Come on, don’t be disingenuous, you need more than a bus ticket if you don’t live close to the border of a state that allows abortions.

Your whole trip will most likely take three days or more (getting there, getting the procedure, coming back), so you need at least two days in a hotel/Airbnb. You will have to get off work for those days as well, that is cost as well.

That could be around 300$ together if you don’t have any vacation/sick days, on top of the cost of the procedure itself. And it’s not like you can save up that money over several weeks/months either, when you need an abortion every day counts. Contrary to some media, those affected don’t want to wait until the last possible day.

Some people really only have money for the bare necessities. And they are the ones who really should have access to an abortion because a baby wouldn’t improve their situation in the slightest.

Being poor isn’t a choice in most cases. Learned helplessness might play a role, but telling them “just get a bus ticket, lul” won’t change that.

I mean, it is tempting if you are a soulless politician that only thinks as far as the next reelection. In 2008 the economy and therefore city finances were just a tiny bit under the weather. If you are then able to pull a deal that nets the city over a billion dollars, that’s great. You won’t be there to see the repercussions and you bolstered the balancesheet for a year, what’s not to like? /s

It depends on the type of supporting structure for the panels. In Germany a company built it tall enough to use their normal farm equipment: Image

I’ve seen pictures of massive tractors pulling several ploughs side by side in the US, that would most likely not work with this, but there are plenty of solutions for anything on a slightly smaller scale.

At least sunflower and rapeseed oil are back at a somewhat reasonable level, about 2-2,50€/l. Still way more expensive than pre-pandemic but the prices right after the invasion were just ridiculous, as you said, right up there with olive oil.

It’s already constantly out of stock and when it’s available it’s at least +50% of the regular price. (Germany)

In Wingspan there are only very limited ways of “destructively” interacting with other players, to me only two come to mind:

1. You take away birds someone else wants to draw, either by taking them yourself or by refreshing the birdbath with an ability. You can’t steal from someone’s hand or board (not that I think you should be able to). This usually hasn’t that much impact, because there are many birds with similar stats and/or abilities and there are so many birds, you can’t really play for a certain combo anyway.

2. You limit someone’s ability to take or use the food they want by (a) taking it from the pool of rolled dice, but similarly to 1., there are several ways to roll them again or generate them directly. Or (b) take their acquired food with a bird’s ability, but they always get something in return, either a specific resource or they can draft from the pool, it’s rarely punishing und usually at least neutral.

Apart from that there is nothing that would impact your gameplan that is in the hands of another player. You always get the same amount of turns, always at the same time and the first player marker moves predictably. The last round is also pretty lame if you play with the basegame, because laying eggs if you’ve got the space is the best move to take at the end - the expansions fixed that though by giving you less eggs.

Terraforming Mars on the other hand (I haven’t played the others more than once) let’s you compete for bordspace and the resources on them, which already makes it way more important and competitive to get established on the board early on, at least if someone else is doing it. You also compete for the progression track bonuses that directly give more VPs and influences the game’s length. If everyone pushes temperature/O2/oceans early on and you know the game will end around round 11 instead of round 14, you will have to adapt your strategy quite a bit.

I still think Wingspan is a great game, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. Imo it would have fit in better into the normal “Spiel des Jahres”-Category instead of the “Kennerspiel” one, that probably rubbed some people the wrong way/set wrong expectations.