 So this is a game called patchwork. It's a two player game. And I knew this game was hot because when I was working in the PAX library multiple years in a row, right, this game would be coming in and out and in and out. As soon as it came in and went out, people wanted this game. We only had like one copy, which I think maybe felt like it had a higher demand than it deserved because it was a low supply situation. If we had more copies, you probably wouldn't have that problem. But anyway, two player game. I knew it was hot. I've seen it in stores. And recently the iOS app was on super sale, like way discounted. So I bought it. I learned how to play using the app. Today I read the rules PDF. And it turns out the app taught me how to play exactly 100% correctly. The app has an amazing user interface with very few, few flaws. Rim read the rules, which are really short. So he learned how to play. We played twice. I completely destroyed rim both times because I've been practicing playing this on the app for like a few weeks. And I literally never played it before. And you didn't try very hard. Yeah. Well, I wasn't going to spend the time to really look at, but all the potential pieces, but even if you had tried very hard and learned to play, you played it a lot. I mean, the margin of victory by which I destroyed you even in the second game was so vast. I think that, you know, even if you practice this for a while, I would still be better than you. I am. I will play this game enough to prove you wrong on that at least. I think you could make it close. I do not think that you could beat me on any consistent basis. There is the tiniest amount. There's not that much going on in this game of luck in terms of who goes first, which could matter. And if two players were truly equal, depending on the peace distribution, first player could determine winner in like a small percentage of games. And that's about it. Right? So here's how the game works. You're trying to make a quilt, right? And the best quilt wins with big old like extended Tetris pieces. It's sort of like block is right. This is a set of pieces. And it's the same set of pieces for every game. And some pieces are going to go to player one. And some pieces are going to end up with player two. And some places are going to end up with nobody. And you're making a quilt. And at the end of the game, best quilt wins. And here's how it works. On your little board where you make a quilt, which is a nine by nine board, every empty square left at the end of the game is minus two points. So it's 81, nine times nine times two, 81 times two is 164, 162. You can have negative 162 at the end of the game if you don't put any pieces down. That's not going to happen. Also, you then get one point for every button you have. A button is like this currency. And you start with five. And then as you get a certain number of incomes as the game goes on, and the incomes are equal to the number of buttons that are in your quilt already. So certain pieces in your quilt have buttons sewn on to them. And those pieces will generate currency for you every time you pass a currency spot on the track. And the track is this timing track. So basically the way that archaeologist game, right? So the timing track is whenever you add a piece to your quilt, it takes time to sew it on, right? So you get these hourglasses. And when you've got to the end of the game, right, is you've spent so many hourglasses that your piece moves off the edge of the board. So you can think of it as everyone starts the game with X hourglasses and the currency that you're spending. And as you spend more of them, right, you cross certain checkpoints and thus get your income points. And you're also this little one by one squares that you can get by moving faster than the other player around the track. So if you spend a lot of time and get high hourglass pieces that you move faster, which is good and also bad, which is interesting because the game is it's one of those rare games that has two very different currencies and pretty disparate. Like the ranges range from like one hourglass to what's the highest hourglass on there. I've seen sixes. Yep. Yeah. The cost range from like one to ten is zero. There was a zero piece that you can get. No buttons whatsoever. So as a result, the game has a lot of sort of play like within a very narrow band like the rules are simple and there's a narrow space in which to make your decisions. But there's a surprising amount of play within that space. Right. That's the best way I can describe the brain for the first few times I played this. I thought the game was problematic and that it was a snowball game. If you got pieces early that had a lot of buttons on them, then you would get a big income early. Right. Like if you think about it, if you got a piece in your quilt with one button on it right at the beginning of the game, you actually just netted one button per income phase. There's a set number of buttons are not only the currency of the game, but their points at the end. Right. There's a set number of income space times. You're only going to get income X number of times. I forget how many is like seven or eight times or something like that. So if you got one button right at the beginning of the game, right, that's huge. If you get two buttons right at the beginning of the game, that's really huge. Like you're getting two times eight. That's 16 buttons. Like that you're not, you're getting. If you cross that first income phase without any buttons in your quilt, like think about how much that comes out to at the end. Right. So I thought that the way to win this game was to get a bunch of buttons in your quilt early at any cost to get huge income to buy amazing pieces, to have tons of buttons and just fill your quilt in as best you can. And then at the end of the game, we're going to win with a big fistful of buttons. And that is true to some extent. Right. If you do get a bunch of buttons early, you will have a big income and it will snowball and you'll have a good score generally. That is, however, I was afraid it was, but it wasn't. You cannot like guarantee and lock in a win that way. It's not somebody else can have a lower income. It's only a two player game. They can have a lower income and play more efficiently and fill in their quilt better. And as long as they have some kind of good enough income, they can beat you out if you can't fill in your whole quilt because you moved so fast and sort of like how in a lumber of someone else might be getting a bunch of pieces and setting up their stuff really well, but you've been accumulating the right numbers in this giant hand. And then you have a turn where you're like, I want that tile, that tile and that tile. Yep. It happens. There'll also be situations where it's like, okay, you spent 10 buttons and bought a piece of three buttons on it and it filled in a whole bunch of your quilt really nicely. That's great. I bought a piece that cost one button and that means I'm still got nine buttons left. That's like, that's nine buttons. I didn't spend that you spent. Right. So even though my income is less, I actually got more buttons than you because I'm just holding on to them. I have a moderate income and I'm buying bargain basement pieces that are really effective. Whereas you are uncle money bags over there with your big sack of buttons. You spent them all on the Mercedes piece and the, you know, the Ferrari piece. And now you broke son. Guess who wins now with these two currencies. Think of it this way. You've got one currency that is victory points and you, you get them as income and you spend them to buy pieces that may or may not provide more income. Yeah. The other currency is a fixed one where there's only a certain number of spaces you can move in the entire game. So there's one currency where you can only go down and it's worth a buff kiss at the end. You're always going to hit zero. But at the very end of the game and the very last piece you take, it doesn't matter how many you take. So if you've got like one hour glass left, you're going to cross, you're at the next to last space on the board. As soon as you take a patch and add it to your quilt, it will be game over for you because you will cross the finish line. You can take a piece that has like theoretically like a thousand hour glasses on it because they let you do that. So you actually, it's a variable number in that you don't have to cross the finish line exactly. You can benefit quite a lot by squeaking your way up to the finish line and then taking a piece that has like eight hour glasses on it. No. So I mean, in the end, I mean, I'm probably going to buy the game, but I've been collecting, I put it in the same class as Lost Cities and the Morals game, the Mushroom game. Yeah. There's a bunch of games that are like little two battle lines. They come in the flat square box. Adelines is Canizia, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of those ones and it's a good one of those ones. There's a reason it keeps getting checked out of, you know, the PAX library constantly. And also it's pretty short. It's quick. It's really quick to learn. Yep. There's a lot of play in terms of skill and like you can just sort of play it. Like you're not going to play it out unless you really start memorizing build patterns. You start memorizing. Like you, you could really overanalyze. I've played it for like weeks on my phone and I'm still playing it occasionally. It's a good pooping game, I think. Yeah. Good pooping game. I think the best thing about this game is that, you know, even compared to something like Lost Cities, it is way more accessible even to not board game people. Yeah. It would take me five minutes to explain this game to someone who's never played a board game before. You can get anyone to play this game and the theme is even accessible. Lost Cities requires me to explain a whole bunch of math repeatedly and people still don't get it. Right. But the quilt building part, you know, the theme of quilt building is totally chill with everyone, right? No one's opposed to quilt making. No one's offended by quilts. Right. And then you it's totally Tetris piece putting together, which is literally the most popular game that humans want to play. So if you just say, Hey, you know, it's like blockus, right? You can just get anyone to play this. And the fact that it's fast and also two player, you know, you don't need to get this whole group of nerds together to make it happen. You can just open it up with one person and teach them to play it and go. I think it's like a super good entry way. If you need to get one person into board gaming as a hobby, this is like maybe the best game you can get. And in general, these games, I can't think of another two player one that's as good at that. You need to bring a few of them anytime you go to a gaming con like a packs, because you're always leaving the situation where three of your friends are in the middle of a tabletop game. And there's and then you're sitting there just waiting for them to finish. And another person walks up and you need to keep them in your orbit until the next five player game. Yeah. Get the app on the iPad. It's even because then the setup is way faster. Yeah. I think I would prefer to play it with physical pieces because then they're all out all the time just the iPad to the app's credit. It lets you scroll around and see all the pieces. And when you're zoomed in, it shows you a representation of everything that's like it really lets you look at all the information and it's like the app does as good a job as it can do. And it's yeah, like 90% there. It's like one of the best board game apps I've had ever. That's why I'm not complaining about giant iPad helps. But listen, I play on my phone. No problem. But I would prefer it physically just because of the way I play games with extant information like the pieces. Yeah. If I could see being able to see everything at once and not having to scroll to like remember what I just looked at. Yeah. It would be very helpful. But I mean, you're not going to make that happen in a even on a. But that's it. It's a trade off. You can get that holistic extent information experience by playing it physically. But then you have to do all the stuff that the game just sort of handles like counting out the income will slow the game down. Yeah. It's like, okay, what's my income? That could suck. But it's a good game. I'm probably going to buy it. I'll add it to my keep my my bag of tiny games. Yeah. This has been geek nights with rim and Scott special. Thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music. Cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes, discussion news and more. Remember geek nights is not one but four different shows sci-tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays and my comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek nights is distributed under a creative comments attribution 3.0 license geek nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.