General idea of this game is brilliant. You are presented with current geopolitical situation and take control of a existing country. You need to deal with its parliament, army, research, economy, etc. But, as of version 1.08, it is plagued with many bugs. For example in-game music stops playing after you play for some time, and you have to listen to the soundtrack files included in more expensive Deluxe Edition (wav and mp3), if you wan to have full game experience. List of major bugs (there are more smaller ones) that I found is located here https://www.gog.com/forum/realpolitiks/realpolitiks_ii_bugs_no_sound_in_intro_background_music_stops_playing_time_is_not_advancing_scro Nevertheless, I was able to finish campaigns that I started, and the game was quite enjoyable. It was able to cause One More Turn Syndrome. World map is accurate, you can find Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics there. During the game Russia likes to invade Ukraine with its army. Loading screen presents you with quotes from various leaders, dictators and thinkers that fit perfectly with the game. The rules of the game are however not terribly realistic. At the start of the main campaign, there are no alliances between countries (or maybe its is ultra-realistic, and it reflecting the truth of worthlessness of international agreements, for example Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal to Russia in exchange for Russia refraining from using force against Ukraine, look how it turned up). As your country expands its economy and territory, costs of buildings and projects can skyrocket, which means that developing space technologies required to achieve science victory can cost almost infinite amount of resources when you play a powerful country (because rocket able to put 100 tons into LEO build by Monaco requires 2000 tons of propellant and the one build by China requires 6000000 tons, right?). I hope that in Realpolitiks III we will get something better and more adequately representing reality.
This digital board game can be quite absorbing when you get a hang of it. Unfortunately, at least for me, using Windows 10 in 2022 made watching built-in video tutorials impossible, because I could only hear audio and controls of the video player were broken. According to this thread https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher_adventure_game/tutorial_video_bug it was working fine on Windows 7, but now you have to watch external videos on YouTube to learn how to play. Installing the game without GOG Galaxy makes impossible to load saved game (or to star a new game for that matter). Fortunately this bug has a solution, you just have to remove Galaxy.dll from the game folder. Dealing with this bug is quite essential (even when you did not plan to save a game), because I also encounter another bug that made me unable perform any action at the start of the turn. Exiting and loading game again helped (and unresolved effect of another player’s card appeared). There are also some mistakes in cards text. For example different amount of clues required to finish side quest is sometimes found at the expanded card and its preview on the bottom panel. Some portions of some cards are not translated into Polish. To be fair I found those flaws playing version 1.2.5a designated as “English”, and version 2.7.0.24 [1.2.5 (gog-24)] designated as “Polish” possibly has better Polish descriptions (at first I installed 2.7.0.24, but after not being able to watch tutorials and load saved game I switched to 1.2.5a hoping that it will help [it did not]). Despite all those shortcomings I recommend The Witcher Adventure Game. I’m not a board game expert so it is hard for me to compare it to other ones, but I got some fun out of it. I also want to mention that it is probably first game in over 10 years that I played, that has hot seat multiplayer. Existence of this feature brought back memories of childhood.
