Now I have unboxed the game, studied the rules, and prepared it for my board game nights of next week. I even played it in a mock 4-player game against myself to understand it better. And I am still very much enthused, and hope that the other players will equally like it. At least the game raised some interest: We often organize us on Discord to what we play, and I found 3 other players interested in just over an hour.

While Clank! and Dune: Imperium have a deck-building core, in Lightning Train that has morphed into a bag-building core. Which feels slightly different, but should be statistically the same, whether you draw a card from a perfectly shuffled deck, or draw a tile from a perfectly mixed bag. Just like in many deck-building games, part of what the tiles in Lightning Train do is provide a currency with which you can buy new tiles. There are ways to trash your starting tiles to slim your bag, so all the elements of a deck-building game are there.

Where Lightning Train is very different is on the board, in the railway building part. Some tiles are simply train segments, while other tiles (with a Lightning Train symbol) give you more new train segments. The train segments you can spend either to build a railway line, so the tiles are gone from your bag, or you can pay for other things on your player board, so the segments go to your discard pile and then back into the bag. The last important type of tile is the contracts, which determine in what region of the board you can operate. The board shows the United States during the 19th century, and one goal is to connect coast to coast with the Transcontinental Railroad. The contracts everybody starts with are on the east coast, but then you can buy other contract tiles that get you westwards.

There are several sources of points, and who has the most points at the end wins. One important part is two "mogul" cards, which either give you an upgrade or provide you with an objective that scores points at the end of the game. These are interesting, because you get them right at the start, and they can orient your strategy. If you get an objective to connect cities in the Rocky Mountains, that is where you'll want to be heading. Then you get points for building certain railway lines: The shorter and easier ones don't give points, but longer and tunnel lines give a few points, and some tile effects can double those. Finally players build stations all over the map, and these stations are the end points for goods deliveries. Goods pop up at the start of every round, and if you can transport them to the station that needs them, you get points for every of your rail lines you used, but other players also get points if you used their lines. While connections tend to be short in the early game, later there can be longer deliveries which can make quite a bunch of points.

Overall I quite like Lightning Train. But it is definitively less strategic than Dune: Imperium. The mogul and action cards, while welcome for the added variety they bring, also introduce more randomness into the game. A close game might be decided by who drew the more convenient mogul objective card. On the positive side, Lightning Train is a bit lighter than Dune: Imperium, although heavier than Clank!, and is very well suited for my board game nights in length and complexity.

Also today another $5 item I ordered from a smaller online shop arrived. It was something I couldn't get elsewhere, and so I bought it despite the rather outrageous $20 shipping cost. The parcel is small, less than half the size of a shoe box, and light, so I really don't see why shipping it would cost $20. I have a serious suspicion that this smaller online shop has made more money from me by fleecing me on the shipping cost than the profit margin on the $5 item was. It probably makes business sense for smaller operations to have a relatively high floor on shipping costs, so people rather do bigger orders.

Two $5 items bought online, shipping costs between $0 and $20. I wonder how much it actually costs to ship items for an online company. I guess Amazon has built their whole operation around having the fastest and cheapest logistics, and the same parcel costs them a lot less than it would cost me if I went to the post office.

As an European, I am very much used to prices being quoted already including value added tax. Earlier this week I got a board game I pre-ordered, Lightning Train, directly from the publishing company. The game was just below €50, but besides €14 in shipping I then also paid another €13 for VAT. So there is another trap that can make an online order unexpectedly pricier than I had thought. No wonder I end up buying stuff on Amazon whenever possible. They don't always have the lowest quoted price, but with the VAT already included and no shipping cost often end up cheaper than other offers.

My campaign board game group just finished scenario 17 out of 18 of Tidal Blades 2. After a break for the holidays, we will finish that campaign in January. Then we will have to decide what campaign game to play next. Due to my crowdfunding habits, there is an abundance of choice. Even after pre-selecting, there are still 4 candidates: Kinfire Chronicles, Oathsworn, Arydia, and Elder Scrolls: Betrayal of the Second Era. The first two are structurally similar to the campaign games we played before, in that there are a number of scenarios to play through, with very little branching. The latter two have an "open world" element to it, where you walk over a map, and have encounters, rather than a linear series of scenarios.

I haven't made much progress on my board game stack from the Spiel 2025 in Essen, having just played two more games since the last gaming status: The Hobbit - There and Back Again, and Railroad Tiles. EU5 is in part to blame, eating up time I could otherwise use to prepare board games. But also my board game nights have had an increased number of other people bringing their games, and so I have been playing classics like Dune: Imperium or Arcs rather than the latest games I bought.

Once you think of it, this also reveals an interesting fact: The pension crisis isn't the fault of today's pensioners. In fact, if all the money today's pensioners have paid in during their work life had been saved up in their name, their pensions would be a lot safer. It is a triumph of capitalism, where an individual saving system combined with compound interest over decades yields much better results as the "intergenerational solidarity" pay as you go systems.

The obvious problem is that it is hard to impossible to change from a pay as you go system to an individual savings system, as the currently working generation would have to pay both the pensions of the previous generation and their own. Many pension systems all over the world produced surpluses when the baby boomer generation was paying in, there being so many workers per pensioner. But politicians took those previous surpluses and spent it on other stuff, so the money is gone and can't be used to fix the system for the future. Not having locked the money in individual savings accounts also missed out on the compound interest that would have accrued.

In short, the pension crises all over the world are real, but they are self-inflicted. A sequence of larger and smaller generations doesn't cause a pension crisis if every generation pays their own pension.

Published Horrible Guild has over the past years been rather successful with the Railroad Ink series of roll & write games. So in September of last year they launched a Kickstarter for Railroad Tiles. It has the same idea of trying to build a network of rails and roads, but as the name says uses tiles instead of rolling dice and having to draw the network yourself. The Kickstarter delivered on time this year, and extra copies were available at Essen, where I picked up a "Kickstarter version" of the game.

In Railroad Tiles, 5 sets of between 2 and 4 tiles are set up. The first player takes a set, then the second player, and so on. The set not taken receives a star token as additional bonus, the sets are filled back up, and a new player order is determined. Basically, if you chose the 4 tiles set, you will play last, and the fewer tiles you took, the earlier you can choose next round. After 8 rounds, your network is scored, and the game ends, which takes about an hour with 4 players.

Placing you tiles in your network is a puzzle, as there are different things that score points. You will want to take tiles with placement spots for pedestrians, cars, and trains, and connect those. Each round you can place between 1 and 3 of those, and you score points in function of how many of them you connected, up to a maximum of 5 per placement. In my first game I totally underestimated how quickly that adds up and concentrated on other scoring objectives, ending up last in points. Other scoring objectives are the number of tiles in the biggest rectangle, rewarding you for building compact; number of clusters of 3+ cities; and avoiding loose ends of roads or rails leading nowhere.

I like Railroad Tiles better than Railroad Ink. The tiles are prettier and less messy than hand drawn networks, while the puzzle remains more or less the same. But still, this is a lighter and faster game than the average games I play, and so I consider it more as a filler, or for board game nights where we prefer to play a series of shorter games rather than one taking all evening. There are already a bunch of expansions out for Railroad Tiles, but I don't think I'll play this often enough to necessitate expansions.

Personally I don't regret having bought EU5 at all. Even the 85 Euro I paid for the premium edition means I only paid 50 cents per hour up to now, and I am far from finished with this. I can see myself playing this quite a lot more in the coming months, and when I eventually want to move on, I can see myself coming back repeatedly over the coming years.

Having said that, EU5 is an extremely slow game. On my computer a year on the fastest speed without any interruptions takes nearly 2 minutes, or 3 hours for a century and 15 hours for the complete five centuries. If you actually play, a full game takes at least 50 hours, and if you like looking and managing many details, it can easily be 100+ hours for a single run. A full game of a typical 4X strategy game would be a lot faster, so EU5 already isn't for everybody because of that.

My main purchase warning is related to this: While EU5 is perfectly playable as it is, the developers are currently very busy with patches, and those patches can massively change how whatever country you chose plays. For example, this week patch 1.0.8 moved from beta to live, and it messed in a major way with the loyalty of your vassals and the centralization / decentralization values. I was lucky that I started my game on the beta version, so now I just switched to the live version without any changes affecting me. But some people's ongoing games were seriously messed up by the changes.

If you combine frequent patches that introduce massive changes with a game that takes up to a 100 hours to complete, and people who might not like me have 40 hours per week to play, the risk of your game being messed up by a patch becomes rather significant. If that is something you dislike, and you don't want to play a game that feels a lot like early access with regards to devs still experimenting with major game mechanics, I wouldn't recommend buying Europa Universalis V. If you don't mind the changes and the potential chaos, then there is a lot of fun to be had here, and I recommend the game.

Please note that these massive and frequent changes also affect any content you watch on YouTube. If you see for example a video telling you that you absolutely must strive to maximize your centralization value, regardless of what country you play, that video was only correct until patch 1.0.7. Under the current 1.0.8 version the advice would be a bit different, depending on your number of subjects.

The reason I felt I needed to cheat was the current state of Europa Universalis V, where it is extremely difficult to keep peace with your neighbors. As a player, you tend to make your provinces rich, which causes neighbors over the centuries to start desiring your land. Unlike EU4, you aren't being told which lands, and there is no diplomatic action you can do against that. Even if they have been allied with you for centuries, they'll break the alliance and eventually attack you. The only thing that works is forming a defensive league, which the AI has less tendency to break (instead they needlessly keep voting on changing the rules back and forth). As playing Portugal is nearly impossible if Castile / Spain keeps attacking you, I used the console commands to form a defensive league with them at the start of the game.

Compared to my EU4 game as Portugal, where I ended up conquering most of Morocco, in EU5 I was actually weaker than Morocco, and only conquered Granada. I have a small vassal on Moroccan territory, but that is it. So most of my efforts have been directed towards improving my economy, and then using the gains to finance exploration and colonization. It is a sort of a cheat that I already know the Americas exist and can work towards discovering them, while the rest of the world is still ignorant about that fact.

In this game, this focus on exploration worked rather well in my first century. There are a number of islands in the southern part of the Atlantic, like the Azores, Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Cape Verde. In the Age of Discovery they become important staging point for discovering America. In this game, at the end of the Age of Renaissance, I control all of these islands, thus having an advantage for future exploration and colonization. I also managed to explore the way around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, discovering Madagascar. However, colonization is very slow before the Age of Discovery, and I don't have the colonial range to get there yet. The reason I was able to explore that much was some luck with events: You can send a character to explore somewhere, but normally don't have access to specialized explorers before unlocking them with an Age of Discovery technology. Explorers get a 0.5 bonus to exploration progress, which means that even the worst explorer is between twice and three times as fast as a non-explorer in the Age of Renaissance. But I was lucky to get an explorer by an event several times, and that really got my exploration much further than anybody else's.

Up to version 1.0.7, everybody always went for Centralization as one of the most important values of your nation. That increases crown power, which increases your income from trade and taxes, and keeps the estates in check. In version 1.0.8 Centralization comes with a huge negative impact on the loyalty of subjects. So I had to reverse course and am now trying to move towards Decentralization, as a centralized colonial empire doesn't really work anymore. Right now I can't even annex my vassal in Granada, as they are disloyal to me due to the Centralization penalty. It seems the idea is that countries with lots of colonies or vassals decentralize, while Centralization is better for playing tall without subjects.

I reached the start of the Age of Discover in good shape. And then the New World institution spawned in Lisboa, giving me a further advantage for discovering the Americas. I am having a lot of fun with this game, and am looking forward to see how all this colonization gameplay is going to work out.

On the plus side of playing Mecklenburg was a good start, due to a location right next to the Lübeck market. It also was a good experience of the reformation within the HRE. I didn't do any discovery or colonization. Absolutism was boring, I felt it was easy enough to push through. And the Age of Revolution was just annoying, with revolutions happening on a random 1% chance per month unless you lower all your taxes (which I did after the first revolution), and the revolutionary war being not very interesting.

I don't think I'll play much ironman in the future. I'm not really that interested in achievements, I just didn't want to have none of them. It was more a proof of concept that the game *can* be played on ironman from start to finish.

My next run is probably going to be Portugal. However, I might need to use some console commands for that. Paradox is still tuning their AI, as people tend to complain both if it is too aggressive and when it is too meak. The problem is that an AI that acts okay in one region of the world might end up with unwanted outcomes in another region of the world. The current AI is made in a way that results in Castille almost always attacking and crushing Portugal. That is already true for AI Castille against AI Portugal, and then gets worse for player Portugal, as players tend to make their country richer, and thus more desirable for aggressive neighbors.

Now you might say that the historical reality of Portugal resisting being taken over by Castille and later Spain is an abnormality. But EU4 managed to make that at least a possibility, while EU5 hasn't gotten that far yet. So if I want to play a game in which I don't expand in Europe and concentrate on exploration of the new world and colonization, I will need to cheat a bit. It should be possible to force Castille into an early alliance / defense union they wouldn't accept without cheating, and go from there.

Offering free bus passes or childcare is very far away from the communist ideas of Marx, Lenin, or Stalin. Opposing genocide in Gaza is very far away from 9/11 jihadism. And wanting to deport harmless illegal immigrants is still very far from fascism and the Holocaust.

The incorrect use of these words by politicians and the media then leads to even more use of them in social media. People describe themselves as victims of fascism for any minor administrative inconvenience they had to endure, indecently trying to elevate their hardship to that of somebody who survived a concentration camp. The 1881 welfare reforms by Otto von Bismarck, a staunch conservative, would be called communist if proposed in 2025 in the USA. In the end you have different versions of Godwin's Law, always calling everything in the most extreme term, and completely eroding the meaning of words.

I'm still on my Mecklenburg run, my overall second game of EU5. It is an ironman run to be able to get achievements, and I plan to play until the end in 1836. But bugs and changes to the game did have some weird consequences to my game. For example there was a now fixed bug in which the HRE emperor with the "demand unlawful territory" ended up getting random provinces for himself. In my game that gave Bohemia a north sea harbor, and it is now rivaling England in the colonization of North America.

Having quit my first run after becoming emperor of the HRE without wanting to, I maybe should have made some different strategic choices as Mecklenburg. Instead, in between the player country having a tendency to expand faster than AI countries, and my decision based on history to make Mecklenburg protestant, I found myself leading the protestant side in the religious war of the HRE, won, and ended up as the emperor again. At least this time I wasn't just elected randomly.

In hindsight, I found out that in my first game with Holland, I had by chance avoided a country specific disaster, the hook and cod wars, which frequently triggers if the ruler dies in the plague and the heir is weak. In my second game, I made it to the Age of Absolutism, only to find that by choosing absolutism over liberalism I was hit by another brutal disaster, called court and country. I must say, I'm not impressed with the design of disasters in EU5. They consist of a series of punishing events, and don't feel as if you as the player can do much about them. If a good game is a series of interesting decisions, the EU5 disasters don't live up to that standard.

I am not the richest country in my game of EU5. But I am the 5th richest, despite my country just being a mid-sized duchy in a historical poor part of Germany with no valuable resources. My economy is five times the size of France's. I'll be punching well above my weight in the coming religious wars. That is also because EU5 has a built-in transition in the 16th century from peasant levies to regular armies. Peasant levies are limited by your population. Regular armies are limited by your ability to pay them. EU5 has a helpful indicator on the military tab of your country, telling you how large the game thinks your regular army should be, given the size of your country. My actual army is three times the suggested size, but even in war I just spend a 6th of my income on army maintenance, and thus could easily afford a much bigger one. I'm just waiting for the next technological advance, which will make peasant levies obsolete.

A lot of weirdness is stemming from the fact that there are costs in the game that scale with the size of your economy, and others that do not. The size of your economy is the size of your tax base plus the sum of all purchase costs of your trade. So when doing a big purchase that depends on economy size, like embracing an institution, I can simply stop all trade and suddenly pay a lot less. Meanwhile costs like growing a town into a city aren't changing much over the course of the game, so the around 1500 ducats that costs were prohibitive in the early game, while now I make enough money in a year to do it twice. Why would I want to do that? Well, if you have enough money, the size of your army is then limited by your manpower, and you need towns and cities to build more of the buildings that increase that manpower.

On the one hand, it is quite fun to play this way. The the other hand, economic success leads to some outcomes that are ahistorical, unbalancing for gameplay, or both.

The early positive reviews for Arc Raiders, generally above 90, were tanked by a review from Eurogamer, which gave the game a dismal 40. Not because the game wasn't fun, or had technical problems. Arc Raiders simply had one single feature, AI voice acting for text-to-speech chat, that the reviewer objected against. Which is funny, because the reviewer actually reported positively on an encounter with other players who told him "we are looking for lemons", and I can't think of any way other than AI that would have enabled the game to have voice chat for such a phrase. Pre-recorded human voice chat is all nice and dandy, sounds better, gives work to human voice actors, and all that. But you can't possibly have a recording for everything one player might want to say to another. And if you let players just talk to each other via microphones, you get into all sorts of problems, because you are unable to moderate harassment and other unwanted behavior.

Now I don't mind a reviewer mentioning such a pet peeve in his review. But a professional review giving a game an unusually low score because of such a pet peeve is rather unprofessional. And in the early days around release date, when there are not many critics reviews available, a single very low review can skew the picture on review aggregation sites like Metacritic by a lot. And gamers notice, which ultimately just accelerates the movement away from relying on professional critics. Political activism disguised as a review is just shoveling the grave for professional game criticism.