 So NURTS, NURTS is a game that I didn't really notice. I just didn't think about it. And then Scott one day was like, Hey, let's play NURTS. And I was like, OK, whatever. It was only like a day or two after it came out. I didn't even know when it came out. You just said, hey, we should blow it. Very, very, it came out very, very recent. OK, it came out January 5th. So the Zachtronics game came out January 5th by like January 7th. We were playing it. Exactly. So basically here's what happened. So Zachtronics, if you don't know, they're the ones who make all the cool programming games, as well as some others. You know, for example, the Spacechem, the Codex of Electrical Engineering, TIS 100, Shenzhen I.O. All right. They've also made the new one. What's it called? Mobius Front 80 something 86. Yeah, that's the one I got to play. It's like, it's like near the top of my queue. Hades kind of knocked it down because Hades has like captured me first, but sure. But yeah, they make a lot of games. And that's sort of same vein of, you know, programming, strategy, single-playerish PC games. Mobius Front 83, that's the year. And apparently what happened was when when they were at their office working during lunch, they would play this card game called Nerds. Nerds is not a game that I knew. But apparently it's in the bicycle book. It's in the bicycle book. It's like one of those old card games. It is. Yeah, it is. It's an old card game that like everyone that existed for quite a while, I just didn't personally know about it. And I think part of the reason why I never encountered it is because unlike other card games, you actually need an entire 52 card deck per player. And that would make it, you know, rare to be able to play Nerds. You would have to have someone intentionally buy a shit ton of decks and know the game. Now weirdly, I knew about it because people in my family played it, but I've never liked Solitaire like at all. Like I never played Microsoft Solitaire. Well, it depends which Solitaire you're talking about, right? I don't like any card Solitaires of any kind. Oh, okay. Because I never have. You know, like the Majang tile Solitaire. Not at all. I hate Majang tile. Well, I think I get it's a mine. It's not a huge pet peeve like lectern and podium, but people say Solitaire and they mean Klondike Solitaire. And really like Free Cell is also Solitaire, right? Solitaire is just a class of single player card games. Solitaire just means single player game. That's all it means, right? Anyway, but yeah, Klondike Solitaire, right? I guess Microsoft Solitaire rims not a fan. I mean, I'm not like a huge fan. I don't think it's bad. It's just I had better things to do like Microsoft cards. I think everyone has better things to do than to play Klondike Solitaire. I feel like Klondike Solitaire on Windows machines got the most play in the era when most people did not have access to the internet without dialing up somewhere. Pretty much, yeah. It's still on, it should still be on your computer if you have a Windows computer. Anyway, like the Microsoft App Store now or something. Like it's not that bad. You can get it. You can even get it at Microsoft's. It's there. You can even get Microsoft Solitaire on like your iPhone. This is Microsoft Solitaire app. It makes a lot of noise if you start it. Yeah, anyway. So what is Nerds? Nerds is everybody or up to six people in the case of this game. But I guess there's no reason it couldn't be even more people. All playing Klondike Solitaire. Simultaneously. So you have your deck and you have four free piles, right? That all start with a card on one card each. And those are like your free work piles that you can stack things vertically with the alternating colors just like you do in Klondike. And you have this Nerds pile, which is a set of face down cards from your deck. And one of them is face up. And the only thing you can do with the Nerds pile is take the top card, the face up card of the Nerds pile and put it in a legal spot and then reveal the next card of the Nerds pile. And of course your regular deck, you can draw three and then work with the top card of the three you drew and then draw three, work with the top card and eventually shuffle, right? Just like Klondike. So you're playing this, you know, it's Klondike Solitaire-ish game. And the difference is that the piles in which you sort of score out to where you start with, you know, you find an ace, you can put it out in those piles and then start scoring to them. Those piles are shared among all players. So you throw your ace of spade, you might have your two of spade getting ready to go. If someone else comes in with their two of spade and puts it on your ace of spade and now you got to hold your two of spade until another ace of spade shows up. Now everyone has all four aces in their 52 card deck. So it's guaranteed that eventually, right, you're going to be able to play out, right? But who's going to play out first is the question. Now, the brilliance of this online, this game, is that one is free, like you can just play like this, you don't have to pay anything. They couldn't charge any money for this game, so they don't. Yeah, I feel like if they wanted to, they could have charged like a dollar, 50 cents. Maybe. You know what they, if I were them, the only thing I would do is I would sell cosmetics. I mean, if you have other Zaktronics games that unlocks different cards. That is true. I saw like you, I think you were, Chris had the Shenzhen deck. I had the TIS 100 ones. Yeah, I don't own any of those Zaktronic games because they're not my jam. Like they're good games, but that's not the kind of game I like. But the magic of this game, like the reason we're saying you should play it is that it's really easy to teach and just like dive in. Like it's a good game to play when you're having that conversation with your friends of what game should we play? Like the top right corner of the screen after you open the game as a question mark, you click on that question mark, it brings up a screen with the instructions. It's literally like five sentences and that's all you need to know how to play. Yup. Five sentence instructions. It's actually surprisingly intense. Like you got to move quick. You've got to like be on point. This game is defensive. Who you're playing against. Yeah, if you're playing against Scott, you got to be on point. Like I will get an urge when I am surprised at how quickly that happened. But it just only emptied the nerds pile. Don't do anything else. Yeah. Sometimes, every now and then, my nerds pile is just like three face cards in a row. That happens. Yeah, it does happen. There's luck in this, like there's luck in all solitary card games. But the real magic of this game, like what I love about it is that it's got a ton of style coupled with you can see everyone else's mouse in real time. So that is a genius game choice there, right? Where anyone's mouse cursor is on the screen, you can see it. So when the game starts, it plays this quite long fanfare. Yeah, this fanfare that is announcing the game is about to start. And during this time, you can move your mouse around and everyone you can sort of gesture emotionally with their mouse arrow, right? Now I didn't know this, no one said anything. So when I was playing with Scott and a bunch of our friends on my laptop, it's just muted by default. My games are muted just because, yeah. And I didn't know it was playing music. So I just thought for the first couple of games that the game was just really slow to load for some reason. And then Scott started singing and I was like, what, what's wrong with you? What's going on? You need the sound on if you, you know, in this game, if you can. All races, no spaces. While you're playing, you see the mouse, you know, you can see where people are thinking about, right? If someone's mouse is like going, people tend to subconsciously move their mouse with their eyes, right? So if you see a mouse arrow like going across the middle, right, you can sort of tell that person's looking, right? Over there, maybe they've got something, you know, maybe you should, if they're hovering over this three a heart, maybe, then they suddenly the mouse, their arrow disappears, grab your five of heart, because they're about to drop a four on it. You can put a five down, right? The best moments are when you see some, like someone to lay down like a four of hearts and two or three people simultaneously as fast as possible, try to get that next heart over there. Right, well, I think this is also necessary. If you play this game in person, you're gonna have a lot of that experience where you get, you're physically picking up a card and trying to lay it down in a pile and someone's hand gets there faster and you're like, ah, you jerk, right? So they either had to sort of awkwardly put hands into the game, like, which is I think not a good idea. They just let everyone see everyone's mouse cursor. It works wonderfully. Yep. It's such a small thing, but it adds so much emotional value to like the play of the game. Like, you know who got in your way. Like you feel it viscerally the way you would in person. Everyone's mouse arrow is, it matches their color. So you can tell who it was. And you can do things like, I have moved my mouse and hovered over a card. I want someone else to play while yelling at them to play the two of diamonds. Jesus, so I can play my three and four. Yep. Something else in this game that I think is a negative is that you really do need to play it with a traditional computer mouse and you need to have an able... Oh yeah, like, I'm not good at this game. Like, don't think that I'm making an excuse here. I am dog shit at this game, but the first several times we played, I was even worse because I was trying to use a laptop trackpad. You cannot play this game with a laptop trackpad. You cannot use anything other than a computer mouse. Maybe some other device could do it, but it's really... Track vault might work, but like trackpad fart noise. You really need a computer mouse equivalent device and you need to be able to go fast with it and precise with it or you're going to get hosed in this game. It is not very accessible. You also need a... In that way. A large enough monitor to see the difference between spades and clubs. If your monitor's tiny, you will probably not be able to see that effectively. I guess that's also true. Like an older laptop would have trouble with this. If you have... There are no subtitles and there is a small amount of the language. So like when someone plays an ace to the middle, the game will say out loud the suit of that ace. Hearts. Like hearts. And that is extremely useful and important information because even if you don't have a heart to go out there right now, it's not reminding you to... You can play your hearts now. You're two of hearts that's been waiting. You know that other people are now playing hearts. And you could think, one's a lot. You can feel, I haven't heard hearts in a while, right? Like there isn't a new ace of hearts. Because then you think, I heard hearts a while ago. I have... You draw a six of hearts and you're like, when did I last hear hearts? You can process that very quickly to decide whether to drag that six of hearts out because what are the odds this up? It's good to go now. So originally, when we were playing this game, the one other drawback, it's not really a drawback because this game is like, there's a lot of luck involved in Solitaire card games. But there is luck involved. Like obviously skill will prevail in the long run. But your nerds pile is all kings and queens. You're gonna have a bad time. Yep. Yeah, your draw pile might just not have anything that can go into your buffer. Like it just might not be able to... There's several games where I'll be sitting there just drawing through my deck repeatedly and I can't do any move whatsoever. And I just have to wait for someone else to do something. Yep, it seems to have a fallback where if that happens for too long, it'll reshuffle everyone's decks around. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't say exactly what the rules about shuffling are. It just sort of happens sometimes. And I think it basically, my guess is that it does it when it can tell the game is in a state where no one can do anything, then it will shuffle because when I play with a lot of players, it usually doesn't shuffle. So Scott, did you ever think to just read the change log because there's an update from January 10th that explains all of this? What does it say? So on January 10th, they updated the game. I'm just gonna read these because these will give you a sense of, these are all excellent game design changes. One, increase the number of per player Tableau stacks to six in one to two player games and five in three player games. Oh. That reduces the amount of luck because when there's a small number of players, luck matters more. When there's a large number of players, there's more churn and you're more likely to be able to play effectively. Like even if you get behind. You're also playing over several rounds. You're playing to 100 points. So that also eliminates luck because a good player will just score more points over several rounds and get to 100. Oh yeah. And what they said, even if they might lose a round here or there. Exactly. The reason they made the change, quote, this changes the strategy a little, but it makes the speed of gameplay consistent regardless of the number of players. Oh, because you can get more cards out of your nerds and not just be blocked on like the King of Hearts that's sitting there. Two, they change the rules so that when players get stuck, we end the round instead of shuffling decks for a third time. But what causes the first two shuffles? It looks like if all players have shuffled through their deck three times. Okay. Something like that. I suspect certain people we were playing with don't go through their deck that quick. We could experiment. Yeah, so the controls, because it is a speed game so it's important to get the controls exactly right. So the first time I played, I got blitzed because what I was doing was my natural inclination of click on a card, drag it and let go. That is too slow. You will not win that way. Don't do that. I was twice as good when Scott pointed that out. What you do in this game, it's not obvious, is click on a card to pick it up. So click and now you have the card. You don't need to hold the mouse button down. You have the card and then click a second time to drop the card. If you wanna send the card back to where it came. So like let's say you grab a five of heart, you're going out to the middle to put it onto the four of heart. You're gonna click again and somebody else drops theirs first. They beat you in the speed game. Right click and that will teleport that five of hearts back to where it came from rather than having to like go and aim the mouse at its original location and regular click again or whatever. And the third thing you need to know about controls is that if you press the tab key on your keyboard, the one above the caps lock, it will draw from your regular deck. So you don't have to ever click on your regular deck. You can keep your mouse out in the play zone. Like hovering over that king of hearts that you're like just waiting for someone to play a jack so you can throw this out when the queen comes. Right, so there have been situations where for example, I've got a five of heart. I see someone else rim drops his four of heart in the middle on the three that I was waiting for because I don't know where my four of hearts is. It's hiding somewhere in the Nerth pile probably. So I'm dragging my five out there to put it down. But I remember that I saw the six in my deck. So while I'm dragging the five out to the middle, I'm hitting that tab key like rapid fire. And at the corner of my eye, I'm looking for that six to show up so that as soon as I see the drop that five down, I can come and grab the six and put it out there even though the six wasn't face up at the time. I've got it like reserved in that deck somewhere, right? I can go right back to it. If I, unless I modulus math my way away from it and I can't get it to show up right now, but gotta try anyway, you know, and usually it works. So yeah, this game is like a case study in minimalist reimagining of an existing traditional game. Like that's what I would- They used it to replace the experience they had playing the same game at lunch to play with themselves and they released it to the world. The only negative things I can say about this game besides the lack of accessibility is that it's a multiplayer only game effectively speaking. If you're gonna play single player, just play Microsoft Solitaire. There's no reason to- Yeah, come on. Or FreeSale or something. The only way to play multiplayer is to play with Steam friends. It works perfectly, but you can only be people you're friends with on Steam. So you open the game, one of your Steam friends opens the game and just joins your game or you join their game or whatever. That's the only way you can't play with random internet strangers. You can't play with people on not Steam. It's Steam only as far as I'm aware. So you have to be friends with people on Steam and get online with them at the same time and that is, I think, gonna be difficult for a lot of people. They won't be able to get the nerd experience. You're gonna need to be part of some gaming community, like, I don't know, a Geek Nights Discord or something. Say, hey, who wants to nerds get people who, it's free, but you have to have Steam at a computer with a mouse and a tab key on a keyboard. You gotta have to get people to be friends together on Steam and get them to open nerds at the same time. So I think that's a high bar for a lot of people, right? That's gonna keep them from playing this, even at $0 free. Yep. Of course, the alternative is online play with Rando's, which I don't know if that would ever be fine. Well, I'm just saying, they don't have it though. Whether it's fun or not, they don't have it. There's only one way. So that's that. Yeah, totally worth playing though. There's also no in-game communication that I'm aware of, so you sort of have to set up a voice chat on the side to get the full fun experience. Yep, because the primary, one of my relatives said, this is a common saying in Michigan, phrase slightly differently, but it comes down to people play card games so they have an excuse to complain about their hands. This game is just that, like when we play it, it's just, all of everyone in the table just alternately going, ugh, come on. No one's got a two of diamonds, not one of you fuckers has a two of diamonds. No, no. Scott, you have one right there. And it's like, oh, I'm not gonna play. You can definitely see, so strategy tips, right, that other than the speed tip of click to pick up, click to put down, jam your tab key a lot, is you have to maintain a one, a sort of some memory of what was in your deck the last time you shuffled through so that you could, you know what's in there so that like, you know, if it's time to play. Like, oh, I got a bunch of middling hearts. I got some faces like diamonds and clubs, okay. Right, and also there's like wide vision of like, cause it's the board, you know, so wide, you have to be able to see, you know, not necessarily, you don't really have to pay attention to other people's play areas that much, but the middle area and yours, you have to like keep all those cards in your vision and in your mind at once to see all the possible places a thing can go. And then of course, the scoring is every time you put a card in the middle area, you get a point and when someone calls nerds, any cards in your nerds pile that are left would be negative two points. So just all I do is I'll just pull things out. If I can take the nerds card and put it somewhere, I do it. You don't have to get it in the middle. Almost no matter what. Just get it into your, like into your tableau and you're done. It's gone, don't worry about it. Even if it's really bad, even if it seems like it's a really bad card to put into my tableau, like, let's say I'm sitting there and I've got an empty hole in my tableau, like any card could go there. Well, obviously you'd want to put a king there. But what if there's like a six of hearts that's been blocking your nerds pile? I'll put it to a hearts in that empty spot because even though it might be stuck there for a while and taking up a whole spot and a king would be the best to go there and not to like the worst. An ace of hearts is likely to show up. Yeah, but more importantly, he's not gonna be there that long. You are twice as likely to get rid of a nerd because either you'll be able to play that too, thus allowing the next nerd to go into that slot or the nerd you couldn't see before that's visible could now be played. Exactly, that next nerd being visible is like, well, now you've got another card you can see and move around and get rid of it. Like do whatever you can to see the next nerd even if it isn't good, solitary play. Yep, I do that constantly. It's very rare. The only time I won't do that is like if I see a move where like I can rearrange some cards and put the nerd card like under them or something like that. But other than that, yeah, always take the nerd card. Yep, and the last piece of advice is honestly, you really have to concentrate and give this game your complete attention. Like I know all the same strategy Scott knows, I'm just slower. Like that's it, I'm just slower at it. Yep, I do kind of want to, whenever it's safe to do so, get a whole bunch of decks of cards and play in-person nerds. Yeah. That'll be fun, you know, it'll be a little bit more accessible but a little bit less in some ways, right? The trickiest part is if two, like if two people try to throw a card down at the same time it'll have to be whoever's card is laying flat. I think the trickiest part actually is that the in-person people can make mistakes, right? Oh, people will make a ton of mistakes. Possibly do cheating. We see that was spotted, we see that with like every game involves real time cards. And in a fast game, you don't have time to check people for mistakes. You know, it'll just be found out at the end of the day or never. And the video game version that obviously can't happen it won't let you make an illegal move or an illegal card lay. Four people all try to lay the same card on the same spot. Someone had better frame timing and gets it, like that's it. Yep, as opposed to we hurt our hands or arguing or yeah, who knows what. I don't think you could play this with six people reasonably in-person. I'd like to try it. They did it in-person at their office, that's the only reason they spend during lunchtime. I guess the only reason that they made this to replace that. So my guess is that the reason they could is that they'd been playing it for so long and so intensely that they're like the pros. Like I think our group of friends could play this in-person with a little bit of practice. I just don't think most people could. Maybe. I think that would be a difficult ask of many groups of gamers.