like the increasing cost of education, and the decreasing quality of employment, are unlikely to improve without government intervention. A young person who did everything "right" and got a college degree, only to be stuck with large student debt, and the only jobs available being financially insecure in the gig economy, has good reasons to be desperate. While I don't support political violence, I do think that young people, lacking the political clout of older and richer people, do need to be somewhat louder and more visible in their protests.

So I learned that in order for me to have fun with Transport Fever 3, I need to apply a sort of triage procedure: Let go of the feeling that I should solve every problem, and tackle the problems in order of priority. What I said in my previous post on TF3 helps: Transport Fever 3's win condition is maximum population growth, not maximum money. And helpfully, every city displays after its population number an indicator of whether that city is currently growing. No indicator means no growth, a single arrow upwards means some growth, and a double arrow means fast growth. Thus it is relatively simple to quickly scroll across the whole map and check every city. Any city that isn't growing as fast as the others is a good starting point. You can then click on the city name and get the city overview, with its 8 parameters affecting city growth. Those are color coded green-yellow-red, showing you quickly what the reason for lower growth is.

The starting point for every city is the supplies parameter, with each city needing transported passengers, at least one industry good, and at least one commercial good. The more a city grows, the more of each they need, and from a certain point on, they need a second industry good and a second commercial good. Note that city growth is actually separate, if you provide for example only passengers, the residential area will grow, while without their respective goods delivered, the industry and commercial quarters won't grow as much. Nevertheless, for the start of the game the easiest way to get every single city starting to grow is to create two lines, one from residential to commercial, and one from residential to industry (note that circular lines doing both are possible for this, but tend to cause more traffic problems later). That internal passenger traffic counts for the first supply need, and your overall growth at the start is highest if every single city at least has that passenger demand fulfilled to some degree. Concentrating on a few big cities and just leaving smaller cities untouched is much worse for overall growth. After taking care of the first passengers, you can then check how far each city is from the goods it needs, and start by delivering the closest goods first. I wouldn't start on delivering the more advanced goods until all the demand for basic goods of all cities are fulfilled.

Fortunately, playing this way for maximum overall population growth also tends to work well for your finances. You might sometimes check the balance of all your lines, as putting too many vehicles on a line can result in negative finances. But overall, most lines that provide something that makes a city happier also result in a positive cashflow. Depending on how hard a difficulty you play, you get into a large surplus sooner or later. And then you can tackle problems like delivering needed goods from across the map. Which also is ultimately a money maker, but tends to require more capital outlay.

The discussion of debt has risen over the last few years, due to rising interest rates. If you take a 30-year fixed interest mortgage of $500,000 at 3% interest, you end up paying $258,887 in interest. In other words, you have to pay back $758,887 on that $500,000 debt. If you take a 30-year fixed interest mortgage of $500,000 at 7% interest, the interest payment nearly triples to $697,544, and you have to pay back a total of $1,197,544. It is easy to see how the interest rate can completely change the viability of the concept of buying a house on a 30-year mortgage and hoping that this house will actually be worth more in 30 years than your overall payment.

A lot of people have debt on which the interest rate isn't fixed, but variable. Thus the current increase in interest rates is really hurting them, some of them to the point of financial breakdown. Governments are increasingly in trouble for their national debt; students end up with forever student loans, where repayments based on income never decrease the principal debt; and on credit cards the interest rates charged in the US can now reach between 20% and 25%.

And then there is Warren Buffet's eternal wisdom of "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.". A lot of businesses, and not just private equity, for the past decades relied on the idea that returns on a business investment would be higher than interest rates. Thus they borrowed money to invest. When interest rates went up, and the business cycle pushed down returns, a lot of these companies ended up with the interest payments being higher than the investment yields.

However, many of the gloom and doom stories show only one side of that story, the distress of the people or governments in debt. In reality, debt is a zero sum game, as we never got a loan from the Martians. Every debt corresponds to somebody else's savings. If the discussion of US debt this year mentions "treasury yields" a lot, instead of calling it an interest rate, it is because for the buyers of those treasuries this *is* a yield on a financial investment. A 7.4% 30-year mortgage interest is a 7.4% yield for the bank that gave out that mortgage.

Now it is totally possible for you to get negatively affected by rising interest rates despite you having been personally prudent with debt: You might live in a big apartment building, and suddenly your rent goes up, because your landlord is an investment company that financed the building with debt; or you might get laid off from a company that got acquired by private equity and is now struggling with a high debt load. But the more general case is that a person that doesn't have debt is a lot less affected by rising interest rates than a person who is in debt. And there are quite a number of people out there with savings, who are quite happy to be able to buy US treasuries with a risk-free guaranteed interest of 5.6%. Finding a reasonably safe fixed income investment that paid more than inflation had been quite difficult in the past decades, and now they are back.

On a personal side, my anti-debt value sometimes felt outdated in the long period of extremely low interest rates. With rising interest rates, my values suddenly align better with conventional wisdom. Values are often a result of history. In June 1981, in the so-called Volcker Peak, the US federal interest rate reached 20%; in 2003 that fed interest rate had fallen to 1%. It isn't surprising that people of different generations who experienced these vastly different interest rate environments came out of it with very different views on debt. It is just that missing out on opportunities when interest rates are low is ultimately a much less serious risk than getting surprised by rising interest rates while being deeply in debt.

Transport Fever 3 is actually pretty bad with financial reporting tools. All reporting concentrates on the cash flow, how much money does a particular transport line earn per year. Any investment is counted as an expenditure, so you neither have any information on what your company's assets are worth, nor is there any way to find out useful data like a return on investment. A line bringing in $100,000 a year sounds nice, but if you spent $10,000,000 to build it, the return on investment is actually just 1%. I am not an accountant, but even to me it is pretty obvious that the company's books in TF3 aren't very useful. Another weird financial quirk of TF3 is that the interest rate for loans is only shown cumulatively. A 10% interest loan for 120 months is actually dirt cheap, because the annual percentage rate is less than 1% if you calculated it correctly.

So, if you don't manage the economy, what do you manage? Mostly population growth. Your progress bar, and thus the "victory condition" in as far as there even is one, simply counts the sum of all population in all of your towns. You progress fastest if you achieve the highest possible growth rate in all of your towns. And for that you need to supply all of the demanded goods, e.g. that canned food. You also need to prevent a number of possible problems: Pollution, noise, and unhappiness from waiting too long for your bus or train. That is not always fun to do. Especially pollution is annoying, as it doesn't depend on where you put what; instead it counts the pollution of all the industries in your wider town area, so random industries popping up can really mess up your pollution.

Is Transport Fever 3 a management game? Well, it is mostly a micro-management game. You aren't playing the CEO of a huge transport company. You are playing all the engineers in that company, carefully planning every single train signal, the curvature and incline of those rails, and balancing production rates with transport rates. Due to your towns growing, and new industries popping up, and due to technological advancements adding new modes of transport or just better trains, trucks, and buses, you constantly have to go back, review, and upgrade everything. The big advantage is that there is always something for you to do. But it is extremely easy to get bogged down in details and forget about your overall growth goals.

I am now nearly 30 hours into Transport Fever 3, and I plan to continue playing for some time. So, I would say the game is fun, and was worth buying. However, to like this game, you need to enjoy being constantly occupied with work on details. If you are more of a big picture person, you might enjoy this game a lot less.

I don't think this is because the game is bad. Defenders of the Realm is a classic game from 2010, and the people trying to remake it have a lot of experience in game design. But they are pretty obviously rather bad at marketing. The crowdfunding project page doesn't look good, and there has been a lack of buzz created on other channels usually used for marketing crowdfunded board games. This is their second attempt at a remake, with the first crowdfunding campaign having failed mostly due to being overloaded with plastic and then being too expensive. This second attempt is a lot more reasonably priced at $60 for the base game, or $105 for the deluxe version.

The campaign is still going for three weeks, and it is extremely likely that it will pass 100% funded in that time. But the economics of board game crowdfunding make a game that is between 100% and 200% funded the actually scariest possible outcome. If a crowdfunding campaign doesn't reach its funding goal, your pledge never gets collected. If a campaign is very successful and collects a big multiple of its funding goal, it is very likely to get actually delivered. But a barely funded game is at a big risk that the company takes your money, but then fails to deliver the game. And the way that crowdfunding is set up legally, that is totally your loss.

So right now I am somewhat undecided whether I should renege on my pledge. Losing $60 + VAT isn't a huge financial risk, obviously. But if this project fails to deliver, it would be the first board game crowdfunding campaign to do so for me; and I have been pledging for board game crowdfunded games since 2015. Board game crowdfunding projects have a much lower rate of non-fulfillment than crowdfunding projects for let's say computer games or tech. Board game crowdfunding projects have a high probability of being late, but usually deliver eventually. I like the idea of the game, and I have no negative feelings towards the developers. But the funding goal of $100,000 sounds like awfully little to keep even a small company going for the year it is supposed to run until delivery. Cancelling my pledge looks like the financially smarter move, but emotionally it feels somewhat mean to me.

Transport Fever 3 is running well on my PC. I have heard of some performance issues with larger maps in the later part of the game, but I'm still playing on a beginner-friendly small map and am still in the early days. The graphics are pretty enough, and I found the user interface quite good. Laying roads and tracks usually works as intended. You need to watch out sometimes, e.g. when building a bridge over a river you might need to fiddle with the "bend" setting, otherwise the bridge will be too low to let ships go under it. But generally I found the controls intuitive. I encountered one bug during the tutorial, where the building I was told to build wasn't in the menu; I was able to fix that by saving and reloading, but bugs that make the tutorial get stuck are not a good look.

My main complaint (and the main complaint of many people), is that Transport Fever 3 does a good job of making cities and transport vehicles look appropriate for the historic era, but fails to do so for the industries. So you start in 1900 and have 21st century oil platforms with a helipad, while you are using steamboats and horse carriages to transport that oil to a 21st century oil refinery. That is a bit immersion breaking. Other complaints from TF2 veterans are that this is a $50 game that isn't that much of an upgrade to Transport Fever 2 with all the existing mods, but as I haven't played TF2, that isn't relevant to me. Transport Fever 3 also has new game mechanics over TF2, to make the game more accessible. The subsidies, contracts to connect specific things, are a nice idea, but are probably not well balanced. In a game, where you start with zero money and have to take a $3 million loan to get started, getting $10 million as a reward for sending some workers to a factory seems excessive.

At least the subsidies help a lot to get quickly from relying mostly on horse carriages overland to building train lines. Train lines are expensive to set up, but as you are being paid per unit of good or passenger delivered, trains with their much greater capacity end up being very profitable. As I previously mentioned, I quite like trains, so building a mostly train-based transport empire is fine by me. The part I am least sure about in TF3 is the management of noise and pollution. After some experimentation, I am now usually building bus/tram stations instead of relying on simple bus stops on the street. Bus stops on the street tend to lead to traffic jams. But then the stations produce noise and pollution, dragging the growth of my cities down. So do all sorts of warehouses, train stations, harbors, and the like. That all makes it pretty difficult to place things that a city needs, but then complains about.

Overall Transport Fever 3 is a nice, permanent puzzle of logistics and optimization. It is a lot less complex than other Paradox games, e.g. Europa Universalis V, but a lot deeper than many simpler management games, e.g. Ale Abbey (which I played recently without writing about it). I am playing Transport Fever 3 on normal difficulty. I think I could handle higher difficulties, but that would mostly involve a lot more waiting time, as you let your income slowly accumulate to save for the next big investment. Playing on normal is a lot faster.

Since my retirement, one of the things I am doing a lot of every day is watching YouTube. I am watching more YouTube than I am watching Twitch, Netflix, and TV together. So what I am hearing a lot from various YouTube content creators is "please, support me on Patreon" or "please, support me with a paid channel membership". At one point, a few years ago, I had several such channel subscriptions running on YouTube and Twitch. However, it quickly turned out that I was switching between too many channels too often. Subscribing to many channels is expensive, and even something small like $5 per month is a lot if you then watch that channel only a few hours that month. So I stopped subscribing to individual channels.

On the other hand, I didn't want to be a complete freeloader. The solution I found was YouTube Premium, something I considered a win-win: I get ad-free YouTube, while the content creators get around 5 times more revenue from me than they would get from a non-premium viewer. Also the money is distributed as a function of how many hours I am watching what, which both seems very fair, and rewards long-form content better than advertising revenue does. As I do watch 6-hour videos from NeverKnowsBest sometimes, or long actual play videos from various creators, I do like to encourage long-form content.

But there is another business model on YouTube that I also like: Affiliate links. If I am watching videos of some content creator about some game, and that video makes me want to buy that game, I might as well use the affiliate link that will give that creator a small commission. Steam doesn't offer affiliate links, but various online shops that sell Steam keys do. Which means that by using that affiliate link I support a content creator I like *and* frequently get the game slightly cheaper than I would have gotten it on Steam directly.

Which gets us back to Transport Fever 3. I have been watching content from German streamer Steinwallen a lot, for example his long and still ongoing Europa Universalis V playthrough as Scotland. And recently he started playing Transport Fever 3 (he gets advanced access to Paradox games), and that looks quite interesting to me. So I'll watch a few more of his videos about that game, but then I am seriously considering to use his affiliate link to buy a Steam key for that game tomorrow.

Another critic of large tech and AI is Cory Doctorow. And I also know his name from my MMORPG days. Among other things he wrote a novel, For The Win, about MMORPGs, and contributed to a comic, In Real Life, about gold farming. These days he is mostly known for having invented the term "enshittification", and is also appearing a lot on those same AI critical YouTube videos.

This makes me wonder whether there is some intellectual link between MMORPGs and AI. Or is it just that 20 years ago, MMORPGs were a hot tech topic, and today the hot tech topic is AI? What do you think? Are virtual worlds related to virtual brains?

The game suggests some ways to make the game shorter. For example to play for just 2 turns instead of the regular 3, or to leave out the asymetric player powers. Unfortunately those shortcuts also make the game less good. For example, there are cards that give you something for future turns, which are balanced for being useful when the game has 3 turns, and thus become extremely weak when you play only 2 turns.

According to reviewers, Avalon: The Riven Veil is a rather good game when you play it repeatedly with the same people. Once everybody knows the icons by heart and knows what to do, turns speed up, and one might even be able to play a full 3 turn game in little over 3 hours. But for my use case, where I bring the game to a board game night and have to set it up, explain it to new players, play it, and get it back into the box within a 3.5 hours window, this game just isn’t suitable. If I ever want to play it, I’ll have to organize a seperate board game afternoon or evening without a time limit.

That is of course an inherent problem of backing a game via crowdfunding. The game is frequently not fully finished, or has stretch goal added to it during the crowdfunding campaign. So you can’t possibly know details like how long it actually takes to play. From just having a visual representation it is easy to misjudge how heavy and/or long a game is. The time given in the description and printed on the box is very frequently underestimated, and always only considering playtime for a group of people that already know the game.

So I annoyingly I have another $200 big Kickstarter board game on my shelf and don’t know how and with who I will play it. It’s no wonder I am crowdfunding fewer and fewer games these days, and then frequently just the most basic version.

I am probably not alone in the feeling that I can’t keep up with video games anymore. Steam now releases over 20,000 games per year. The fraction of those games that I am even remotely aware of is tiny. There are a handful of triple-A games that are so huge that you can’t possibly miss them, and there is a lot of trash. But there are also a lot of mid-sized games that are quite good, and not all of them manage to make headlines. So sometimes I become aware of a game only months after release.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For example I played Valheim in 2021. This month Valheim version 1.0 was released. Today is the release date of Endless Legend 2, a game I played nearly a year ago. On the one hand I am sure that the release versions of these games are more polished and complete than the early access versions I played. On the other hand, in a situation where I can’t even keep up with new releases, how would I find the time to play these games again. For me these games are done and dusted, I already played them until I ran out of fun. I couldn’t even manage to find the motivation to play Civilization VII again, after the huge changes.

Civilization VII I bought. Endless Legend 2 I played on Game Pass, and I don’t currently have a subscription for that. Financial tip of the week: Don’t let all of your subscriptions run all of the year, but occasionally drop some, and then maybe resubscribe later. Anyway, if I now wanted to play Endless Legend 2 again, I would need to check whether that game was still on Game Pass, and then pay for that subscription again. I probably won’t do that, given my mixed impression of the game.

So as I can’t keep up with new releases, and even less with new versions of older games, I am really not interested in the games being released a year, two years, or more from now. In a market in which video game projects are often cancelled, developers layed off, and studios closed, I can’t hold my breath for a game that might not even make it over the finish line. Blizzard cancelled two Starcraft shooter games before, so even if I were interested in that type of game, I can’t be sure it would be worth waiting for.