👷‍♂️ Engineering a habitable base on Mars!

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Hello Fellow Engineers!

Welcome to Real Civil Newsletter - the only newsletter where we defy gravity in Graviton Grid, build colonies on Mars before breakfast, and then judge bridges harder than architects judge curtain walls.

This week, newsletter subscribers get an exclusive first look at the brand new Civil Draft Accessories, including the 5-Year Anniversary DeskMatt featuring nearly 200 hidden references from across the channel!

This week, we’re giving away games, flexing over the record-breaking Chantai Yangtze River Bridge, and reviewing the Millau Viaduct - a structure so tall even architects can’t reach its level.

Also inside: a puppy discovers barking, engineers discover patience, and everyone discovers that math is still cooler than “aesthetic vision.”

Grab your coffee and your hard hat, this one’s load-bearing.

Let’s dive into it 👇

We’re giving away THREE copies of Graviton Grid! ⚙️🛰️

If you’ve ever wanted to bend gravity, break Newton’s laws, and call it “engineering,” this is your game. Twist space, time, and your patience - all in glorious isometric puzzles.

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for… 🥁

🏆 WINNER: armypenguin101 🏆
🏆 WINNER: justdevette 🏆
🏆 WINNER: dexterraynoble 🏆

Check your inbox for your key and get ready to start engineering the impossible. 🧠🔩

Missed out? Don’t worry, there’s always another giveaway coming soon.
Want a shot at the next one? Vote for a bridge in this week’s poll! 🌉✨

🧱 Civil Draft Accessories Have Landed!

Hello fellow engineers, and welcome to the official accessory line for Civil Draft - the Real Civil Engineer Trading Card Game!

These accessories are fully compatible with the base game and packed with even more hidden references to hunt down (some of which even I forgot I hid):

🧩 The DeskMatt – A Where’s Wally-style design celebrating 5 years of the channel, featuring nearly 200 Easter eggs from across RCE history. A checklist will help you find them all… if you’ve got the patience of an engineer.

📐 Blueprint DeskMatt – For those who prefer a clean, calculated look. Perfect for drafting, gaming, or judging bridges.

🎴 Civil Draft PlayMatt – The official 2-player layout for Civil Draft. Flip, fight, and build like a pro (just don’t spill coffee on it).

📘 Civil Draft Binder – A premium, zip-closing, side-loading fortress for your cards. 360 slots of pure organizational bliss.

🪙 Collector’s Coin – The official in-game flip coin, complete with a magnetic measuring tape-style display box. Yes, it’s as extra as it sounds.

This is a limited preorder campaign, available from November 14 to December 7 only.

No extensions, no excuses. We’re engineers, not procrastinators.

👉 Check them out here: creocards.com/civildraft

And if you haven’t yet, grab the 5 Year Anniversary Shirt to complete the set!

👷‍♂️ Truss Me, I’m an Engineer…

The Chantai Yangtze River Bridge: A Long Span, and an Even Longer Flex

Fellow engineers, this month’s megastructure is the kind that makes architects whisper, “How did they even…?” while we sip coffee and say, “Math.”

Meet the Chantai Yangtze River Bridge, China’s latest engineering show-off. Opened in September 2025, it now holds the record for the world’s longest cable-stayed span, a mind-bending 1,208 metres of pure structural swagger.

Unlike most pretty bridges, this one doesn’t just carry cars, it carries high-speed trains and six lanes of traffic on the same deck. It’s a hybrid cable-stayed and steel-truss design that laughs in the face of symmetry: the rail side weighs nearly three times more than the road side, so engineers pre-tensioned the cables so the deck would straighten out after construction. That’s not intuition, that’s calculated chaos.

During testing, 30 four-axle trucks (over 1,200 tonnes) parked on one span while 800+ sensors recorded micrometre movements.

The result? A 10-lane-wide ribbon of steel and math that redefines hybrid bridge design. It’s a structure that earns its elegance through terrifyingly precise engineering.

⚡ Cool Links

⚙️ Engineering & Infrastructure

• Projects using AfriSam Construction Materials shine at the 24th Construction World Best Projects Awards 2025, A variety of major South African infrastructure & road-works projects (bridges, bypasses) were honoured, proving to architects that engineers actually do build real stuff

• Arcadis and Jupiter Intelligence partner to accelerate global climate-resilience solutions, A strategic engineering consultancy deal to build resilience into infrastructure globally.

• Dubai Metro Blue Line reaches 10 % milestone just five months after construction started, A big-scale transit infrastructure project showing serious progress.

🎮 Gaming & Indie Update

• Indie Game Round-up (November 8, 2025), A bunch of quirky indie titles including a third-person shooter where you pilot a shrimp in an abyssal realm. Yes, a shrimp.

• Every Game Coming Out In November 2025: 47 titles you might’ve missed, Strategy, roguelike, sim… there’s something here for the builder-in-you.

🐕‍🦺 Paddy’s Corner

8 week old black labrador puppy's first bark! SUPER ADORABLE!

Another one from the archives!

After being riled up by his own shadow, Paddy the 8 week old labrador puppy found a yoga mat that caused his first ever bark to be caught on camera! He then has a funny five minutes attacking a large plastic coin jar in the shape of a huge bottle and runs around the lounge before having a cheeky playful bite on my leg!

👾 Not-So-Indie Game of the Week:

This week, I tried Surviving Mars Relaunched - a city builder where you’re not just an engineer… you’re the entire space program.

I started out building a simple landing pad and somehow ended up managing a full Martian colony, oxygen pipelines, and about 400 slightly confused drones.

Let’s just say, I achieved peak engineer energy: optimizing solar panels while accidentally terraforming the wrong crater.

👷‍♂️ Engineering a habitable base on Mars!

It’s time for a Bridge Review!

This week we’re going peak bridge, and I mean actual peak. The Millau Viaduct in southern France doesn’t just cross a valley, it flexes across it.

At 343 metres tall (taller than the Eiffel Tower), it’s the world’s highest cable-stayed bridge. Designed so elegantly that architects everywhere claim it’s “beautiful,” but don’t be fooled, this thing is 99% engineering and 1% French wind resistance.

It’s got seven concrete piers that had to be built before they knew if the deck alignment would even work, a 2.5 km steel roadway launched from both ends like a mechanical lightsaber, and expansion joints that move more than some small houses. The whole thing is so balanced it could probably survive an architect trying to “add some curves.”

Final score: 9.8 / 10 - loses 0.2 points because some architect probably got partial credit for “aesthetics.”