Tobold's Blog

Looking behind the curtain of EU5 events

2026-03-11T10:05:00.000+01:00

I just installed an EU5 mod called Unique Events Tab. It adds another tab to the EU5 user interface, which lets you see possible country-specific events, and the conditions under which they would trigger. The base game of EU5 already has a lot of these unique events, although they are concentrated in the most historically relevant countries: England has 233 unique Dynamic Historical Events, while many small non-European countries have none at all. But more importantly, the bulk of the content of the DLCs for EU5 will come in the form of such unique events, which makes it interesting to understand them.

However, once you understand these events, you'll quickly see a problem: Without the mod, you don't even know these events are there, unless they fulfill the trigger condition and pop up. And that isn't obvious. For example in my current Byzanz run, I now see that there is an event in the case that I conquer Athens and integrate it. However, I chose to vassalize Athens and annex it. So I never triggered the integration condition, and never saw the event.

If you look at the unique events and their triggers, it becomes obvious that the developers assume the player will play a country in a certain way. It is only logical for the Byzantine Empire to want to reconquer all of Greece. However, there is also an event that triggers if the Byzantine Empire owns both Constantinople and Venice, and not ever player of the Byzantine Empire will want to meddle with Italy. It is easy to imagine a run in which the player decides to turn eastwards instead of going the historical way of trying to reconstitute the Roman empire. Any player who plays any country in a more original way will end up triggering fewer unique events for that country.

That makes me wonder how attractive the Europa Universalis V DLCs are going to be. Already at the base, if you don't want to play the Byzantine Empire, you don't need the first DLC, Rise of the Phoenix. But even if you buy it and play it, you might not see a large part of the content. There is at least a risk that buyers of the DLC will be underwhelmed, because too much of the content is invisible to them.

Pauper's Ladder

2026-03-09T10:08:00.001+01:00

Pauper's Ladder is a board game from 2019, but the German version was just released this year, and I bought a copy. Pauper's Ladder is an adventure game, that is to say that you are dealing with a lot of unpredictable random events. You have some control, by deciding where you go, or by manipulating cards. But the basic mechanic is moving somewhere, drawing a card, and then seeing whether that card is good or bad for you. As my personal venture into fantasy board games and roleplaying games started in the 80's with Talisman, I can relate to that game loop.

Board games over the past decades have developed a divide between Eurogames and Amerigames (and that is the polite term, some people use Ameritrash). While not all Eurogames are European and not all Amerigames are American, a majority of games I see in shops here in Europe or encounter at a games fair are Eurogames. Eurogames are mostly about resource management and strategy, player interaction is often only indirect, and very often the victory condition is having the most victory points at the end. If you like to plan several moves ahead, Eurogames are for you. Amerigames are more concerned with the experience than with planning and strategy; they don't mind sudden surprises, as long as that creates fun, and those surprises can be players being able to directly attack each other.

Now for most of my life I have been playing pen & paper roleplaying games, which are very clearly Amerigames. And I continue to enjoy campaign games, like our current campaign of Arydia, which sit somewhere between board games and roleplaying games. So I did enjoy Pauper's Ladder, even if for Euro gamers the randomness might be a bit disconcerting.

I was thinking of the advantages of Amerigames this weekend, as I was playing some older Eurogames with some people in an unfavorable composition for that: Two of the four players knew the two games very well, and had even years ago played one of them at tournament level. Me and another guy played those games for the very first time. Even if winning is not the most important thing about playing games for me, playing a board game at such very different levels and having the feeling of not being in the running at all isn't much fun.

Since I have stopped playing roleplaying games and am visiting public board game nights twice a week on average, I have bought a lot of suitable games for that, and brought a different game every week. Apart from a few games like Dune: Imperium, which for some time were repeatedly played, most of the board games I played were as new to me as to the other players, which evens the playing field. One would need to play the same game with the same people repeatedly to achieve another sort of balance; and that is difficult in the environment I am playing in. Amerigames like Pauper's Ladder have this problem to a much lower degree, as the randomness much diminishes the effect of experience, and people can win by just being lucky. I really want to have some games like that in my collection, also because on some nights I just don't feel like deep thinking.

Winner takes it all advertising

2026-03-06T09:38:00.000+01:00

If you were to enter the search term "MMORPG blog" into Google or another search engine, there is at least a chance for you to see a link to my blog on the first few pages. That is of course completely irrelevant, nobody searches for MMORPGs or blogs anymore, my blog isn't a MMORPG anymore, and I don't get any income from people seeing my content. But I still get spam comments hoping to profit from my Google page rank, and I still get mails offering me SEO (search engine optimization) services to improve that page rank.

This is all based on the fact that most search engines for most of the time of the existence of search engines gave out results in the form of long lists of possible results. Of course the top results got the most clicks, but being on the bottom of the first page or somewhere on page two was still a lot better than not being listed at all. For people who derived income from people visiting their website, paying for search engine optimization or paying Google directly to be high on a search result page made sense.

Today was the first time I saw the term AEO (answer engine optimization). Because search on the internet is changing. Even on Google, the list of links is now pushed further below, with the top of the page being more and more often totally dominated by an answer given by artificial intelligence. If you "search" by directly putting a prompt into a chatbot like ChatGPT, you don't get a list of links at all, only the AI answer. If I ask Google AI what the best smartphone is, it answers "In 2026, the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max and Google Pixel 10 Pro XL are widely considered the best smartphones overall for their top-tier performance, cameras, and software experiences.". This answer is obviously rather valuable for both Apple and Google, as many people with this question won't search much further than this. Being given a definitive sounding answer suits most people. But if you think about it, we don't know whether that definitive answer is true, how it was produced, and how it was possibly manipulated. Maybe another AI, not made by Google, would recommend a Samsung phone over a Google phone.

This is not just bad news for people offering SEO services, which are becoming increasingly irrelevant. It also changes the interest of being on page two of the search results. If the AI answer pushes the other links further down, or only the AI answer is displayed at all with no link list at all, then you need to be either in that AI answer, or you don't get any clicks at all. There is no such thing anymore as a good but not top Google page rank, you are either at the top or not there at all. Winner takes it all. Like for Super Bowl ads, the advertising cost for being displayed at the top rises astronomically, while the second tier advertising business loses customers.

Funnily enough, if I ask Google AI "What is the best MMORPG blog?" the answer is "The top-rated MMORPG blogs and news sites are MMORPG.com, Massively Overpowered, and MMOBomb.com, offering consistent news, reviews, and community discussions. Other highly regarded, specialized, or opinion-driven sites include MMOs.com, Tobold's Blog, and MMO Culture.". That result is probably a combination of the AI operating on outdated information, there not being much new information on the outdated topic, and nobody paying to push his MMORPG blog to the top of the queue. It is also very possible that different people asking the same question to different AIs will get different answers. For me that doesn't really make a difference. But not being in the first answer to a question to an AI chatbot could potentially make a huge difference to anybody trying to make a living with internet content.

The internet is currently full of content that isn't the best or top in its category, but still gets clicked on enough to create a revenue stream that allows the content creator to continue. The more people will rely on AI answers instead of scrolling through lists of search results, the less viable that second tier becomes. You will either be a rockstar among content creators, or not be visible at all. And unless, like me, somebody is creating content without a monetary incentive, those content creators will disappear.

Byzantine Empire in EU5

2026-03-03T10:12:00.000+01:00

I am back to playing some more Europa Universalis V. I took a break because the developers had taken a break, for Christmas holidays and to prepare a large patch. Patch 1.1.0 is now out for the release version, and there is a beta server with patch 1.1.8. It solves the problem of the AI being overly aggressive, but otherwise the patches are an endless story of game systems being changed to solve one problem, only for the changes to cause another problem elsewhere. Still, I'm not overly sensitive to that, and so I am playing on the beta servers.

While a single game of EU5 over 5 centuries of game time already takes up to around 100 hours, I am now 240 hours into the game, and had to consider replayability. What is it, that makes one game of EU5 different from another? The answer is mostly location. For example, I already played a game as Holland, in which I conquered Utrecht early in the game, and later formed the Netherlands. If I would now play a game as Utrecht, conquer Holland early in the game, and later form the Netherlands, that game wouldn't be much different than what I already played.

But besides location, there are also countries that have particular starting conditions or special rules. So I decided to play one of those, the Byzantine Empire. In EU4, the Byzantine Empire is already very small, and usually gets quickly overrun by the Ottomans. In EU5, the Byzantine Empire is still stronger, and larger than the Ottomans. That gives a player the opportunity to preempt history, attack the Ottomans early, and reverse the decline of the Byzantine Empire.

That isn't easy, because the Byzantine Empire in EU5 starts with strong negative modifiers in the form of estate privileges, which result in nobody but the peasants paying taxes. And they don't pay very much, so the financial situation is dire. Also the initial ruler has a very low life expectancy, and his heir is still an infant. This is definitely not a country that I would recommend to a new player. However, removing estate privileges and strengthening crown power is already a regular part of gameplay for about any country in EU5. And so are country finances.

I will not go into the details, but let's say that my gameplay of the first decades of the Byzantine Empire involved a lot of brinkmanship (e.g. razing all my forts to save money) and borderline exploitation of game mechanics. But I basically brought the Ottomans down to a single province, and are militarily secure against divided Turkish countries. While the Byzantine Empire starts with a lot of non-integrated provinces, the lands in Western Anatolia are actually Greek in culture, and the Byzantine Empire has lots of cores there. So it is easier to conquer these and get control there, than to increase your control in Greece.

Once the Byzantine Empire gets all its estates to pay taxes and increases control over its existing and conquered territory, it has a rather strong position. There are a lot of expensive resources in the area, like gold, gems, or silk. And as the name suggests, Byzantium is already an empire, the highest possible country rank, which gives various benefits like for example more cabinet members. Once the finances were in order, I was able to afford the new feature of patch 1.1.0, a local governor. That is a very expensive to maintain building which provides a local source of 80% proximity, like a second capital. I built it in Thessaloniki, and that much improved my control in the Greek part of the country. Constantinople also starts with some advanced buildings, some actually from later ages, like a dock. And there are several hospitals in the country, which helps a lot with the plague. So the outlook for my Byzantine Empire is now rather good.

There is one other reason that I am playing Byzantium now: The first major DLC for EU5, now postponed into the next quarter, is Fate of the Phoenix, a DLC that adds specific content for the Byzantine Empire. In EU4, DLCs often came with changes to game mechanics, which resulted in the annoying situation that you had to buy a specific DLC in order to get access to a specific game mechanic, like for example army drilling. The promise for EU5 is that all changes to game mechanics will come in free patches, and buying the DLCs will only add content, usually country- or region-specific. It is not very clear how that will work, and how much value a player gets out of such a DLC. As I am very curious about this, I decided to play the Byzantine Empire now, before the DLC, to then be better able to judge the improvements the DLC brings.

Avocado toast instead of houses

2026-02-25T13:32:00.001+01:00

I am a German living in Belgium. 72% of Belgians own the house they live in. Only 48% of Germans do. That has a lot of significant economic consequences. Despite the fact the Germany has a higher GDP per person, and lower taxes than Belgium, the median household net worth per adult in Belgium is $250k, compared to only $67k in Germany. Wealth is far more evenly distributed in Belgium. All over the world, houses mostly belong to average people, not banks or billionaires, and are thus an essential part of the middle class dream.

Buying a house in 2026 is harder than buying a house in 1976. There is a common narrative on the internet that this is due to some sort of generational conspiracy, where the older generations like the Boomers succeeded in an evil plot to keep the younger generations like Millennials or Gen Z poor. That is complete rubbish. The internet favors simplistic, sensationalist, and wrong narratives over complicated and less interesting truths. The counter-narrative of younger generations having no houses due to spending all their money on avocado toast isn't much better.

The complicated truth here is that patterns of consumption and asset ownership have very much changed over the last 50 years. I sometimes wish that the young people filled with generation envy and complaining the loudest about older generations could be put into a time machine and forced to spend some time in 1976. I doubt they would like the experience very much. No mobile phones, no streaming, no internet, no social media, VHS was just invented, few people had one, and there were no video rental shops yet. Households spent a much larger part of their income on groceries, but had a lot less variety. Any type of consumer goods was comparatively much more expensive. Holiday air travel was expensive and a lot less common.

And then 50 years of increased industrialization and globalisation happened. As a result, the relative cost of consumer goods fell. The relative cost of assets rose. The availability of various services exploded, but that came with a cost. Average screen time rose from 4.5 hours in 1976 to over 7 hours in 2026, but while in 1976 the main cost was buying a TV, today we have far more and far cheaper screens in our houses, but pay a lot more for subscriptions.

At 9% mortgage interest rate, houses weren't all that much more affordable in 1976 than in 2026, and as people had a lot less stuff, they were about 40% smaller. But they did require less down payment. And the value of a house grew faster than inflation in the past 5 decades, so it was a great investment. Still, one shouldn't neglect that most people who bought a house in the 70's had a lot less money left for consumption, and that money bought them comparatively less comfort. A mortgage is a way to force yourself to save more money and consume less, which obviously results in better retirement savings and a more comfortable situation in old age. The personal saving rate of Americans was 12% in 1976, and is under 4% now.

The world changed in the last 50 years, and people changed with it. The 2026 median household lifestyle with its much bigger choice of cheaper consumer goods and services would seem like luxury and science fiction to a person from 1976. But people simply adjusted their expectations to what lifestyle is normal. If we express wealth as the pile of stuff we own and the services we consume, we are a lot richer in 2026 than the people of the same age in 1976 were. But the fundamentals of people only earning money in the middle section of their lives, and their saving rate during that part of their life having a big impact on their retirement finances hasn't changed at all.

In the US, a record number of high earners report living paycheck to paycheck. But that is due to all the expenses that they consider to be "necessary" today, some of which didn't even exist before. Less consumption and higher savings rates are still possible today, even if it might involve resisting stronger temptation. Whether you buy a house or some other investment portfolio with the saved money, your future self will be grateful. It is easy to blame everything on "the economy" or "older generations", but a lot harder to make good lifestyle choices for the long term.

Civilization 7 failed the test of time

2026-02-21T10:44:00.000+01:00

Civilization 7 was released just over a year ago. Although Firaxis claimed that they had great sales on consoles, the success of Civ 7 with its core audience on PC wasn't great. Player numbers peaked at only half the level of Civ 6, and a few months later even Civ 5 had more daily users than 7. A number of updates and DLCs didn't change much there. Some of the core features that distinguished Civ 7 from Civ 6, like the game having three eras, with some kind of reset between them, and players having to switch to a new civilization in a new era, were not very popular. So now Firaxis announced for "Spring 2026" the Test of Time update, which basically backpedals on these core features: You will now be able to play a civilization through all ages, and the whole reset between ages, and victory conditions for each age will be massively toned down. Civ 7 after the next update will resemble Civ 6 a lot more than before.

Now whether a game is officially in early access or not, we have become used to games changing a lot during at least their first few years. And of course there are always people who love the new content being added, the bugs being fixed, and the balance being improved; while others always kind of like some unbalanced features, and are complaining about them being removed. But I would argue that these changes to Civilization VII are something different. This isn't just added content and balance improvement. It is an admission of failure, that a core concept for the game was unpopular, and an attempt to change that core concept without completely breaking the game.

From the previews it appears as if these changes will massively change how Civilization 7 is played. Most players at least somewhat oriented their gameplay to the era victory conditions and legacy paths. By moving the goalposts, Firaxis is fundamentally changing the way that most players will play this game, even if large parts of Civ 7 will still look like before. Civilization 7 is dead, long live Civilization 7.5!

Following the money - Insider trading

2026-02-20T14:23:00.000+01:00

Earlier this month, an unknown person made $17,000 on the prediction market Polymarket by getting 17 out of 20 bets right regarding the Super Bowl half-time show. The circumstances strongly suggest that this person had some insider information. Which isn't really surprising. Even if event organizers want to keep the details of the half-time show a surprise, there are a number of people involved organizing such an event, and the information is probably guarded less well than state secrets or sensitive financial information. If you know something that few other people know, you can make money with insider trading.

Which brings me to the core of my post, where I would like to give kudos to the UK police. Not just for bagging the first royal in 400 years, but for asking the right question that was previously ignored: How did Jeffrey Epstein profit from trafficking underage girls to presumably a lot of important people? As far as we know, he didn't directly blackmail somebody like the former Prince Andrew as in "give me money, or I'll release compromising photos and videos of you with underage girls". Instead there seems to have been a much subtler interaction going on, in which Andrew gave Epstein insider information that he had due to his role as UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment. It isn't hard to imagine how such information could be valuable to Epstein, who was a financier.

Since Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion in 1931, police knows that following the money trail is often a lot easier than proving the underlying crimes. Some of the released photos of Andrew in the Epstein files or before are suggestive, but there was apparently no hard evidence on which to convict him on any sex crimes, which are notoriously difficult to prove. Proving that Andrew had access to confidential information and gave that to Epstein will be a lot easier. And, somewhat ironically, the maximum UK prison sentence for "misconduct in public office" is higher than that for having sex with underage girls.

To me it seems very likely that a lot of the Americans who were invited to Jeffrey Epstein's island did also give him information that enabled him to do insider trading. But the Department of Justice apparently didn't pursue that line of inquiry up to now, possibly due to political pressure. The American guests of Jeffrey Epstein up to now only were punished by cancel culture, not by any legal proceedings. The UK looks morally superior here, being able to arrest the brother of the king.

Working with cheap idiots

2026-02-19T08:02:00.000+01:00

There is another board game drama, because the COO of a large board game company believes that in the future board games will be designed by AI. He said on Linkedin about AI: "Three years ago it was essentially nothing but a curiosity. Now it's useful but in limited cases. In a year or two it will be as useful as any new hire. A year or two after that it will be as useful as an experienced employee. For a few dollars a day in cost."

I don't care about the drama and calls to boycott the company. But I find it interesting what top managers think about AI. And while I am in no way an expert, I am pretty certain that the above quote reveals a number of very important misunderstandings about the use of AI to replace employees.

First of all, there is the question how useful AI is and will be as an employee. A research institute on AI tried to test that, by creating a Remote Labor Index benchmark. It takes real world examples of jobs that have been posted on freelance platforms like Fiverr. It then compares how various LLM AI models perform in those jobs, compared to humans. In the paper the AI succeeds in only 2.5% of the time to do as well as a human freelancer, while in a later update with the latest LLM models it still doesn't get better than 3.75%, failing to complete over 96% of projects at a level that would be accepted as commissioned work in a realistic freelancing environment.

Will there be further progress in these LLM AI models? Most certainly! But there is already a lot of indicators saying that the progress is slowing down. If a future generation of LLM model with the help of even more data centers and computing power then manages to do 10% of tasks as good as a human freelancer, that is still not going to be good enough for companies to really replace employees by AI. And that is just for the type of work that is already identified as being very possible to do remotely, just with a computer. The "robo plumber" that comes to your house, identifies the problem with your faucet, and fixes it is still very much science fiction, and will be for at least decades to come.

The other big issue with the statement about the future of AI employees is the "few dollars a day" part. The current cost for users to use LLM models is not in any way even covering the cost to run them. And the cost to run them is increasing fast. AI is still very much in the honeymoon phase of the enshittification business process, where it is sold below cost to attract and bind users. Once the "winning" AI models have been identified and established a monopoly or oligopoly, the companies will substantially increase prices to get their trillion dollar investment back.

Will AI change the economy? Absolutely it will! But we aren't heading for a future where all of us are unemployed. We are heading for a future where most work that requires any manual part will be still done by humans, because even if an AI controlled robot can do it, that won't be cost efficient. And the type of office work that doesn't require a robot will be done by AI supervised by human handlers. While a LLM AI is not actually "intelligent", there are some tasks that it clearly can do faster and cheaper than a human, especially in the generation of text and images. But it has been shown that hallucinations are a fundamental part of the technology, and won't be fixed by future versions. So for any type of work output that somebody else then has to rely on, a human needs to verify the AI work, which often takes longer than the AI needed to produce it.

And now we come to the part nobody talks about: So-called bullshit jobs. In any large company, a significant percentage of the employees is doing work that isn't actually essential or useful to the companies bottom line. You don't want AI designing a bridge and rely on that bridge not crashing. You might want to use AI to make Powerpoint slides for internal company use, or to write long boring documents for some compliance paperwork task. The less actually useful your current job is now, the more likely you are to be replaced by AI in the future. And even then you might be promoted to AI handler, with an increased output of Powerpoint slides and paperwork that isn't essential. The future of AI is us working with cheap idiots that nobody trusts to do the real work, because for the real work the cost of verification is higher than letting the work be done by a human in the first place.

AI, bots, and algorithms don't buy consumer goods

2026-02-16T10:14:00.001+01:00

I could write a whole other blog post about luxury poverty, where people live paycheck to paycheck, but own a lot of advertised consumer goods. But let's just say that it has been proven that advertising in general works, that with a lot of advertising a consumer good is sold more than without. But that is in aggregate, over all forms of advertising for all forms of consumer goods. It still remains difficult for any individual advertiser to determine how effective one particular form of advertising is.

This just caused some drama in the board game space. One well-respected YouTuber cut ties to another content creator with whom he had shared a channel, accusing the other guy of unethical advertising practices. Basically the unethical scheme works like this: YouTube channel owner pays YouTube to get more views for his videos; at the same time he charges advertisers per view, making more money than he paid to YouTube. Channel owner makes more money, advertisers pays for thousands of viewers that aren't organic, and that often stop viewing before even seeing the advertised product. The world unethical is used because the practice is neither illegal, nor prohibited by YouTube itself, who also make money that way.

Why do that for a board game channel? Because the organic number of viewers and subscribers for board game channels is small. Board game publishers are mostly small, board games are often printed in only a few thousand copies. Influencer advertising for board games works generally well, because in such a small niche, there are only a few places where a significant concentration of possible customers exist. But the effect of paying YouTube for more viewers depends on the size of YouTube, not on the size of the niche. These viewers just clicked on a thumbnail YouTube proposed to them on their first page, and then quickly realize that the video is about a subject they aren't interested in. But as shown in this example, this got the view numbers up from around 2k to 36k. If you can pretend to advertisers that your channel is over one order of magnitude bigger than it is really, you make an order of magnitude more money.

For me this is just another example of a long and ongoing trend: There are a million ways to boost "viewership". I even still get mail regularly from people who offer SEO (search engine optimization) for my blog, which was one of the earlier methods to boost "eyeballs". Algorithms send people this way or that, so the people who make money from viewers learn to reverse engineer the algorithms and optimize their content for maximum algorithmic impact. But you can also simply pay some bot farm to send thousands of fake viewers your way. And if you are okay with your viewers not actually being interested in your content, you can also create that content quickly these days with generative AI, which is even better than humans for algorithmic optimization. We aren't quite at the dead internet theory level yet, but yes, there is content out there that is not created by humans, and where a large portion of the viewers either isn't human, or is human, but isn't engaged with the content at all. And the bots and "algorithmic viewers" won't be buying the advertised good.

An AI video watched by bots doesn't appear to make economic sense, until you realize that an advertiser who wasn't careful is probably paying for those fake views of the fake content. The global internet advertising market is estimated to have a size of several hundred billions of dollars, and some of it is spent unwisely, or the advertiser is being scammed. The obvious problem of that is that it isn't sustainable. It just takes one economic downturn for advertisers to be forced to look more closely at the efficacy of their advertising spending, or they get wiser over time. For influencer advertising to work, you need actual humans to be engaged with the content. AI slop on the content side, and bots and algorithmic "fake" viewers on the view side, diminish the effect of advertising, which diminishes its economic value. In a new form of Gresham's Law, bad advertising could actually drive out good advertising, because advertisers simply lower what they pay per view, and channels with just organic viewers suffer more from that than channels with fake viewers.

In a perfect world, advertisers find a way to better determine how effectively their advertising dollars are spent, and AI slop and fake viewers stop getting paid, and then disappear. Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world. There is both the risk of the wrong people getting paid, and the risk of people who make good content not getting paid enough to continue doing so. On an internet without advertising money, you'd only get content creators like me, producing a rather low amount of content with low production value, because most people won't do more than that without getting paid. Advertising money created the modern internet as we know it. The people who are trying to abuse the system with get rich quick schemes are a danger to that.

Menace first impressions

2026-02-10T11:53:00.000+01:00

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.

Insulation

2026-02-09T10:57:00.001+01:00

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.

Kingdom Crossing

2026-02-08T08:25:00.000+01:00

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.

Recalculating and changing my mind

2026-02-05T16:10:00.000+01:00

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.

Unmenaced

2026-02-03T06:30:00.058+01:00

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.

Enshrouded

2026-02-01T10:47:00.003+01:00

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!

Abroad and Fromage

2026-01-28T21:22:00.000+01:00

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.

Protests and political violence

2026-01-27T11:31:00.000+01:00

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.

Open world survival crafting base building

2026-01-21T14:41:00.000+01:00

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.

Waking Europe

2026-01-19T13:38:00.000+01:00

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.

First thoughts on Arydia

2026-01-17T12:23:00.000+01:00

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.

Emberheart

2026-01-15T10:03:00.000+01:00

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.

Rune Dice

2026-01-13T09:16:00.002+01:00

I came across a nice game via some influencer, and would like to pass on the recommendation. The game is called Rune Dice, it will come out this year, but on Steam there is a free demo you can already play. It is a game about the physics of throwing dice onto a dice tray, you aren't actually *rolling* dice. Instead you are throwing a die with a 1 on it, trying to cause a collision with another 1 die on the table. That will produce a 2, which will then automatically jump towards the closest other 2 on the table. If it can reach that, that causes another merging of the dice, the value goes up to 3, and it jumps towards the next 3, and so on. Although the dice are cubes, this isn't even limited to reaching 6. And you can cause multiple chain reactions at the same time, if you cause a collision of already existing dice.

All merged dice are moved to the left, and when all the collisions are done, the merged dice are processed. Regular dice just produce damage onto the monsters at the top of the screen that are moving towards your hero. But there are special dice with special effects, with everything from healing to setting enemies on fire. After a few throws, the table is reset and new dice appear on it, so you don't run out of targets to throw at. Combat ends if either you are dead, or all the monsters are. Then you move towards the next fight, until you reach the boss fight at the end of the map. Besides fights, there are spaces with bonuses or shops, where you can buy additional dice, runes, and relics.

Rune Dice is a roguelite game, but the demo doesn't have those lasting effects between runs yet. You can also only play two different character classes, with more to come in the release version. However, the demo doesn't prevent you from playing a complete run, and you can do that repeatedly. It might be a tad too generous there, because you could very well play this for hours, and then not feel the need to buy the game when it comes out, unless you want this roguelite progression. In any case, this is certainly fun for a while, and free, so I can only recommend it.

Plastic foam safety warning

2026-01-12T09:43:00.000+01:00

In view of recent events, I would like to give some home improvement safety advice, based on me having worked in plastic material science. On January 1st, 40 people died in a bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, and 116 others suffered burn injuries. The investigation quickly found out that the fire started when sparklers were held too close to the ceiling, which was covered with noise absorbing plastic foam. It later turned out that the owner of the bar had bought that noise absorbing foam in a home improvement store and installed it himself, and there had been no safety inspections for years.

Basic plastic foam of the cheapest variety is incredibly flammable. But you can also buy only slightly more expensive versions with increasing amounts of additives that prevent the foam from catching fire or hinder the fire from expanding quickly. If the owner of the bar had just paid a little bit more for his noise absorbing foam and taken a flame-retardant one, the fire would have been much slower, and a lot more people would have been saved.

So if you are thinking of doing any home improvement for heat or noise insulation that involves plastic foam, please buy a flame-retardant version, even if it is slightly more expensive.

Betting on semantics

2026-01-11T09:10:00.001+01:00

Gambling used to be heavily restricted in the USA, with casinos legal only in Nevada and Indian reservations. But then a Supreme Court decision in 2018 allowed states to legalize sports betting. And then so called "prediction markets" appeared online, allowing people to bet on just about anything. They do that by claiming to be financial instruments, futures markets, instead of betting sites. But there are some obvious problems there, and some of those became public when the US captured Maduro.

The first problem is one of insider knowledge. In other financial markets, you can't trade on insider knowledge. With prediction markets offering greater anonymity, that is much harder to enforce. While the capture of Maduro came to a surprise for most of the world, obviously a number of people were involved in preparing it. So when an anonymous person created a new prediction market trading account just days before the capture, only to bet $30k on Maduro being captured before January 31st, and promptly made over $400k profit, it seems likely that this person made money on insider information.

But there were other bets on Venezuela on Polymarket, one of the biggest prediction markets. For example one that let you bet on whether the USA would invade Venezuela by January 31st. And that is now causing even bigger trouble. The people who bet on that argue that if US soldiers bomb Caracas, land there with helicopters, capture and extract the head of state, and then say the US will run Venezuela, the USA has obviously invaded Venezuela. But Polymarket says that bet was only about "US military operations intended to establish control", while the US action in Venezuela according to Marco Rubio was only a law enforcement action.

Now it is one thing to quibble over semantics for political purposes. You could see the political bias of various media from what words they used about the capture of Maduro, with left leaning media using "kidnapped", while right leaning media using words like "extradition". Fortunately the bet on that used the neutral term "captured", and nobody disputes that Maduro was captured. The bet on the "invasion" is less fortunately worded. What exactly is an invasion? The US is still threatening Venezuela in classic 19th century gunboat diplomacy, but the US soldiers that captured Maduro left, and the US is not occupying the country. Some people would call that an invasion, others not.

And that is obviously a problem of prediction markets compared to sports betting. Much of the purpose of various sports organizations is to establish and enforce extremely clear rules on who exactly has won a competition. People in a sports bar watching a soccer match will argue about things like whether an action by a player was a foul, or whether an offside occured. But umpires on the field rule that immediately, and the game always ends with a clear result, even if some fans don't consider it fair. You don't get people in sports betting argue about who actually won the game. But if a prediction market allows you to bet on anything, the reality might be a lot less clear, and semantics suddenly matter. Is an invasion only a ground invasion with an occupation?

As prediction markets are relatively new, rules have not really been established yet. There is a strong argument to be made that this sort of gambling is harmful, and should be illegal. But even if it is decided that it is legal, there need to be rules on who is the umpire that establishes whether an event happened by the terms of the bet or didn't.

Sengoku Dynasty

2026-01-10T10:17:00.000+01:00

In April 2024, I played some Medieval Dynasty and liked it. At the time, Sengoku Dynasty had already released, but was still in early access. And of course I didn't want to play two very similar games one after another. Meanwhile, Sengoku Dynasty has had a full release, an update to version 1.1, with version 1.2 already announced. So this is what I am playing now. Compared to Medieval Dynasty, Sengoku Dynasty has more quality of life features like fast travel. And I do like the Japanese theme.

Sengoku Dynasty belongs in the survival crafting genre of games, like Valheim, or Palworld. It does have automation like Palworld, but of course you have villagers to do the work instead of Pokemons. From humble beginnings as a refugee stranded on a coast, you quickly get to building your first village, and can currently end up having up to 4 villages.

What I typically don't like so much about survival crafting games is the combat part, where for example raiders attack your village. Fortunately you can turn that off in Sengoku Dynasty. You need to kill some bandits as a condition to liberate some areas, but you can trivialize that by giving yourself infinite health. So the combat never gets into the way of the part I like, gathering resources and building villages. I am basically playing it more as a cozy game.

Having said that, I played Medieval Dynasty for 30 hours, Palworld for 50 hours, and will probably play Sengoku Dynasty for 30 or so hours and then stop. These games all have some sort of progression system or tech tree, and once you can build the best buildings, there isn't much reason to continue. There is also the aspect that running around in a new open world collecting resources is fun, but only for so long. Survival crafting games are also comparatively cheap, you can usually get them for around $30 or less. And if you just plan to visit for a while and leave anyway, you can get many of them for even cheaper on Game Pass, as it doesn't matter to you that you don't get to keep the game.