🏗️ Totally Not a RCE Trading Card Game Announcement (Wink)

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Hello Fellow Engineers!

This week we’ve got dams cracking, bamboo bridges flexing, and a border patrol game where I accidentally vaporize the healthy (sorry, Steve). There’s also a totally hypothetical trading card game in the works, but shhh, you didn’t hear that from me.

Oh, and Paddy? Still out there saving the world, one soggy stick at a time.

Let’s dive into it 👇

This Week’s Giveaway: 3 Copies of Dicey Chess! ♟🎲

What do you get when you mix classic chess, chaos, and a total disregard for traditional strategy? Dicey Chess, of course, because who doesn’t want to bring RNG into the most calculated board game ever invented?

To enter this week’s giveaway, all you have to do is cast your vote in the super secret trading card game poll below. You know… the one about that totally unconfirmed, entirely theoretical TCG I may or may not be working on 👀

🏆asminyou305🏆
🏆benjaminhealey🏆
🏆j.b4077🏆

Check your email for your game key!

Missed last week’s giveaway? Don’t worry - more free games, more chaos, and more bridge-related nonsense are coming.

👷‍♂️ Truss Me, I’m an Engineer…

Spittallam Dam

Move over architects, this one’s a job for the real heroes: engineers. Switzerland’s Spittallam Dam - built back in 1932 when slide rules ruled and no one fully understood water pressure -has a crack.

Shocking, I know… almost like designing a giant water-holding wall without fully understanding the forces involved was a bad idea. Who could’ve guessed?

Now, the upgrade is finally here, and it’s bending in all the right ways. The replacement dam curves both horizontally and vertically, because straight lines are for sketchbooks and overpriced cafés. This double curve means thinner walls, fewer materials, and no existential crises when the snow starts falling.

Despite being built in a location more remote than an architect’s sense of practicality, and during winters colder than their coffee shop workspaces, this project is an engineering masterpiece.

No mood boards. No abstract metaphors. Just physics, concrete, and raw brainpower.

⚡ Cool Links

🌉 China’s Mega Bridges: Engineering Where Others Fear to Tread
Chinese engineers are redefining the limits of civil engineering by constructing some of the world's longest and most impressive bridges, tackling challenging terrains like misty gorges and typhoon-prone straits.

🧠 AI-Powered 'Bridge Doctor' Enhances Concrete Bridge Safety
New research details how combining infrared thermography, high-definition imaging, and neural network analysis can efficiently evaluate the safety of concrete bridges. Pretty cool!

🧙‍♀️ Crescent County: Indie RPG Surpasses Kickstarter Goal
After being rejected by over 50 publishers, the indie RPG 'Crescent County' smashed its $60,000 Kickstarter goal in less than 24 hours, offering players a magical island adventure with "witch-tech" broomsticks.

👀 Five new Steam games you probably missed
Steam just got five new games and odds are you missed all of 'em. Don't worry, so did I until 10 minutes ago. Highlights include: a ghost-hunting sim where your best weapon is an EMF reader, a cat-run town planner, and a samurai afterlife brawl that makes duelling look... kinda cool.

🃏 SUPER SECRET TRADING CARD GAME POLL

Rumours are swirling, whispers echo across the construction site... Could Real Civil Engineer be working on a super secret unannounced TCG? I can neither confirm nor deny anything, obviously.

BUT - if such a game did exist, purely hypothetically - you’d definitely want to see some of the cards, right? So let’s say, theoretically, we’re revealing one next week in this very newsletter...

What kind of card should be revealed first? Vote below:

Should the super secret TCG become less secret, expect weekly reveals here in the newsletter, with even more card drops leaking onto YouTube Community posts, Discord, Patreon, Twitter, Reddit, and maybe even a Twitch stream if I remember how OBS works.

Make sure to follow me on all those platforms to stay updated!

• Youtube

• Discord

• Patreon

• Twitter

• Reddit

• Twitch

🐕‍🦺 Paddy’s Corner

Paddy saves stick from dangerous foam...

BREAKING: Paddy rescues stick from vicious river foam, zero hesitation, full tail wag.

Local legend demands snacks, global fame, and maybe a Netflix doc.

👾 Indie Game of the Week:

New Indie Game of the Week is live! And this time, I’m denying entry to the undead and accidentally vaporizing the healthy in Quarantine Zone. Oops.

Think Papers, Please but with zombies, bad neck tattoos, and a trolley I can’t drive. Come watch me fail at border patrol, build the worst med clinic ever, and fire a minigun at everything that twitches.

👇 Watch the full video on YouTube!

This week’s bridge review comes courtesy of RCE fan Aloïs, who’s brought us an absolute unit of a project from the French island of La Réunion. It’s called La Nouvelle Route du Littoral, and it’s so long that by the time you reach the end, you've had enough time to question your career choices, calculate the moment, and still have time for a sandwich.

Here’s what makes this beast shine:

• Length: Over 12km, which is roughly 12,000 metres more than what any architect has ever practically justified.

• Functionality: Not just a bridge, this thing was built to replace a coastal road regularly attacked by gravity (read: falling boulders).

• Cost: €2.5 billion. That’s €200 million per kilometre. Engineers call it an investment. Architects call it “too straight.”

• Design: Arch-gravity-defying engineering with a sleek, rockfall-proof overwater alignment. No unnecessary curves, no glass panels, just pure “don’t die” infrastructure.

It even triggered a giant legal battle, because apparently, not everyone agrees that preventing cars from being squashed by cliffs is a worthwhile cause. But in the end, engineering prevailed, as it always should.

Aloïs says it's long enough to stretch an extra line of disappointed architects, and honestly, he’s not wrong.

Brilliantly overbuilt. Solid engineering purpose. No useless artistic vision boards in sight. And most importantly, it works.

Final Score: 9.2/10 – Long. Expensive. Glorious. And no spiral ramps in sight.

Big shoutout to Aloïs for the submission. You’re officially in the structurally sound club.

🧱 Want your favourite bridge featured next? Send it in! Bonus points if it comes with a petty jab at architects.

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