Social Media: The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent

And Twinsday made sixth, and you're listening to The Secret Cup Ball Gaming again! Today the founders review, pass one, and discuss the best part. And now please welcome The Secret Cup Ball founders! And now Kabal is in Welcome to Episode 34 of The Secret Cup Ball Gaming Podcast! This is Jamie. Tony here. Hey, this is Chris. Hello, hello, this is Don. And this is Steve. And 26 years ago the question was asked, who left the dogs out? Now, almost 26 years ago? Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. Believe it or not. I don't think it's that. I figured out who left the dogs out and that society. Society left the dogs out by normalizing the bizarre. Okay? Yeah, now I do know the names of some of the dogs. Some of the dogs have been named. One dog we will talk about later, his name is Matthew O'Keefe. But the other two dogs, I'm going to bring up right now, are named Magnus Carlson and Hans Neeman. That's right. Thankfully, Netflix listened to us and made a documentary about these two. I think the Netflix listened to the entire internet because this was hot for a little while. As Steve is talking about there, Netflix created a documentary. They're untold series, which is a lot of documentaries about sports scandals and stuff like that. They made one called chess mates, which is a documentary we talked about in the last episode about the scandal between Magnus Carlson and Hans Neeman. And let me, I'll do the very quick brief overview just in case nobody has heard this story. Magnus Carlson, best chess player in the world. Hans Neeman is this American upstart guy who's pretty good chess player. They get into this tournament together and you know, Magnus Carlson just gets crushed by this Hans Neeman guy. This Hans Neeman like is just making all the right moves, bam, beats him. Carlson stands up, leaves the tournament, quits the tournament and it posts how he thinks that Hans Neeman was cheating. And then it started our entire scandal. And this is the scandal where the internet decided that Hans Neeman was sticking anal beads in his but hole so that it would zap him with all the right moves to beat Magnus Carlson in this game. It was big scandal. Then later Hans Neeman sued Magnus Carlson and there was settlements out of court and all kinds of stuff. And this is what this documentary is. Now we have all except for Steve who did not do his homework, watch this documentary. We will now discuss in the only of one question from this movie, Jamie. And that is who got custody of the beads after the lawsuit. Well, the problem is the beads were never found Steve that big pears Morgan got him. It remains a mystery if the anal beads were even part of the whole thing or not. It was very entertaining to see the personalities a little bit more involved here. Right. When you read the stories and you see the pictures, yeah. And you just see like a clip or two. It's a different sort of image that is painted in your mind. I thought Netflix did a pretty good job of being not sort of overly in favor of one side or the other here. And they sort of painted everyone not terribly, but also not greatly. Well, I don't think the documentary painted them at all. They just sat them in a chair and said, talk. They painted themselves. Because here's a thing like both of them are exactly kind of who we thought they were. Magnus Carlson is an incredibly intelligent, talented guy who's a big weirdo and kind of like he's a little bit of, you know, he's kind of like a douchey attitude kind of. He's cocky when it comes to chess. Yeah. Like he's got, and that's for a reason, right? He's not without some legitimate to that, right? He's the best. I walked away from this documentary just thinking, you know what? This is all just a bunch of people's egos because Hans Neiman also has a big ego. Magnus Carlson has a big ego. His dad has a big ego. The founders of chess.com have big egos and it's all just this melting of ego. And Hans Neiman came off as incredibly crazy, like just like, oh my goodness. Like, like, but like in like a not, he was just like a weirdo. He's just like a weirdo. He's a driven and ambitious person. Yeah. Well, I think he was a product of the internet nowadays because I was wide like they were showing his online chess feed thing and I'm like, that's just the same stuff that my kid watches is like people on YouTube screaming. Yeah, right. Exactly. So they don't like he's a screaming one of your guses in there. Like the chess world's going to be like, who the hell is this guy? Actually, I sort of want to disagree with you a little bit, Tony. I don't know if I'm disagreeing with you or not, but push back maybe. I thought that the guy, the two guys who own chess calm came off incredibly well. They seem like when I say big ego, it's not necessarily like a slain, uh, look for own shade on them. They're just driven, ambitious. They have big goals in their life. So like everyone's got an ego like chess.com is a huge business. Exactly. They just pushed big dreams and they're going hard after them. And part of that is ego drive. Like you have to have ego drive to do that. You have to be like, I believe in myself. I'm good. I can do this. And that is like comes across clearly to me anyway. That's the way I felt is like I feel like, yeah, like without merit, they got merit for sure. And I like the way I like their role in the situation because they, they were actually behind Hans Neiman and like pushing him as like trying to prop him up and get him exposure. And then they found out later like, oh shit, this guy's cheating like crazy on this website. That was the ambiguous part because they said he was cheating constantly all the time. And Hans Neiman's like, oh, it's like once or twice like, I don't know about that. Once or twice a day, they never, I don't think the chess.com people, they just said that he cheated. He was cheating more than he admitted to. They said it was a lot. They were, they, they leaned into a lot. They did specify it was a lot more. Yeah. Many, many games. And Magnus Carlson's father. I was like, if this, he reminds me of like, he would be like a perfect bond villain in my mind. And I would stand like the one moment he's like, I just don't understand why Hans would be so upset. I'm like, what are you crazy? It's like, it's like different cultures. Like the internet decided that he used anal beads. Like, of course, he's going to be upset. You're saying that Magnus Carlson's father is the bond villain. That would make Magnus Carlson like his robot monster creature. What do I call for Hans? Neiman sued Carlson and one and then Carlson had to be his butler for a year. I was going to say technically he did win. It was settled. Maybe, maybe Magnus is over there, butlering for Hans and it's true. Magnus Carlson was kind of pissed off. He was like the American justice system is shit. And I was like, you know what? It kind of is. I'm with you on that. Right. Right. It sees justice out if you have enough money to get to that point. Yeah. Yeah. So when I was said done though, if I mean, again, if I heard the end of it right, so they did some testing and that they came to the conclusion that he was not cheating. Is that correct? That. According to their algorithms, they made, they reworked the algorithms so that they could use them for over the table play. And they came to the conclusion that he wasn't cheating. I mean, I don't think there's any like 100% here, but like they did some extensive studies. So given that, the most likely outcome given that study, although studies just said that advanced math they were applying against this, this dude, Hans Neiman just happened to read about this particular defensive move against this very obscure opening that Magnus Carlson just happened to use. And he probably thought himself, how lucky can I be? I know how to defend against this. That throws Magnus off his game because Magnus is like, wait a second. What did so Magnus is now in his own head? Hans is getting some confidence. And you and I, we all know like when you're in a, you know, a competition like confidence can boost you alive. So more than likely, those two mindsets led to Hans legitimately beating Magnus Carlson only to then later be accused of having anal beads and breathing. Just being told he was cheating or whatever. A little bit of this I think is a vindication of him, right? You know, I mean, it's like you're, you're also, you're clearing the biggest asshole of the whole story, but that's sort of where the truth seems to lie, right? I agree, Don. I think my, I mean, when it comes to the end of the documentary, I mean, we're spoiling this documentary, whatever. When it gets comes to the end, it's, there's no resolution and there's no solution. There's no, you know, yes, there was anal beads. No, there was no anal beads like pretty much there was no anal beads, but whatever. Yeah. There was no resolution. So it's just we have to figure it out for ourselves. And I am, I'm with you, Don. I think Hans and Eman didn't cheat. I've in this moment. I think that he just got into a really, really awesome situation and he handled it really poorly. Like the way that he like talked about how he like read about it this morning, you know, and it's just like the way he kind of talked about it, he came off poorly. I don't know why he talked about it because you know, cheers speaks for itself. Oh, I love it. The whole thing is well worth it just for the interview with Pierce Morgan that that was the best part because Pierce like have you ever used Adelbeads? And their response is basically like, I don't know, Pierce, you're pretty interested in the Adelbeads. Hello. It seems zoning in on that. But I mean, I think part of it that's telling is near the end. They went into how Hanson demon came back and he was in a chest tournament and there was a second matchup between Max Carlson and Hanson demon and Max Carlson won, but it was a close match. It was down to the wire and he was giving him some real competition. So he's like, well, I mean, he got better in that ensuing time, but still like he had the chops to be able to do that. So poor Hans, Neiman, we gave, we, we were giving him shit poor Hans, Neiman, that dude settled out for millions of dollars of satellite. That's true. Not for a man. Not for a man. Right. All because of one, one dude on the internet just thought it'd be funny to throw the word Adelbeads in there. Yeah. And the internet took off. This would never have made this level of discussion. Anyway, including on, on podcasts here, if it wasn't for the, you think, and it's like the founders were like, Oh, we got to talk about that every episode. It's topical. And it has worked out beautifully. Yeah. It's a, it's a fun, it's a fun documentary. Just like Tony said, I think the best part of it is that we know the story. We've told the story on the show here and there's nothing new that comes out of this documentary that we haven't talked about really or anybody else has talked about. But what you get to find is the personalities of the people involved and the, and you get to get to know these interesting characters because that's for sure. They're both characters and the dad and the chess calm guys and all those. Yeah. It's worth watching. I got to know that I never, ever want to meet these people ever in my entire life. Really? They seem like they would be interesting for like a couple of hours. Yeah. I give this one personally two beads up. You know what I'm saying? This is a great one. Uh huh. It's a high up in there. Recommend for me. That's right. All righty. So we're not going to talk about chess today, but we are going to talk about other games you play on a board. I'm going to talk about a game. Steve, you and I just played this week and we played it a bunch of times in a row. And I know we're going to be going back to it a bunch of times because we had a great time. And that is a game that's right up our alley, Spook, Tacular, Spook, Tacular, the theme of this board game is you got a board that's a movie theater with hallways and different theaters and the lobby and the bathrooms and all different stuff. And people have come to the movies. All these different colored meeples came to watch movies. And what happens? All the movie monsters jump off the screens and start killing everybody. So you get to play a movie monster. And there's all kinds of movie monsters in this game like tons of tons of them, you know, like there's a there's a killer clown. There's a killer car. There's a one that's a football mascot. There's a, you know, a giant fish like an angler fish. There's a, you know, I played one that was like a telephone, like telephones that were killing people when they were at answer the phones. All the stuff and each one of them has this really amazing movie poster that's your player board and you flip it over and it's your player board. So every single one of these movie monsters plays differently, has like different rules for it. So how you're going to move around the theater, you're going to scare the people that are in there. It's called spook. You spook the people. So you run into a room and you spook the people and they like run in all directions and you score points for scaring everybody. Then you're going to devour people and you collect these people and when you collect sets of these different colored people, you trade them in for points. And that's, that's it. That's all there is to it. You're just scaring people and you're devouring people and you're trying to do this based on the set of mechanisms that you have for your particular character, which is completely different for everybody. So you're trying to figure out how to strategically do that. And the game is pretty quick. Takes about 30 minutes to play and you pick a new movie monster. You learn how to use that one. You just go back into it and do it again. Listen, this was fun. There's a movie poster in here that I'm looking at called killer car. Yes. Is there a car that comes down and drives around the movie theater? Yeah. Yeah. Your car is just driving around the movie theater. Kill a people. Yeah. Yeah. Pick it up. Man, it's picking them up. Get them back. But like I said, like, my new chest stuff, the character that I played Chris was called deadline. And it was like, I would spawn telephones in each of the rooms in different rooms. And I would call the phones and the other monsters would answer the phones and then shit would happen. And like I was trying to like place them in places that I knew the monsters were going to go so that they would answer and and and I would do make the people move around and I would kill them and stuff. It was awesome. Wow. Yeah, super cool. There's like a blob character. There's a mummy alligator thing. Mummy Gator. There's a yeah, mummy gator. Ask Jamie was the one time. Yeah, mummy gator was great because I put down my my my tomb, the mummy's tomb. And I would draw people into the mummy's tomb. And then I would consume them and they would go into little bottles. And when I would get a bottle, I'd get a special power. Man, it was it's just great playing all these different characters. Yeah. And it's very replayable. I think because there's so many different monsters. Yeah. Like, Emil was Dr. Terror and he put traps around that would do stuff to the the people, not the other monsters. And I was screaming Eagle. He's a football mascot. Like, he spawns with team members. Like the football team, I guess is there and he's trying to kill them specifically. You get points, but also the other meeples too. Anyway, it's great. There's like so many different ways to play. I loved your other character, Steve. You played called Kill Tron 3000. That was a perfect game. You had to program your actions. Yeah, that was great. There's you play three cards and at the end of each round, one of the cards on the end slides off. You play a new card and you just every turn you go down the cards like programming. Yeah. That was fun. Now, I will say this, the game is very, very, very basic and simple. Because it's the most streamlined game you're ever going to find. So gameplay wise, you're doing the same thing every time you're trying to spook care meeples make them run away or consume them and trade them in for points. So that's really the only thing you're trying to do here. So in that respect, if you're looking for a very, very deep experience, you're not going to get it here, but this is closer to sort of a family style game, right? Yeah. Where the fun comes in is exploring the different characters, the different monsters and how they operate. I did not play any of the basic characters because some of them are just real basic, like killer card and play because there's like one power on it. And I'm like, I don't want to do that. I don't play something that's complicated. So we were picking the intermediate and the advanced level monsters. And that was the fun. It was trying to figure out how to make this stuff work for me in this game. Their replayability is in the fact that there are a shitload of them. Like there's a big stack of them in the game. And another thing you said, you guys didn't play the simple ones, but for family games or people that are new to gaming, you could easily hand them one of these and sort of walk them through it and they would get it. So it's not only is it very replayable, there's a wide demographic, which, you know, which would enjoy it. I like that too. I'm going to make a weird, what may seem like a weird comparison here. And so the game this reminds me of, and I'm sticking this a little bit from a line I saw in one of the comments on board game geek is like magical athlete, but with some game meat there, right? Magic athlete just sort of rolling dice, but you have all those characters doing those funny interesting things. This is like that. We have all these characters doing all these funny interesting things, but there is some level of at least tactical gameplay there. Sure. As you said, it's not the deepest thing, but it is sure fun, man. And it's a kind of game that'll play a play super quick 30, 45 minutes. I mean, and then you just rack it up and do it again. Yeah. So you can play three or four games this in a row, trying all the different characters and all that's cool. That's cool. Tons of replayability. Tons of fun in this game. Spooktacular is, it's just a really, really fun game. And this has been a while since I thought about this one. I was like, you know what? I want to pick that up. So I think Steve would really dig that, particularly because of the theme. Yeah. Where's the production goes? Here's the other thing. The production is very, very, very understated. It's just a board with, you know, basic colored meeples, but then the monster meeples are screen printed with this really kind of cool looking artwork on them. So there isn't a whole lot to the game from a production standpoint, but it actually doesn't need that. And it does keep the price a little lower too. So that's, it's, it's definitely one I recommend. If you like horror movies and you're into like some good tactical gameplay, but still like kind of a streamlined experience, I think this is one to go with. It's really, really fun. Yeah. And 20 movie monsters, right? So there's a lot of replayability there. That's spooktacular. So I'm down to hear about this next one. I think it's probably a match made in heaven. Tony, I can't imagine somebody else that would love this next game as much as you. We'll see what you say about it there. So I headed maybe like half an hour north of here. I left my house to play games at Will the Hungry Gamers house. We played Shackleton bass. Oh, man. Oh man. Yeah. This is one of my favorites. It's Mark 10. I haven't rated a 10 on board game geek. A 10. You, you have this rated a 10? I'm not gonna come in at a 10 it's a 10 man. Oh, oh no (laughing) - You're comfortable to be very fascinating. It was a little bit of a slog to learn, to will the hungry gamers credit though, he did an excellent job in teaching the game. We got to the game in a pretty reasonable clip for how complicated this sucker is. - There's only three actions, Tony. (laughing) - That is, well, no, that's not true at all. That's a little reductive, I think. But in shackles and bass, you're basically like, you're basically building shit on the moon. - Oh yeah, big pile of, relax, relax. - And you got different kinds of workers. And you're getting spaceships to take these workers. I guess the spaceships represent like the worker going up to the moon. I didn't really think through the theme, probably enough. - Yeah, the shuttles coming from the earth to bring in up new employees to work on the moon. And you're drafting them. - Yeah, yeah, so you got this pool of spaceships. And you're like, well, I'm gonna take this spaceship that's got these kind of workers on it. - Mm-hmm. - And there's three different types of workers. You got your scientists and they're blue. You got your, I thought of them as bureaucrats. I don't know if they're like bureaucrats or administrators. They're red. They typically get you money. And then you got the yellow workers, which I guess are engineers or your builders. And they can all do any action, which is kind of interesting. But if you line the engineer up engineering action, it's a better version of that action. So that was kind of cool. You have these different kinds of workers and they do different kinds of things. The other thing that you can do with these workers have, there's basically two different actions each worker can do. You can send them off to this one track and it's a different action. Or you can put them around the edge of the board around the moon, basically. There's the circular part of the board that represents the moon. And you can put the workers on the edge of that. That's the Shackleton crater. - Yeah, yeah. You're building in the crater. And then you can sort of trigger a line across the moon activates. And if you activate, like the scientist, if you use a scientist to activate, that does something different than if you use a bureaucrat to activate or an engineer to activate. You get different resources. Like the bureaucrat gets you money. The engineer gets you the sort of building resources. And then the scientists, they get you these blue chits that do different things. They sort of line up with the technology that there's these corporation boards. The corporation boards is another thing that kind of makes it a little bit of a slog to learn because you're basically, there's a bunch of corporations in the game. And they're all different. They all have different rules basically. And you play with three of them. Maybe it's always, is it always three, Jamie, or is that related to player count? - Nope, you always play with three. - So it's three. We played three players. So there's three corporations now. Not those aren't tied together though. But, and there's all these different technologies. You can get, we played one that was kind of fun, was like a robotics manufacturer, for instance. - Yeah. - If you got the resource for the robot, you could get a robot. And then you had to pair the robot up with these little tiles, which I sort of thought of as like factories basically. So you got to have your robot. - It's exactly with that tree. - And you got to, what's that? - It's exactly what they are. They're factories. You build the factories. - Yeah, and once you get the robot paired up with the factory, it activates and then you got something that's giving you something then. So there's definitely like, you're building this big tableau, which is also kind of like an engine. You're trying to, you're trying to get the right spaceships with the workers that match up the best with your tableau. There's a lot going on. It's a lot of fun puzzle for sure. Your brain is cooking as you're thinking this one up. I like these little, these like, I thought of them as sort of like geodesic domes that you're putting in the crater. There's kind of like the buildings you're building. And there's basically like an area control aspect of it. And but it's also, you're not fighting and destroying each other's buildings. You're just kind of like competing for the land and the space on the board. And you kind of share different regions or you can build your like super, your super geodesic dome thing and take over a whole section all by yourself. Yeah. You're trying to control the strips though. Because what you want to do is you want to be able to activate a strip and have it be all bunch of your stuff. Because you're basically, if you activate a space that's, you don't have anything in, you got to pay other people money, which I hated doing. I hated giving will the money. (laughing) So terrible. But in the inverse of that, you love it when the other people have to give you money. So you're trying to make that happen without, you're trying to make it happen. So you get the money and they don't get the money, which is always fun. And sometimes you're one or two money short and suddenly you get it. You're like, yes. Now I can do what I need you to do. Yeah, I tell you what I love about this game so much is that it is a delicious mix of game styles that I like, I like construction. So I like building stuff out on the board. I like managing a business, like having my employees on different spaces, doing different things. I love area majority and you get a little bit of area majority at the end of every round with like how you strategically placed your employees out on the board so you can gain like rewards for that. It's just, there's so many good aspects to it that it just comes together really well for me. The thing I didn't like about it was what you just described. So it's kind of one of those things it's what I like about it. And what it's like, what I don't like about it are almost the same thing. It's when you get all those different things together and sometimes they're like all happening and at the same time you say they are. It gets a little tedious to make sure you're remembering everything. So we've all seen that theme in games before where it's like, wait, did I do this right? Did I do that? Did I do this? Wait, did I forget to do that? There's some of that. So you gotta be sort of meticulous. You can't, I wouldn't want to be in a hurry playing this game. I would, it would be like, oh my goodness, like, I gotta remember this, gotta remember that. And there's a lot going on. Maybe it might get easier though as you play it more times. I would see that that would go away the more you play it, right? 'Cause you're more familiar with everything that's going on and it's easier to not sort of forget things. - Imagine it turns more into just how to, the mental load and then becomes, how do I combo those three factions because you start getting used to and remembering the actions that are kind of shared no matter what, right? - Right. - And I think that's a good point, Chris. And I think going one further, one of the great things about the game is when you start off playing the game, you're trying to figure out how to leverage a corporation and how to make points with that, or maybe two, you know, if you wanna think like in two levels. When you start to play the game a lot, you start to have to think, now how am I going to make points with the corporation and also how am I going to make sure that other players aren't scoring points on theirs? Because there's a lot of corporations that, if you just let someone go and just run wild on a corporation, they're gonna score in mid-semouse of points. You have to get your fingers in their pie to get some of those points and minimize their points, you know? - That's a lot. - That's a very common first or second time play. You will notice that somebody just runs wild. You know, particularly with that friggin, the one where the tourists come in, if you let somebody run wild with the tourists, like you're screwed. (laughing) - Well, that's what happened in our game. I was doing, I thought I was doing well. In fact, Will thought I was like doing, I was gonna win. He's like, Tony's got this, but that bastard, he got control of the one for the-- - Just a wish. - I love it. That one corporation. - Congratulations. - I believe the other player that I was playing with. - Oh, because you. (laughing) - Well, I was focusing over here. And it was up to him basically then to make sure that Will didn't dominate that other corporation and that just didn't happen. - Well, the last time I played Chris, that's what happened too. It wasn't my fault that I lost. Like, this other guy wasn't playing good and let Chris win. That's right. - Exactly. - Tony sounds like the students I used to have in college. There were two things true of those students. One was either I gave them an AF or they got an AF. - Two different friends. - Right, exactly. - I didn't get an AF just to be clear. I didn't say that. It's an AF plus. I'm sure. - I was very happy with how I did for-- - Considering I played the game once. - Yeah, there you go. (laughing) - Tony, some copium going down on it. - Well, I don't need copium. I just got the truth about that. - Now, I think that your criticism of this game is absolutely valid. It is a very complicated game. And the cognitive load on this one is very high. 'Cause there's a lot of things that are going on. And I just liked the combination of stuff enough to bring me back so that I could get over the cognitive load problem. Like I just played it enough now that I kind of, I just get it. Now I just can go. And I could teach it pretty quick now too because I've played so many times. - I would love this to show up on a board game arena. 'Cause I think this is one of those games that would work really well on there. And I would probably play the shit out of it on board game arena. 'Cause it's just for whatever reason. It's one of those games where you can just sort of like leave open on your extra monitor on your computer and just sort of your turn pops up. You look over here and you're like, okay, I'll build here. - One of the things I really like about Shackl and Bay similar to another game we'll be talking about later is that it's a relatively easy rules set when you get down to it, right? It's a worker placement game but there's a lot of nuance and sort of secondary effects associated with the game. with those choices you make that are initially just getting your resources or doing a thing. There's like a, there's an echo effect, whole trail of effects that happen when you do a thing. And I like that. And that's, I believe, what makes the cognitive load high. But when you get more in flow with that game, you'll see this over time, T, 'cause I'm sure you'll play it many times, you get way better than any other set it. But when you approach it, like once you get in the flow of that game, oh, it just feels so good because it's like, you see the code behind the matrix. It's like, oh, I know how to now manipulate these things. That's what makes such a wonderful game to me. Have you guys picked up the expansion? Yeah. Oh, it's not out yet. I have the expansion out. Yeah, it's shit. Yeah, everybody's got it. Everybody's got it, but you don't. Yeah, that was a lot. I think we'll wanted to get the game night together because he had just got the expansion. Yeah, I got to get this thing. I'm playing it. You guys having stuff on it. I have, I have it, but I have not played it yet. I read the rules for each of the, the corporations, but I just haven't found a night for it yet. So that's, it's definitely high on the list of games that I want to play, but there's always that game that like creeps right in. Like I just got the game that Chris really wants to play coming of age. So this got bumped for that now. We played one of the, we played one of the expansion corporations. Will said they were a little, uh, crazier like the rules were a little more, you know, so I don't know if it's on the shelves right now or not done, but I know Kabalists on the discord were receiving their pre-orders. Oh, okay. And that was like a month ago. And I got mine about two, three weeks ago, three weeks ago, at least. Wow. Cool. All right. And it's not. I'm just saying pre-orders. I like seeing Don's froth and junky behavior. Like, activate in front of my eyes. Because I love this game so much. Shackle Debacy is a great game. How could you not want more and more corporations for it? It's funny how very, very agitated he is that he's like, last to get it. I think I'll be all right. Oh my well. Shackleton bass. It's a, it's a very fun heavy Euro. If you like, if you're looking for a heavy Euro to try, I would say give it a try. Named after Ernest Shackleton Arctic Explorer. That's a fun story too. So Tony, you'll take hard in knowing that you were not the only one to get absolutely whipped out of game. I did not get whipped. I lost my reasonable margin. That's what I'll call it to you then. Well, I got my ass whipped out of game, but I loved every minute of it. This was sniperly the board game, public volume unplugged and designed by Rodgers Tankersley, Roger Tankersley and our buddy Dave Thompson. And I don't know. Did you have a co-author credit there Steve that I'm overlooking? I'm sorry. I know you and Dave worked closely on everything together. I don't like point in those things out every time, but yeah, I'm in there. So sniperly came out in 2022 based on a video game and also some wasn't Omar's and I talked to Dave about this. He's very open about this about an homage to specter ops, right? Although now that I recently replayed specter ops and I recently replayed sniperly, I've come to the conclusion that sniperly is just leagues behind specter ops. Maybe that's not surprising. Giving it was a later iteration. It was some honing down and some adjustments that were made. But yes, sniperly is just such a great game. The idea behind this game is it's a one versus mini game where one, two or three players play as the Nazi soldiers that are sort of guarding a camp and that camp has objectives in it. I think it's nine or ten objectives. And the sniper is hidden throughout most of the time. He wants to stay hidden. And so he's drawing a couple of random objective cards. These objective cards, the way they do it, they do it with suit. So those two objectives can't really be close together. And further, he has to enter the map away from those two objectives. So he's basically got to traverse the map to get to first objective and then get to a second objective. If he does that, he wins the game. Meanwhile, the guards are trying to find out where he is so they can attack and then do two points of damage to him somehow. And if they do that, they win the game. So the wing conditions are very straightforward in this game. It is a hidden movement game. The sniper has a dry race board that's a small version of the large board. And they are tracking their movements turned by turn on this board. They also have some items they can use. So they start with three cards and they can get more in some of those objectives that they didn't pull in their core objective too. So the idea is the sniper moves either a lot or a little. If he moves a lot and he moves beside soldiers, he has to alert the Nazi guards that, hey, this guard heard something. So they don't know exactly which space he moved through, but they can sort of narrow it down. And the guards can do things like spot in the space or sweep or they can attack or they can move so variety of things. So there's a nice sort of action economy that's going on here both between the sniper and also the guards. And the sniper wants to sneak, but the sniper has to move fast sometimes because he just doesn't have enough time according to the round track to just sort of walk casually toward the objective. He's got to be in a hurry at certain points. So the trick is when to be in a hurry, when not, when to use your items, you know, when to, it's one of the things I love about this game. When you think about specter ops, it's very much a, it's a bunch of cats chasing one mouse. Sniper elite, the board game is a little bit different in that the sniper is a sniper for a reason. So they can shoot, which has a bag pulling mechanism is very clever and they can, you know, pop these soldiers off the board. And when they do that, they get more aim tokens, which makes them better at further shots. You could approach this game in a variety of ways as a sniper. You could just try to stay lay low the whole time, use cards that help you to remain hidden. I found that is an effective, I mean, I sort of tend to gravitate toward that play style. It can be effective. The downside of that is the guards, the people playing the guards, that can be sort of a buzz kill because it's like their search and search and search and they never find a lot of action and suddenly the sniper wins the game. So I decided to approach this a little bit of a different way. I said, you know, I'm going to go full on, I'm just going to start sniping folks, I'm taking in a knife. Right. And so the knife became useful. I use that. I did take one sign up movement card that allows you to move more spaces but not make noise. And I did take that. But very quickly, I was like, this flipped on me. I was playing against three of the players, each of which has a PhD in math. And it's like, that was not the right choice. So I never made it to my first objective. I will say this. I'll have a little sip of that copium you got there to, so there were like three events that happened where there were three corn flips in a row that they got right. And that sort of helped. But again, I enjoyed every minute of this. It is a very tense cat and mouse game where very much like probably my favorite hidden moving game beast, it's not clear who is hunting who at all times. And there's a certain satisfaction you get. Even though I didn't get any objectives, I took out a lot of soldiers and it was fun going out from a different approach of being like more offensive. And they were moving around a little scared of, okay, who's the next one he's going to take out. And man, suddenly two soldiers off the board and this officer's off the board. It's like, oh, I think he's squirreled around us when actually I'm standing right beside him. So a lot of tension, a lot of fun. But I did lose the game. Had a wonderful time doing it though. Done. What you're saying is they did not see you. Oh, God. Is that correct? They did not see me until they saw me and they really saw me. Don't be, don't be too upset, Don. I think they all watched the chessmates documentaries. There was probably three evil beazers around the table. That's right. And you just didn't have one. We'll write it off on that. That's got to be it. So I actually introduced this to, I have an ad hoc wizard night thing where, you know, two of these people, not really gamers. They're getting more into games because I'm exposing the new cool mechanisms. And every time I bring something out, they're like, wow, didn't know something like this existed. It's super cool. And there was another person, not really a gamer that we brought in and he's going to be part of the group now, because he's like, that's super fun. So now we got this regular ongoing ad hoc group that I can show new interesting mechanisms to. And they're coming at it from a beginner's, a relative beginner point of view when it comes to real hobby board games, right, the deeper games. So I'm really enjoying this. I really enjoyed the fact that they puzzled this out. It's so funny, man. I was like, oh, I got them now. And then she's like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to spawn a soldier right here and then soldier. I got nothing else to do with them. It's just going to attack here. And that's what I was. Like, oh, you got to be good. But that is so fun, right? That is really the idea that that three relatively new gamers crushed. They did. There is that makes me happy. I like that story. But the good thing is I learned something from a strategic point of view. I went in with a mix of offensive and defensive offensive cards and sneaking cards. And I think you kind of got to go one way or the other with that. So I'm interested in trying to gain where I go in with like a knife and a trench gun and the shotgun and really do some damage and see how effective that is. Because I'm fairly effective at the sneaking around and sniper relief. I love the fact that it gives you different sort of loadouts and paths you can go down. And remains a really good game regardless of the approach you take. And there's a bunch of different boards too, which I dig the fact that there is some that are like bases, like you're inside like a base. And some of them are like a much higher level. So it's like a whole neighborhood and countryside because that's very much like the sniper elite video game, which I play quite a bit of. There's some that are just these vast gigantic maps. And there's some of them that are these bases you're running around inside of. And that's both of them are represented in this game and equal measure. And the game works just as well with both styles of maps. Yeah. I haven't played the second style yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I've always played the first map because you know, I'm teaching new people every time. You think this fired spectroobs for you? 100%. I mean, between. between this and Beast, which has a new expansion coming. You know, there's no reason to go back to spectra. It's just not as dynamic and not as interesting as sniper elite, not as quick as sniper elite either, right? It's a longer drawn out game. Sniper Elite, as I've proven, can be over pre-quick. (laughs) But great game, we'll keep coming back to it, man. It's just such a great game that I think Roger and Dave should be extremely proud of. It has staying power and it is among the top elite of the hidden movement games. That sniper elite, the board game, if you're a fan of hidden movement, you gotta try it. - Jamie, I was looking at the description for the next game and I see it has diplomatic shenanigans, which means I will never play this game again. - No, no, no, there's not a whole lot of that going on. The thing is though, so going into this next game, we've had one story where Don got smashed and destroyed and stomped down in a game. We had one where Tony has been smashed down and stomped down in a game and lost miserable it. I got smashed and stomped. - I don't know, it just changed. - And smashed miserably by Steve in this next one. - That's right. - We played for all mankind. For all mankind is, for all intents and purposes, it was very, very much inspired by Catan because a lot of the gameplay mirrors a lot of the mechanisms from Catan. But they change some of the stuff that were criticisms of Catan to try to make it better, right? So it's called for all mankind because it is our solar system. The board is round and all of the planets of our solar system are the places where you can construct outposts and these outposts are what are going to generate you resources. It's cool that our solar system because every round the planets will rotate and based on their orbit, they rotate more in small amounts or vast amounts depending on where they are in the solar system. And the way you jump from planet to planet is you have to spend fuel to be able to build there. So you have this little ruler that shows, that you put down on top and it shows you how much fuel it costs to get to the next planet. So as those planets are rotating, the fuel costs to get to various planets is changing and you will build these outposts. These outposts will generate you resources. Just like Katan, only there's no dice rolling. They just automatically produce you the resources every turn. There's also technologies you can build. There's a ton of different technologies that give you special powers and there's also espionage cards you can buy which will get you all kinds of stuff that you can do, one of which and sort of the most, sort of the poster child thing of the game is that you can build tactical nukes that you can just simply build a tactical nute and deploy it and blow up anybody's anything. You can blow up anybody's outposts that's producing them resources. You can blow up anybody's technology. You can do anything that anybody has with these tactical nukes. So that makes there's like a warlike deterrent there. So you can have these sort of arms races, these cold wars or you can have all out wars, whatever. And it's just like Katan, it's when you get to 10 points which points are outposts or technologies or these special, you know, victory goals whoever gets to 10 points first wins the game. So it plays just like Katan. So what you just described as Katan with nukes. Kind of, yes. Kind of. Where you can blow people's bases up. There are differences because of the way the board works and the way that the resource are produced and the technologies and stuff, yes. But it is pretty much Katan other than that. Here's the thing, it's really kind of cool and it's beautiful, but they're the magic somehow went away when you compare it to Katan. Something about Katan has a magic to it. Like there's just this really delicate level of interaction with the players with the trading phases and stuff. There is a trading phase in this game, but you don't really have to do it. Like it's easy to get by without trading. So the trading phase in Katan, like there's this cool like magic to that. Like that's really good interaction. There's a lot of strategy to how you lay out your roads and your settlements on the board in Katan. For all mankind loses all of that. It loses all the interaction from the trading phase. There's just, it's, my final thought was it's fun, but it's just not very good. You know, I had fun playing it, but I'm not sure that I'd ever go back to it anymore. What did you think, Steve? - Yeah, I mean, pretty much what you said, it was fun. I had a good time beating you. - Yeah. - And a meal, question. - Beyond all recognition. - Yeah. - But, you know, I'm thinking about it like, okay. So the starting, you know, resource powers you have are very important for how you play the game initially because you generate two of one particular resource and just one of the other ones. So, you know, and I think no matter what starting resource you have, you're gonna be basically doing the same thing, which is trying to get the other three resources so you can generate more. - Right, it is, yeah. I still don't think it's like super replayable. I had a good time playing it. It's a cool concept and I did have a good time, but I'm not gonna be like, hey, Jamie, whoop that up. - It looks neat, it looks neat, but there's planets floating around the board. - Yeah, that's the thing Chris. - And that's the thing Chris. And that's the thing that really, really kills me is that it is dead gorgeous. It's got this really amazing retro 1960s graphic design and sort of, you know, it's just everything about like the artistry of the design of all the components is gorgeous. It's really well done, but the gameplay just feels very novice and not really like thought through. Like Steve said, the opening outpost you get on Earth, they really, really sends you down a path. And like you can't do, you know, you can't do, you can only do one specific thing, each person. They have one action that they can do. And you either do that or don't do anything so that you just generate resources again. So you have a lot of resources the next turn so you can actually do something. And that is one of the major flaws that like really, really burns me up about the game. Any game that has this in it, I'm gonna do nothing on my turn because I can't, and I'll just generate all the resources again. So next turn I can do something. Like seriously, that's terrible. That is a terrible design flaw. If you can just say I'm gonna do nothing on my turn because that's my best move. Oh my God, like what kind of design? - And it's the first turn. - Exactly, that is just absolutely stupid. That's terrible. You know, like I just feel really bad because this was designed by a couple who just really wanted to design a game. And it sucks to kinda like don't go in their game, you know? But, you know, and they made a lot of good choices with this game. I'll tell you, the tactical Nuke's part is terrific. Like I absolutely adore that because it's really easy to nuke somebody. You just, you know, the deck has a bunch of nuke cards in it and you just buy them and then you get one. You're like, oh cool, and then you have one and you could just blow up anything on the board anywhere without impunity. It's terrific. And it's a great deterrent because you could have a whole bunch of nuke sitting down here and like, oh, if you blow me up, I'll blow you up kind of thing. Or you could just like straight out do it and build something right on top of where you just built blew up. I like that. I think that's a really fun sort of take that is sort of the spirit of the game because even at the top of the box, it says, explore the solar system, blow up your friends. Like they are advertising on the front of the box that this is a take that style sort of tongue and cheek game. And I like that. But the rest of the game's gotta be great. And it wasn't great. It's just fine and fine is not good enough. And that's how I won because the person who puts all 10 of their little rocket ships out wins. So the last turn that we played, I put a rocket ship out on Pluto, which got rid of a rocket ship. That also got me the bonus goal of being the furthest out in the solar system. So I got another rocket ship. And then I nuke somebody and built on the, you know, smoking crater where there are people used to live. And that was my third rocket ship. And then the game just ended. You guys can do anything. Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that's sort of, I guess the way the game's played. You build up a great turn and then deploy it and you win the game, which is not terribly dissimilar to Katan. Katan is that way too. You could build up a big turn where you could do a bunch of stuff. And then all of a sudden be like, that's my one point, two points, tenth point, I win, you know. And something about Katan, there's like a special magic to making that happen because you felt good about the play. You know, in this one, like you did build towards that. So that's good. It actually worked out. But a lot of the stuff along the way just doesn't feel, doesn't feel baked, you know. Yeah. It's unfortunate. Don't feel too bad, Jamie, because Tony got absolutely demolished in the chocolate days. Yeah. So I came in, I came in second, I had eight points. And Steve got his tenth. Emil had eight points and I got my, and when Steve got his tenth. So we weren't actually destroyed like Tony was. No, Paul. That's right. Tony, you paying attention now. I stopped listening. I was thinking, well, started to develop. Tony got lie. You would, you would listen anyway. Well, I could see Tony's camera just here. That brought that up. Tony's, look, we just like, Oh, man, you're not dissuading us, Tony. When you do that, it's like, oh, got to go back in. Hey, Tony. Oh, what? It's more. I got, I had a Hitler joke, like 30 minutes ago. And I said, hey, Tony, a whole bunch. Happy end of Smape or Elite. So here's your Hitler joke. Hey, Tony, how did, you know, Hitler? tie his shoes. Tell me, Steve in Nazis. That was free to suppose. I know. I feel laughing about it. Nazis. I know. I got it. I just tried not to lie. I mean, Nazi jokes aren't terribly fun. Well, what did they call Hitler when he got fired or removed from his artist job? What did they call him? Lead off Hitler. There. Oh my God. So I knew what to cover one more thing about for all mankind. So Jamie, you're like, yes, from a couple, you know, kind of don't want to bag on the game too much, but it does sound like from a first design point of you. There is some promise here, right? Like they've done some things that are interesting. So that's good. I mean, most of the time, people's first game are not the killer game, but that mean don't stay at it because you know, we have a lot of second, third designs that just are fantastic. Some of the best games we can we can name were like, not the first one. I mean, I mean, games Martin Wallace had designed before brass, right? And a lot of those good, but not all. Yeah, you're right. Done. They made a lot of good choices with a lot of things. The production of the game is very fun. I think this is also the one Tony that you said when we were talking about it in the news that they only had locally sourced components to. So even though like the planets are a little janky looking, it's because they were locally sourced components. And after you play with them, the janky components are kind of charming. Like it's like it looks cool out there. I don't know. There's something about it. They just did a great job with with the production, but yeah, gameplay is just unfortunately not not where it needs to be. Anyway, that's for all mankind. Steve, you got no, you got any more jokes before we get into the last game here. I don't want to interrupt you. Step on your toes. Oh, you want some more Hitler jokes? No, no, thank you. How about what about an animal or something? What noise does Hitler's turkey make? No, me and my big mouth. What's the? The Gerbels. Oh, man. All right. Come on. Come on. Stop. I was just from this stop stalling. Come on. Let's get it on. I got to play the new hotness here. This is the latest from designer, Stefan failed. Published by Aliyah. And that is the druids of Adora. Now, we have heard a lot about this like this is Stefan fails, return to form and throw back to his classic games. And I have to admit, it is that. I don't think it rises to the levels of the castles of Burgundy, uh, of the past, but it's really good. It's kind of hard to get to that. It is kind of hard. That's right. But as far as like, is it a fun game with some depth? The answer is absolutely yes. I do think the rule book is like, man, it's kind of a, it makes it seem far more complicated than it is. Uh, and to be honest, there are plenty of things that we talked about cognitive load earlier. We were talking about shackle of base that game that Tony got killed at. And the cognitive load is as large for this one, I think, if not larger. So there's just so many different tiles that do so many different things and so many different actions. And, you know, you just got powers on top of powers and asymmetry on top of asymmetry and things to worry about all across the board. If you like that sort of being buried in the, uh, let's say the depth of a game and understanding that everybody's going to be missing some things and being suboptimal, but you want to be the best, the closest to optimal among those suboptimal players. This might be the game for you. The idea here is that you are druids. You have a druid moving around a map. And there are some action places in between some paths that lead between these, these little meadow to kind of areas. You're going to move. You can move your druid along any sequence of these paths, but it costs you provisions to do so, which is one of the resources in the game. Once you have paid your provisions to move the druid, you then have to pay provisions to lay a die out that you have. One of the end game triggers is running out of dice. So, uh, you know, just about every turn, I should say, if you're playing it well, every turn, you're going to lay a die out. So there's like, you know, it's, it's not a lot of turns that you have in this game. In case you move, you place a die out, you do whatever that action is, and that actually be refill your provisions. It can be to establish what's called a standing stone on the board or a, um, a stone tablet or you can get mistletoe and then you can buy things with mistletoe or you can put a gem on an amulet or you can move your sickle up and your sickle unliked powers and just there's all these things that you can do to give yourself some ongoing power, some asymmetry, building up an economy. But you have to pay attention to so many things. You have to pay attention to, if you have enough provisions to move, not only this term, but the following term, because before you run out, you want to take an action to refill and those are starting to go away over the board because people are taking those spots. So you got to be really careful about routing your path only to find out someone's taking that critical spot on that path that you wanted, but they got first is like, oh, now I got to do something different. And so you inevitably pivot off that long term strategy a bit to take another spot, which sort of cascades and messes up somebody else's plans. There's a little bit of getting each other's way this whole time. But as far as the way the game plays, it is far simpler as I said that the rulebook suggests, you move, you place a die, you do a thing. And if you surround certain symbols on the board, these fires, you get some more bonuses. So the idea is here that you want to sort of cascade these bonuses and surround things and get to things before other people do. If I have any criticism about the game, it is that there's just so many different things to worry about. And it's not intuitive, right? You have to start, you have to really learn the symbols and what each of the individual stone tablet tiles does and what the potions do. And you're just not going to get that on the first game. I mean, that's kind of an advantage in a way because that means there's some inherent replayability in it when you come back. But the good news is you have fun going through this path, even though you're sort of, you realize, okay, I kind of got to ignore 25% of this game because I can't just think about all those things. And if I try to do a little bit of everything, I'm going to do nothing very well. So pick a path and kind of go down it and experiment. Next time you play, pick a different path, go down experiment. I will say it's the most fun part to me is that whole idea of sequencing out where you want to move and trying to figure out if other players are also eyeing those areas as well so that you can either clear your path or understand that there may be difficulties in your path. And the board gets more constrained as you go. So the tension ramps up. And I really like that in a game. And I think Stefan failed as the king of that kind of thing. You know, his games have always been one of those at worst like there are a lot of different mechanisms that tie in together efficiently in a way that with an efficiency, the other designers just can't reach. This is another game along those lines. So if you like those Stefan failed classics, this really falls in that category, I think. One thing that really stands out to me in this game is how pleasant looking it is. I love the colors they use in this game are there these really pleasant browns and pastel colors. The board is pretty. It's not. It doesn't seem too cluttered. It's just a pleasing game to look at. It sure is Chris. Here's something that I want to comment on. So one of the hardest things about being a podcaster and doing an audio format is explaining a game so that it makes sense when the game has absolutely no discernible theme. So like, and listen, I have this game. I have not played it yet. But really, this is an abstract strategy game with a theme on it. And that is not a criticism. Like I'm not levying that as a criticism. It's an abstract strategy game that they have tried to do their best to put a theme on, right? Like your druids wandering around the forest, building like these little towers, like these little stone hinge kind of things and whatever, all with this sort of laying the dice mechanism. And I'm really excited to play this game as a matter of fact, Steve, I hope that this looks cool to you because I'm going to force you to play it sooner or later. That's fun. Because it really, really, really looks like a great game. And what you described on, I understand a little more because I've kind of looked at it and stuff and messed with it. But I imagine it's very difficult for anyone to kind of grok what the theme might be of this game because just really that it's kind of, it's very light on theme. It is very light on theme. And that doesn't help when it comes to learning the game, given how many different things you have to, you know, keep in mind in a given time. A lot of the games like we talked about Shackling the Bass earlier, you know, you can think about, as you said, you gave a theme that says, hey, you have new people come into the planet with different backgrounds and they go to Shackling the Bass to do things. Like that theme helps you to understand, okay, it's a work replacement game on PantWorkers out. These are things you don't have to remember. Druids of Adore is not like that. Yeah. You have to remember what this symbol means and what the flower looking things do because it's not tied to flowers, right? It does a thing and you simply have to remember that thing without that theme underneath it to support it. It's not a bad thing. Like you said, it's just a truth. It's an abstract game. Well, I'm very excited to play it. Dang King was on the show a couple months ago and he was just singing the praisens of Druids of Adora and I've been wanting to play it since then. I just, I actually just got a copy of it last week. So I'm dying to play it. When you do play it, bring your readers because from a component point of view, there are some icons there that are very, very small. So yeah, that's one of the criticisms. But I mean, once you learn those icons, you know what they are. So you can tell what they are, even though you can't see them extremely clearly. But like I said, the components are beautiful. The colors are very fun and like, you know, they're very pleasant and the components are neat because you got these little standing stones that are like little miniatures of statues and [BLANK_AUDIO] like weird little statue looking things that you're building everywhere. It's very, very cool. It's very, very neat. Like, yeah, it's a cool game. I think you'll like it. I think Steve you'll like it as well. - Yeah, I think we'll be cool. - I think we'll be cool. - Yeah. - That like, Stefan Fale designs will like this, especially if you're a fan of some of that stuff from way back, the castles of burgundies of the day. Because there is a throwback feel to that. It's one I definitely am happy I have my collection, but I don't think it's gonna replace castles of burgundy as my favorite. - Yeah. - That's a tall order though, you know? - It is a tall order. - That's why I was like, it's not gonna dislodge brass, you know? That kind of thing. Anyway, the newest Stefan Fale and a pleasant surprise and a return to form, the Druids of Adora. - Yeah, I can't wait to play Druids of Adora. I mean, listen, Stefan Fale, great designer, and that's one that we've been talking about, putting in the hopper for a feature review coming up soon because Don's really loving it. I have a copy of it. I'll give it a play and then we'll make a decision if we wanna feature that one. Druids of Adora. Anyway, so Cappallists, I wanna throw out a couple of announcements here real quick before we move on to the feature review today of Fale's Swamp. And you wanna stick around for that because Fale's Swamp, beautiful game, beautiful, beautiful game. First off, if you're gonna be at Origins Game Fair this summer, here at the beginning of May, we're about a month and a half until we're gonna make that trek out to Columbus, Ohio for Origins Game Fair. And we're so excited. And yes, we are going to be having our Cappallists meetup once again this year. And we would absolutely love to see all of you out. It's going to be Friday night, June 19th, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. and we'll be at the Whistle and Keg in Columbus, Ohio. This will be the third time that we've hosted the meetup at the Whistle and Keg in Columbus. And man, they are such amazing people with a really cool space. It's just about two blocks away from the convention centers and easy walk. There's tables inside, there's great beer and cider and mixed drinks and all kinds of stuff. There's an outdoor patio area where they have cornhole set up to play. It's an absolutely fun time. Of course, as we always do, we're gonna host our raffle. You could go home with a bag full of board games. So come on out, the Cappallist meetup Friday, June 19th at 7 p.m. at the Whistle and Keg in Columbus, Ohio. And no, you don't need any tickets. All you gotta do is show up and hang out with us. This is not an official origins or gamma event. You don't even have to attend the convention to come to the meetup. If you live in the Ohio area, just come by and hang out with the founders. You don't even have to go to orges if you don't want to. You show up at 7 p.m. and hang out with the founders and friends and all the other Cappallists. It's gonna be a great time. Remember Friday night, June 19th at 7 p.m. Be there. Secondly, Cappallist. Now I haven't talked about this much since the end of last year. The secret Cappall kickstarter happened at the end of the year last year. And I wanted to give fundraising a rest for a while so I didn't mention it. I'm going to be closing down the kickstarter for late pledges as of this week. So if you wanna get over there and pledge to the kickstarter, you can. I'm gonna be closing it down sometime later this week. If you end up missing it and you really wanted to pledge to the Cappall, don't worry about it. It's still late pledge in the pledge manager, which will launch pretty soon. As soon as I get that all set up, I have to stop the pledges on the kickstarter and then import all that over to backer kit. And then I can launch the pledge manager for people to be able to go in and late pledge if they want to. Anyway, so I'm gonna start that process this week so I can have the pledge manager running for a little bit this summer. And then I'll get all your goodies to you by the fall. And with that gang, let's get on to our feature review today of an absolutely amazing absolutely gorgeous game. I love this one. Faze Swamp. And now the sacred Cappall's feature review. Hi, Caballas. For today's feature review, we have Faye Swamp, designed by Helga and Ainsam Ostrataq. It's for two to four players, plays in about an hour and a half to two hours. When this game, you're gonna take the roles of a bunch of swamp dwelling creatures that are different tribes that are trying to come into this swamp. You're gonna be building settlements. You're sending your boats out to catch fish. You're gonna bring those fish back, sell them to the different settlements. And then you're gonna be having parties. And that's as simple as this theme is. But as simple as that theme is, there's a whole lot of depth to this game. Yeah, this is a very surprising game. The theme is not one that normally brings me in. I mean, these anthropomorphic creatures that are fishing and then delivering things to islands, there's a little bit of a pickup to deliver there. And then you're celebrating about trading those things in. When you combine that with the fact that it is a worker placement game at its heart, that's not the kind of thing that sort of gets me jazzed up. Now, spoiler alert, we're gonna have great things to say about this game. But the theme is as interesting as it is is not one that really is, that's not the selling point of the game. Yeah, for me, it absolutely is the selling point of this game initially. I was really, really, really excited about this game. We talked about it last year when we did our gen, I'm sorry, essence, spiel, top 10 games that we want to see coming out of there. This was my number one. And it's because I just love the artwork. I think the theme is fun and it's different. It's unique. I mean, it's not the same, you know, same old thing over and over again. It has a swath of mechanisms that are very unique. We got worker placement, mixed with tiling, mixed with pickup and deliver. You know, that's just not something that we see made very often today. So I'm, I really, really love this game. And I think the aesthetic looks great. I think the components are understated, not bad, not over the top deluxe, but good. So I just, you know, and that, but that keeps the price down too. So all in all, this is thematically and components wise. This one really jives with me. Yeah. So you and I disagree a bit on the components. I mean, I feel like the settlements, they're wooden chits. They're all the same. The meatballs, the wooden meatballs are functional. I do like the colors they've chosen. There's, we didn't have any issues from a colorblind as perspective or anything. Yeah. I mean, they're not screen printed. There's, you don't have like dual layer boards or anything like that. I mean, things work fine. The fish pieces are cardboard. The gold pieces are just cardboard. Don't look like gold. You do have the man and gems that are, we refer to them in our games, crack rock. Right. You get to crack rock and you go one crack rock. But anyway, they, you know, they look like little gems and that's cool. But everything else, as you said, I think understated is the word. I do like the art, but again, that just doesn't pull me into it. Now, what I personally feel, I mean, I respect your opinion, Jamie, of course, but I personally feel like the value of this game is not necessarily in the components or the artwork, but rather the gameplay. And I'm assuming you feel that that's really high level too. Oh, absolutely. I think I personally think, well, if we're talking value for money, this game's $50. And that is on the low end of board games today. And I think you get a great and excellent value for your money here across the board. Because, you know, not every game has to be this deluxe, you know, all in $120. This is a $50 game and it lives up to every dollar you spend on it. Yeah, I completely agree. And this is not from a big publisher either. This is from Frechtle, whoegos or 999 games, cranio, creations, you know, this is, I mean, these are prominent publishers, but not like the big high end publishers. And so I think that comes through a little bit, but there's a quaintness associated with that too. They're not beholden to those expectations of some of those bigger games. I love the fact that it comes in a relatively small manageable box. Everything fits fine. It's not this big table hog, but when all said and done, you get a really good Euro game session out of this thing. Yeah. So they watch Tellin' How it plays and then we'll come back and talk about the things beyond the components. Absolutely. In phase swamp, the players take the roles of various swamp dwelling creatures. They have little tribes and they're going to be building settlements in the swamp. Then they're going to be taking their boats out, they're going to be going fishing, bringing back their hull and selling it to all the different settlements. And then those settlements will celebrate by eating the fish and you'll get a bunch of victory points for it. The main board is just a big hexagon map that looks like a big lake. And on some of those spaces, there are fish icons. And each one of those fish are different species of fish that are in season in different seasons throughout the year. And there's also nine totem poles that are out on the board. And these represent the different islands that you can build on. Each player has their own player board that's like a little tech tree that has four tracks on it. This will help you get more boats out on the board. It'll increase the speed of your boats, the amount of fish that you can catch and also unlock some income in the form of gold or fish every turn. Now at the end of every round, but it's important to know this in the beginning, everyone is going to draft one of the guide cars and the guides are these swamp dwelling creatures that are going to help you do all this different stuff. Each one of these guides has its own special ability and it dictates how much settlement's costs and how far your boats can move in that turn. Now these guides are very, very important to the strategy of the game. So you have to draft one that really works for however you're going to play out your turn. So after that, essentially it's worker placement. You have a series of workers you're going to play some on the action spaces and you're going to do stuff. There's a bunch of sailing actions which include catching fish. You can move all of the boats you have on the board and whatever space they're on, We're going to catch fish on that space. based on which fish are in season, and how much fish you can catch based on your technologies. Then another one of the actions is you can sail to the islands with all of your boats, and you can sail all that fish to all the different settlements. You can certainly sail to your own settlements, and that's good, but you won't make any money. You want to be sailing to the other players to make a bunch of money. There's other actions where you can build more settlements to increase the size of these islands, and this also gives players more spaces to sail their fish to. Now this is a big dynamic in the game because the more settlements that are built, the larger these islands get, and the harder it gets to sail around in this swamp because everything's being built up so much that there are only certain places you can go. There are some land-based actions as well, and one of them is called "celebrate". When you celebrate, you pick one of the islands, and all of the settlements on that island that have fish on them, they will eat those fish, and whoever owns that settlement is going to score a bunch of victory points, so you can see all the players are selling fish to all the different settlements to make money, but those players are then going to be scoring victory points when the celebration happens. So once you've used all your workers, or earlier if you want to, you can pass, and then you trade in your guide card for one of the other guide cards that are out there on the board. This is setting up how you're going to play out your next turn. Each round of play a different type of fishes in season, so you have to figure out how you're going to play each round based on that. You're also going for a bunch of different victory point conditions, and you're also going to score points based on the number of settlements you have on each one of the islands. So now it sounds very simple when I describe it like that, right? Well, absolutely not. This is a very, very heavy game. There's a lot of number crunching to figure out here. What's the best move in the best moment and how much is it going to score me versus the other players? There's a lot more to this game than the description would indicate. So that is basically how you play Faye's swamp. All right. The central mechanism here is it's a worker placement game, and we've seen worker placement games before. And in fact, there's a component that pretty much is just there because some of those worker places cost a little bit more in terms of manage. In general, you're going to be getting manage and generally going to be trading them in to take actions that are being contested in any given of the four rounds. And I like that. It's not overly complicated. You basically have fish, you're selling those fish for money, and people are trading those fish and you're sold in the way the celebration for victory points. It's a very clean sort of cycle that this game goes into. Yeah, I think this game feels like what Reiner Knitzu would design if someone asked him to design a worker placement game, which is not what he goes into. I don't, I can't think of any worker placement games that Reiner Knitzu designed. But this feels like if somebody said, hey, design a worker placement game, this kind of game would pop out of it because really the focus isn't on the worker placement. It's focused on the island or the islands that you're building and sort of the placement mechanisms there. The worker placement is just making that sort of the engine behind making all that operate. Yeah, and I love the fact that it's really straightforward as far as a worker placement games go. The first time you play this, you're like, okay, I go here to build settlements. It's a boat action. I go here to fish. That's a boat action. I go here to increase my sailing capacity so I can travel further in the game with all of my boats, right? I go here so I can go visit the temples and get things. It's all very clear. It doesn't seem very complicated. And it's not. It's one of those things that sort of, it's a bit of light without heat. They don't seem complicated. What you're doing seems simple. When you think about how all those things tie in together, that's where the beauty of the game comes in. Yeah, I think that unfolds over the first game or two as you're playing it. Like, man, there's so much, there's so many more secondary and third order effects from doing a thing in this game and understanding what others can do and what they're equipped to do and not equipped to do. That is where the magic of this game comes in. So it's a worker placement game with depth well beyond the relative simplicity of the actions you're taking in that worker placement game. Yeah, I think that that's really the huge takeaway I have for this game is I was flabbergasted by how deep this game goes with the teach. You know, I read the rules and I was like, oh, it's going to be, you know, a nice game. And then I taught it to everybody and it's dead simple to teach this game. And then when we were in the middle of the game and the beginning of the game, it's real easy, you know, but then when you hit the middle section, you're like, you start, it dawns on you what the effects of things are going to be late game, you know, it's just there's so many little aspects that of this game that are, you know, oh, wow. Like I can't believe how that works together so elegantly, right? And I believe that, you know, we know that this game was a previous design. This is a re-implementation of a game that was designed before called, uh, Kaivi, which is about, you know, uh, I think it's, you know, a South Pacific Islands and fishermen going around in the different islands and stuff, building little settlements there. So it's pretty similar in theme, uh, but this is a re-implementation of that. And I got to tell you, it feels very much like an older game. This feels like a game that would have been designed like 20 years ago, which it was designed 20 years ago. Uh, and I say that in the pot in the most positive way possible because this is an elegant game that has very simple rules and a high level of depth. Yeah. I would say it, it's not subject to the bloat we've seen in some other games. Absolutely. It's, it's designed with a simplicity in mind. So everybody listed the podcast probably knows I'm a huge fan of Puerto Rico and you think about the simplicity of that, but the depth associated with it. Now, I'm not going to claim that Faye Swamp is another Puerto Rico, but it is on that end of the scale. All right. There's no question. In a way that many of the, I don't say commodity games, but some of the bigger games and more prominent games, uh, don't achieve today because of all that sort of, all the additional layers in the chrome that's put on it. Those that can wash out the, the elegance of the game and man that elegance is where Faye Swamp has just in spades. Yeah. Glad you said that done because I never really thought about it in those terms before, but a lot of the, uh, your games that come out today are incredibly complex and the difficulty of playing and playing well is fighting through complexity and learning what's, you know, the efficient way to do things that this is a very different animal. This is playing two and three turns ahead and seeing and predicting where things are going to go and figuring for those things. And I think that's an actual, an interesting concept here. This is a really great mixture of both strategy and tactics because generally when we review games, we like, oh, this is more of a strategy game. Well, this is more of a tactical game. There's both in this and equal measure. Oh, yeah. Because there is a, you, everything that the other players are going to do is going to botch what you're planning on doing because you, you're, they're building those islands out and those islands are getting bigger and it's harder to move around and all the different stuff. You never know exactly what cards are going to be available for you with those guides, which are amazing. But you have to do a lot of fore planning to decide how am I going to place my, my, uh, settlements out there? What fish am I going to go for this turn and then next turn because you can predict in the future, which fish are going to be in season and you have to float to that side of the board to make sure you get in this fish. There is, that's such a rare thing today to have strategy and tactics and equal measure like this game has. Yeah. You can definitely have a strategy, but you have to understand when the tactics in this game, counterbalance that strategy, the point where it's like, I've got to do a thing that's tactically very good, right? Even though it may not be strategically very good and I have to adjust my strategy to, you know, account for it. Man, that doesn't feel like a force pivot either. Like it's not like you're saying dang it. My strategy is blown because I have to do this thing. Rather, it's like, okay, I have to perturb my strategy a bit, but I don't, I'm not completely abandoning it. So as you said, it's just the perfect balance of that, I think. Yeah. One of the very simplest of those things is you'll be doing some stuff, doing some stuff and all of a sudden somebody dumps a bunch of fish on an island and you're like, wow, it brings me back to like 15 years ago. We used to talk about the juicy spots on, on the, all the fish space in, in the, however, no full of fish. I can't not take it. It would be foolish of me. That's the same thing here. Like the fish build up on the island and you're like, like he just did that. Now I can just make the celebration happen. We all get points and I get more points than I'm and make sure that the totem goes over there. So I get a little extra points and stuff like that. So it just, again, it feels kind of old school in that way, but it's such a satisfying moment when you break your strategy just to go over and take that juicy space. But again, we talk about secondary effects. This is what we're talking about, right? Like you said, someone has placed a bunch of fish on an island like, ooh, I get to sell this for a big celebration. You can also sell fish and then force them to do a celebration to give you points because it, these weird situations pop over. It's like, well, I could celebrate there and I'll get five points and he'll get two or whatever I'm making this up. Or I could sell fish there, more fish, and now he's going to get six points for celebrating and I'm going to get eight points for celebrating when he celebrates. And so even though I'm getting more points, it's in his best interest because if it rolls back around to me, I'm going to get even more points. So you set up these situations where it's like the lesser of two evils is what you want all your opponents doing to benefit you. It's one of those things where everybody's making progress, but your score is kind of determined not only about what you do. In fact, I would say mostly by what you're influencing the other players to do on all those islands. And that's just doing that and still having each player feel they have a relatively strong sense of agency in the game is a very, very hard design place to be in. I think they have nailed it. Yeah, absolutely. I think we haven't talked about that. I'd love to. I kind of alluded to it a little bit there are the guide cards. Those guide cards are so incredibly important to every round of this game. And this is where the DNA comes from that they share with Terra Mystica because you know, that's the same as those sort of round tiles that you pick at the end of the round. And that's what you're going to have for the next round. I love the balance of these cards because they all have a special ability. They all have a cost for building settlements and they all have how far they can go in the boat, right? So all of those things are different and they're balanced in equal measure across the board there. So you have to decide if you get first pick, what's my next turn going to look like? And how do I pick a card that's going to compliment that well? Or if you're late in the round and you have really bad choices, you just got to deal with what comes along. That's going to inform your strategy going into the next turn, sort of like forcing your hand to go in a certain direction. I love this dynamic. I love that you can and it's not just random either because you could choose to pass a little early if you want the choice and have the control of your next round or you can. Or late if you want to card someone else is using this round. Absolutely. Right. You can wait for them to pass. Yeah. You could try and push it out. Well, if you have the ability to wait for them, that's right. Sometimes you don't. But, you know, I think a fourth thing, maybe you, yeah, I'm out of misted if you mentioned but turn order is also on those cards. I didn't mention a frown about that. There are four things you're weighing with those cards. And there's this interesting. So imagine balance points and we see games where it's like, okay, you balance your cost versus your speed. Well, this is cost speed, ability and the turn order. Yeah. And that cost is so important because money is relatively tight in this game. And so when things cost a little bit more, it matters a lot. And you can sail a little bit further. It matters a lot because again, those boats can't take an action unless they can move all the way to the point where they take action. And so if you do some clever things, I mean, it's sort of yucking yams in the game, but you can block certain boats out from getting far enough to do an action and force opponents to do things in sub optimal steps. Like, they might have wanted to sail before they fish and now they have to fish before they sail because they've got to get that boat to some place where they can sail. And in order to do that, they got to pass a fish spot because they just don't have enough sailing capacity. But again, if it sounds like that's down in the net andoid details of the game, it is. And that's the beauty of this. It's simple to explain, but there are big repercussions to everything you're doing, everything everything every other player is doing, everything they're influencing to do and everything you are influencing them to do. Yeah. And I love also when you pass, you also get to take a bonus tile from the from underneath the round track. And some of those are incredibly powerful in comparison to others. And some of them are very situationally powerful to use specifically. So choosing when to pass can that's another juicy reason to pass early to get your pick of the litter of those tokens. Yeah, I really, I just think everything was tweaked just right in the game and it feels so good. And those in round bonuses you're getting that you use later the tokens that you can use at some point later in the game, they're different depending on the round. Yeah. And then it's something that modifies a later action, unless you say a little further, spend a little bit less to build, right? In the second round, you get something that gives you a turn, so you don't have to play a worker out, you can do an action. So that's wonderful. It's like, okay, I need to build next round, but I have to do other things and I'm afraid that the bill spaces will run out. I'll just take that build bonus and that way I can just turn that in and build when I want a build. No one can stop me. Or you could take that dirty leader. He's like blocks off spaces right in the way. Right in the beginning man. Oh, he just, yeah, that's the trade off thing. He gets to go first because he's the number one guy if he's in the game because you only use seven of the team. Yep. He gets to go first and he gets to block off a space that no one else can take. So he's like taking two spaces right off the bat. But the problem is everything is really expensive for him. He's not sailing very far and he's spent a lot to build things. So you got to trade all these things. All this thing works perfectly together. The guides that are the game very much changes the texture of the game. I don't know another word to use for it, but it sets the rules of engagement for the game. Oh, that's a great way to play. If you have the guide in there that gives you two neutral workers, a lot more workers are flowing into the game, which means a lot more settlement is going to be built, which means a lot more fish is going to happen. A lot more of everything is going to happen. It turns out that's very different than if that guy is not in the game. And you have a lot more freedom to pass it of passing. Like we talked about before. Yeah. So yeah, greatly balanced the choice of the choice, the random smattering of the guides in a game will change the texture as well. The in game race cards as well, the in game scoring cards, all that stuff just makes every game a bit different in a very cool way because you are discovering, you know, sort of what the relatively optimal path is through this maze of all that. The guides and the in game points and the, you know, the bonuses and it's just a path through the end and the fish, right? How the fish are sort of active or not active in different colors throughout the course of the game. All that's got to be factored in. Can one human do that? No. And that's what's so great about this game. But one of you will do it best. I love that you make a great point. They're done that every game you have to go into. You can't say like, oh, today I'm going to go into the game and this is going to be my strategy because that strategy. You got to see what the layout is, right? You got to see what all those guides are and what all those in game bonuses are and where they are and that kind of stuff. They're and the race cards and the victory point conditions. All of those things together are going to inform your strategy and you have to sort of go in there and do an initial, you know, briefing like, right? Like, oh, here's all the stuff and figure out where you're going to start. That's that really lends a lot to the replay ability of this game, which we haven't talked about yet. But I really feel like every game feels just a little bit different based on that combination of stuff and that's that's amazing. Yeah, and I'll talk about we've talked about this flow a little bit. I think it's worth sort of double tapping this particular thing. That flow of fishing, selling fish to settlements and then celebrations happening where those fish get traded in for victory points. Now, whoever takes a celebrate action gets some additional points, right? And that they get points for every place at celebrating. But the people that have the fish on their settlements get points for each fish. So there's a nice trade off there. There's this constant sort of transmutation that's happening between actions and resources. So you want to fish a lot and get a lot of fish where you need to worry about your worms, your fishing capacity, get a bunch of fish, sell a bunch of fish to get points. I mean, it's hard to get money usually. And then, so that gives other people fish, other people can then trade those fish in for points. And you, or you can sell to yourself, not get money and trade in for points for yourself. But again, all this sort of symbiotic loop that is just so tight and elegant and easy. It's not complicated. It's not burdensome, but it's super interesting. Yeah. I love that you called it a symbiotic. I was thinking of it like, there's a web of mechanisms here that work together, specifically like, you know, if you're going for building a lot of settlements so that you can get those multipliers at the end of the game to score a bunch of points, you need to build those little spirit temples throughout the island, right? Because that multiplied by your settlements is how many points you score for that. So if you really want to hit those points real hard, you got to be building those little spirit things. That increases the cost of building the settlements for other players too. So if you're all in on money, right? Like you're working on building those and every the broke players can't build on your awesome island. And then that has an effect on the celebrations too, because it's moving that little totem around, which gives you bonus points of things. So you want to time getting that totem in the right place so then you can celebrate and get those bonus points. It's a, I love how all of it just kind of intertwines and mix together in like a beautiful little tapestry. Yeah. And speaking of tapestries, what we haven't talked about yet is when you build settlements, you get additional things. That's additional boats or workers or income every round. And the, the sequence in which you build these settlements, not only as you said, Jamie, appreciate your multipliers at the end of the game for each of these nine islands. Right. You know, it's the number of spirit tiles times the number of your settlements. So that's just raw points you're getting. But also you get these additional benefits from building on one of those four tracks on your board. And again, there's a relatively optimal sequence depending on how the game is set up. So part of it is dividing that sequence, figuring out a way where you can build those settlements in a, in a quick fashion to give you the income you need or celebrations that you would normally be able to take or to give you fishing capacity or whatever. The beauty is you can't get all these things. So you have to figure out which things to prioritize and that will change as I said from game to game. You know what? I just realized that this is a civilization game. You're building your tech trees. You're building settlements. You're building up your tech trees and you're moving around to feeding your people, your citizens and stuff. This is a civilization game. Just as much as it is anything else. You said you work a place with tile, a place to recognize like all these things in a nice small package. And I got to say player interaction is incredibly great in this game because it's just, it's very indirect because really it is your building things and the places that you build things are always informed by what you don't want other players to get at. And where you're placing your boats and where you build those settlements and just tweaking it. If I'm here, it causes headaches for all the other players and that's how you're building. So there's a, you know, you mentioned it earlier, maybe it's a little mean sometimes. Well, that's a lot of this game. It's really about blocking people off, even though you're not allowed to block people off, but you can sort of kind of block people off knowing how far they intensive purposes. You know how far they can sail. You're going to build something so they just can't get where they want to go in this time. I can't stop you from running, but I'm going to tie your shoelaces together. Yeah. It's kind of out, guys. Now, now we're, it's a little bit of a, of a too far of an elaboration. I see an exaggeration at that point because you can't really stop them. I mean, you can, but it's very hard and not worth that effort. What you want to do is just be more optimal in how you're doing things. And when you give them a chance to sort of hinder them a little bit, you hinder them a little bit, right? You sail to the right island or you build something the right place or you put a spirit island token where suddenly they can't extend their settlement, setting out any further from that island, at least not in that space. All these things are like, but, but like you said, it's not mean spirited. Believe it or not, it reminds me a little bit of Tigris and Euphrates in that regard. Oh, yeah. When you're playing Tigris and Frades, you do something that blocks somebody who does something. And it's not like they go, well, you son of a, it's not like that. It's like, okay, that's a clever play. Oh, saying that is how it plays out and things are swamped. You do something. Everybody's like, oh, man. You know, that was the right move to do. Yeah. In fact, I moved some, I took it last game. I played, I moved some ships out. My buddy Lee was like, you son of a bitch. I was like, I just did that. He's like, did you know you're blocking me? And I said, I knew I was slowing you down. I don't know if I was blocking you. Of course, he went and did something else. Now, it was, it was the optimal thing he wanted to do, but he got to do a thing, right? Yeah. He moved forward. But at the end of the game, you know, you just want to have moved forward more than other people. And really, this is not like a, like a shot out of a cannon type game either, because at the beginning of the game, you could do anything you want. The world is your oyster. There's so much freedom. It's a giant empty lake. Yeah. It gets real cut through. And you're like, right, taking things for people, everybody wants this and that and whoever gets to it first and snatch it. So it gets really tense by the end of the game. And that's terrific. It's a slow burn to get to that point. And you know, that remind that part reminds me of La Jolla a little bit. One of my favorite aspects of La Jolla is when it starts out, it's like, you just get stuff. You want to go out and do stuff and things are open and you can, you can buy a thing or two here or whatever. But as the game blossoms more and more and more actions become available to you. Now you don't get additional actions in Faye Swamp, but the repercussions of your actions sort of get larger and larger as you go throughout the game. And so, you know, once you figured out how these mechanisms work, then you're starting to really use them at the end of your first game. I think you got to go through two or three games to really get in the flow of what this game is trying to try to do. So it takes a while, but not because of complexity, because of the depth of the game play itself. Right. Yeah. And part of that is that player interaction and figuring out exactly how to benefit yourself the best and hinder people a little bit. But again, it's nothing that was being spirited. So a lot of positive player interactions game and replayability, it's just terrific. Terrific terrific terrific. I mean, discovery is great because there's a whole bunch of, you know, guides that you can mix and match in there. Even though there's not a million of them, the combination of them created a different dynamic, the combination of race, endgame victory point cards changes the dynamic of the game. And, you know, just as a matter of fact, I don't know, Don, did you play with the advanced player boards? I have not seen a need to play with the advanced player boards yet. Wow. Really? It's like, I like this base game as it is, right? Because you can build some asymmetry into it pretty quickly. We definitely looked at the other sides of the player boards and sort of thought about how it would affect the game. I'm interested to try it because, you know, one player board in particular, it just moves one spot, one thing on the track. And I'm like, how can it make that much of a difference? But given how well everything else is designed here, I would imagine it does. Part of the reason I didn't want to play with those advanced boards because I felt like it sort of started to not pigeonhole you, but really push you down a path. Like you look at it's, ooh, I've got to go fishing because that's what this particular faction does. Or, you know, I've got to build because that's what this faction does. And I like the freedom of being able to do any of that stuff, according to what the game sets out for you. I have not played without the advanced boards actually. And I love them. Wow, I do love them. I mean, they're, they're all very diverse. That do very interesting things. My favorite is the one that I first played on, which was the rewards you get for the different tech trees, you choose them as you go. Oh, yeah. Right? So you just put them on whenever you're ready. And that was amazing because I was like shooting up one and like getting everything that I need just right. And I was, I played very differently with that faction that I played with anybody else. And that one gives you a lot of freedom. But no, I really like that and exploring all four of those different, you know, little tribe boards was really exciting. So, yeah, I mean, replayability is crazy. I mean, and not to mention, of course, improvement, improvement is where it's at. Like 100%. That's the replayability of this game over and above everything else. Yeah, I think improvement sort of washes the others out in a big way. Now you can't go without fun factor, right? It comes along with the high fun factor. Discovery for me wasn't the highest, right? Again, you will see different things as you play this game over and over because the combination of the guides and the race cards and the in game score cards. But the gameplay loop itself is the same. And so that that relatively low discovery from my point of view at least is not a negative, but rather it's because it doesn't have to rely on all the bells and whistles and discovery because the improvement and the fun factor is just so high here. So, discovery is relatively low. But again, that's not where the replayability is. I still think it has amazingly high replayability for that improvement and fun factor. All right, John. What do you say we hit up our final thoughts on Faye Swamp? Yeah, so Faye Swamp has been the absolute surprise of 2026 for me so far. When I saw this, I was like, okay, it's clearly not a, and I remember when we covered in the news, it's clearly not a tear misca clone because, you know, Austro tag at least one of the two is known for, you know, tear misca and guy a project and age of innovation, like these tear misca derivatives. And so it's like, okay, it's not that. So immediately, I'm like, I don't, therefore I don't know what value to assign it, having not played it. Now having played it, it's like, wow, this is a game that has the depth of those games, but without, you know, a lot of the, the chrome associated with them. And I love those games. Don't get me wrong. But I think Faye Swamp deserves its spot up in the discussion of those games, even though from some points of view, it just doesn't compete, right? Theme wise for me at least, it doesn't compete. But man, from a gameplay point of view, it's just as fun and enjoyable as those games. I wasn't expecting much. It absolutely blew me away. I think if you're a friend of worker placement and sort of spatial, spatial reasoning, and especially if you like those powers, like in tear misca that are sort of flowing around the board as you're passing, I see that in Rezark, Canada, my favorite game. Though, you know, if you like those combinations of things, I can't imagine you not liking this game because it takes all those things. And I think you said it earlier, it weaves this way up of things that just tied so well together. And I absolutely love that trade off and that symbiosis in an economy that's playing out for all the players. You're engaged 100% of the time. And when it's done, everybody's brains were burned, were burned. But it doesn't feel like they were burned. It's like it's a burn that you liked. Right. So that's why Faye Swamp for me has a really, really high recommendation. You need to play it. And I think once you play it, if you're a fan of all those things, you're probably going to buy it. And rightly so, it's a great game. For me, as I mentioned earlier, this was one that I've been looking forward to ever since a spiel last year. It was my number one. And I got to tell you, when I finally got this game and I played the game, and this is rare exceeded my expectations in every single way. I thought it just looked pleasant and fun. Like, oh, that'll be a nice pickup and deliver game. Cool tiles. Got some fun artwork with some crazy, you know, alligators and crazy, salamanders and frogs and stuff. I like that. Man, when I sat down, I learned this game. I'm like, this is going to be, I think, pretty good. And in the middle of playing it, I was like, this is just so much better than I ever expected it was going to be. The people that I played it with initially, some of them didn't even want to play it. They were just kind of like thrown into the game because there wasn't anything else to play. And by the end of the game, they were like, yo, this is good. This is a good game. Everything about it for me. I really like the theme. I think it's very well implemented. It's very thematic. The way it uses this theme, artwork is beautiful. The component's very understated. The price is right. And it's very easy to learn. It's very easy to teach and it exceeds its simplicity in depth like you wouldn't believe. This is just a really, really solid, excellent game that boy oh boy, I can't wait to play this one again. I really can't. Like, this is all in the docket for me. I'm taking this into origins. That's right. You know I'm taking my coffee. Yeah. So Faye Swap is a hugely high recommendation for me. I recommend this one all the way. If you like old school style games and I'm really into like older school games out, like Twa and Stone Age are betraying these games that I missed in the past. This one feels like it fits right in there with those games because it was technically designed 20 years ago. So it fits right in there with those older school games with a sort of a modern redevelopment on it. Check it out. it, Faye's swamp. [music] Alrighty, Kovals, let's take a quick second here to talk about our absolutely fantastic sponsor, Restoration Games. The gang over Restoration Games has something wild and crazy in the works that's gonna blow your mind. The gang is teaming up with Space Cowboys and Middle-earth Enterprises to bring back a classic grail game from 26 years ago called The Queens Gambit. But this time, it's not set in a galaxy far, far away, but rather in JRR tokens Middle-earth with Lord of the Rings. Just like The Queens Gambit, Lord of the Rings, The Kings Gambit spans across three major battlefields. The riders are Rohan are smashing back the dark hordes at Pelinor Fields and sound the horn of Godore because you're gonna be combating the Shadow Forces at Ministeroth. And all the while, Ergorn, Gimli and Legolas bob and weave through the streets as they make their way to the great port of Pelligrier. And of course, Sam and Frodo, they're climbing up that mountain so they can pinch that ring into the lava. Listen to me, Kovals, all of this stuff goes on in one single game and I played an early version of this game and it was amazing. Rob Davio and the incredible team over at Restoration Games is going to hit an absolute grand slam with this game Lord of the Rings, The Kings Gambit. So I mentioned earlier that they're partnering up with Space Cowboys. Well, Space Cowboys is going to be handling the retail release for Kings Gambit. But the legends at Restoration Games are cooking up one of the wildest deluxe productions you could ever imagine. You gotta check out the behind the scenes sneak peak video that they posted and it shows all of their plans. They got 3D battlefields and buildings and castles and an amazing three layered ministerial and of course, they got Mountain Doom. Oh my goodness, this thing is incredible looking. You gotta check this thing out and if you want to sign up to be notified when this incredible game goes to Kickstarter, you gotta go over to RestorationGames.com right now. Do it! And now, the news with your host and secret couple founder Tony Topper. Greetings Kabalists, this is Tony T with the news. We have Digital Game Studio Handel Abra games expanding to the world of tabletop. Yeah, they picked up some tabletop games, IPs, centenials of the multiverse and the brand greater than games. Yeah, this is a really interesting story because Handel Abra games is a digital video game publisher that makes developer, that makes digital implementations of board games and they did all the digital implementations of sentals of multiverse and some other greater than games titles and they turned around and bought them all and the whole company, the whole brand of greater than games from the company. I find that an interesting sort of turn of events. It says here in the article that they bought it to protect that business. Yeah, but it also says we're not interested in becoming a tabletop publisher, but lucky for us, we know a lot of good people who are good at exactly that. So, yes, I believe that greater than games was purchased by flat river group at a certain point. You know, greater than games was a publisher that made sentals of the multiverse and had sentinel comics and then flat river group, which is a group, but you know, like it's sort of like a company that owns a lot of different, you know, board game IPs and stuff like that. They purchased greater than games and I imagine that this Handel Abra bought greater than games to sort of preserve the brand. Like Steve says to keep it going even though it was sort of owned by somebody else and was going to be phased out eventually. It's kind of cool. Who did you say bought them? And flat river group. That sounds like a country band. Flat river group is an e-commerce. I'm sorry, like a it's a full service e-commerce distribution partner and they own a bunch of stuff and they own a bunch of board game publishers too. And greater than games was one of them that they picked up. So it's kind of like one of those companies that eats other companies should connect for. Yeah, right. Exactly. I never played any of the digital implementations of sentals of the multiverse as anybody tried them out. I have. It's great because sentals of the multiverse is notoriously fiddly because it has 10,000 like modifiers, right? Like, oh, like I played this card and that card and that card and that modifies like 10 different things. You have to put these tokens all over the place and it was just kind of despite the fact that sentals was a great game. It's very fiddly and the video game just made all that easy, right? Does it for you? Yeah. Well, hopefully we'll see some cool sentinels of the multiverse stuff. Yeah. Post acquisition here. Well Tony, before you get on to this next story, I have something new for us here. Here we go. Oh, Tony Topper, your trusted source for Pokemon Snatch job, stick up and smash and grab new stories right here on the secret couple gaming podcast. Justice has been served. Is that right? Yeah, to the Chicago Pokemon bandit. Nice. He's been arrested. I think it was last episode we talked about how I talked about this. There was someone in Chicago that was like luring people out to sell their Pokemon cards. Oh, yeah. His bait baiting it out into parking lots and then robbing them to get their Pokemon cards. It sounds like the same parking lot over and over. Not really a criminal mastermind. The suspect Anthony Garcia, well, he's 23. He's a developing mastermind. He robbed them at gunpoint. So this is armed robbery. So if you know anything about the justice system, that is a much worse charge. And if convicted will be much worse for this, it's alleged. Well, apparently Anthony Garcia is a common criminal name because I grew up in the city because I Google him and the first thing that comes up is a murderer, a serial killer. Shit. Well, he robbed five people. He robbed a 20 year old, another 20 year old, a 19 year old, a 21 year old, and a 29 year old man. Bad for the cycle. I'm sure some detective got promoted for coming up with a master plan to catch him. That he's probably like, why don't we just have somebody walk with a bunch of cards in your hand in this one parking lot and just see what happens. It's like a to catch a predator type thing where he just went on the website and be like, I got, I got a black. Look at here, whatever the fuck about equivalent of a black Lotus is. And I'm just going to be randomly be parking walking on this one block. This time he comes up. He's got his finger in his pocket. He says like, give me all your side docks. Right. Well, that's good. I'm good for the Chicago police for catching the Pokemon bandit. Yeah. That's great. Well, you know, you know what? I was a little confused by this next one because the two, the next story is very similar to the Chicago's. I'm like, wait, this one says Vancouver though, but it basically sounds like the same, the same. Oh man. This, this, you know, the, the up here would, would like go on Facebook and be like, I'll buy your Pokemon cards. And the weapon he didn't use a gun, he used bear spray. Yeah. Because he's Canadian and there's far, they're far more polite than we are. I don't know how polite bear spray is. It sounds, I think I would rather have a gun pointed at me. I think to me to actually shot with big spray. So this, this, give you all your Pokemon cards. I'm going to have to speak to you harshly. So this asshole was spraying bear spray into people's faces and stealing their Pokemon cards and running off with them. Yeah. And Cooper police carried out a major sting operation to catch the serial Pokemon robber. Yeah. The major sting operation was, we'll list some cards on Facebook or whatever, whatever the site that I read. Let's write them on. And then we'll wait for this guy to invite us to or you can just wait around to see some cards getting sold that smell like bear spray. Because how do you keep that set? I mean, you're spraying that crap everywhere. It's getting on the, I guess they're in the protective cases or whatever. Yeah. Come on, man. There's getting one of those dreams, everything you should know that. This is true. That's why I do it. So they don't get bear spray on them. It's a, yeah, bear spray is just very concentrated cap season. So it's like a hot pepper oil spraying in a face. That would be terrible. Imagine getting hit with bear spray. Yeah. That's you. It's powerful. Yeah. Did they actually catch this guy? Because it just says they did a sting operation. Yeah. They called him. Well, they don't name him. The other article had a name. I don't know. This isn't Canada. So they may have different rules up there. Yeah. It does say he rested a man accused of targeting Pokemon card sales. I think the stew's name was Anthony Garcia. It was, it was funny though. Like there's a video. or on of this, you know, Canadian cop that's talking about how I didn't I don't know anything about Pokemon card. But I fought off a few bears in my day. That's right. Now every police officer across the country is going to have to learn about Pokemon because this bullshit. Well, let me tell you, let me tell you about the next story. That's right. Not one story. It gets worse stories. So apparently an argument about Pokemon cards erupted in a Kruger parking lot. Of course. That ended with shots fired. Oh, man. This is a shoot at each other in grocery store parking lot over Pokemon cards. Man, it's a Kroger. That's not really surprising. This is an Indianapolis, the gaming capital of the world. Oh, most home man. So they were there were what are they doing with Pokemon cards? They were like a trading in the parking lot of a Kruger's. They didn't get into the details. I guess it's an ongoing investigation. The top comment is glock 19. I choose you. There's another comment here that says this guy is in the Poke man. I'm going to tell you, people are going absolutely apeshit over these stupid Pokemon cards. Man. Right in your neck of the woods, Jamie. I know. There was a sledgehammer smashing grab at a local game store. This is on the YDR.com, which was actually my first job out of college was working at the YDR.com. Yep. That's York daily record. We live in York, Pennsylvania and the York daily records are local paper. And this was brainwash cards, which is a card game store. And this is like two minutes from my house, like right up the road from me. You know what I love? You know what I loved about this story? The guy came back an hour later. For more. Like it's like it's raw and he came back from over again. Master criminals were dealing with you. You know what I also loved about it. They left the Yugiocards on the parking lot ground. They like. I don't know. The cops found like change in Yugiocards spread across the parking lot. It's just like the guys like running off with his with his bounty of a thievery and he's and they're just Yugiocards. He's just like, I don't like these are just extra baggage. Yeah, man. This reminds me of the stories we used to hear years ago where there was one story. Who knows? This is way forward to internet in the pioneer days when I grew up. But basically this dude steals like $620,000 from a bank, right? The cops they come in and they're interviewing people whatever. And the way they catch you, if somebody walks in later that day and tries to deposit $620,000 in a new bank account. Oh man. So at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned some dogs. One of them was Matthew O'Keefe and this is the name of the guy. Oh, there you go. He broke into the York store. Are they dover? Yeah. Oh my goodness. I love it when a joke comes together two hours later. That's right. That was well worth it too. I'm playing a long game, Don. That's right. Oh man. Listen, like this is serious now. These Pokemon stores need to up their game with protecting their stock because this is, it's incredibly crazy how there's just this this flap of everybody running around smashing through doors and walls and stealing Pokemon cards and throwing you guys cards on the ground. Well, here's the thing is they even had metal reinforcement on the window and the guy just like was like, well, I'm coming back with a sledgehammer. Yeah. Man. It's hell my goodness. Like the froth. The froth of these crazy, these CCG people that are just, yeah. I think we need to ban these. There's these to be a Pokemon ban. Oh, Chris. What's crazy to me is that they busted through the door at 2 30 in the morning and then they left at 2 38 and then they came back an hour later and this is all, they know this because of the surveillance footage. Nothing happened between that in that hour and suing hours. So the store was smashed into no one knew. There was no alarm that went off to alert the owners of the store and nothing. So these guys just like went wild. The alarm systems are pretty cheap now too. So like, they're not that they have all this, you know, home automation technology going on. You can, you can set up a sort of DIY home security system pretty easy with some sort of sensors and you live. You learn, I guess brainwash cards. I've never gone in that store. Chest piece for itself. That's exactly. $18,000 of merchandise in between one and $2,000 at cash. Why wouldn't you just take the cash drawer into like a secure location? I don't know. Why are we the only ones that know that this is a dangerous game to be in? Well, that's the problem is is these shops aren't listening to our news segment. Exactly. Yeah. They would be informed if they listened. Oh my goodness. Just, just, just a wild. It's like a crime spree. I'm telling you, this should be the next Netflix documentary like Pokemonia or. Exactly. It's crazy to me that we have one story every episode about a Pokemon smashing grab in this episode. We have four of them. Four stories about Pokemon crime. And I didn't even have to look that hard. Netflix is going to be like untold nerds gone wild. Yeah. Got a smash them all. There you go. He went to that. He talked about the untold chess mates earlier. Well, Hans Neiman and Magnus, Magnus Carlson are back in the news again. Yeah. Yeah. Hans Neiman is throwing shade all over the place. Oh, he got, he got invigorated by the, by the documentary getting released. All that money is his pocket right now. He's, he's complaining about Magnus Carlson. He says he's got a God complex. He says that he's got his sort of, you know, control of the chess world has, has cost in him. Yes. Too much influence in chess. Yeah. Yeah. This documentary is going to just spawn all kinds of nonsense from these two because it's, they're claim to fame now. They're just, it's going to be constantly back and forth just to keep on. Magnus Carlson's claim to fame is that he's an incredibly good chess player. His Neiman's claim to fame is that he was accused of putting, anal beads in his bottle. So this guy is, he's caching in on this. Like he has a name in the chess world now because of this controversy. So he's now saying loudly Magnus Carlson has a God complex. He loves it that he's like the skeletor to Magnus Carlson's human. That's great. I would Magnus. I don't know about a quick character eyes in that way. You got a God complex he man. My anal beads will be true. I think that you know how like, I remember like we're back in the, back in the day that the hip hop artists would like behind the scenes, they would be all like, tell me with each other. But then like in public, they would like make these beefs. And they would like sort of amplify the animosity. And you'll see this, you see this with like UFC fighters too. It's just like they, they want to sell tickets. They want to, they want to get the publicity. They want to sell albums. So they create these, they amplify these situations so that they can get attention. This whole thing is good for chess, right? Because it gets people interested in chess. Yeah. It's like, oh, look at this drama. It creates a drama, creates a story, a narrative that people can get into and follow up on. So in some ways it's like, are these guys like masterminds? Yeah, why not? Just whatever. We'll just, we'll just keep the beef going because it gets, it gets the media interested in chess. I mean, who gave a crap about chess before this? A lot of people I guess did, did during COVID. They were saying in that documentary. Yeah, they had the COVID bump. They had the queen bump and then they had the butt bump. Yeah, the queen's gambit. Yeah, the butt bump. Yeah. Well, they need to keep those bumps coming in. So they got, they got a Hans Demon rowed up. So he starts popping off, pull out the beads, base man. Tony, you got to get into this chess game. I like, this is a, this is a feud that you could do wonders being involved in. I did, I did think about creating a chess.com account after I heard this. I used to love playing chess when I was younger, but I remember the last time I played chess was against Tony and I beat him soundly. I remember this. This is a lot. It was at a coffee shop. I had tour India. And last time I played chess, the guy did some weird move in the middle of his eye. I moved this piece here and this piece here and I'm like, you can do that. To me. Yeah. Yeah, it was like if you're, if you have certain pieces in a certain position, you can like, we called Cassling. Yeah, he was wrestling. Yeah, I don't know any of this stuff. So I was just like, okay, well, this guy either just totally cheated. Because I don't know what I'm doing or I used to, I used to love battle chess. Well, I forget if it was a Tendo or super Nintendo. Yeah, thinking about that. You got to use terms, Chris is familiar with. It's like docking Chris. Yeah. God. There is another old game I like called Archon where it's chess, but you like fight when you, like you look. pieces fight in the Kings like a dragon or something and it's really hard to beat with a pawn. Anyway, I could probably beat both of those guys at that game. Hey, I like this, I like this one story where it's now it's Hans Neiman is, is bringing up this accusation of that Magnus Carlson cheated and he's like, he did it right on the, right on the video and it is very interesting because okay, so Magnus Carlson was streaming this, this online chess game that was in a tournament where there was prize money involved and he's, he has another like chess grandmaster there with him. They're just sort of like hanging out, you know, and playing, he's playing in this tournament and the other grandmaster points out a move to Magnus Carlson and then Magnus Carlson does that move. So it's kind of like, well, you're not supposed to do that, right? You're not supposed to get outside help. Yeah. One of these talking during speeds. That's right. It's kind of like, Hans Neiman just gets kicked out of it like, oh, look at this. Yeah. And there was a, there's another interesting story that was posted in our discord about Magnus Carlson. Apparently, there's a, there's this news story where this girl was playing in a chess tournament with Magnus Carlson. She was playing in a match with him. She pulls out her cell phone and asked Magnus Carlson, can I get a selfie with you? And Magnus Carlson says, sure. And he gives her, he's in the selfie with her and then he gets up and walks over and a, and turns her in for cheating for having her phone. Oh my god. Well, here's the thing. Everyone was saying that you know, Magnus Carlson was a jerk for that. Well, I don't think so. It's like that's the rule. You're absolutely right, Tony. It's the rule. But the jerk part is like, he's like, okay, sure. I'll have a selfie with you and then he goes turns her in. I don't know. It's like, he probably should be like, listen, you shouldn't have that. You know, you're not allowed to have that in the tournament. You know, like a normal guy would do that. Well, I don't think I don't think she got in, I think she just got a warning. Yeah. If you watch the video, it looks like the judge just came, took her phone, told her like, hey, you remember, you're not supposed to have these. Yeah. And then they shook hands and I think they started the match. So it wasn't like, it wasn't like she was like, got in big trouble for it. It was kind of like, I mean, it's just funny. It's just, it's so weird because the one thing I thought was crazy in the documentary was how when they're going into these chess matches, it's like going through the TSA. They're like, wounding them down and Chris, that was after the anal beads thing. They were doing that on purpose. They were purposefully sticking like that metal detector up Hans Neem's butt to see what they could find. Anyway, more Hans Neem and Magnus Carlson drama. And we love it. All right. Well, we let's check back in on some on the crowdfunding world. We got the cyberpunk TCG. Yeah. Crazy. Become the most funded game in crowdfunding history. The froth hit big time. Yes, it did. People are absolutely crazy about this. Now, the final take is difficult to note because with Kickstarter right now, even after the campaign closes, you can keep back in the project indefinitely until they turn it off. So currently it's at $27,800,000. Now I said that it was going to end at $28 million was my prediction. Now, this is a little higher than what it ended with, but I feel like I'm pretty close. I should count. I got the the price is right here. Well, no, well, you didn't. If it was the price and price is right, you would have been 20. We have a little over. I'm a little over. But you can't go over. This is right. This is the the the the shut up Tony. This is the. I'm going to be right. I was closer than you. I asked you and you said a lot. I said like 20 million. I think was my guess was the commit. No, that's a lot under almost $28 million. This thing is taken already. That's absolutely crazy. And then when they go to the the pledge manager, they're going to get millions more for sure. This is this is junky behavior right here. I don't I don't know what the collectability is going to end up being for these right. This this CCG market is sort of seeing it. There's they're trying to break into it. Right. You got all these people trying to break in. You got Lorca Nna one piece flesh and bone. It's all be it's all be and see tear right. Like none of these have hit the a tier. Versa it's Pokemon imagine the gathering. That's the a tier. Yeah. I don't it doesn't look like anyone's coming close to that. Sure. But be a B tier. Million be a B tier is still good. We yet because B tier gets you 20 million on your Kickstarter. There you go. That's pretty good. And it's cards. We're not making miniatures and you know, complicated components of stuff here and making cards. So the production costs can't be that high comparatively to other games. Yeah. Right. I mean, it looks neat. Yeah. It does. I love the theme. I think these playmats are a little ridiculous premium cloth play mat. What does that even mean premium cloth that just means it's going to slide all over the place. Yeah. I don't know what cloth means. I mean, I mean, cloth is cloth. I don't know how that would operate as a play mat. But I like Neoprene. Neoprene scene is always the best, right? I like that. Just that basic Neoprene mat there with the spaces for your decks and stuff. I like that. I don't need all this crazy colors and artwork and stuff flying all over the place. I just want this one to be able to pick up my cards. Anyway, Cyberpunk 28 million. Looks good. They did good. We got another Kickstarter. It's not doing nearly as well. No, yeah. Yeah. 26,000 is not 28 million. A Gore demons hollow. This is on the board game geek hotness, which is actually why I put it in the news because I wanted to talk about this. Sure. Okay. It's on the board game geek hotness. Yet it only has 147 backers. Wow. Yeah. I don't understand how that happened. That's not nearly popular enough in my mind to make the board game geek hotness. If you only have you don't even have 150 backers. Well, I mean, I'm looking at this box and I swear to God, it was like, okay, we need a creature to put on top of the box. Let's put an owl on there. All right. How can we make it even cooler? Let's put an eyeball in the middle of its head. All right. It needs more. That's such a bat wings on there on its head, too. Give us some horns. It's not like every creature in the world on this fucking owl. I tell you what I like. I like the the what's that called the the it's called the euro. It's like a I don't know a slug or some shit with teeth and like four eyes and and like a mustache. They need to put that on the top of that owl. Yeah. It looks like something out of men and black. Yeah, the monsters in this are crazy. And I kind of like that they're crazy. So we're going to be beaver. Yeah. Evil beaver. We got to evil vulture there. Evil plant. That vulture's name is Cliff. Right. Clif vulture. Cliff vulture. I don't know. Lay out like I could see why that it's not doing terribly well because it's very, very basic in my opinion. The artwork is basic. The miniatures look cool, but like the tiles are very basic. The graphic design is very basic. It like I like the the aesthetic of the miniatures, but it looks like a very, very simple style game. And I can't figure out why it's on the hotness either Tony because there aren't that many people talking about it. There's only two. The hotness doesn't work on based on how popular the game is. It works on how many people are hitting that the BGG page to see the images and stuff. Well, there's almost no images. There's no forum posts. There are no rates one rating. So I don't understand how it could be at the top of the hotness. Yeah. Steve, you need to get a hold of David Wabright of Man vs. Meeple and tell him how to make quotes for kick starters because his quote is just these miniatures are really, really well done. I was all that. Well, listen, like, think you got to get my quote. And if the game isn't good enough to like cut the mustard. You got to say they say something. Now, if I think a game is not very good, I'm not giving a quote, but hey, Dave's trying to try to do this thing. Hey, the more you scroll, the more a demon there is a ridiculous number of demons. It's got an evil goat. It's got 20 days to go. So maybe, maybe it'll get a bump. Look, I'm still bothered by this, this owl. I need to, I need to get off this page. I don't know. The owl is really bothering me. I have to save the image of this owl just for later use against Chris. I'm sure that's funny. It said extra eye in it, Chris. That's what's really bothering me. It's just, it's just, it's like five creatures all on the owl's head. Weird. Weird. It's too much. I just want to, I want Cliff Vulture. Like, I think that's a cool ass monster. Cliff Vulture. Anyway, that's I gore demons hollow, not doing very well, but looks interesting. That's my thoughts. That's my, that's my quote. If they want to put that on there, not doing very well. Oh, give a quote. Why is there so much shit on that owl's? What's going on in this next one, Tony? What's happening here? Well, this next one is not on the board game geek hotness, but has like, yeah, multiples more backers. This one's got almost 3300 backers. It is a Yote deluxe edition. Yeah. It looks cool. Yes, it does. It's really pretty cool. The wooden components are local Hokkaido wood. I don't know. Like this, these little chests. What's this? What are you putting in this chest? The biocomposite wheat straw, little potatoes, plastic potato tokens. This is a lot of potatoes. This is a machi building game of forest mountains and potatoes. Chris, what is machi? Machi? Mochi. Are you talking about mochi? I don't know. Read the page there. I'm looking for where you're talking about. What are you shit on the sand? M A C H I machi building game. I have no idea. Well, I will look it up then. Machi, most kind of is Japanese word for town or city. I thought it was a food. I thought it was a food because it says a machi building game of a forest mountains and potatoes. Okay. So I guess you're building little town. They'll use machi with food because it's like you would say like machi sushi for like the local sushi place. Oh, is that right? I think so. If I remember correctly, it's sort of like you you you can put it in front of other things like a prefix kind of thing like the town's local thing of a jig. I got you. Okay. It's a machi demon L. So the idea here is you're building a little town. You have a bunch of cards that have some really cute artwork on here. You place tokens on cards that are like different landscapes. Oh, it's forests, farms, you know, the volcano there. You collect cards. You gain cards to unlock higher. I don't like it. Okay. I don't know what that means. I don't like you. That tells you like a bunch of stuff that makes no sense. Anyway, it looks pretty cool. Lots of potatoes in this. I know one guy who really like this game. Yeah. You got cards with all the different kinds of terrains on them. You get cards with like different buildings on them. You're building a little town. You're growing potatoes. I imagine here because they got potato tokens that look just like potatoes. Only tiny. You're putting them in little wooden boxes. It looks cute. Steve. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't know. Potatoes. Sweet potatoes. Oh, he does. Love. Yeah. Well, it looks it looks cute. It looks like a fun little game. I like that. Yeah. I would love to play this. There's a quote for you. And that's game. That game is called YOTYOTEI. Check that out. YOTY. What else we got? It's a classic. Over on GameFan, we have Goa. Don, have you ever played Goa before? This is a classic from back in 2004. Yeah. It's a really good game. Now, I have to admit, it was a really good game for the time. I haven't played it in. I'm sure over a decade. Yeah. Probably 15 years. But yeah, there are some interesting things going on here in terms of the economy. And also the, there's a central board, which you are sort of moving a shared piece around and using up the tiles. And it's constraining the things that you can get from that center board as I recall. And that was really interesting. Yeah. I'm betting it, I'm betting the gameplay has held up to be honest. Rudegaard Dorn is the designer and he's done some really great things over the years. Tony, you should appreciate this. There is only one pledge level. One. There you go. 69 space bucks. That's it. 69 dudes. They only have no, no, scroll to the bottom, Chris. Scroll to the bottom. There's two pledge levels. Chris doesn't have to use GameFound. And apparently I don't because to be honest, nobody knows how to use GameFound. So that's totally okay. I take that back. You get a pass. Like, five million things down there. There's, there's two main pledge levels though. There's only, there's the Merchant Edition and the Governor Edition. Yeah. Anyway, it looks beautiful. I love the artwork that they've chosen to go with here. It takes like an old school year. And makes it feel, you know, a little friendlier and beautiful, very colorful. I like the understated design. It just has some really nice thick tiles here. I dig it. I dig this. Of course, there's only two pledge levels, but there's about 16,000 add-ons. Yeah. No, what, and then what add-ons do I need? You need them all, Tony. Coins and mats and expansions. And then you can get Carnegie and movers and shakers add-ons, different games and stuff. This is a wild stuff. Yeah. It's got one of those box inserts that you can't close it later, Steve. Steve, it looks like a good game. I would love to play Goa. Never have. Get on it, Don. I think I still got my old copy. I'm so tempted to have a new copy of this because I think that 85 bucks that Governor Deluxe or whatever. That's not bad for that game. Yeah. Oh, wait, let's be careful here. That's the same stuff. Spacebugs. Wait, hold it on a minute. Hold on a minute. Yeah. What does humans play? You want the Governor's Edition? It's like 115. That's what it is. Yeah, still. That's not bad. It's a classic Goa, Rudy Gerdorn. Check it out. If you haven't checked it out before, it looks good. We've got one more game found. Demon Castle, Mononoke. Yeah. This one looks great. A cooperative survival game. One to four players struggled to survive in a ruined castle as it is besieged by a powerful Mononoke and a yokai from Japanese mythology. You can play solo co-op. Look at the, look how beautiful the artwork is on this Chris. Oh my gosh. I know. And I watched in the little short little gameplay video thing where you're putting out all the rooms and stuff. Man, I, look at this though. When you battle the deadly Mononoke, it's in a demon book and it's a pop-up book. That's great. That is such cool. That's so cool. Oh, that's so cool. This is so cool. This is one of the coolest things I've seen in the while. Well, the art is really cool because it's actual traditional woodblock Japanese art. Like the main one is Utegawa Kunayoshi, which is like a famous Japanese artist. Yeah. It did all sorts of, I think it was mostly woodblock stuff, but it's got that sort of that style that we know as Japanese quintessentially. This is how you do it when you want to create a demon. You don't have to put like 10 animals on its head. You just draw a little snake lady with long hair. That's just the public domain artwork that's really old and not copyrighted anymore. My goodness. This is absolutely incredibly gorgeous. And to Chris, to your point from the last one, this one technically only has one pledge level because there's three, but the other two are a retailer level and a three pack. So you use only one level to pledge and it's get the game. And that's actually what the pledge level is get the game. And guess who's getting the game? Oh, man, I just pledged because this looks awesome. I can't wait to play it. I love how it has like descriptions of the creatures like the history of the creatures in here. It's Jamie. I am dying now. I want this. Yeah, I want it. And this one is not terribly popular either. It has 26 days to go. Now it's brand new. 26 days to go. Only has 404 backers on it, only $25,000. So hopefully this one gets juice up. It's only 64% pledge. So I'm imagining this is going to, you know, finish successfully. But yeah, go check this one out. What's this called? Demon Castle Mononoke? I love though. It looks at this thing. Yeah, I love me some Japanese woodblock art. It's a co op game. Have we mentioned that? Yep. Oh, there is a, it says there's an all versus one mode. Oh, that would be fun. Yeah. That's neat. A single in this game mode, a single player becomes the Mononoke. Oh, no, that's turning the game into a battle of wits. Well, it depends on your plan against. Tony, you don't have to play that one. Wait, you think he'd lose. He gets mashed. Well, no, the, the player to his right wouldn't do what that player is supposed to do. So then that's right. Got you. Brutal. You're sure an outreach. Brutal. Go back to your savage hole. All right. Well, there's plenty of froth for Demon Castle Mononoke. Carry this on to some founders, froth. The founders froth. Where the founders give you the lowdown on something that's got them riled up. Woohoo. This is driving me nuts. I cannot wait to play this game. We haven't, I haven't seen Chris Froth and for a while, Chris. No, tell us about coming of age. That's your froth here. And you got Jamie on in on the froth here too. Yeah. So coming of age reminds me of pursuit of happiness, kind of in the, in the style of gameplay, where you start as a kid and then you continue developing over time as you get older and older. I don't know. But some of us don't. Yeah. That's true. I'm not sure if in, in pursuit of happiness, you eventually die in the end. I don't know if coming of age does that, but it's cool that you're going to develop like your set of skills and stuff as the game goes on. I don't know. I just like the journey that this, these, both of these games, like provide you as you're playing. It's kind of like developing a character. Like you're, it's got a storytelling aspect in that, in that regard. Yeah. This game, it's as Chris was saying, you don't, you don't go all the way through your life in this game because this is coming of age. This is a game where you start off as a very young person. You, you grow up to an adulthood and that's it. So it's you becoming an adult and it's different from, you know, Chris, you were talking about pursuit of happiness. Yeah, similar thematically, but this is a heavy euro that has that same kind of theme. Your play board is your head, your character's head and all of the tracks and things that are on in your head are the psychology of your character. And like your friends hide out. Yeah, your friendships and your demeanor and all different kinds of stuff that you're managing inside of your head. And on the main board, you have all different locations and activities that your character can do, right? And sort of the round tracker is this school bus that's going down the track, which is kind of fun. And so you're making friends, you're managing your psychology, you're managing your activities and stuff like that. I'm, I can't wait to play this game. We're playing it this week. Chris and me. So I'm dying to see how it plays. Look at this turning. One of the accident spaces is touching grass and got laying down in the grass. There you go. Right? No, people need to do more of that. That's right. Yeah, Jamie, I am so looking forward to this. No. Ever since I first heard about this game, I've been fallen for it. I just love these style games. I just love them. They're, they're pleasant. It's going to be a great game. I think I hope I'm crossing my fingers. Danny Garcia is the designer. Danny Garcia has done a lot of great things. Both Chris and I liked Winno Valley. Barcelona was a really cool game that he recently put out. I know that he also did Voynich puzzle, which Don wasn't as fired up about, but, but the design was at least good. Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited about it. And Jamie, you can make your character, Hans Neiman, and I can be Magnus Carlson and you can, you can get out in this game. That'll be our story that we're playing. That's right. That's right. Yep. So coming of age, can't wait. Don. Tony. That's what I was going to do. You can get an expansion to a game that you love. Chris likes the Beast too. That's right. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. I'm excited about it. Tell us about these Beast expansions. You're for all of them for. Yeah. These are, man, they're supposed to be at the hub. So I'm dying for it to get sent out right now. It's a draft card. It's 13 new items. 13 new Beast Attempts. Four new contracts. Sounds like great stuff. Beast The Great Hunt has another Beast, the feathered king, and a new hunter. The captain of the Great Hunt. So it's more variety in the Beast game. Also, I was looking to have Minis coming for this with this. I'm excited about that too because one of the things I like the acrylic tokens, I really like them a lot. But I just want to see if the Minis add another level of immersion to the game. And plus, I mean, that's where Minis makes sense for these kind of games to me. This is how you make an owl. This bird creature is freaking great looking. Yeah, these are some Minis Don. Maybe you should get our good buddy Ben to paint them up to paint up. Yeah. Yeah. Now Don, the original Beast that you have, that seems to have a lot of content in it. It does. You don't think that this is just going to, it's just more of the same. Or have you played the original so much that you really just do need like some extra. I think I've played every Beast in the original. I'm sure I've played every Beast some multiple times. And also I've seen every Hunter played. I haven't played all the Hunters because usually I'm the Beast because I'm teaching it. But yeah, each of the Beast is very different. So I'm kind of interested to see with this expansion if they've added to that variety. It reminds me a little bit of like Final Girl. You think about Final Girl, you think about all the different Final Girl modules and the killers and stuff and you're like, they are different enough. The creativity continues to flow for those games and I'm hoping the same is true of Beast. I love the original so much. I think it's worth just, they got me until they don't have me anymore, right? This Spider creature mini is amazing. It is astounding. God, these are good Minis. I want to say something about this game and the thematics of it. There are very few games that draw me in thematically as much as this game does. I think this might be, if I were to make a list of most thematic games of all time, this would easily be in the top 10, probably right at the top because something about the way the artwork, something about the way the gameplay and mechanisms, something about just the whole concept of the premise of the game with the Beast versus the people. All of it comes together so harmoniously. It feels great. When I'm in the game, it's very, very rare that I actually feel like, okay, I'm in the forest and I'm hunting this monster and I'm kind of afraid that he might be right there, but I also kind of want him to be there because I want to fight him. This is a terrific game. This is an absolutely incredible game. Yeah, I agree. Early in the episode, we talked about Sniper Elite. This is the only one that sort of stays at that level. I think Sniper Elite's great because of the elegance with which that design happened, right? It's just smooth and quick and you get the full scratch for that itch, for that hidden movement itch in a relatively short period of time. Beast is more about that immersion, right? That feeling of who's hunting who and it's like, it's just this, and the fact that you have these different contracts that change the game up. I love the one where it's like, you know, the settlers are on the boat and they're trying to get to the towns and you're trying to pick them off. Yeah, right. There's just different scenarios and with the new maps and new mechanisms, it's like that I can only imagine that immersion will get deeper. And so I agree with you, Jamie. I think this is an excellent game, a fantastic game. We're looking forward to it. For all of it. Beast shattered aisles and beast, the great hunt. Well, here's an expansion that I'm definitely going to pick up. In Spain. Yeah. Sharks and reefs. Now you know that a game has captured me in a special way when the minute an expansion is acknowledged, I'm like, oh, yeah, I definitely want that. And that's exactly how I felt with FinSpan. I've historically been a little bit hard on Wingspan and like that series, just, you know, I'm okay with it, but I was never really excited about Wingspan, but something about FinSpan really captured me. I really like the theme, I think much better of all the spans. Yeah. I think the fish one is the one that just makes me feel calm and happy, except now there's going to be sharks in the water and I want some games. I want to be eaten. I want to be eating your stuff, Chris. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, what do you think? What is it about FinSpan that levels it up for you, Jamie? I'm not sure. That's a great question, Tony. There's an X factor that FinSpan has that I just feel good about. First off, I like, I think the fish better than the dragons and the birds. I don't know, something about the fish I like. It's the simplest of the three, but I don't think that it's that it suffers from being more simplistic than Wingspan and Wormspan. Wormspan was the most complex and as much as I really liked Wormspan, we reviewed it and I was positive about it. I feel like comparatively, I don't think that the lack of complexity in FinSpan makes it any less good than Wormspan having that extra complexity. I feel like the fact that I can remember how to play this one without even looking at the rulebook and being able to teach it quickly makes it more approachable even for a person like me who is cool with the extra complexity. I don't know. I think there's like an X factor there for it. I don't know. Wingspan, Sharks and Reefs, it'll be on pre-order by the time this episode releases. Check that out. I will definitely be reporting back when I get a chance to play it. We're getting a new version of horrified. This one's going to have a Dungeons & Dragons theme in the setting of Ravenloft. That's right. This is my, I think this is my second favorite D&D campaign setting. What's your first favorite? Ravenloft. Oh, yeah, me too. But the great thing is in Dragon Lance, I can just get to Ravenloft if I want to just walk through some of this. That's true. Yeah, actually, my favorite is Dragon Lance and my second favorite is Ravenloft. You're right. This is the second horrified that is in the Dungeons & Dragons theme. The original had a displacer beast, a beholder, a dragon, and mimics, which is such a weird monster to pick for that. But they did. This one is horrified. Ravenloft, which is the Gothic horror setting for D&D, and it looks like it's got a Baba Yaga. That's, yeah, I thought that was so cool. Yeah. Baba Yaga is like the weirdest frickin monster there is. Yeah. The house with chicken legs. Yeah. Baba Yaga is a, yeah, it's like a house with chicken legs. It's like a witch type thing. That was ZaraVitch, which is a classic Ravenloft monster. Yeah. This is beautiful. I can't wait for this. I might actually pick this one up. This might be the one version of horrified that I actually get, because I think it's just that cool. And these are the ones that are in the game. I mean, the hard fight games are standalone, right? I mean, you can just, yep, buy it and play it a lot. Like, you don't need anything else. That's actually one criticism I have of it that you can't take the monsters from one and play them in another game, even though it'd be weird to bring like big foot into the Ravenloft setting, but hey, why not? But you can't do that. Looks like it's going to be available for purchase July 19th. Not that far away. Jamie's got five versions of horrified. We're all going to get our fifth edition here of Fury of Dracula. I have two copies of this on my shelf. Am I going to get a third copy too? Listen, Fury of Dracula, we talked about sniper elite earlier. We talked about beast earlier. We talked about spectro ops earlier. The oldest of all of those types of games that we're really into is Fury of Dracula. And I got to say to this day, Fury of Dracula is still my favorite theme of them all. And it still has the excitement. I really, really love Fury of Dracula. And the newer editions have really refined it to a much better game too. Yeah, I agree. Absolutely love the artwork on this fifth edition box. It is cool. It reminds me of like a 1940s movie poster almost. Yeah. Well, the first comment here is, I hate the cover of this box. Really? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. On board game geek, then there's the post about this news of the new edition. The first comment is, hate the cover. I will say this that I like the cover just fine, but I like the last cover better because the Dracula is like Beloligosi. And I'm a Beloligosi guy. Yeah, that's a cool game. I'm glad they keep coming out with new versions just so that people can get it in their hands. Sure. I think this is. It's not clear how much they're changing from the prior edition. I guess we'll get more details as we get. Yeah, but it definitely looks about the same. It's taught me to tell if the map is simplified. It doesn't look simplified though. So maybe it's just like updated artwork and I'm going to be played from fourth edition. I'm going to bet $100 that there is not, there's nothing changed because this has moved over to Avalon Hill now. And it was fantasy. It was games workshop. It was sort of the original version then fantasy flight had it and then ran it then whiz kids had it. And now it's over with Avalon Hill and Avalon Hill, you know, they're not like, you know, they're not busting their balls to redesign a bunch of these games, right? They're just putting shit out. I like pure Dracula too. I think it's up there with those other games. The downside of pure Dracula is it can be much longer than those other games. It's true. Yeah, it can drag out. And that's the only thing keeping up from that very, very top tier is the length of game. That was one of the things that they improved upon with the last edition. Yeah. Is that they cut the game length down quite a bit by making, you know, just tweaking the rules. And it's still a longer game. I ain't got a lie. But, you know, that original version, man, I remember when we, I had a game day here and some people were sitting here for a fair of that. There was like six hours of people playing period Dracula and some of them were not happy. That's a very weird experience. Most people don't have that experience. But, hopefully they get rid of that newspaper article card. That sucks. That's all you teleport across the board wherever you want to do something crazy. Yeah. Well, yeah, that are like, uh, there's one that just shows you where Dracula is. Yeah. Yeah. That comes out at the start of the game. It's like, all right. Well, it don't matter if they take it out or not, Chris, I'm taking it out. It will be taken out. That's funny. Like that card is in my older copy. That card is in a baggy separate from the other cards because it's taken out. It ruins the game. Very a Dracula. I'm happy that it's in print. Speaking of print, this is big news, T. Yeah. I kind of got a little bit messed up when I saw this messed up. Oh, wow. Well, it's, it's a 10th anniversary edition. Yeah. So it just made me feel old. This game was from the decade ago. I know. Crazy. I am aging. I've had that same thing happen when I'm talking to people about the podcast. I'm like, it seems like for 10 years, or for five years now, I've been saying, oh, yeah, we've been doing for 11 years. And then I do the math. And I'm like, oh, my God, 15 years. Yeah. So we're getting a 10th anniversary edition of Max versus minions. Yeah. It's returning to print. Yeah. Max versus minions based on League of Legends, which is interesting because honestly, like, I barely know, see anything League of Legends in this. It's not a League of Legends game. It's just in the world of League of Legends. Um, and I'm saying that like Tony, like League of Legends. No, but less of Legends. I will say, Max versus minions is an incredibly well designed game. And then the, the, the, the, the programming of actions is awesome. The cooperative nature of it is awesome. I have played this game recently in the past year or so. And it holds up 10 years later. It is just really, really fun. This might be my favorite co-op game. Not like I got a big fan of co-game. So that's not like saying a whole lot. I, of the co-op games, if you're like, Tony, you have to play a co-op game. I would be like, okay, let's play a Mac versus minions. That sounds fun. It's funny because when we originally like reviewed this game back in the day, people are like, oh, you're just, you're just saying nice things about it because of the, it Riot Games is a big company. And like, what is Riot Games going to do for me? And like that, they're not doing anything for me. Like, I'll give it a shit. Uh, now it's just a really, really good game. And it was, uh, it was notoriously difficult to get for many, many years. So I'm happy that people will rediscover this one. I'm curious to see what the price point on this is going to be because I, I, I, I, I recall Max versus minions was one of the, the best quality to value. Yeah. At the time, it sure was Chris. I think it was like 70 bucks for a game that would have been easily $200 on a Kickstarter. Yeah, it was, it was really cheap. So I, I imagine it would be more expensive now. 10 years later, like shit, the, the value of a dollar is way different. Now, I'm happy to see this, particularly Chris Cantrell, Chris Cantrell, Tony and I got to know Chris, one of the designers of this game. And he is just a really, really good dude and he's got a, he's a really smart designer. And I wish that we would see more board games from him. Absolutely. Do we have a price on this? Where have you been looking? Why heard you say something about the price and I was like, we never found one, huh? No, I don't think they say anything about it. I think actually looking at this, a lot of the comments are trying to figure out like what the price point will be. So there'll be twice as much as it originally cost. Yeah, that'd be, yeah. That's it for the news. Please give us a big thumbs up. I have a man of many accents. You can pronounce it like my dad does the secret cable. You can also post on our discord if you got some news stories. We like it over there. We like seeing our cabalists gather. We got some juicy news content up on our website. So go over there and check it out and click on the link for this episode. Stick around because we got stuff coming up that you'll like. Alrighty, cabalists, let's take a quick second here to talk about our absolutely fantastic sponsor, Game Toppers. Now, I've talked about Game Toppers for many years now and many of you know that I have three, count them three Game Toppers in my basement and I use them all the time and I am so happy to have them. I'm not lying when I say that these three Game Toppers look every bit as beautiful as they did. The day they come out of the package and I put them out in my game room. They are gorgeous heirloom quality furniture. And if you're looking to get into the world of Game Toppers, if you're looking for a game table solution, that is the highest quality that you're going to find out there right now at the time. The Game Toppers 5.0 Kickstarter has been over for a while but you can still late pledge right now getting some of the best deals you're ever going to get on quality like this. And on top of the beautiful quality of these products, Game Toppers is a company that you can feel good supporting. Burkey and his gang over at Game Toppers are top tier people like the best people that I have met in this gaming industry in any industry for that matter. Their customer service is bar none the best I've ever experienced. They take pride in their products and they want to make sure that you have the best experience possible and they put forth that effort every single time. So listen, if you're looking for a great game table solution, Game Toppers should be your first stop in the search and I guarantee you it'll be the last because you hit the bullseye on the first try. And of course Game Toppers has all the accessories you're looking for. You got your cup holders, your dice trays, your dining covers, your leg kits, you got the beautiful artistic neoprene mats and of course they're so proud of their magnetic easel tray. Get over there to the Kickstarter. Search Game Toppers 5.0, check out the Kickstarter, all the cool stuff they have to offer and late pledge right now. Check it all out at Game Toppers LLC. com. [MUSIC] Alrighty, Cabolla. So for today's discussion topic, I was inspired by one of my favorite board game publishers who also has a YouTube channel. Jamie Stagmeyer has the Stone Myer Games YouTube channel. And on that channel, he does a lot of different things, but one specific series of videos that he has been doing for quite a while now is a series called My Favorite Mechanism. In those videos, he will essentially review a board game, but he won't talk about the entire thing. He generally will focus on one specific aspect of that game, one mechanism about that game that is his favorite mechanism of that particular game. And I got to say, I was inspired by this because I think that's a really creative, unique way to approach doing a board game review. So the other day when I was poking around on his YouTube channel, I was thinking like, wow, I would really like to do a discussion topic where we do exactly this thing. Each of us take a game that we really, really like and we'd say, what are favorite thing is about that game? What is the X-Factor? I used X-Factor earlier in the episode about FinSpan and what specifically about that game got me all fired up. Well, I want to take some games here and talk about the very specific thing, the pinpoint, the one thing that makes the game stand out for you. So let's talk about our favorite part. What do you say, fellas? That sound good? Nah. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Well, I want to do that. What would you prefer to talk about Steven? Talk about some kind of books or something. That's okay. All right. Well, Don, why don't you start us off? Tell us about a game that you love and what's your very favorite part of it. Yeah, so this is a game I love and looking at the board game ratings, not a lot of people love it, but I love it. And this is an older game. This is from almost 20 years ago. It's 2008 SINGE, SEN J.I. This was designed by a couple of heavy hitters in the board game design. Oh, yeah. That's Bruno Kothala and Sarah Zajay. The way this game plays out is that you are all representing families in feudal Japan and you can go through a variety of phases in successive rounds until someone has reached 60 Vittor points. That 60 Vittor points is going to be critical because that's going to trigger the end of the game. And also, it'll lean into why there's a certain aspect of this game that I think is just the hook, the things that sort of sells this game. So in any given round, you're doing a welcoming of the Emperor. This is where the Emperor's rights can move around the table. Winter phase is diplomacy. That's going to be the part I'm going to talk about a second. Spring phase is where you program orders on your units on the board because the dudes on the map kind of control, kind of game. Summer phase is you will resolve orders. So if that order programming and resolution of order sounds a little bit like Game of Thrones ideas. So if you've played that, you've got an idea. Game of Thrones. Sorry. You've got an idea of how it goes. You're putting little tokens on the board and flipping them over in some order as you go around and around and around to execute something to move or harvest or something like that with these units. And then the autumn phase is trading, recruiting and gaining of honor. That's also going to be important when I talk about the hook here in a second. So 90% of this, I shouldn't say 90%. 80% of this game is dudes on a map, moving around, fighting, playing cards, kind of stuff. The very, very interesting part is in that winter phase. This is the diplomacy phase. And the way this goes is that there's a four minute timer. And the Emperor player is responsible for monitoring this four minute timer, which we interpreted when I read rules years ago, as if they wanted to go a little longer than four minutes, that's fine. They can do that if they want to go a lot longer than four minutes. That's fine. They can do that because it adds to the intrigue because this day and night, he'd go walk his dog. It's the same. We play it now. But the cool thing about this diplomacy phase is every player has a hand of cards. And those cards come in three types. And you have your full hand. That's trading, military support and family cards. So the trading cards are, whenever, so let me get through the diplomacy phase and we'll talk about what these cards do. So during the diplomacy phase, you can either do it at the table in the wide open or you can walk to another room with somebody or three people can go together. It's like, there's this really, this window where diplomacy happens and some of those diplomatic relations are private. And so you pull people to the other room and you're like, okay, look, I can trade you this card, you trade me that card. Or if you agree not to attack this province, I'll give you this or you give me that and I want to attack you. Blah, blah, blah. So the funny thing is you're not limited to trading only your cards to other players. Because again, you're getting cards from other players in trade. You can then later trade those cards to other players. So the cards you had that you had traded to certain people may have moved around the table, unbeknownst to you throughout the course of this game. I love games that have diplomacy like this. Yes. I have not played Senji, but it reminds me of Game of Thrones when we would play that and you'd see your ally go off and start talking to your enemy. And you're like, what the hell are they scheming about over there? I don't know what's going on. I remember we were playing it in my house and my garage is right next to the dining room where we were we were playing. And I was like, I got to go get a beer and win the garage. And I was like, listening to the wall trying to try to hear what was going on. Yeah. So those kind of games are fun because there are a handful of games that do that. Where Senji I think peaks its head above the wrist is that it's what you can do with these cards. So again, I said those cards come in three types. Trading, military, support, and family. Two of these types are sort of straightforward simple. Trading is I trade you my card. And at some point later in the game, a player, probably you, but doesn't have to be if you've traded that away can reveal that card and then sort of look at my cards and take one of them out of the number that you look at. So if they play a card, a trading card of value three, I have to show them three cards. I had to handle three cards and they choose one to keep. So again, these are sort of, this is a way for cards to move around the table in ways that were sort of weird. Right. So that's trading. Military support, when you're in a battle, you can play a family's card to get that many points of strength added to the battle. But that family's card has to be a family not in the fight. So basically, yeah, I can't directly help you over there, but I can give you this card if you attack you can play this to add to your power. Those are pretty interesting. The super interesting ones are the family cards. And these are family members that have values on the cards. And what you can do is if someone attacks you, you can reveal that card, you can gain the amount of honor on the card and the attacking player loses twice the amount of armor on that card. So, so this is a look, I'm not going, it's not more than a diplomatic, I'm not going to attack you. It's, here's a family member that you can hold in your house. And then if I attack you can execute them. You get honor and I lose twice the honor. Oh, that's cool. It is super cool. Or the family members can be housed so you can play them in front of you in your play area. And while they're housed, you get those honor points associated with their value, but it's only temporary. If you pull them back into your hand, you lose those honor points. But why would you want to do something like that? Well, maybe you want to execute them. So, so there's this weird aspect of like you have sent family members off in the form of cards to other families. And they can therefore been traded off to other families. So at least these weird situations where it's like, okay, I'm going to get points just by attacking Bob. So I'm going to attack Bob. And suddenly Bob reveals a family member that I never gave him that Chris gave him because it's son of a bitch, right? And so Bob reveals his card, gets a bunch of honor. I lose a bunch of honor. So it's that kind of shenanigans that play now. What counters this is at the end of the of the round in that last phase that a lot of phase, you can trade five cards in from other families to get 10 points. Again, you're only playing a 60. So if you do some some interesting healing and dealing to get cards, you don't have to nest this area to use them or house them or execute them. You can trade them in for points. And that could be what gets you over the 60 points. The beauty is how these cards flow around the table. And you don't know where they are at at the given time. And there's this teaching associated with where you're going to attack and who can attack you and who has leverage and who doesn't because you don't know exactly where this family members are. I think this is a brilliant mechanism. I haven't seen it used in any other game since 2008. I'm very surprised that this game is so not really well liked on board game geek. I'm kind of like tooling around on it here. It's got a pretty low rating of 6.5, which is a game that I would completely ignore otherwise. It's an absolutely beautiful production for it being developed in 2008, which is a great a long time ago. Yeah, man, that sounds great. That sounds like a lot of fun. So when you say, what's held this game back? I think there's a lot of luck involved with certain card draws you get, Samaroud that you're using. And further some dice rolling in the combat. And I think people like, that's a little too swingy. But it could be retooled, brought out a new version, man. I think it could be a real hit. I love, love, love, love that diplomacy phase because it's just so fun to go wheel and deal with everybody. Jamie, I think this is the kind of game you would absolutely love to play. Yeah. Because I know you like those negotiation games and there's these surprises that pop up all the time. It's very entertaining. That's a good one. I like that. Great pick time. I like dark work, too. Yeah, the artworks. Good. Like I said, I really like this game. Even when it came out in 2008, but it really didn't light up anybody else's anybody in the game group, so it sort of preferences. And so I played it a few times and they really didn't come out anymore. I'm thinking about going back and revisiting it, seeing if I can dig it out. find it and play it again because, hell, it might hit in 2026 in a way it did in 2008. You had to date up and find it in your giant. I don't think I'm gonna have to be honest because I think I've traded it away at some point. Might have to re-acquire it, Chris. So anyway, that's Sinji. That was from Asma Day, way back in the day, designed by Bruno Catholic and Sarah's was Jay. Yeah, when Asma Day was just a straight publisher. And that's right. And those guys are two monsters in the design world. So you can, you fill it in that game. It's, it's, it's design well. I'm surprised it wasn't a huge hit to be honest. I mean, 2008 was almost 20 years ago, right? Yeah. This is true. Well, Steve, how about you give us your game? What, what game do you love and what's its best part? Well, I'm gonna say, you know, escape room style games. Now, you exit as an example. There's a bunch of those, but pretty much they all have the same mechanic and I call it deductive reasoning via clue mapping. Okay. And actually, you can put this on other hidden movement style games too. Like, you know where somebody is at one point and you're trying to figure out where they're going next or what they're up to. So there's a lot of games that have deductive reasoning in them. I'm just gonna highlight these escape room games. So typically in the exit games and all the other games, you find clues and you're putting codes into a decoder or a wheel that spins around. And that tells you where to progress next. What card to draw next or see if you're right. Sometimes they're red herrings and they throw you back and you lose some time on it. And typically, you're doing this as a progression. You're going through the deck of cards or whatever it is in the escape room within a set amount of time. Right. A lot of these have an app that goes with it. And you can input codes and the app stuff. And a lot of them have the hint system. So if you're stuck, it'll kind of suck if you have 60 minutes doing escape room. And you spend 55 of that scratching your head and you don't get very far in the game. It includes this hint system in the app that you can use to help you if you get stuck. And then the other like, I'll see with the exit games, there are a lot of fun because I'll spoil anything obviously. But a lot of times you have to think outside the box. Literally sometimes their clues hidden on the box. Those are the best. Yes, those are very fun. That's part of the reason why we liked box. Was it box one and box two so much, right? Especially box one because you look at that box and like you said, for these kind of games, that even said that from these, you know, all the escape room, which kind of games we have now, because you look at it and you think it's a certain thing and it's way more than that. And you just can't envision that when you first look at the box. I like escape room, the game of all these because I like that tactile feel. Components and things in the game. And like you said, those keys that you plug into the box that tell you whether you're right or wrong and maybe decreased the time on you as opposed to the car driven ones that are all cars. Those are fun. And sometimes they can be very creative, Steve. Yeah, but but I like the ones were like, they're tactile things. Yeah, so that's the bad thing about escape room games is they're disposable, right? I mean, once you've played it, you're done with. Pretty much all of them are. Which is a huge concern, but man, otherwise I love them. Steve, you mentioned, I think one specific thing that, since you're you kind of focusing in on the exit games in this pick, one thing that I think is the standout mechanism of there and you mentioned it specifically was how it has a wheel that you plug things into. Now, I have obviously not played all the exit games. I just actually played one a few weeks ago. Nice. And the every single one that I've played has that same wheel. And I'm not I think that's that's a common thread amongst all of them, but I'm not quite sure. But I'm going to say at least going through board game, you got looked at five of them and they all had the same wheel in it, just different shapes and stuff on it. And I think that's the coolest mechanism of the exit games is that when you it has the same format and structure. So whereas other escape room games, you're not sure if you're actually making progress or not because like you're like, okay, I'm figuring things out, but I'm not sure if this thing, you know, fits in with that thing or whatever. At least the exit games has this logical flow. I'm looking for these these types of four four digit numbers or high-roglyphics or whatever. And if I find those things, I know I'm specifically making progress and it makes you feel, it makes you feel like you you have guidance in a sense in this game that is completely wacky and out there. Like you said, like sometimes you have to like assemble things on the box or you have to it's like crazy stuff you have to do in some of these boxes. And yeah, I think that's just a really, really clever way to bring the chaos of an escape room game into a box, but give you directions so that you never feel like you're just floundering. Yeah. And that's part of what's fun about it too. Unlike any other board game pretty much, uh, this is played once and then thrown away. Now you can make photocopies or anything or whatever and not actually do that or you can just do it because the price points are low. Yeah. You know, other games I can kind of think of that you alter and write on or like legacy games like risk legacy where you're putting stickers on and stuff, but still you keep that game when you're done with it. Yeah, you'd have to you'd have to photocopy this stuff ahead of time because you fucked that stuff up. Yeah, like you're like, four things, ripping things, like, drawn all over it. Yeah. That always drives me crazy when I'm doing that. I just there's this like level of excitement that I get to do it. But then there's also like as I'm tearing a part of my board game up, I'm like, that's funny. Chris because, uh, you know, I think that's a board gameers mentality because when I was playing it with my family, hey, care. They were just like, they didn't like move around and stuff. They're like, I don't know whatever. This is what you're supposed to do. I still remember the first time I tore a card in half in a risk, a risk legacy game. Yeah. And it was like, you felt the, there was a disturbance in the force in the room. That's right. Like everybody's like, oh my god, you can't be doing that. I just did it. It was funny. Chris says that. He doesn't like, you know, ripping stuff up, but his dog, Jews on all his other games. Yeah. Well, his dog likes his dog. I didn't see the guy. I like that. You said Steve that his dog likes to chew up his stuff. No, his dog likes to chew up my stuff. So ex a games have defined a nice, uh, niche. And I don't know if it's a niche, right? It's a big category of gaming at this point. But I remember years ago, when I think it was werewolf, the escape room game came out. I thought, can they really do that? Can this be done? And now we've seen so many different different implementations of escape room games that it has become a really defined part of the market and a very enjoyable kind. Like I said, the, the downside is you pointed out, uh, Jamie's you got tear stuff up and they're disposable, right? Uh, another downside here is that it, they can be very hit or miss depending upon the design team. So sometimes you play them like, man, this one was perfect. It was a right level of puzzles. And others you play it's like, it's just too easy or it's like, you have to look it up or get a huge hint. I mean, how was I ever supposed to solve that? Like they didn't give you enough breadcrumbs to solve it. Like they thought they wouldn't, you know, yeah, something like that about it. So it's sort of hit or miss in that regard. But again, Steve, lower price point. So the cost of entry is lower. So it's worth the trade off. That's another thing I like about the exit series done is that they're all designed by Ingen Marcus brand. So they have sort of perfected the art of doing it. You got that consistency. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that's fun when you play with a group that you don't necessarily get in other games because this is cooperative. Obviously, you have people with certain skills that will shine through the game. And that's fun. Like, thanks. Steve, I appreciate it, buddy. Yeah. Well, I was going to mention you. Like maybe there's like a math puzzle in the game. Don't shine down. There's a lot of people feel smart. Don shines when there's a late over his head. See, there's a math problem because there are some math problems. Some of these games, Don might see that right away and be like, Oh, this is a math problem and like work it out and save the group a chunk of time. Well, it's not about odds. Then they're set or maybe Tony sees a problem that's associated with beating a three year old kid at karate or something. All right. Well, that's a great because he's not here to defend himself. Yeah. That's great. All right. Well, that's a great pick. Steve, you picked the exit games and mostly just a escape room games in general. But yeah, exit games. Perfect. Yeah. I'm excited to hear about Chris's. Yeah. I see. What did Chris put in the document here? Masterbation. A message. Masterbation. Oh my god. It's written in the doc. Black gets a question. You put that in there. That's got to be a con thing. No, why didn't put that in there? We thought you put that in there. I didn't put that in there. Oh my god. What we started is that was black. Somebody put that in. It's done. Look at his ridiculous face. I know. I'm so done. All right. Well, my game, I picked one of my favorite games from one of my favorite publishers. It was published in 2015. And that is Chakaryon from Minecraft games. Chakaryon, if you don't know about it, is a game where there is a magician who is retiring in the city. He has the one true Chakaryon stone that contains true magic. Well, he's retiring and looking to see who he should give the stone to. So there are other magicians in the city, who are the players competing to be the best magician there can be. Can I ask you a question real quick? Chris, this is a philosophical question. I know you'll like philosophy. So the theme of this game is that there's a magician who is like a stage magician, because the whole thing's about building cool like illusions and stuff. Yeah. And yeah. So the master magician has a real magical crystal. Do you consider that cheating in the world of of stage magicians? Um, well, I mean, all's fair, I guess. I don't know. I don't think that's cheating. It's cool. I think that if I think if the, the, the, the craft is, is creating cool illusions on stage, if you're using real magic, you're cheating. To be fair, if I was using real magic, I wouldn't care what anybody thought of whether I was cheating or not. If I was using real magic, I wouldn't be doing shows. I'd be like, just making money come in up here in front of me. I think technically, JV, you're correct that that is cheating because the, the art is in the illusion and the sleight of hand in the misdirection. So, uh, yes, I think that is cheating. Do, do I care? No, I want the magic. Stand. All right. There you go. Chris. That's, that's all I wanted to hear. Now continue. Sorry to interrupt. That's okay. Um, so the way this game plays out, uh, plays out over a number of rounds with all the magicians having, uh, a collection of people that they're going to use and place at different locations on the board. And that's, that's the mechanic I wanted to highlight, which is the worker placement in this game. I find it wonderful. So I'll get to that. And, and a second, uh, the, the characters you have are your magician. You have some, uh, princesses. Then you, uh, I'm sorry, you have some assistance. Then you can get, uh, there are three different types of kind of like mid-level characters that have special abilities, depending on where you put them. And, uh, you were going to place these out in, I'm going to talk about the base game. So there are four locations that you can place them in the base game. You can go to, uh, downtown where you'll get new tricks. You'll get money. You'll get, uh, higher new assistants. You'll do a lot of the, the, the purchasing aspects. Uh, you can go to market row. Market row is where you get the materials for your tricks and your illusions. It's basically like you're putting in a contract that you can get access to this much stuff. Uh, the theater is where you go to essentially put on your shows. And there's like a planning aspect of this. And then there's actually performing and to perform your magician has to be there. Uh, basically all these cards will come out. They have a different set up on them, like where you're going to put your tricks in and try to line them up. So like your tricks kind of flow so that they create like, uh, synced locations, like little, they're like little chain syncs and they give you extra stuff. Um, and then you have your workshop where you'll prepare your tricks. You'll, uh, manipulate your cards. There's a couple different things based on which, um, assistant you're going to utilize there. Now all of these assistants and your magician, they have different action points associated with them. And the action points will give you, um, basically certain number of things you can do at a location at each location. Certain things cost a different number of action points. If you put your magician there and he has three, so you have three action points. What is great about this game and great about the worker placement is that it requires that you be paying attention to what everybody else is doing, what they're buying, what tricks they've gotten, what, uh, what people they have available to put out onto the board where there's people are possibly going because you need to get, sometimes you need to get there first so you can get a certain number of action points. And particularly you want to plan all this around basically being able to let them do the hard work essentially. You want to time it so that the other players are, are doing work for you. So you're not spending action points, whether they're, uh, bringing in new, a different type of good to the market or whether they're setting up a new show that you can throw some of your tricks into or, you know, that aspect of it keeps me watching what every other player is doing. And I feel engaged with everybody when I play this game. And that's what I love about how this action selection works in this game. I agree, Chris. I think that this is an excellent mechanism in that the byproduct of the mechanism is that it keeps you constantly engaged. There are many, many games that will play where everybody's just heads down in their own player board. When it's their turn, they go through their turn and then they check back out again or games like dominion where you're just like you're taking your turn so fast that you're not, you don't even care what anybody else is doing. You're just doing your thing. Well, designed into this game is a specific mechanism where you must be paying attention to the other players because timing is a huge factor to all of it. So you need to make sure that you're predicting where the spaces are going to be and when you, you need to take those spaces. It's, it's an incredibly clever game design from a psychological standpoint about being engaged in a game. So one thing I like about your carry on and this goes back to 2006. So two different movies came out. The prestige and the illusionist both seem like they're set in the same time period as carry on. Yeah, pretty much. And now the illusionist doesn't have competing magicians in it. The prestige does, but this game always reminds me of that. And that's great because both of those are really good movies. Yeah. Was this their first, Chris? Did you say or it's the, I think this might have been the first one because I mean, I remember we were, this when we were recording Jamie's basement and I remember seeing this game come up from them and I'm like, here's the hell is this publisher and this game looks absolutely stunning. Yeah, well, they definitely sort of set the stage for a sequence of great games, passes. And this is sort of the OG 2015 increase my appreciation for it. 2015 was to carry on 2017 was an acronym and then onwards and upwards, cerebrae and onwards. So yeah, it looks like to carry on was their first game according to board game geek. Nice. Well, it's a good one. That's a good one, Chris. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's one of those that keeps me coming back. And in particular, I'll say this, there are expansions out there that give more action spaces than I talked about and a lot more stuff to do. But this is one of those games where I don't really use the expansions at all. I think it's beautiful just the way it is. Nice. So to be clear, your mechanic is worker placement. The technically, yes. The specific time implementation of worker placement. Yes. No, Steve, it is not masturbation like Don put in here. All right. I was assuming it wasn't that. It's too bad for you, buddy. It's just got some blue shoes in the mail. All right. So to wrap things up, my pick is a game similar to dawns that's that's kind of an obscure pick. This is not a terribly old game. This one came out in 2020. I was kick started before that I believe. And I just happened to stumble upon it and was drawn in by the cover art. And this game is called far away. Now, this is not the card game that came out recently called far away, which is all one big word. This is far space away. And the tagline on the front of the box is boldly go where no one has returned from yet. That's what I love. And this is basically a space exploration game. But what the idea is that you work for a company that explores space and you will land on a planet that is unexplored. You always crash on the planet. And because that is part of like the sort a little bit of a tongue and cheek nature of this game is that everything is going to break down. And because the company really doesn't have it shit together and they don't really fund it very well. So you, whatever you land on a planet, you always crash there. And the idea of the game is that it is it is only a two player game. So you go there and you have two astronauts and these astronauts will have different missions that they need to solve. They can explore the surrounding area that's turning over tiles. Which are different terrain types. You will discover the fauna and the flora of the planet. You will start learning about what this planet has to offer. And then you will start constructing structures there, like radio towers or like barracks or whatever that you can sleep in and that kind of stuff. So you're building different things. And the mission cards kind of guide you to what you want to do. And you're supposed to survive. And being a two player game is very interesting. You know, this was my sort of runner up mechanic that I wanted us to highlight. When you are not in the space with another player, you're not allowed to communicate with them. Like you have to just go about your turns on your own because you can't talk to each other because apparently like your calm system is really bad. And they didn't pay for it. So anyway, so it's really interesting. So you have to come back together to actually collaborate and then and then separate to go do your your plans. The mechanism that I wanted to highlight here as my favorite part of it is the most unique mechanism I've ever experienced for. having a quote, AI in the game, like an artificial intelligence where the game plays itself in a sense, when you meet creatures in this game, like the indigenous animals of the planet, there's a card that comes out and these animals have traits on them that are their behavioral traits. It'll say something like this animal is an carnivore and it is aggressive and it is territorial and or another one might say it is, it is an herbivore, but it is destructive and it is like a den animal so it won't wander the board too much. So it have these particular traits on it. So when you as the player and counter these creatures or these creatures encounter you by like kind of wandering into your area, you have to make them do what they're gonna do. And how do you do that? You do it by roleplaying the monster. And as a matter of fact, in the rulebook, there's an acronym that is trying to find here. Realistically and objectively, log events performed logistically by animals and yourself and that's roleplay. (laughing) And that's not the only acronym that you use, but you know what I mean? Exactly the description. The entire rulebook is filled with these, that's crazy. And so anyway, what do you, what do I mean by that? So what you do is you say, all right, the creature is here in this space. What are its traits? Say its traits are herbivore, wandering and destructive. You're standing in a hex next to it and your radio tower is, and is in a different hex as adjacent to it. You decide, all right, okay, it's an herbivore and it's not aggressive. So it's not gonna run over and attack me because it doesn't wanna eat me. It wants to eat plants, but it's destructive. It's gonna run over and knock down my radio tower. So you have to make the decision, yes, because of its traits, this is the logical thing that it would do, so I'm gonna move it into that space and knock down my radio tower 'cause the thing like bashed into it and knocked it over. It relies on you being fair, because the game's not fun if you're not fair. So you could very, you could come up with some stupid logical reason why it would do something different. But if it's a carnivore and it's aggressive and you're standing next to it, it's gonna move into your space and try to eat you. And you have to make that call yourself roleplaying the traits of the character. And I think that's just absolutely terrific. It's a way to feel very creative in the middle of the game. It's a way to use common sense in the game that just makes sense. It just feels good. You pay attention to the patterns and the behaviors of the animals and it actually gives them more personality than if you just like follow a flow chart, right? Flow chart of what the monsters would do. Actively like thinking about what the creatures would do and then acting them out. It makes it feel more alive in a sense. It feels a little more organic. And man, that's just a really, really, really fun mechanism to this game that I've never seen any other game leverage that before. Yeah, I've never heard of anything like that ever. Yeah. And that just seems like such, it seems like such a cool way of looking at things. Like honestly, I think that might actually bother some players because it requires you to make choices that are detrimental to you in order to tell the story. And some players might not dig that. I've definitely played with groups that sort of, they go and think they min-max things and like seventh continent was sort of a disaster because I tried to play that and they were trying to like play it like a regular game. And I can see that type of playing group approach this game and not really understanding how not to min-max the engagement with the monsters. It's like you're sort of playing a game but you're also having a narrative experience, right? Where you are guiding these creatures in a way that regardless of how it makes sense or not to you, it's how it makes sense to the creature. And I think it might be hard for groups, for certain players and groups to switch in and out of those two modes. Right. But if they're good at it, I think it would be super fun 'cause it's like it's all making thematic sense and you're getting a little bit of role-playing and you're making a little bit of role-playing and you're making a little bit of role-playing or I'm sorry, with your partner every now and then so that you can build your loneliness back up. So you don't die of loneliness in the middle of like this weird planet. But it helps. You can cuddle some of the creatures if they're into that, right? That's right. Well, if they're free. I don't know about that. Why don't you choose this as your mechanism in real life? Yeah, right? Cuddle creatures. Yeah, I don't know. So I'm looking at the different animal traits. Paracetic is one of them. So I guess that's kind of like cuddling. I guess that's kind of like cuddling. (laughs) It is eight points. Chris, like 20 bucks, 20 bucks. Yeah, right. So anyway, with that, maybe think of Jamie's there's a unlock game called the Island of Dr. Gorse. And in that, the players are like, I guess they crash on an island or they're stranded, but they're split up into two different teams. And the teams each have deck of cards. They have to puzzle out. And actually look at each other's cards until they both find the radio. Oh, that's neat. Yeah, that was fun. So like, you explaining this game made me think of that. That's a cool mechanic. Just in and of itself that you can't talk to each other. You communicate effectively unless you do something. That's right. Yeah, this is a really neat game. Far away is the name of the game. Far space away. And it's by a little publisher called Cherypick Games. It's reasonably priced at $58. You can still get it on their website. I'm looking at it right now. It's a really solid game. If you are like a couple or do you have just one other friend that you play a lot of two player games and you're into these sort of like cooperative survival games, this is a really neat, innovative, different game that you're going to, then you're going to get anywhere else. And the tongue and cheek nature of it is fun. Like all those an acronyms all over the place is crazy. But yeah, man, it's a fun game. Check it out far away. Well, Kabal, I guess that is going to wrap up episode 344 of the Secret Kabal Gaming Podcast. As always, you can bounce over to the secret kabal.com. Click on the link to this episode. Get all the links to the games we talked about today. All the news stories that Tony brought up today. Also, you'll find links to our socials. We got Blue Sky, we got Facebook, we got Instagram, we got the board game geek guild. And of course, you'll find links to our amazing sponsors, Restoration Games, Game Toppers, and Prestors painting. And please, while you're going to check all that stuff out, make sure to join the Kabal community on Discord. Got Kabal's over there sharing their 3D prints. They're listing all the games of crowdfunding and they're sharing hilarious memes. Get in on the fun with the rest of us. By heading over to www.thesecretkabal.com/discord. And we'd like to take this time to thank all of our peaches. All of our Patreon supporters. So if you'd like to support the secret Kabal, you can do so also on Patreon by heading to patreon.com/thesecretkabal. And finally, another great way that you can support the Kabal is to head over to Spotify or iTunes and give us a five star rating and even better a positive review on iTunes. It'll support growing the show by helping new listeners find us so they can become kabalists like you. Kabal, kabalists. Kabalists. Kabalists. And again, Kabalists, if you would like to hook up with the founders and friends at Orch's Game Fair next month, you can find us at the Whistling Keg on Friday, June 19th, at 7pm to 10pm. We're going to have games to give away. You can come, you can drink beers and cider and hang out with us. If you're Dave Thompson, you can order a door dash during the raffle. You can play Cornhole with Stephen Bonacore. It's going to be a great time. Come by the Whistling Keg. June 19th at 7pm at Orch's Game Fair. game fair. No tickets required. Just show up and have a good time. And Kabalists, you have not heard Tony T for the past 20 minutes, half hour because Tony had to leave. He went to Prague. He's galovanting across Europe, having a good time while we're back here doing a podcast for all you Kabalists. So unfortunately, Tony couldn't be here to do his final words of wisdom. He couldn't be here to help you. Kabalists learn how to act right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hand the microphone over to somebody who can teach you the exact opposite. Not to act right. I'm going to hand the airwaves over to Chris Miller to give you his final words of wisdom. Take it away, Chris. All right. Well, it's funny you should say that, Jamie, because that is absolutely true. I'm going to teach you how not to act right. Well, I'm teaching you how to act right. So one thing that's really, really important. And I am particularly bad at because I like spontaneity. I think it's fun. One thing you need to do sometimes is to plan. You need to make plans for things. You got to write in the document. So Don doesn't put in masturbation for your game. That's right. You got to you got to work with your partners to hug creatures. You got to plan for your exit game. You also, you also got to tell the person who's going to do words of wisdom. A lot sooner or else you get this kind of stuff. I will go to 10 30. I was literally sitting on the potty getting ready to get ready for the show. And I looked out on my phone and I see Jamie messaged me, hey, you're going to do words of wisdom today. I was like, well, shit. I don't know what to talk about. Well, I have a backup prepared. Uh-oh. Oh, Lord. Of course, doesn't have anything I can try. I think you did have something. Well, Steve, if you want to do a dual words of wisdom, take it away. Give us your give us your backup. So I think it's important for all of us to try and understand humankind. And I think we need to really break it down. Humankind is made up of two separate words. Humma and McKinnd. Now, I have no idea what those words mean. It's a complete mystery. And that's why humankind is so confusing. Chris, how was that? There's no way that was better than mine. 100%. Well, Cabalus, I apologize that Tony was not here for use, gallivanting across Europe somewhere right now, having a great time while we're stuck with whatever those those two words wisdom were. Well, Cabalus will then hang more. All right, fine. Here's somebody might need to hear this today. Here's a real word to wisdom. Just because today is terrible doesn't mean tomorrow might not be the best day of your life. You just need to get there. Well, after all that, it can't come soon enough. All right, Cabalus, well, come all back next week because we get another absolutely fantastic episode of Dungeon Master's Lutus, but after that, another wild crazy bananas, but busting brilliant magnificent monumental and most sugar episode of the secret Cabal gaming podcast. Good night, everybody. Day good night. Have a good one. Good night. Maybe next time I'll tell you about Uncle Keaping. He was a bear, I think. He was. And that wraps up another episode of the secret Cabal Gaming Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, please join us again next weekend every week for more content from the secret Cabal. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and join our official Discord server at the secret Cabal.com/discord. To support the secret Cabal, check out our Patreon fundraiser initiative at patreon.com/thesecordcabal. And remember our motto, "Scribing Lestar Company" "Belazing Cowardly Manoeuver." [Music]