Ah, I didn’t see your edit to say you’d played it too. I’m not sure if it will appeal to a more hardcore player (I hadn’t played any for at least a year prior), but yeah, I think it’s pretty nice for newbies and more casual players. Some people will like just opening packs and might not bother with the battles.

One thing about PTCGL was that the app/PC client were really bloated, slow, and ran hot on my devices. The app for Pocket has great performance.

I’ve still been playing Fire Emblem Engage in bursts, but don’t think I played it this week - however, I think I’m on the last chapter now, so might finish it this weekend. Although there’s still DLC chapters to do that I haven’t looked at yet.

What I’ve actually been playing is Pokemon TCG Pocket. I played PTCG Online a bit just before it transitioned to PTCG Live, and then continued with PTCGL a bit after that, so I was already familiar with how battles work. So far, I’m pretty happy with PTCGP. It’s a simplified version of the normal PTCG rules with custom cards without real-world equivalents. It is definitely more straightforwards, which is nice for doing quick battles but limits the types of interesting plays you can make. What I really appreciate is some kind of single-player mode (which they had in PTCGO but scrapped in PTCGL) with interesting challenges to do.

I’m not sure if a meta has emerged, but I feel that the online battles I’ve done are farily diverse it terms of the decks people use - I think there are more viable decks to use. In PTCGL, there were like 3 or 4 decks that everyone used, so that battles were really repetitive.

It’s still early days for PTCGP, but I think it’s a very well made game. Not something I’ll play all year round, but might dip in every now and then.

To be fair, it’s only the countries in dark blue on that map that have it. The light blue countries have something like one of your parents has to be a citizen/settled, which is what the previous commenter was suggesting as an alternative.

Not most, technically - wiki says 0-14 make 44% of population. But this article breaks down the 70% further by saying 44% killed were 14 or under, so it’s pretty much bang on for indicating that they’re killing Palestinians at random.

The huge list of echoes that you have to scroll through in a single line looking for the right one is pretty annoying. It was same kind of problem when you wanted to attach something to an arrow in TotK.

I’ve been doing a bit of Fire Emblem Engage every evening, and it’s really grown on me. The battles are challenging in a way that you really have to think about how you set everyone up at the start, consider most moves carefully, and respond when the enemy does something you don’t expect. It all leads to a very satisfying result when you execute it well. I haven’t played a FE game since Awakening, so I can’t really compare it with more recent games and maybe I’ve forgotten what FE is like, but it does feel like a really well-balanced game in terms of the battle difficulty.

Slowly carrying on with Fire Emblem Engage. It’s picking up a bit and it’s pretty fun now. I’m playing on the easiest settings (no permadeath and unlimited use of the time crystal to rewind when you make mistakes). I’m slightly conflicted about that now, because I did enjoy the old challenge of getting through without anyone ever dying. In Engage I’m mainly using the time crystal when I make a button press when I don’t mean it or immediately seeing a better placement for a unit, but every chapter or two I have a character die and I rewind to save them (where in the past I would have restarted the chapter). On one chapter, I didn’t bother rewinding and just let someone die because I knew they’d come back. It is a huge (real) time saver, but it’s a very different feel from older FE games. I know I could play with harder settings, but now the option is there, I’m not sure I have the patience and time to go back to the old way. Not sure what the point of this ramble was - still a fun game, and I’m definitely going to play through to the end.