 So, there's a game called Traders of Genoa, but now it's just called Genoa, right? I played, there was an original printing in the U.S. that said Traders of Genoa on it. I played that a long time ago, back in Beacon, Poughkeepsie actually at Moz. And then- For some reason, I didn't go to that Moz meeting. Yeah. That guy, I remember he went to his apartment, he was there, he played it with us, but it was brought by this red-haired guy you didn't see. Wait, the apartment with the bird? Yes. Okay, I like that. We played Shadows over Camelot and Starfarers. And then they were like the two cool people in town who then disappeared. But there was another cool person who you did not see that was there. The red-haired guy. He was born to own, yeah. I never played a game with him. Yeah, he owned Traders of Genoa and he played at that time. How come the three cool people literally disappeared and we had no contact info? That's what you get for not going every time. No, but they disappeared and somehow we had no way to contact them. I think I have a business card from one of the guys. You should email them and be like, hey, you're still in Poughkeepsie. Anyway, so I played the game then and the whole gist of the game is that it's a game where all the bits in the game are tradable, right? So it's like, you know, you play Monopoly and it's like, you're not really allowed to just trade money with people, right? It's like, you can, I guess it's in the rules. You can trade properties and it's like, you know, a lot of games that have trading have really reset, even have trading at all. Like settlers, you can trade resources for resources in a very constrained Yes, there are very few games that have ultra free form trading and traders of Genoa also does not have completely free form trading. You can only trade with the person who's turn it is, right? And you can only make trades that are binding and immediate. The only other kind of trade you can make that's binding is if somebody is going to go into a workshop, and this will make no sense. If you've never played it, you can trade with them for the goods that workshop would produce when they go into it, right? So other than that, you can't really do anything. But the interesting thing is all the different pieces in the game. You know, the cardboard pieces, cards, tokens, money, recent goods, you know, all the different kinds of bits. And there's a bunch of them. There's like four or five, six different kinds of bits can all be traded. So you can be like, I'll give you three dollars and a tree for your contract and a beer. You know, you can really go crazy with that. And that is the core of the fun and awesomeness of this game. So it's had a recent reprinting in the United States and where it's just called Genoa instead of trades in Genoa. But it is the exact same goddamn game, as far as I can tell, only newly printed with new art, that kind of thing going on bigger. I think it's like a larger in its construction. You know, I have no way to tell bigger board, bigger pieces. I think I'm not 100 percent sure. But it's the same game and it's just as fun and we own it and we've now both played it many more times. Now, the gist of it is pretty simple. You basically it's hard to really explain a lot of the bits without looking at a board. But basically you move around this board like you have a trail you leave like a slime trail of traders and every turn you're like Trader, not Trator. I could move it here or move it there. What do you guys want me to do? And Scott will be like, I'll give you a beer and five bucks if you move it there and let me do the thing. Right. Because basically you move this train of discs around the board and they all have to be in a line. But you could sort of, you know, you follow a path. Think of it as there is a guy. He's walking around town doing errands. In one day he can walk five squares, right? And in those five squares, he's going to go into certain buildings and do errands in each of those buildings that he walks into, right? One person is controlling the guy who walks around town and he moves all five spaces. Every time he goes into a building, one of the players at the table gets to do the errand in that building, but only once. So you can't normally do two different buildings in the same turn. If I do the brewery, that's it for me this turn. I can't also do the city hall in the same turn, right? So even though I'm controlling the guy walking around the town, only one of the buildings that I walk into, I can do myself. The other buildings I walk into, other people at the table are going to do those buildings, which means I need to get them to pay me to let them do those buildings or I can just end my turn immediately. Now, if I haven't taken my action yet, like I'm the trader doing the thing, if I haven't taken my action yet, I could always be like, well, I'm going to use it myself unless someone else gives me another bid. But if I'm going to go into a place and someone actually does offer me, like offers me something, I have to take it or end my turn. Right, like if no one at the table wants anything that's adjacent to rim, right? And I say, rim, I'll give you $1 for the thing next to you. He either has to say yes and let me have it or do it himself or end his turn. Those are the only three options available to him. Now, the other cool thing about this game is, like Scott said, you can trade anything for anything and there's a spatial clue-like component of what's close to what and moving around and there's all these different bits. Like you can get a contract, which has, like there's things that have to do with having like a number of contracts adjacent to each other or like deals where like get these particular combinations of goods and then cash them in at this place or have the trader go between this place and this place in one turn. So you have hidden information of here are my goals that will get me a bunch of money and everyone else has their own hidden goals and you're all trying to negotiate to maximize your own goals and minimize the goals of others. Oh, but did I mention that the way to win this game, the only thing that matters is at the very end, how much money do you have? Right, that's all that matters at the end. And of course, at the end of the game, some of the things you have like contracts can be converted into money straight up depending on what you have. But a lot of the things are worth no money at the end of the game. Like if you just have a beer sitting there at the end of the game, it's worth nothing. There might be some tie breakers involving things like that but I'm not sure what they are. I don't have the rules in front of me. So really it's all about just getting as much money as possible and all these other bits are just means of getting money. Now a lot of them, if you get them in the right combinations in time, could be worth like a hundred bucks. So like if you're, if Rimm is like he really wants a beer, I see he has a large contract. I know that with that beer, he could potentially get a hundred bucks. So I'm gonna be like, Rimm, this beer is basically what's it actually worth in the game overall, maybe 10, who knows what. But to you, at this moment in time, it is worth $100. So if you want it, you're going to have to pay out the nose, right? It's like it's worth at least 50, right? Cause that'll be sort of fair, but I want to win. So I'll give you, you give me 64, right? And that's the kind of shit that goes on in this game. But it's like, oh, if someone else wanted the beer, I'd be like, oh, 10 bucks. Cause I know that you only have a small contract, which means the most you can get from this beer would be 30, you know? So that all that kind of stuff comes into play where you're looking at what the other guy has to figure out how much the thing is worth to them, as opposed to how much something is worth on a global marketplace. So what's interesting is that this game shares two very important aspects with another game that we play a lot. And I think we've talked about on the show, modern art. One, one of the mediums you use for bidding and trading is also victory points in both games. And two, both games get around the settler's problem of it's not actually, like no one actually wants to trade or do business. Because in both this game and modern art, the mechanics basically force you to trade and do business. I think the other game that does that, of course, is Bonanza. Bonanza too. Right? It's people, if you're playing. But you're not trading victory points in that game. Right, no, that's true. It only shows one aspect. It forced you to trade, right? It does. Is that if you have a game where there is trading, people, if it's just free form trading, there is no reason to trade with anyone unless you're ripping them off. Therefore, right, if all players playing are smart and it is not possible to rip anyone off because anyone will reject a rip-off trade, no one will trade. But trading is fun and that's part of the, that's why settler's isn't fun or very fun when you have good players because no one trades and the whole fun of the game is like brick forward. Oh, all right. So in order to have a fun game for smart people with trading that is fun, you need something to force people to make it a good idea to trade even if you're not getting ripped off. And what the Genoa does to make that happen is they give you multiple opportunities when it's your turn to where, sure, your turn could end right here, but if you go and you walk your little guy and you move the tower into other buildings, allowing other people to run errands in those buildings, they will pay you and you will get resources this turn right now that you could use. If you end the turn, you're not getting anything for the rest of this turn. So even though you're helping other people, you will also be helping yourself in this turn versus ending it right now. And if everyone just went into one building and ended their turn on every single action, if one person didn't do that, that person would be pretty much guaranteed to win because all the extra stuff they'd be getting. So it's a good idea to let people pay you to do things. Games like this really put into stark contrast games that involve trading, but either don't facilitate people actually trading or the other way around, they know when trades and settlers, if it turns into the Vote Who Wins game where people trade or don't trade based on who they like or the politicals or the heuristics, are you reading the Richard Garfield book yet? No. Can I start using the terminology from it instead of our own terminology? I'm gonna start reading it soon because I just finished the book. Because what we call Vote Who Wins games, he calls the chip taking game. Same thing. Well describe the chip taking game. Is it is one of the simple example game theory games? So the chip taking game shows how some games because of the mechanics. Now here's another thing, particularly this is a flaw in games that involve direct fucking, which is what we call, he calls it something else. But direct fucking is a game like Vinci where I can attack Scott the player directly in the game. That is true. That has a lot of Vote Who Wins aspects. So games that have direct fucking tend to have Vote Who Wins ideas. Right, because if you can choose, if you're playing say three, four players, you choose who you attack and whoever you attack, you're basically voting for them to lose. Now they're falling behind. So here's the chip taking game. Every round, everyone has an action. Well, what do you have at the beginning? Yeah, so everyone starts with 10 chips and on your round, you choose one person, take a chip away from them and throw it in the garbage. Whoever is the last man standing with any chips wins the game. So wouldn't you just always, so round one, how many people are playing? Let's say you, me and Scott Johnson. Three people. Okay, so round one, I take from Scott Johnson. Round two, you're not gonna take from Scott Johnson because you're already down one. You're not gonna take from yourselves, you take from me. And then Scott Johnson takes from you. So basically whoever went, depending on the turn order, we're basically, so we're all down to one. And then it's someone's turn. I guess I went first, right? So now I'm voting either rim or Scott Johnson will be eliminated. And then so I eliminate, say, Scott Johnson, then on your turn, you eliminate me or I eliminate you. And then Scott Johnson eliminates me. Now look, now here's the problem. You iterate through that. The game is either set or if it's arbitrary. What if it's simultaneous voting to which chip to remove? Yeah, but even then. Cause then round one, we all reveal our votes. Me and you both vote Scott Johnson. Now he's down two. So then in the second round, well you're not gonna vote Scott Johnson again. You're gonna vote me and I'm gonna vote you. Cause we just both voted Scott Johnson. So think about this. But Scott Johnson's gonna pick one of us again. So think about this. He already picked one of us. He's probably gonna pick the other one of us. In a game like this now, the person who's ahead isn't necessarily the person with the most chips cause that's the person who's going to be fucked the most. Right, you would be thinking at least one or two rounds ahead of who's someone gonna vote for, right? Cause you know, in round one, we both voted for Scott Johnson. He's down to eight. He voted for me. So I'm down to nine. You're still at 10. So I'm gonna vote for you. And he's probably also gonna vote for you. And then you're gonna vote for me, right? So then we're all done. So, but then I'd know that you were doing that. So the determining factor of the game is either arbitrary political bullshit or attack or him. He's gonna win. Right, but also you get a little bit, especially when the chips are getting low. Like when someone has two chips, suddenly it becomes the stick game of unstable state because if you only have two chips, you could theoretically be eliminated that immediately. Well, no, then it doesn't become the stick game. It becomes the game is already over game. Or it becomes the brinksmanship game of, Scott, if you don't attack him, he's gonna win. So, which is a problem in many games. I'm at two and you're both at one. The only chance you guys have of winning is if you both vote for me. Anyway, the terminology that Garfield uses in this book. One of you will die because I'm attacking only one. Is that these many games just boil down to like the mechanics don't matter. The actual decisions that matter are just which player do I attack? Yep. Who do I fuck? And that's basically deciding which of the other players will lose and your own fate is out of your hands. Unless you would obviously pick the person most likely to vote for you, but that's really all there is to it. So, once again, just to kind of show how cool this book is, just because it gives us terminology for all this stuff. Look at Settlers. I used to win Settlers a lot in our crew before everyone got really good at Settlers. And the reason I was able to do it is that Settlers breaks down in that whoever's ahead, whenever the seven comes up, everyone tries to gang bang on the person who's winning so they don't win to give everyone else a chance to catch up. So the key to the game was to lay low and be in second place with a non-obvious way to jump ahead at the last second and win. Stiffy cards, longest road out of nowhere. Being close to having longest road and largest army, but somehow other people don't notice because, and here's the way- You don't actually have them in front of you? The game has, other players have a poor model in their head of who's actually winning. And that is the key in Traders of Genoa. It is really fucking hard to tell who is actually winning because somebody might be like hundreds of dollars behind you, but they might be having a fistful of completed large contracts. They just haven't cashed in yet. And as soon as you get near via Palletti, boom, they just lay it out, boom, boom. And they're just, you know, cashing them in big time right at the end of the game. And there's nothing you can do about it. Here's where the game breaks down and that it's a little not fun. The big contracts are worth 100 dinars, do-kits, whatever, whatever the money is. Now the trouble with that is that these big contracts, there's four places where you can cash them in. Any time a player wants to go there and has at least three goods, everyone assumes pretty much correctly that they have a big contract and demands a large portion of the profits. So it's a very predictable and unfun element of the game. There's no way to really bluff that. Well, but the point is, is that that person already paid out a whole bunch along the way to even get those goods unless they were really lucky and the contract itself. So it's like then to pay out a huge portion of the profits on the final end, it's like on the large contract, how much do you actually make? So, you know, if you have to, you know- Oh, but I'm saying that the act of going forward, cashing it in is not fun because- That's true. Among smart players- And you don't even get a contract, what's it called? So the only reason people go after those, or the only way people go after them is going after the things that let you teleport somewhere automatically. But then people realize that that is the game determiner, determiner. So people now treat that the same way they treat the corners. And you can see how the game, that the negotiations around that, especially among smart, but not necessarily well-versed in the game players, is just not super fun. It's super fun among really apt players who are also smart. It's not fun among inexperienced players who are smart, but it is fun again if there's a few inexperienced and un-smart players. And you're taking advantage of the nubs. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know- But that gets into the classic example. And then there's the whole thing where, like, there'll be a nub doing something dumb, and they'll be helping out, say, Rym, and I'll try to educate the nub and say, look, you're about to give Rym all this whatever. Guys, advice, if Scott's telling you what to do, he's lying and trying to win. Advice, Rym is the person who lies, and Scott never lies. And you know what the result of that is? Someone other than me and Scott wins a game like that. Possibly. But then I win because- That's because you didn't listen to me. Yeah. If I tell you that the move Rym's about to make is going to earn him that much money and that you should ask him for- Dude, it's only like four victory points, and Scott has a fistful of beer and whatever, and that's how these games work. Yeah, it's only beer. You can't do anything with just beer. You know what? If you're a German-style, Euro board gamer type and you like these kinds of games, Jenna was on the, you might as well, own it list. Yeah, I mean, the fact that you can trade anything for anything, you know, makes this game a whole lot of fun for the vast majority of people who like to play strategic games, you know, and it can only really be unfun for you if, A, you don't like trading at all, B, you're, it's basically everyone at the table is me and Rym, me and Rym, or, and you all play like assholes and everyone knows everything that's going on. Now it's deceptively, despite looking like one or- Or C, none of you are smart enough to actually understand the game. The game looks complex like N-Tacker. If you just look at it. No, it's one of those deceptively simple games. Yeah, if you have someone else teach you the rules, the game is ridiculous, simple to learn. I hate all these, that's one- Now the game sucks to learn if nobody at the table already knows how to play. That's one thing I really hate about a lot of games lately I've noticed is like, you know, Agricola, or this, or- Yeah, if someone else teaches you how to play, it takes 10 minutes, it's great. But even if someone teaches you, it's like they teach you so many things because you can't leave anything out, right? So they teach you all these rules when it takes a long time, no matter how, even if you're super fast learners and they go over all these different bits and cards and all these things. And then when you actually play, it's like, oh, this is really actually fast and simple. And most of those rules I had to learn don't come into play very often. And when they do, I sort of know them now and it makes sense. And this game is way easy to play. Well, you know what's interesting. But explaining the rules was not easy at all. One of the examples in Richard Carfield's book that I never thought of because I don't- It's like hard to teach easy to play. Because I don't like, I used to play games like Cribbage Bridge and whatever, and I really don't like games like that anymore. I like hearts inexplicably, and I enjoy Euker, but I only enjoy Euker if I cheat at it. But anyway, so the idea of the people who- Is every show about board games actually gonna be a review of this stupid book now? Until you read it, and I can just start using the terminology from the book. Granted, I like our term direct fucking more than his term, so I think I'm gonna keep using that one. But so if people who teach that game, who understand that game, will usually also teach bidding systems in Bridge, which are the systems of bidding to indicate to the other player whether or not you have a good hand in what they should do and all that bullshit, which is crucial to playing Bridge- Without cheating. Yeah. But at the same time, really, really confuses new players and really obfuscates what the core mechanics of Bridge are. And really don't, you know, I don't even really know the full rules of Bridge, but like the scant details I do know, they make it seem like, wow, that's fucking stupid, right? It's like if there's a special signaling system where like you can't communicate, but you can bid. So if I bid 10, and that's a signal to my partner to do a certain thing, now don't the other players know what that signal is to because it's a well-known system? Yes, so then the game, so then it's Street Fighter. You have this high-level game of using increasingly complex bidding systems or using a bidding system to bluff so the other team... But then wouldn't my partner know? Not if I'm trying to bluff and you know, you're not allowed to communicate. So I try to fool the other players that are on the other team, but I end up fooling my own partner and we fuck ourselves. You gotta trust the other player. Yeah, we mean trust. That they understand the bidding systems enough. It's, it's, you know, it's like, I think it's just nonsense. To me, I'll be honest. Games like Bridge are taking a deck of cards and doing too much with it. Yeah, I get that. I haven't, I don't know the rules of Bridge and I know a lot of... I used to play a lot. There is a lot of advanced Bridge out there. So I store the water with... Hard-sugar-risk-cribbage. But I just don't know enough about it to really make a, you know, an informed judgment. I just, I don't enjoy games like that anymore. I don't enjoy trick-taking games with bidding systems. I like Hearts too. Yeah, but Hearts is also, we get to, have we ever done a show on Hearts? I mean, we can do a whole show on Hearts. I could do a whole fucking show on Hearts. You shut your mouth. The Microsoft Hearts. Afrontrookrew.com archive. Hearts. Hearts. We did a special on it on September 11th, 2007. There you go. Huh. He knows it's already like two years old. I know. Hearts is a good game. Now it's seven years old. Anyway, I think we're done. You know what? It's, it's, if you care about German style board games, you should own Geno. Yeah. If you're the entry shelf, this is like there with Puerto Rico. Well, this is like the second, this is the second tier, right? Like if you were already, you know, if you're hardcore in the European board games, this is the second tier game. You got to get it. But if you're a dabbler or a newbie or whatever, this is not the first tier. So it should not be one of the first games you buy. You should, but like once you've already covered like the A plus games and you're looking for more, then Geno is one of the first games you should go start to look at. I mean, it's board game geek rank 172 out of many thousands. So that is not bad. I actually really kind of want to play End Decker again now. Oh, with the huts? The huts are the only good part. No, fuck the huts. You think it's, you say the huts are the good part. One, they're not. And two, how come you always fuck up the huts? I'm not just saying I'm good at the huts. I just really like that there's little huts and they're hidden and you sort of walk these dudes over to go investigate. The game's all about risk management. It's physically fun, the huts. And you know what? All the End Deckers taught me in my entire life of playing it with smart people is that one, humans fucking suck at pattern recognition and they fucking suck at managing risk. 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.