I've played most of the way through Might and Magic 6. While the world exploration and building up your characters is fun the story is pretty mundane and drip fed to you through hours and hours of fetch quests which all inevitably involve clearing out a dungeon. It gets a little tedious. For a a better open world party based RPG from the same era I recommend Betrayal at Krondor. Significantly better story and depth of play. I also put in about 15-20 hours of Might and Magic 1 and hand drew many maps. I can only recommend that title for real masochists.
I've played through the campaign and done most of the alien technology challenges. I really like the physical board game but it doesn't make it to the table that often because the setup takes some time and it can be punishing for new players. With the electronic version set up is a breeze and the campaign provides a nice onboarding experience easing the player into the various aspects of the game. There's also a story that while not a grand space opera kept me interested. The alien technology challenges give you an opportunity to dive into expansion material and provides a wide variety of scenarios. Regarding the randomness of the game, in the campaign you will usually get a hint as to what to expect from each scenario. The challenges will give details as well. Then while you're building your ship you have the option to look at up 75% of upcoming event cards. It costs you time to do so but that's part of the strategy. Do you go fast and try to grab the best pieces and try to build an impervious gunship with only enough cargo capacity for your tooth brush or do you peek at the events and try to make a ship built specifically to handle them that will also allow you pick up loads of cargo along the way? Regarding the instability of the game, it kicked me out during the ship selection about 10% of the time. Fortunately, it has an autosave feature and loads up quickly so when I got boot to my desktop it took about a minute to get back where I was before.
