Episode 3 - Designer Mitchell Land & Next War Con

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Hello, welcome to episode three of Cardboard Campaigns. I'm Kevin Halls. - And I'm Don Weveck. - And I'm Mitchell Land. - Hey, we got a star with us today. - All right. - And we jumped out of a cake. - Yeah, I don't know about that. - But who? - Yeah, we're legit now Don, this is serious. - Right. Before we dive into the topic, so I do just wanna say, love the new intro music. So appreciate you sourcing that for us Don. That's a banger. - So that came from Devon Balicki, who I will admit is my future daughter-in-law. And we will put a link to her work in the show notes, either this episode or next episode in case anyone wants to reach out since she does produce music as a side hustle. - And we played Cremlin with Mitch a couple weeks ago, and the corruption has already taken root deep into the Cardboard Campaigns' part. - Yes, so. - Nepotism makes sense, I believe. - Exactly. - So for those who don't know, Mitch Land is a very successful war game designer in our hobby, and Don and I are both fans of his series in particular, and just wanted to hand it over to Mitch to do a quick little intro of himself for the audience who may not be familiar. - Clearly must be fans of you flew the St. Louis to play it, but anyway. - Yeah, so Mitch Land, if you don't know design of the next war series, which is an offshoot of Crisis Korea in 1995 from GMT Games, I think there are six volumes now. Couple with second editions of Poland, Korea, and Taiwan's second edition should be coming out, keep your fingers crossed very shortly. These sets of they keep telling me. And then several supplements that add, optional rules and additional counters and all kinds of things to the games. Also dabbled with Silver Bandit, when Jean wanted to redo that for the 25th anniversary, so that was a lot of fun. And just, you know, generally hanging out and having fun kind of come up with new things. - Yes, what is it, three games you've done on Vietnam in total? - Oh, I forgot about Vietnam 65, 75, yeah. So we contacted Nick Cart, and basically Ralph Justin and I contacted him, but Ralph Justin and I, Ralph Shelton of the MetaVyron and Justin Martinez who was the GMTR director, had contacted Nick and said, "Hey, we wanna redo 1965, 75." And we don't wanna change anything. He said, "I have been waiting for people to tell me they don't wanna change anything. Let's do it." So there you go. Silver Bandit, 1975, 1975, and of course, next we're Vietnam. So, perfect. - And when you're not doing that, Mitch, what do you do with your time? - Playtest? - No. (laughing) - No, I, so, I mean, it sounds funny, but I love, in good weather, I love bike riding. So outside, we have a rail to trail right here at the Katie Trail. I think Don, you told me you ridden it. - I did ride the Katie Trail. So I love going out there riding on the gravel and just kinda turning my brain off and going. I have a rowing machine in the basement, which I absolutely love. I love rowing to great exercise if you don't have one. Get one. Yeah, other than that, it's pretty much it, you know, game playing. So, you know, every Tuesday nights, game night, although we mostly have been just playing next to where, which is really funny. - Yeah, the games, are they more fun when you've designed them or less fun when you've designed them? - You know, it depends. So it's kind of funny, like I haven't touched, you know, India Pakistan or Korea in a long time. And those are the, you know, the first couple, you know, they're older. I had a chance to play India Pakistan. We played, actually, played the standard campaign game to completion and that was at an event in Norfolk. And that was super fun. Just getting back into it and playing it. And then this recent, just at the next work on, which we're gonna talk about, you know, I played Rich in the very, very nascent Flashpoint scenario for next work, Korea. And I was like, wow, it's just fun to get back into this. So it always, it's funny 'cause when I go back and play one of these scenarios, especially with these Flashpoint scenarios coming up, I was like, how? I need to go play the campaign game for this, you know, or watch and don play Poland. Yeah, I don't wanna play that, you know? So, but it's hard to go back because I'm always working on the next thing, right? So, we all wanted to play next work Poland, but we'll get into that a little bit. Yes, we will. So before we dive too much into the topics that we have lined up for everyone tonight, I do just wanna give another call out to, we have a discord now. So if you like interacting on that medium, I will put a link to the server down in the show notes for this episode and future episodes. And I hope you give us a join on the server and kind of participate in the chat, the community, we're soliciting, you know, different podcasts, ideas, questions, and good way to stay connected within the hobby, as well as via discord if you're into it. So, yeah, I'm just gonna stab you in on there. And I think there's a lot of active people. I mean, it's not huge yet, but it will get there. But so I mean, as a personal side, I like discord. I love it for just communicating and getting responses or whatever and all of a sudden, you'll have this, you know, 30 post long thread of just everybody's going, bo bo bo, back and forth. That's great. And then silence for three hours. But it's fun, right? - I'm assuming that silence is when you actually work because I question whether you work because of how active you are on discord, even during like normal, what would, for most people, be work days. - Right, right. - Parts on how that is anymore, but since I'm pretty much retired, but I assume that other people actually work during your day. - Well, IT is funny, right? So it's, I mean, this is horrible analogy because it has nothing to do with, it's nothing like combat, but it's kind of like combat, is that it's hours of boredom with minutes of excitement when something breaks or something has to be done or whatever, right? So it's not this constant churn of, I gotta do this, do this, do this. So I've always got discord up in the corner, or something pops and I have time. Well, sure, I'll just, you know, dance or whatever. - Don, I was so proud of us. We made a show agenda. We didn't have a correction desk segment outlined that we needed to speak to. And now next episode, we're gonna have to clarify that Mitch Land does indeed work during the day and is just on discord. We were so close to do two episodes in a row. - Right, no corrections. - Well, fortunately, we have an intro for our correction segment now. So now we'll get a chance to use it. (gentle music) - Does jeopardy music or the blooper music? - No, it's more, you know, original music. - Oh, nice. - We figured we might need it again. - Right, right. - I told everyone that intro and outro music and then something for a recurring segment knowing that it would probably be like, here's where Don's screwed up last month. Let's fix that segment. - And being a family member, they believed it. - Right. - Right. - So that's discord and we're gonna be talking a lot about next war and a specific next war con that Mitch hosted here a few weeks ago. But before we dive into that, just wanna go around the table and ask outside of next war. What have folks played for the last month? - Mitch, you wanna start? - Yeah, that's a tough one. 'Cause I mean, I'm looking over here. I've got next war, the insurgency scenario for a ran on the table. Out there, I just finished setting up the next war flashpoint scenario for Vietnam. Although to do that, I cleaned up, I had played through the opening stages of the invasion of Killing Ground Overlord from NES games, that right? - Yeah, New England Simulations games. That was on the table for a little while. Man, what else have I played? I don't know that I've played a whole lot. This is the next war, which is ironic. 'Cause usually I don't play a lot of next war, but with flashpoints ramping up and everything else and trying to get some point for it at the door, I'm like, okay, yeah, we need to test some of these things. - Sure. Done? How about you? - Well, I knew I wasn't much of an opponent for Mitch, but he's completely like, - No off the fact that he and I are playing the Labyrinth on Steam. And so clearly, I've not posed enough of a challenge to enter into his brain that exists. - We were all in. long like turn four. So yeah, so I actually, we started playing because I'd mentioned on the discord that I had put labyrinth on the table. It's a great solo game because the bots are very well constructed and so I'm about a third of the way through the full campaign with both the awakening and the forever war expansion. So it's a huge sort of stack of cards that you have to go through. It'll take me a while, but it's it's a lot of fun. I really I really enjoyed it. It's very important. And isn't isn't that one where you play like the first three card the base deck and then you play the next decks from awakening then you play the next decks from like, yeah, I think massive right? Yeah, you can do it like, you know, I guess if you want you can do various scenarios, but when you want to play the full campaign then yes, it's the entire base game deck and then an equally large awakening deck and an equally large forever war deck. You just you know, go through them and so I think it's I think it's a what is it 11 or 14 11 turns per deck. I think it is is the is the you know is the count. And so it's you know, it's it's it's pretty cool because you get to watch you know, you get to sort of see the the events unfold right close to the normal chronologic order now each deck, you know, because their mix stops stuff can happen that happened maybe later in in those years then then it comes out because it's a random shuffle of each deck. But yeah, you know, mix the decks right? It's I do not base game deck and then it's the right. But like isn't the base game campaign three times through the normal deck. So you're really just replacing that with the two extra decks, right? Correct. Right. So I play right three right three decks worth of right. So it's about in like my you know card holder you know, that's just like vertical you know, plastic thing. It's probably maybe eight inches of cards. So not a visual medium done. Right. I was you know, it's sizes, you know, it depends on who you ask. Right. That's what you ask about. Right. So, you know, Mary was here. You'd get a much different answer. What I just had outputs like yeah, it's this big. So I'm here. The game's done. So I've been in Boston the last four days helping to take care of my grandson. So a lot of what I've been playing is actually transformers and hot wheels. So I could tell you more about the different hot wheels than I remember from when my children who were all in their 30s were young. They all have different movement rates. So we we have a vertical track like this blue plastic track. It's really cool. It it sticks in a suction cups. You put it on a window and then the track just goes down from the window to the floor. It's just a flexible plastic track. And so you can create loops. You can create, you know, different amount of of you know, vertical drop and so you get some speed. Yeah. And so yes, we I can tell you which of those actually are the fastest in which go to furthest off, you know, off a ramp jump. So so there's been a lot of that. I'm just firing up a solo RPG called Miami 86. It's based on the Miami vice era. And so you know, you can play anything from a mob boss to a drug lord to a my you know, a vice cop. So I'm just in the character creation of that. And I'm sure I'll talk more about solo RPGs in the coming months. The the stratomatic football cards from last season. If anyone needs reminding that was a year that the Philadelphia Eagles crushed the chiefs for the Super Bowl. Just wanted to make sure I throw that out there. So I just started going through those cards. I'll probably start playing that with a friend in the next couple of weeks. And then Bill Simone who we've mentioned before, he and I have one turn left when stonewell stone walls sword the blind swords game. Oh yeah. And I think I'm not sure he's ahead. I think he's going to win that his goal is actually to play them all in production order, not date of battle order production order blind swords. Yes. And there's I think they're up to like 11 or 13. And so I I stopped keeping up. It's enough. It's it's it's as I've talked about you know previous weeks. It's one of my favorite system. I will probably do that. I had a game the next word Vietnam going on. And the Indian Pakistan flashpoint play test with someone sticky wicked going on. So I'll get back to those in earnest when we get back to Alan town over the weekend. So right now a lot of its one hold after you recover from grandson sitting right after right after so that's me Kevin. Yeah. So I've I've been good this month. I don't want to miss land you and for some reason you and I have been playing but you and I've been playing BCS so intermittently right Kevin. So I did forget about that. Right. He's you'll BCS is actually a really good play that email game. I have found. Yeah. Well, well, maybe get there later on in the campaign. We're still dusting off some cobwebs we'll say. Which which BBS last blitzkrieg. Oh wow. So that's the tiny one. Yeah. Right. I couldn't convince them to do panzers last stand. So here we are. Yes. My first real foray into into BCS. So I'm still learning Kevin's been a great teacher and I love this. Incredibly patient with my ignorance. I've brought up to play by email thing Mitch. I'll just be honest with you. Yeah. Patients. Yes. Well, good. It does work well. But yeah. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. The for me though this month, I have been good to go back to that. My own self patting myself on the back a little like an audience can't see this for really good at this podcast thing. Well, you know, the other thing they're missing is that Don and Kevin are wearing matching green shirts. Thanks for pointing that out. Patreon content. Yeah. One day we you can't see what's below that that chest angle those. But I don't want to exactly. So better stop right there at matching green shirts. That's a different membership platform that we will never be on. So I've been playing Pacific War. And I have been painstakingly slow in my play. But I have been trying to go back to one of my objectives for this year is to focus on three key games in my library for me. That's Pacific War. The third winter and Federation and Empire. So this month, I have spent outside of next war and the very long sessions with Don on last Blitzkrieg. I have been focused on Pacific War. So that's what's been on my table, which is scenario you're playing. I'm on take five or six of rewracking choral C. Are you just going through them in order? No, no, I just keep focusing on choral C's again. I'm just trying to practice as many different approaches to that battle as I can. What Guadal can now that's the same. Yeah. Okay. So Herman led me astray with all of his content about choral C. Venus favorite. Okay. I'll give quite a canal try. Yeah, I need something for next month. So yeah, but I've been having a blast. That's just fantastic. I keep going back to it. I can't think of something in the Pacific War theater that isn't in that box. It's just oh no. It's a swiss army knife of everything you want. Correct. Yeah. When I don't remember if we talked about it at the con, but maybe, but you know, there's Empire of the Sun and then there's Pacific War. And if you play them both, you can absolutely see the bones of Pacific War in Empire of the Sun. Right. Yeah. I still prefer Pacific War over Empire of the Sun. That's just because CDGs. You know, it's kind of like my expression with OCS. It's my preferred solitaire system. BCS is my preferred opposed system, kind of the same with Pacific War and Empire of the Sun. Right. I'd rather kind of play Empire of the Sun because it's a you can do it in a day. Oh, sure. Sit down and do it. But sure. Yeah. With that, there was a next work on. So, do you want to talk a little bit about what that was? You really want me to and you really want me to answer that one? Well, we shouldn't ask the designer because he's going to be talking for the next 30 minutes. Right. Yeah. Like what that one. And I think that I agree because Mitch, as you know, the first question that's going to come to you after I dabble a little bit about this is what you were hoping to achieve by that because, you know, my guess is that it was only partially successful in that regard. And we'll see. So Mitch had the idea. So people on the next were discord and some of the other platforms have spoken about combined games. Can we put certain games together and then how do you deal with the assets that exist in both theaters or more than two theaters for people that have really had aspirations for these huge combined games? And so Mitch has been working on rules for a combined game and we'll talk about where that's going and all later. And my perception was that he wanted to give it its first real test. And so he organized a four day convention in St. Louis where eight players got together and we played four theaters, Vietnam in the Pakistan, Korea and Iran. What Poland, Poland, Poland, yeah, I forgot the one I played right. Well, we all did. Right. Right. For reasons we'll get to Poland, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iran, and Korea, Korea. Oh, Vietnam, I threw in there incorrectly. You left Poland out of the economic because that's when you're playing. Right. That's when I've been playing. And so the idea was there were four players on the allied side, four players on the non allied side. And each of the two sides had a fixed amount of assets, especially from the dominant, the dominant participant, which was the Russians from the non allied side and then the US from the allied side. And so each side had to get together and come up with a strategy of how they were going to share assets such as air units and and cruise missiles and ballistic missiles and then even down to if they wanted moving ground units from one theater to the other. And what they would do with reinforcements so that there was options that if reinforcements, if the same reinforcements existed in more than one theater, then the party leader for that side ultimately had the decision making authority to decide where those assets would go with the idea set, you know, trying to see how that would impact the outcome of these games. And we played the tactical scenario, which will, you know, also talk about in a little bit for each of them. And the idea was that during the four days decisions could be made on the fly if needed to share those assets or move those around if certain theaters needed it and could make a case to the party leader that indeed those assets should be transferred. And so I think it was a sort of a group experience. It was in some ways it played out like four separate games. You know, they were not combined physically. We were in one large room, but had four separate tables spread apart enough that you could barely hear each of the other theaters, which was intentional. You really didn't want to know exactly what was going on without going over to ask. And you know, the idea was that either whichever side won the majority of the games would be the winner of world domination and take over the world. Mitch, do you want to refine that a little? I'm sure that was. No, actually, that goes pretty good. Pretty good recap. One time I got to places right. But yeah, right. I mean, I will say technically a combined game has played been played before one of the historic fest conventions, but it wasn't it wasn't an organized. It wasn't there were no rules. So I'll just play these three games in my phone, right, which actually was the Genesis for you know what we should put some I prefer to call them guidelines because you know it's hard to write rules for if you're going to play four or five can you know combine games, you're going to have to make some crap up on the fly. I mean, you're I can't write a role for every edge case that shows up. You're just going to figure it out, you know, or at the end of the day just roll a die and you know low roll wins because rolling low is good, except in one case, but you know, well, two cases anyway. So no, I think I think that was a good recap and we'll we'll also be inserting as we go through some of these questions we have for Mitch sound bites that we captured from all the different participants at the event and we'll put those into the episode here so you can kind of hear other participants perspectives on next war the con and their experience as well. Now a quick call out I'm realizing I don't have a recap from rich so we're listening. I don't know if I forgot to get one for you or if I lost it, but rich also participated and he played one of the games so I know he had some of the turn one like turn recaps that we posted on YouTube. Yeah, I don't remember if he did a recap recap and on that note, I will shout out and link the next war YouTube as well where you can find lots of great video content about the con as well. Well, let's qualify great. Well, the quality you can find content is the point of comparison being Don and I certain. Low, but great. Your videos aren't color coded. Although you guys all had so the whole non-alied side. Was that day one day two, whatever they all had the same t-shirt on that I think Chris's wife had made. Yes, yes, so and I forget the. I think it was a great name on the back, but it was it was very cute, but yeah, the whole non-alied side players all had the same t-shirt on. Yeah, well, maybe we'll post a picture of that Kevin. It was very Russian of you. So very uniform. I actually came in on. I came in that day with the t-shirt on and I had I had a far hat on. It was actually Canadian, not Russian, but it was Canadian air, but I purchased a big Russian command in the middle of it. So it was a great because so dawn to be for full transparency. Don was the Russian national leader. Right. It went great. So where in the agenda was it that we talk about how I sort of fucked up the entire four days for most people. That's in the blooper outtakes. Am I editing that out? No, of course, you don't have anything. Come on. So I'll maybe just I'll jump into this now and that was with the combined game. There was a desire to be synchronized between the different games. That didn't happen. No, and for good reasons, which maybe we can talk about a little. Right. So part of it. So one of the goals was to figure out a do these rules make sense, right? Or guidelines. I should call them guidelines. Do these guidelines make sense? So part of the guidelines are look the US and the Russians and the Chinese who are the big three will call them. I mean, there are some limits on some of the other nationalism powers. But you have limits of things. There are only so many F-22s to go around. There are only so many B-1s or whatever the whatever the platformer as it is. There's only one Russian 98th guards airborne division. You can't be in all three theaters at once unless you parcel out the brigades, right? You can't have the entire division in three. The others. So so no, you back up a little bit each game like Viet or 10 feet now Poland and Iran and Korea and India Pakistan would call those theaters, right? And so at the beginning of the game, we'll talk about a little bit more, but I had the national leaders of the US and the Russian say, well, all these reinforcements are coming in. Here's a reinforcement schedule. You need to decide who's going where they can only go to one theater. There are guidelines for well, I don't really want to go to that theater, but they can go here, right? There's delays and all that kind of stuff. But the basic premise was look, you like, I think Don said this, you have to figure out where do you want to commit your assets that are very limited in order to achieve victory in a certain number of theaters. And so the idea behind the combined games is you have a non-alien side and allied side. If you have three games, one side has to win two theaters out of the three to win, right? Otherwise, it's a draw whatever. I mean, like I think I said this at the con in the immortal words of Dinesik, you'll know who won. The problem, I think, became synchronization like we talked about. India Pakistan. So well, a, India Pakistan had no outside of a convention. No troops, no air, no nothing went to any Pakistan. But you guys got through 13 turns I think. - No. - No? - It might have been 10 or something. - Oh, okay, so 10. - Yeah. - Okay, so Korea and Iran, Korea and Iran is oddly enough, we're pretty much in sync. We were five and six, I think, terms. Now there are reasons for that. Rich, who was playing the non-aligned side, chose Storm for the first turn, which caused the second turn to be contested because nobody could get enough victory points, which also happened to be a Storm turn. So we didn't get, we tied on victory points, so we had two contested terms in a row until turn four. - For people not familiar, especially with all the advanced rules, can you quickly say what that means that both a Storm and a contested turn? - Yeah, so Storm is what you would imagine, right? It just slows everything down. Air is hamstring, movement is hamstring, strikes are hamstring, hamstring to cheese, hamstring. So it just, it makes things less effective. And so, in, so there are two types of turn, initiative and contested, you get initiative by earning VP. It's really hard to earn in the necessary minimum amount of VP. If you can't do the things that you need to do, like attacks or strikes or whatever, and so Storms, just obviously slow that down. So there's an initiative VP target you have to get to in turn in order to have the next turn also be an initiative turn. Well, neither one of us met that, so it was contested. Normally in a contested turn, so usually you have an initiative turn, which is set by a scenario, like he had the initiative on the first turn. This is Korea. Normally it's set by scenario, the number of turns, in this case it was one. Somebody gets enough VP to get initiative in the next turn. Well, neither of us made it because of a Storm, so we go to contested. Usually in a contested turn, whoever gets the most victory point, so it doesn't matter if you meet the initiative target or not, is gonna get an initiative turn the next turn. Well, it just so happened, we tied, I think we ended up getting like two or four VP each, that we tied, so it was another contested turn, right? Which is very unusual, especially in Korea. So that helped Korea speed up, because the thing that I noticed was, or the basic thing that we're worried about is the games that have a lot of pieces. So Korea and Poland in particular, have a lot of pieces that have to move, fight the air fight is huge, right? It just bogs the game down. It's obviously slower in the beginning turns. Well, because of Rich's choice, it got really fast, and so we were able to keep up with Iran at that point. And it was just, it was just the way it was, just the way it turned out. So I would say if you're gonna do, if you're gonna follow the guidelines, you need to figure out some way to keep them synchronized. Now, I wanna roll back to what Don was talking about in this combined game. So this was kind of a forced scenario, in the terms of I wanted to be Russians versus the US in all these theaters, right? Primarily, that was because Taiwan's second edition isn't out yet. And after having played tested the second edition, and knowing what's coming, I did not wanna play first edition Taiwan. Otherwise, we would have done the China stuff, and thrown India Pakistan in instead. So we would have had Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Pakistan, India, Pakistan. But we didn't, and so we kind of, kind of forced it in. And one of the things like Kevin, you and Bill had to found out is, oh yeah, that's right. And India, Pakistan, the Russians come in on the Indian side, not the Pakistani side. So we had to quickly pivot and make that stuff up. But again, that goes back to the, these are guidelines, they're not rules. If you wanna make stuff up, make stuff up, right? It's okay. But anyway, sorry. I'm sure if I answered the question, but I rambled a lot. - That was, yeah. It was a longer way of saying, Don's came when a little slow. - It did go slow. So I think, yeah, the rest of us, so I think, as you said, so Korea and Iran got to, I think, turn five or six, and what'd you get to, Don, turn two, one and a half? - We finished two complete turns. So we both suffered from some analysis, paralysis, especially as you said, there were just so many units on the map. So that was the Russian side. - Right, and that was one issue. Setup took a long time, and I had some issues with the Russian setup. And actually, when I had the sort of re-wreck, the Russian setup, and I inadvertently added some of the reinforcements that were supposed to come in in later turns into my initial setup. - Is this where you play the correction music? (soft music) - This is right out there. I'm just, I just gotta get it off my chest. So it meant there were even more units to move in the first two turns, and it made it even harder for Brian, my opponent, to react because he felt completely overwhelmed, and as he should have, because I had a lot more units on the map than I think he was expecting. I also think he was expecting from your, from the allied communication chain that I was probably gonna move a lot more units out of Poland into other theaters. And we had some plans to do that, but I never got to that point where that could happen. And by the time it could, like after turn one, everyone was so far down the line already that they were sort of committed. And actually what wound up happening was that Chris, from playing Iran, actually sent me cruise missiles, as opposed to me sending him cruise missiles, which was our original plan. So we clearly went slower than everyone else. Some of it our own fault, some of it I think, 'cause there's just a lot of pieces. And we had winter, so we chose winter as the over-arching season for all four games, the non-allies were given that opportunity to choose the season. And we did that so that the lakes, the small lakes and the small rivers were frozen on the Poland map, which made it easier for the Russians to advance through the Baltics as well as into Poland, thinking that I'd be able to achieve more of a blitzkrieg and right away and try and turn that game quickly. So we did not have a storm turn. The second turn I had initiative, so as Mitch mentioned, the contested turns are much shorter than initiative turns because several steps are dropped from the sequence of play. And so we had two full sort of over-resourced, full initiative turns and we just went slow. And I think it inhibited that sort of sharing of resources, which was one of the goals of the game. - And I wanted to just add to, for those that may not be as familiar with the different titles in the series, Korea, as you can imagine, you have a DMZ. It's a static line on a small peninsula. There's not a lot of decision making on which hecks you're gonna attack into. There are just 10 hexes you can attack into and you choose which ones do you try to overload? In Poland, you're talking about the Swalky Gat. - Wow, that area here. - Right, right, open maneuver warfare. And each counter might have 10 different texes they could choose to move into, so the decision space is entirely different. I run, you don't see ground combat until a few turns into every game, if not five or six turns into a game. And India Pakistan has one tenth as many counters as Poland or Korea may. So there's a lot of variety, I think, in the series, in terms of density and what type of combat environment you're simulating. And that might lead me on to a little bit of a question for you, Mitch. What do you think is kind of the audience for the combined game? Because we did this in a con environment. - Right. - Well, so actually, I wanna revisit two things before we get to there. - Sure, so we'll find me your question. So one is, so Dawn talked about the weather choice. So the guidelines in the combined games, the weather choice is very nuanced of who can choose the weather. And depending on who chooses the weather, it might make it really good for them. And it's always the non-alight side choosing the weather, right? It might make it really good for the guys in Iran, but it might make it really crappy. In this case, in Korea, it was always stormed 'cause I forget how to work it up, but we had a diorama modifier that tended to be more storm, right? So that's kind of a little mini game inside of the mind games of how to play. Holy shit, I just forgot my second point, but anyway. Oh, so you were talking about the different way the game's played. So one of the things I'm probably most happy with is that all the games play differently, right? It's mostly the same rules, but it's a totally different, you can't take the same mindset from Korea and bring it to Poland. It's not gonna work, right? And. And I think we saw that you would come into Donor India, Pakistan game that kind of the in state of the map. Oh, geez. Really, we had never seen before. Right. And that was a big world. World War One. Yeah. And that was in large part because the non-alied side dedicated those outside reinforcements and the allied side dedicated those outside reinforcements to other theaters. Right. And you realized there was never enough quantity to snowball in for one side to win over the other and it was just a draw at the end of the day. Nope. So you might as well remind me what your question was again. Well, yeah, what's your kind of target audience with the combined game because I've got an answer in my head I've been thinking about, but we saw an economy environment. And that's really. So I agree. So I think, I mean, my target audience would be anybody who thinks they want to play a combined game, right? So I think it's either going to be at a con where you've got guys, or I shouldn't say guys, people who are going to come play the game and they know they're going to play the game. And hopefully listen to this and realize that there are some synchronization issues that they're going to have to keep in mind. Maybe you have a side game for the guys who are playing faster than whatever, right? Or whatever. Or it's, you know what? I've got five of these games. I'm going to lay them all out in my basement and I'm going to play a combined game. And now I can play at my own pace or it's two guys or four guys who are playing four games. And so you can kind of keep the synchronization in check, right? Because I think that was probably one of the biggest takeaways was synchronization is key. You have to keep them close enough or like Don was saying, you can't, you know, I had the playing to send this unit over here, but because we're so far behind, I can't. Well, that becomes an issue at some point, right? So you need to, you need to try really, really hard to keep all the games as closely as it's possible. Yeah. I, I think this is perfect for anybody who does want that monster experience of next world. She's my interpretation, right? And another call out, I think we may even mentioned on a previous episode is unlike a lot of monster games, you don't need a 10 foot by six foot table to play this game. You can have lots of smaller tables, lots of smaller footprints to play this. And you can do it solitary. You can do it one V one and a sink or synchronization is not an issue for you at all. And I think you're going to have a great time. I'm, I'm really excited about even solitary in this combined rules set now. Yeah, I was saying, I think, I think, and it's probably makes sense normally, but I think Korea probably had the biggest footprint just because of the way it is, right? It's the two offset maps with the, you know, off thing off to the side. So yeah, but yeah, if you wanted to do it, I mean, you're going to need some table space. Don't get us wrong. Yeah, right? But you don't need to have. Or a vessel or a vessel. Yeah, but you, you could have a little folding table there, a little dining table there. Sure. And suddenly you've got this monster game that you can play. Yeah. I mean, set aside a long time. Maybe, maybe maybe one of the, uh, constant world expose or something. Yeah. I think the visual of being able to walk around that room and see the four, you know, the four games, the four theaters was really striking and really cool that I think, you know, even if you were doing this yourself in your basement, I think would, would sort of get lost in the vessel, you know, what I mean, like, oh, yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the rancope of this, especially when you are sort of moving assets between theaters, it's, you know, it, it just has so much more impact when you're, when you're doing that, at least to me. And, you know, we talked about this previously, how much I prefer sort of physical components to, oh, when possible. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, uh, play vessel if I have to, but I way prefer pushing counters around. Yeah. So, like you say that, Don, one of the, one of the funniest memories I have is me looking up and kind of leaning over because, you know, it was so, it was Korea. You can't see me pointing with my hands. It was Korea. And then Poland and then Iran and then India, Pakistan was back in the corner where they belong. But even I was like leaning around. You saw I could see around you and Brian who were playing Poland and say, hey, Keith, can I have some replacement point? You're muted, Kevin. Well, that I will edit out. We're going to take a quick minute here. And we'll insert a little bit of a sound bite from, I think, both Chris and Bill will go into it this point. And we'll be back in a moment with some questions for Mitch to continue the conversation. Hi, this is Bill. I played with Kevin in the India Pakistan theater for the combined game of next war. It was sort of the odd man out of the scenarios, especially with the Russians having intervened for the overall tournament or session that we did. But that's such a good game because it's evenly based and you can have opportunities for both offense and defense. This is Chris. I wanted to share some lessons learned about next war around. And I was the Iranian player in a combined session that we just recently had at next war, count six. One of the things that I picked up on my one of my strategies was to put four missile launchers, SSM naval launchers in this side of the battlefield and then the other six over there thinking that I would have an impatient opponent and lure them into the Persian Gulf where I would get a minus to modify it for the narrowness of the Gulf. That didn't happen. I had a very patient opponent. Can you help off on bringing his naval assets into the theater? The anti-dint wasn't able to capitalize on it. One of the things that I learned from the ally player was the first thing he did was to take out all the refineries on the map and on the islands, which is over here, which deprived the Iranian player of points. They gained two points per refinery that's not destroyed. So you immediately started degrading my ability to gain points. So Mitch, again, for people that are not as familiar with the system, we talked about the scenario that was used, the tactical scenario. Can you briefly describe the difference between the three advanced scenarios and why you chose tactical for the con? Sure. Well, maybe if you don't mind, I'll broaden that a little bit. So there's the standard game and there's the advanced game in next war. The standard game is, I mean, if you've picked up a hex encounter game, it's a hex encounter game, right? There's movement. There's zox. Well, not every game has zox, but you know what I mean? There's movement, there's zox or comment. And it's not really a whole lot of meat there. I mean, it's okay. I don't particularly prefer the standard game, but like I said, I just played the whole India Pakistan campaign game in the standard rules. It was fine, right? But once you've played the advanced game, it's really hard to go back. But the standard game is really there for you to wrap your head around the basic concepts of the game. How do you move? How do you combat? How do you do X or Y or Z, right? And then you go to the advanced game and you get all these other levers and buttons and whatever. So there, the standard games tend to be much smaller, much more limited in scope, right? Unless you happen to play the standard campaign game. Then you get to the advanced game. All the advanced games are, I want to say they're at least 12 to 16 turns long. It sounds right. It could be wrong. But I think that's okay. I think it is 12 to 16. Yeah. I think it's 12 to 16. And then they're divided into three levels, which frankly I stole from NATO the next war in Europe. There's a strategic surprise and a tactile surprise and extended build up scenario. So the idea is the strategic surprise scenario favors the belligerent, the attacker, the extended build up scenario favors the defender. And then the tactical surprise scenarios tend to be more, I'm going to say balanced, but in a game that's 16 terms long with as many die rolls are as in next war and on a D10, it's as balanced as you can consider that to be balanced, right? So the reason that's, so that's the long answer to that's why I chose tactical is it's the most balanced of you get a lot of toys. We don't get a lot of toys. You get enough toys to have fun and the situation should be relatively. I don't want to say even, but you're not going to get steamrolled in any of the theaters. You get no toys if Don is your national leader. That's true. Like the impact of no toys. No toys. I have plenty. Yeah. Yeah. So the US national leader was very generous to the Korean theater. I'm just saying. But that was the answer. That North Korean Air Force really needed the extra well, so extra push. One of these has a quality all its own, right? But I mean, well, the thing with Korea, if you have never played next war career, the funny thing is he's like, oh my god, I'm losing area. It's less than right. I'm like, yes, but rich. only a half VP each. Oh, I'm throwing all these in there. Yeah, in most games through the air units are two VP. Oops. Right. I'm just like, oh, dude, you can lose four. And that's equal to me. Well, the rock losing one. Now a US air unit loss in Korea is five. Oh, yeah. Maybe we should have sent rich some fighters. They're done. Yeah, those were in peace. So we, we, uh, and Mitch, uh, we, so the non-alloys had three planning phone calls, you know, where we got on Discord, you know, the four of us to talk about. And that's where we made the weather choice, the sea's our choice. And we talked about, uh, you know, asset allocation and what people would need. And we made several, you know, uh, conscious decisions to, to leave in the Pakistan, uh, you know, on its own. So that was not, you know, that was not by accident that they didn't receive anything. That was planned in, and that was the way we thought about the, you know, based on the outcomes that would, that would happen. Did what, and, and so obviously it, you know, it, it helped a little, uh, to, to have that. What did the allied side do to come up with their, their overall strategic plan? And reinforcements, because I never, I never could get that out of my opponent. I tried to beat it out of them and, and, uh, he wouldn't just off. We exchanged a few emails and then say, that's good. Yeah. Well, that, that may be the case for how it was derived, but the non-allied player side felt a little confused coming into the room. And there were these printed out booklets of different reinforcement schedules that the allies had planned. Well, so, well, they were in code. Yeah. Yeah, they were like to be coded. You had to have like a, you know, a, uh, you know, a special ring, a decoder ring that everyone had. Well, so to be fair, when you're playing the combined, I mean, the US has a lot of assets that can go a lot of different ways. Like we have a, I think what I tell you, Don, I think I mentioned like a 149 separate things that all had a different reinforcement schedule, depending on which state or you're right. And so the US national leader had to account for each one of those. Where is it going? Right. And so that's why we ended up, okay, here's a combined. So you talk about lessons learned. We, we, one of the early rule was look as the national leader, you have to, you have to, before the game begins, figure out all the reinforcement schedules, what a rise, where, when and earliest, and then you have to assign them where they're going to go. And that was such a freaking nightmare that I was like, nope, we're not doing that. I'm, so I went back and that within that weekend, right after that week, I'm like, no, I'm changing the rules. As you, you arrive, your reinforcements arrive, the earliest they arrive. If you want to transfer them, that's up to you. And so you just go to the transfer guidelines and say, well, if it's a leg unit and it's going into an airbase, it takes three turns to go from here to here. Okay, well, it's turn one. It's going to show up here and turn four done, right? So you do it real time rather than trying to plan this all out ahead of time, because that was, that was hat we spent, we didn't do calls. We just, we exchanged a lot of emails, basically. It was painful. It was very painful. And I'm just like, you know, this is already complex enough. Let's just simplify it. We were the corporate meme of this could have been an email. You're right. Exactly. Per my previous email. Yeah. Now it went great and really appreciate two Keith showing up. One of the purpose, oh, brought just production, publication, quality, coil bound like player booklets for every single player in the A. Well, in theater specific, right? It was those were amazing. I felt like I was living in the lap of luxury. I'm going to do that. Right. So I mentioned I have my next war. So the flashpoints scenario for Vietnam is on the side table. And I'm using that booklet as my charts. I'm like, this is just fantastic. Yeah. It was great. So we didn't get t-shirts, but we got booklets. But everybody got a booklet. That's right. We got. I hope something like that's in the box for next war Taiwan. That's, you know, oh, that's disappointing. But you do have the next war Taiwan charts because that he used those in the booklet. Right. Do I do? Well, we'll get to maybe next war Taiwan here a little bit later. I think a question that I do have for you, Mitch, could you speak a little bit maybe to the versatility for the player and how they set up their combined game. So do they get to choose which theaters to include what are the options available to the person that wants to play a combined game following these guidelines? Right. Guidelines, not rules guidelines. Yeah. So I mean. So as we discovered, I mentioned earlier, we included in the Pakistan with the Russians as the, as the none of the side in that we had to pivot on the fly. So there are, so there are no guidelines in the guidelines is to which theaters. But I mean, really, it's as versatile as you want to make it. It really is because the, the guideline they, they set out. If you're the Russians or the Chinese, here's your hard limit on certain assets. So certain things like make 29, you can have as many make 29 as you want because they're everywhere, right? But you can only have so many as you 57s because that's, that's, that's, a limit, right? Same thing on the US side. There's only so many F 35s or F 22s or whatever. That's really where the versatility comes in is you can include whichever theaters you want and make up your own, oh, well, what if this kicked off here and this happened here? And I'm going to make this. I'm going to do Poland and Korea and Vietnam because that's just interest me. You know, and the, the Russians are in Poland and the Chinese are in the other two. And that's just the way it is. And then then it's really the US's problem because the Chinese and the Russians are separate, right? So it's as versatile as you want to make it. The, the idea was to put some limits on, well, you can't have 52 B 52s because there's only so many in the game, right? Or is so many in the combined game? So many in the world. Well, right. Exactly. Yeah. So you can have all of them everywhere at once. Yeah. It, it provides a lot of options, I think, which is nice as you create your own monster game. We can call it. It's the, it's a DIY monster game. Right. And it's everything from two to what do we say six? Whatever. Right. So with that, we'll jump over to a quick little recap from both Keith and Brian to other participants from the con and we'll be right back with more questions for Mitch. All right. I'm Brian. I'm one of the next work on participants. So for my favorite part of next work, I guess I just, I don't play out a lot of the hypothetical games, but I like that something about kind of this near future one. It's a lot of fun. As far as the combined game, I guess my advice would be to early kind of work out what resources are going where so that you can come in with a plan, like there's a degree to which once you kind of set that, you kind of figured out, hey, what is your scenario, kind of your plans, you're kind of making your own scenario for each individual game. And then you can kind of devise a plan. I think particularly with next to our Poland, is the allies, like you need to have some sense of like where you want to put units and kind of like cover a bit of different, you know, passive attack that the enemy's going to take and not just purely reacting to what's happening. So I think it's good to kind of like have that plan kind of figure it out what you want to do and then start making adjustments as you see where the Russian player sends the bulk of their assets. So I think it is just good to have something up front so that you're not making it up on the fly. My name is Keith. I was the US National Leader and the Theater Commander for the Iran game. What I like about the next war system is the integration in one game of ground, air, naval, each one is modeled in quite a lot of detail and in particular the ground and the air. And so I think a lot of fun just trying to try to put together a plan and it makes those all work out. And the next work combined game was interesting because we had a real resource allocation problem as the US National Leader, you have limited resources. Some of them, particularly some of the rapid reaction divisions 80s sack and 100s first appear in really all the games and we had to figure out where we were going to send those initially and we made the decision to send those to Poland, which I think was the right decision. That had implications for all of the other games though. So as I and Iran, we did not have the rapid reaction forces. So the plan there was to be methodical, find an air war, suppress the Iranians, take your time and just slowly fight one's way into the Gulf. So as you look back on all the games, was there one that was more difficult than the others to design and wall. Why? It's an interesting question. I mean, really the first one was the hardest. And I think you can see that just from like if you go back to Consum World and you see the progression of posts or whatever about how that all played out, Korea took a long time from gestation to birth. And that's for going to use that metaphor, right? And then the rest kind of every time is a little shorter, a little shorter, a little shorter, because once you have, once you have the base, it's really what's the map, what's the order battle, are there any special rules? You know what I mean? Iran, Iran was a little tough only because of the situation and I will be the first to admit it's a little contrived, but my opinion is still fun. Yeah, I would say if so the base answer is Korea just because that's where all the ideas had to be jelled together. And even then, after Korea came out, I had to make some changes. So if you played Korea first edition right when it came out, the sequence of play was different than it is now. So some things shifted around because it just wasn't quite working right. And so we shifted the sequence of play so that s o f and things like that would affect the air game and all this kind of stuff. And then two, there's two supply phases instead of one supply phase and all this kind of thing. So those came in long later. So it was just growing pains, I guess, if you want to call that from continued exposure to the system. I want to jump in there because I now feel a little hot blooded by something that you said in their Mitch about Iran of, you know, how that came out maybe compared to what we've seen in 2025. And I think it's common sometimes right on social media and such about how these conflicts actually happen compared to how they've been war game or modeled. Sure. Guys, come on. Any war game is just one possibility just because this war game was different possibility doesn't mean it's an accurate. Well, it was so is a very recent question on the next word discord actually of you know, well, how good are these games are predicting and my answer was they're not. Yeah, they're not predictors right they make you think about it. Yeah, they're not predictors in any sense of any sense of the word right. What are things that could happen and I think that my as a player that's one key takeaway always take from your series Mitch is just. There are components within each of these games that everybody should think about of what could happen in something going kinetic in that given theater correct right or it's all about asset management. Right, what do I do when do I have a plan do I execute that plan and how well does that plan work now whether that's how work. What a quote in the real world who knows it's not a predictor of that it can't be there's no way there's so many factors in the real world that you just can't capture in a game. Not possible. Yeah, right. Well, I'll pivot over then maybe to another question here and this is the one that I also again see quite frequently out there in social media or just people talking about the series. What's your end with the NSA the CIA what have you where do you get your order of battles what can you reveal about your research right but just. I like art tell you but then I'd have to kill you yeah right what what's your under cover story that you've got right. If I hold my ears and you tell then that means you only kill Kevin. Right. Yeah and I'm doing the editing so this will never go out if you do that well it just depends on well after it goes out anyway so so that's a very interesting question I use it so it's all open source I have no insight to anything else. I guess obviously that would get anybody else in trouble right. I use a combination of Wikipedia the institute for strategic studies out of the UK. Which is hard to parse because they don't quite it's not like this is this you know this is the they have these number of many battalions or whatever but anyway. It's really just a combination of open source materials and then some other. Helpers I guess I should say I don't want to get too deep but you know hey does this look reasonable yes that looks really okay thanks right. Kind of thing you run was interesting because. I for the longest time didn't want think it was a viable game and then. So I guess folks were like well it could be if you positive this way and oh by the way here's an order of battle you can use right so I got it from there and then I checked it against Wikipedia all that good stuff yeah this looks reasonable right. So it's really it's it's open source it's you know news articles of so a lot of the not the pivot too far but a lot of the supplement rules are. So for instance just today I saw a news article the Apache successfully launched the. What is it the end loss no line of sight but there's something in front of the end loss so it allows it to do so basically standoff strikes well hey look new optional right. So it's a lot of those kind of things of just trying to keep abreast of a lot of different defense site new sites and things like that of here's all things and I got to tell you in the modern world stuff is changing so fast it's not even funny right I mean. We have these orders of battle of these units and they're probably not even right anymore you know I mean. Just because things are changing so quickly. But I presume that's one of the reasons to do the supplements with some order battle updates or the second editions of some games right and as a player I really appreciate that because. At this scale sometimes the asset or the hardware does change the dynamics one that I'm personally looking forward to to plug a little bit Taiwan second edition is the F 21's when I played. And addition I can see how that hardware changes how the allied player thinks about the strategic environment that they find themselves in right and. It's not to say that that covers every anti ship missile that the PRC has at its capability but it introduces that as a decision points so right well and that's the thing like we're talking about how are these good predict no. But does it give you the feel right of what you would have to deal with yes and that's why I said earlier on like I didn't want to play first edition because there are so many changes in second edition that just in my opinion better yeah right about how that situation would unfold. The drones are common discord top how do you have drones and how have you adapted the rules for drones and so correct I hope my answer today on discord was near near accurate it was no yeah I thought it was so like I tried to keep saying like. So drones are an effect so at the level of next war series they're an effect they're not a you're not going to fly a drone kind of right that's a tactical level thing it's affecting the tactical battlefield absolutely is it affecting the strategic battlefield kind of yes but that's more in the strike model already right so. If you launch a cruise missile strike consider half of those to be drones it doesn't really matter at the end of the day you're delivering explosives on target you either made it or you didn't make it right doesn't really matter what the vehicle was you know what I mean so the level of next word. Trones don't really have a lot of effect now is that accurate I don't know it feels okay to me right once why some of the one of the re sorry one of the recent changes was. I don't know if we did this in Iran or just Taiwan but like the aerial detection rules out the window if the US PRC China whatever are involved you're assuming complete drone coverage everybody's detected unless you're very specific terrain conditions right because drones can see everywhere except for high value targets like supply depots and and excuse right you stop to find those guys but. Yeah I think that's another one that's just always low contentious and it's come out guys Ukraine's putting drone units into every brigade but every one counter or every battalion excuse me right but you you have one counter for a brigade in this series what do you want to do add on attack factor to it or something right it doesn't make sense at this well it's funny you say that I had toyed around with some drone rules for some before I just didn't like them right there were just. Too heavy handed it was just too much and basically my design note was if it's too drone enabled nation so my idea was there's a drone enabled nations and non drone enabled nations. If you're a drone enabled nation you get these bonuses well the problem is if you have a drone enabled nation with a not with a drone enabled nation it's boring because you both have the effect right so. It only matter if one side wasn't in like well I mean it's in the next five years everybody will have them so at that point it's a wash it time scale comes into play to I think because your your titles they're simulating a couple of weeks worth of conflict between two two powers right what Ukraine was doing in the first week so the war in 2022 with drone. So nothing right now right I mean they're getting daily right. So it's not something that I think kind of fits that premise that each of the titles has. Right. 100%. Yeah. Glad we agree, Mitch. It's good to have you on. Right. Yeah. All right, Don. Jackson the mail. Yeah. Yeah. I'll catch that ASAP. But so, I mean, just like, sorry, just to close the loop on that, but that is why the supplements exist. Like, I figure which supplement it is. I had a whole new PRC order battle, right, which of course you're going to see in Taiwan, technical issue anyway, but the, you know, the whole rock order battle changed in. Three. I don't know. I forget. There's so many of them. But, you know, that's what that's the vehicle for. Hey, this change and rather an issue, a whole new game. Oh, here you go. Well, so on that note in our con. We played with I had specially printed some counters that are going to be appearing supplement for. For use in all these games now really mostly affected Poland, because the Russians got two new, I think two new divisions, a bunch of new airborne brigade, the polls got a whole new division. That kind of stuff. So. Yeah, they all came in on turn one who's correct. So what's next for the next war series? Well, so as recently announced the flashpoint next war flashpoint. So that'll be so the whole idea behind that is you're going to get three back printed maps. You guys have seen the Poland map. So it'll be like that. But for every game, right, you play the advanced scenario or you play an advanced scenario. You get all the bells and whistles. You get cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, S.O.F. Air units supply. HQs HQs artillery. All those things will be there for you to play in a three or four turn scenario in a very small space. But the, but the so the product will have the map in it. So you don't need to bring out you don't need to break out your game. Well, you do need break out your game because you need to counters, but you don't need to break out all the maps, right? You just need this one map and all the counters and that's it. So it's a very small footprint advanced game short term two, three hour sessions and you're done with a full advanced game scenario, right? Now there will be rules for. Or set up areas. If you don't have the map, the special map, well, you can play it in the regular maps, but obviously you're going to have to mark out there or whatever. But the product will be the maps and the scenarios. So that's what I'm, like I said, I'm testing the Vietnam one. We tested the Korea one at the con Poland has been part of the we actually had two tournaments for that one. It's pretty well tested and all the other various stages of testing, right? I am on again off again working on a call at next war naval. I think you guys I think I've talked to about, but so it's individual ships with. Missile capacities and all kinds of things and the problem with it now is it's over in about two or three turns as soon as you run out of missiles, which is probably true to life, but it's not a very fun game. So I got a little like the euro. You should right. That's that management. But so I got to figure out how so how do I make this into a game, right, as opposed to well, yeah, you just put them down. You grow a bunch of dice and one died side dies or doesn't die. So anyway, that's pretty much it. I love that I'm not sure the only thing the only other thing I'm playing with is. Think of lowering the scale. The smaller like battalion level all battalions right and then going to specific places like. When I've been toying with mostly the Guadalcanal like what happens if we have to re invade Guadalcanal, you know, or whatever, right. And so that that's something I've been toying with. I'm not really very far along with that role. I'm looking forward to that naval concept, Mitch, because as with all crazy folks that get really deep into these systems, I would love to do a. Hey, next war, but I'm going to resolve all the naval combat using the naval game. Right, right. Just kind of like a fed an empire and starfleet battles type of stuff for the attack level. So soon as we can get that, it'd be appreciated, but I. I'll ask you to play test materials. Okay, sense. See how I got signed up for work there. I'm a minute yet. Don, we've played that that scenario for Poland, you and myself incredibly well balanced. I want to point out that it ended up in draw and I won on a die roll, but I did win. That's the. Yeah, to point that out. So we could probably get to the table again soon and next work Taiwan favorite in the series, Mitch so far that second edition. It's if you haven't got your pre order in before it ships, make sure you do with GMT. So really, really cool mechanics. Yeah, that he merged that very. Yeah, I'm really excited about the flashpoints because I mean, that's one of the big. Complaints, right? Is that the I mean, granted the campaign games take a long time. Right. So how can you play the advanced game in a shorter period of time while here you go. Here's your chance, right? Now, the caveat is there's a shit on a special rules make that work. Right. But, you know, it's it's not too bad. No, and it wasn't it wasn't that heavy for the the Poland that's you know, so lucky gap and right. And I'm you know, I'm playing sticky wicket. There's not. Yeah, I mean, that's very manageable amount of of game specific rules or scenario specific. And I'm hoping so on the on the on the I called them bespoke maps that are designed for these flashpoints hoping to get most of those SSRs like baked into the map. So you don't really have the refer to them. That's on the map. That'd be cool. All right. Well, I think that wraps it up for the designer interview. We'll go to some shout outs and what's next on the episode agenda, but just want to really. Mitch, thank you so much for taking the time with us and so much. So great con to go to and four days of next war was delightful. Oh, yeah, it was. I hope you do it again. I hope I didn't like screw up my invitation and never and and I just want to say and I've said this to to Mitch before that one of the you know, this is a. To me, a relatively high complexity game is of all the the rules and then the game specific rules, but the community of support. That exists out there is phenomenal and and led by Mitch who you know who I've joked, you know, I'm not sure when he works since a responsive, you know, in discord and others has really made it a you know, a much more enjoyable experience and one that has sort of kept me going because I know when I get stuck, it's not. And so today's it's sometimes minutes before I know the answer and so I've been you know, very appreciative of Mitch and the community support to you know, continue my my understanding and learning of the game. Appreciate that. Yeah, that's my goal is I don't want to be the roadblock right if you don't understand something. So it's either it's either me or Ralph or what I found really encouraging is some of the community members are like, oh, here's the answer to that question. I'll just I'll just thumb it right. I'm like, yep, that's right. Right. You need a separate emoji there, Mitch on your server for like this is Mitch approved is it. I need that I need the hey Mitch right. Yeah, yeah, that's perfect. All right, well, I snuck this into the agenda kind of last minute. So not to put down on the spot or Mitch, but any shout outs, either of you would like to give I have one, which is why snuck it in, but anything you'd like to call out. I'm not going to start Kevin and see if it triggers any flashbacks. Yeah flashbacks. Wow, appreciate that done. I want to shout out real quick, a friend of the pod Don and I both knows gentlemen Ross and he just started a new YouTube channel and it's called a sound like thunder. He has a video out there right now looking at the battle of Big Beth though, which is the swords and bayonets game that stickler did with GMT. Fent even if you're not interested in American Civil War War gaming, the production quality that Ross has is just top notch. It's the perfect thing to put on and you'll fall sleep perfection in terms of audio and just really, really excited for him to put more videos out there. So please give him a like thumbs up in subscription so he keeps making some content is great to see him there. So see you did trigger one for me. So I'll shout out to to the history on the table podcast, which is now back in production. So after an eight month hiatus, Matt and Rich dropped a new episode recently. and plan to be back to their monthly routine of releasing them and it's a podcast that sort of led me to next war as well to other games and as well as meeting a bunch of really nice cool people. So I'm glad they're back. It's really a great podcast and well worth tuning in. After you listen to ours. It's like an origin story for us Don, it's how we met. Yeah, it is. That's right. That's right. Well, is the origin story and the cause of, yeah, right. That's right. I'm right. Insert correction desk music. Right. Yeah. No, my shout out. I would just be for all the next war comp players. I really appreciate you guys coming out and you know, indulging me and trying to figure out how this thing would work. But it was fun. It was good times. So it was a wonderful time and some great food to sing. Yeah. That Indian place. Whoo. I love that place. That was the spiciest McChryspy chicken sandwich I've ever had. And bear house. Yeah, I'm to bear house. Right. Yeah. Bear is. Yeah. Yeah. Somehow we always wound up at some place that had a huge bourbon selection. Wonder how they do. All right. Well, just to wrap up here then a little bit of a teaser. Our next episode, the topic that Don and I will be exploring is war gaming and its intersections with real life. And we will also have a little bit of a NHL preview for the 2025 NHL season just because we both want to talk about how optimistic we are for the flyers and the Red Wings. How the blues are going to win the Stanley Cup again? That feels like a long shot. Right. A little bit. A little bit. Right. You know, hey, we'll take our one and just, you know, sail off in the sunset. It was a good one. It was more recent than we've seen in Motown. So and almost my whole life since Philadelphia. So you know, you always have the Eagles though. We do. And maybe the fillies except for losing Zach Wheeler last week for the rest of the season. So that's a big problem. I'm curious Mitch to see how long it takes to realize I keep editing out every reference to Philadelphia winning in sports. You could edit out all the references to Cardinals because, you know, they're attendance. They posted this attendance graphic of the other day of 17,000, which is the lowest in like 100 years, right? I mean, not just a slight exaggeration, but not that big of one. We talked about that at the con because I was shocked that it's all it's horrible. You know, that, you know, and that people are blaming the ownership group and sort of, I mean, I'm glad they're voting with their feet and not showing up and being just, you know, blind fans, you know, even if it's a shitty product that's being put out there, that's where it's supposed to happen is that you're supposed to, you know, vote with it. I mean, you know, I feel for the players, they're, I'm sure they're playing, but it's just not, you know, I like to clarify again something Don just said if you think that this is a crappy product, don't vote with your feet. Listen and subscribe. Let's create a sism because we'll listen. You don't have to listen, just download it. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Just download it. Yeah. Come on, Don. I'm going to try those controls. Army working. That's right. Yeah. Well, I have all my kids and friends listening in, whether, you know, they've no idea what they're listening to, but I said, at least download it and give us that we have that's we have Mitch Land Royal T checks now that we have to consider Don. That's right. All right. Well, Mitch, thank you again for joining us on this episode. Fire and Board campaigns and hope everyone has a very excellent day and you're all well and we'll see you for episode four. Everyone stay safe. Yep. Take care. [Music]