Settlers of Catan is a monument in the history of tabletop board gaming. I've even heard people talk about Catan as if it is the "Jesus" of board games, and that the history of board games can be broadly divided up into "before Catan" and "after Catan". It was the first German game to receive mass commercial success and popular acclaim in the United States. In a time when most American tabletop gamers were still playing Monopoly, Risk, and Stratego, Catan almost single-handedly popularized the "Eurogame".

But I've never, personally, been big into Catan. I own a Star Trek version of the game, which was gifted to me, but I've never owned the original Settlers of Catan or any of its themed expansions or revisions. I've only ever played Catan with friends who own the game, and I've always felt very "meh" about it.

Players will build power plants and must manage pollution and climate change.

But when I saw the announcement earlier this year of a renewable-energy-themed edition of the game, called New Energies, I was a lot more interested. I'm very enthusiastic about environmentalism and renewable energy. In fact, for those who don't know, my day job is a software engineer working as a contractor with utility companies regarding energy efficiency, renewable energy, and demand response programs. You know when your thermostats sets your air conditioning 2 or 4 degrees hotter on the hottest days of the year? Yeah, that's what I do. (It's intended to reduce the demand on the grid and prevent brownouts from excessive air conditioning use, so that you don't loose power entirely and have to go without any air conditioning at all!). So I have both a personal and a professional interest in the subject matter of New Energies.

I actually bought this game the week of its release, and made a concerted effort to play it promptly, instead of letting it sit on my shelf, still in its shrink-wrap, collecting dust for 2 years. Actually, it can't sit around in its shrink-wrap, because it doesn't come in shrink-wrap. In keeping with its environmentalist themes, Catan: New Energies does not include any plastic in its components or packaging. All the pieces are bio-degradable wood and cardboard, and all the tokens and cards came wrapped in recyclable, bio-degradeable paper sleeves and bags. And there was no shrink-wrap; the game was sealed with 4 pieces of circular industrial tape on each side of the box. So Catan Studio gets brownie points from me for walking-the-walk in regards to its environmental theming!

New Energies commits to its environmental theme, and include no plastic in its components or packaging.

And the components are generally very good. There's a cardboard insert for all of the game components that helps speed up set-up and tear-down. My only complaints (components-wise) is that the draw bag for event discs might be a bit over-sized, and there aren't any player aide cards that outline the turn sequence, environmental event effects, or endgame sequence. It's always helpful to have something like that for player to follow along with while I explain the core rules. Yes, the costs of all the player actions are shown on the player boards, but it's real easy for new players to miss certain actions, or not understand what the symbols mean without any kind of textual description. Thankfully, the general turn sequence for Catan is relatively simple and straightforward, so it's still fairly manageable to explain the rules without such player aides.

While I was searching the PlayStation Store for some VR games to play on my PSVR2 headset (and on a PS4 VR headset that a friend let me borrow, since the PSVR2 headset isn't backwards-compatible), I stumbled upon an old sci-fi game that had apparently slipped under my radar when it released back in 2016. That game is a near-future space disaster game called ADR1FT. Unfortunately, this particular game doesn't have PSVR support, even though it apparently does have PC VR support, but it looked pretty and intriguing, so I bought it anyway.

Space station by Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich

In ADR1FT, the player plays as an astronaut who is a survivor of a catastrophic disaster aboard an orbital space station. The entire station has broken apart, and even the sections that are still intact are without power or life support. It is up to the player to explore the debris, look for any other survivors, and restore enough power and computer functionality to escape back to Earth in an Emergency Escape Vehicle (EEV). Personally, I think it's silly that an Emergency Escape Vehicle would be rendered useless in the event of an emergency that disables power and computer functionality. Kind of defeats the purpose of such a vehicle. One would think that such a vehicle would have an independent power supply and computer, and some way of detaching or ejecting the vehicle without the station being powered -- like, I don't know, some kind of explosive decompression of the clamps that attach the escape vehicle to the station, which works based on simple physics, rather than requiring power or computers.

But whatever, suspension of disbelief. I have to restore power to the main computer to get the escape pods to work. Fine. I can live with that contrivance.

The space station debris hovering over the Earth is a striking visual.

The space catastrophe itself is loaded with striking visual details. From the vistas of the Earth spinning below, to the fields of debris suspended in space, to water bubbles floating around certain chambers, ADR1FT really sells the look and feel of being trapped on a near-future destroyed space station. This includes the feeling of isolation, loneliness, and hopelessness of being trapped in space. In fact, it might be too good at selling this aesthetic, because it does so to the point of occasional frustration.

This will be the second part of a 2-part Retrospective on Civilization VI. The first part features my personal list of Top 10 Good Ideas that Firaxis put into the game, and this second part will be the Top 10 Bad Ideas. If you haven't read the Good Ideas yet, then I highly recommend you check that out first, as there will be several topics in this list that will build on what was said in the previous list. In fact, there will be some topics that are appearing in both lists, so I hope you'll read the good things that I have to say before reading the bad.

I also don't want to be a complete downer, and would like to provide constructive feedback. So wherever possible, I will try to make suggestions on how I think Firaxis could improve on some of these ideas if they chose to revisit them for future games. And some of these ideas are certainly worth re-visiting.

With the New Frontiers Pass for Civ VI over, an "Anthology" edition of Civ VI on sale, and no news at all regarding future DLC or expansions, I'm assuming that Firaxis has finished with Civ VI. As such, I want to look back on the game and reflect on the things that I liked most about it, and the things that annoyed me the most.

After the lifespan of Civilization V had ended, I wrote up a pair of retrospective blogs about my personal Top 10 Good Ideas and Top 10 Bad Ideas that went into that game. I'll be doing the same thing now with Civ VI.

I want to stress that this is a list of 10 good and bad ideas -- not necessarily good and bad mechanics. Some of the good ideas will be ideas that I like in principle (or on paper), but which might need more iteration before they truly work as intended. In contrast, there may be some bad ideas that work fine mechanically, but which hurt the "flavor" or theming of the game, in my opinion.

This is, of course, a subjective list of personal favorite and disliked concepts in the game. I'm sure there will be a lot of disagreement, and some of the things I write here will probably be somewhat controversial with the rest of the player base. So I'm interested in reading others' feedback. So if you agree with any of my points, or you vehemently disagree, feel free to post a comment and share your thoughts.

This first post will cover my personal Top 10 Good Ideas, and I will follow it up with the next post being about the Top 10 Bad Ideas.

This past weekend, I put up my review of Gathering Storm, the new expansion for Civilization VI. The overall summary is that I felt very "meh" about the game's headline features, but was actually impressed by how the smaller, more subtle changes really improve the underlying game. That review focused on a lot of the high-level concepts of the game, and was already starting to get rather long (my readers all know how verbose I can be). I decided to cut a lot of my smaller criticisms of individual mechanics or functionality out of that review, and save them for their own separate post.

So now that you all know how I feel about the expansion overall, here's some of my smaller nags and nitpicks (and suggestions for resolving them) that I hope can be resolved by some post-release patches.

Table of contents

• Un-Intelligent Queuing
  • No wishful-thinking in the queue?
• Ugh, now there's even more U.I. issues!
  • "Resume Game" should tell me which game I'm resuming
• Units should require different resources
  • More domestic uses for strategic resources
• World Congress should have a leader who sets the agenda
• We should be able to demand promises before the offending action
• Joint wars should still count as "Surprise Wars"
  Joint wars and joining an ongoing war should cost Diplomatic Favor
• Civs who don't pollute should gain Diplomatic Favor