 The best game we played at packs was another Friedman freeze game. Who's actually one of our Friedman freeze. If you don't know is the power grid guy. Yep. And all his games come in a green box and all his games are have a name that is two words that begin with F. Power grid was translated from German German name of power grid is two words that begin with F. Don't get on me about this non German speakers Elkfest Elkfest. Right. We played a Friedman freeze game that is not new, but we hadn't played it before. We played it maybe three or four times at packs. Yep. And that game is fresh fish, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh. Our joke at packs was saying it increasingly like that just as the weekend went on. Right. So the way fresh fish works is pretty simple game on the board. There are these four. It's simple, but yes, there are four food trucks and you are at four carts, one cart per truck. And you want to get your fish cart as close to the fish truck as you can. And you want to get your soda truck, your soda cart as close to the soda truck as you can. That way, you know, the food delivery comes in the truck. You sell the food out of your cart and the food that you sell be fresher than the food other people sell because the delivery took less time to get to your store theme than other people stores. Barely even comes close to making sense. No, it makes no sense whatsoever, but especially when you see the game, who would make I really like the art. The art is good. Yeah, it is. It's that kind of it's like a it's almost like a garbage pail kid style, but cuter and kid like the name for it is, but I've seen it around and I really like it. I particularly like the fish actually. The fish is okay. But the your score at the end is how the combined total of how many spaces away from each cart or from each truck your respective cart is due to the rules of the game. You have to be at least one space away. So like you could get a four because each you masterfully got every cart one space away from every truck. Yeah. So that already is a pretty solid mechanic for like a simple, but complex game to add to that. The way you play is you put reservation tokens out on your turn. You either draw tile from the bag, which we'll talk about, or you put a reservation token out. The reality is you put reservation tokens out for a long time. You've got six of them and you just keep putting them out. You could go really risky and go to the bag early. If someone you go to the bag when you don't have a lot of tokens out, you're pretty much just hurting yourself. So it really did get the rules of the game sometimes, but usually if you don't have a lot of tokens on the board, you're almost definitely going to hurt yourself. So there's not a lot of incentive to just go straight for the bag and hoping you'll fuck someone else instead of and luckily not fuck yourself. Like, you'll know when with people who've played this game before, if someone goes to the bag early, a hush falls over the crowd. It's like, Oh, you're going to that bag with like two tokens. We're going to put that cart. We're going to put that car. It's like you don't have any reservation token anywhere near the fish. What if you pull the fish out of that bag? You are just fuck. Yep. So here's the other main mechanic. You have 14 chips or 15 chips, some number of chips that they're money. Oh yeah. And you want a low score, obviously, low, it's golf, low score. The chips are negative points and you bid them when a cart of a particular type comes up. Right. So someone reaches in the bag and pulls out the fish card, which means it's time for somebody to put out a fish cart, closed fist auction. Whoever bid the most puts their cart out. Right. And so you everyone's got reservation tokens near the fish. Everyone does a closed fist auction. See who bids the most. And then that person gets to put their replace one of their reservation tokens with the fish cart that is theirs now because we're all pro. I mean, Chris and Anthony, who are pretty pro over the game. Yeah, they're literally they were playing nothing, but they played mostly freebie and freeze games because they also had famiglia with them. But so in pro mode, what you'll see if someone fucks up is everybody bids zero because the person who drew the tile wins because they break a tie that way. And that's why it's very dangerous. And they are forced to pull the tile out. Is that your fish cart? You only have one token up. Oh, I guess you're getting max score on the fish car. Right. It's like so rim goes in the bag thinking, Hey, hey, hey, I'll pull out a card and screw these guys. I don't have a lot of tokens out, but I'll screw them over. You pull out the fish cart. Everyone sees that your token is like on the other side of the board far away from the fish. Everyone bid zero rim now must put his fish cart on that far away token. And it's worth a million points. Yeah, Scott might be like seven, eight, nine away from one, but you max out at like 14 if you can't get there. And basically the way it works mechanically other than that auction thing is what you place these little reservation things. And when something comes out, there's areas of the board, numbers of squares, they're sort of surrounded and they have one or two next to them. That means they can only be one or two things in that space. So if Scott puts a blocking tile on one of the spaces in a two area because he had a reservation thing there, and I put my cart on another one in that area, everything else in that entire area becomes roads and anyone else who had a reservation token there just gets kicked the fuck out. So me and rim, we both put our reservation tokens in this area really close to the cheese. I win the cheese auction and put my cheese down. It's a one area. Which means rim loses his reservation token. If another cheese auction happens, that could be bad news bears for rim who doesn't have any reservation tokens near the cheese now. And if I lost the auction, uh-oh bad for me. Yeah. So to make matters even worse, the carts you put out or the blocking tiles you put out block, you have to follow a road. So we kind of played bastard mode where we had carts that were kind of like trucks that were near each other. Uh, many games in a row, a car got entirely walled off from the entire board. And you know what the answer is in this game? Max score. Yup. Fuck you. Yeah. The answer to any question. What if I do this is your fucked? Yeah, you can. It's like, what if I can't, I can connect, but I have to go off the edge of the board. It's like, Oh, you can actually do that. Yeah. It's two spaces for every edge of board space you use. So that costs you like, Oh, it's Max score. You're too far away. This game looks really simple, like a light fun game. It is one of the most brutal, like short multiplayer games I've ever played. The cut throatists of placing carts and picnic flea market stands. This is a, this is a game where four or five people will do a closed fix fist auction. Everyone opens and everyone immediately closes all their fingers, but one yeah. After seeing what the other people had in their hand. The game has two phases. Effectively the posturing phase and the fucking phase. And there's really nothing else to this game. Fresh fish fuck. So the thing about this game that I noticed though, is that I won every time I played, I think I won a few times, but I lost a few times too. I think I played twice and one twice. You didn't win every time you played. I won. I won. You did win more often than me. Anyway, but what I was doing that made a difference was when I was putting my reservation tokens, I was trying to put them in such a way to where no auction result could fuck me. And as long as I eventually got the auction, which is going to happen eventually at the end of the game, every cart will have been placed no matter what. I would have my cart in a good position. So that way I didn't have to bid a lot in the auctions. I got a cheese auction would come up and I'd be like, you know what, if I won this cheese auction, that would be a good thing. However, if I lose the cheese auction, it's not really going to hurt me at all because I placed my marker in such a clever place that it's going to get a good score. However, I can't really be bumped out easily. I saw you with that strategy and it worked very well. Very many times. Anthony found a pretty good counter to that strategy by begging earlier and putting markets out blockers and just knocking my backup guy also off the board before the end of the game. And then I have got max score on two carts and lost by a lot instead of winning by a lot. Yeah. So I was able to with my strategy not have to bid a lot in the auctions and usually there would be one auction during the game where I couldn't avoid bidding a lot and I would bid a lot and I'd win that important auction. And then all of my carts would be like one, two, three, not a lot of points at all. And I just had a ridiculously good score. Yeah. The first time I played, which I did win, my strategy was, well, I've got these tokens. If not now, then when my goal is to spend all of them. And that worked really well. Yeah. I mean, if you spend all your tokens and you don't care about bidding a lot, you're going to have great placements and you usually getting great placements, your score is going to be like less than five, six, something like that. But I have seen negative scores. Sure. But you know, that's a terrific score though in a four player game, right? Where someone's getting like a 15 on something. In a five player game, I saw one where someone won with like 13. Right. Yeah. It's like you're going to have one bad cart is going to ruin everything. So you know, if you spend all your tokens and get four, get all your carts in good positions, that's a good score. If you get one bad position, but you didn't spend anything in the auctions, that's also going to be a good score. All right. So there's a lot of different ways you can approach it and still turn out well. But the real, the game is real quick to teach, real quick to play, really, really satisfying. There's some randomness elements to it. Like it's not a perfect. Well, turn order matters a lot for getting the good positions, but it is really felt like the turn order actually helped me quite a bit because every time I had at the beginning of the game, every time like a position in mind, like for my marker and every time I got to my turn 90% at the time, that position was still open because turn order. Yep. But the game has a very high fun economy as in the amount of fun per minute it takes to play is a very high value. That is true. And there's also, so it's a Friedman freeze game. So it actually has two versions of the rules. We were playing the like newer updated version, but there is an older version, more streamlined version. Yeah. The difference between the two is basically in the version that we were playing, the one that most people would play. When you fill a place, then the roads go in. But in the original weird rules, it's kind of like battle line. You only fill in roads by deduction by like all places have to be connected to all places. So once you show that they're like, you have to place a road here or that breaks, then roads start appearing and stuff starts happening. We did not actually play that way because the former way is great. So also the former way is kind of more dickish because in the in the in the older way, in the very least, everything's connected. But the way we were playing with the newer rules, you could very easily entirely wall something off and make the game horrible. Very intentionally people would get picked flea market stands and line them up in a diagonal impossible to cross by any means so that it's like, well, the people on this side of these flea market stands can have good scores on cheese. Everyone who's who isn't already on this side, your cheese score is at minimum going to be like eight. And that's if you get that one spot there, everyone else, 15, get five. And you're going to look those other people in the eye as you place that cart, flipping them off and high five in the person who's on the good side with you. I frequently, another part of my strategy was to specifically put markers in places I wanted, pick a flea market stands. And then go in the bag and actively try to get flea market stands to fuck people up. And it worked. It's a super fun game. If I would highlight it, like it's also really tiny. If you're a board gamer at all, just own it. It's a perfect game to have in your repertoire to like keep it. And it's not like it doesn't. It's not like any other game. The closest game I can think to this would be through the desert. No, yeah. But it's not through the desert actually takes a long time. Right. It's not really even it's similar to through the desert, but it's not it's not close enough to where they're like displacing each other. Right. It's like there's no other game that you have that is like this game where you wouldn't want this on your shelf. But through the desert takes so it takes twice as long to play as this game. And it's not as good. Yeah. Yeah. So like this is a kind of game that I would just carry in my backpack at a convention right alongside like elk fest and those other little games that I carry around in wizard. There you go. That's it. Fresh fish. Fresh food. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Cat Lee for Web Design and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news and more. Remember Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons 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.