 So anyway, we were at PAX PAX East. They all blur together at this point. There's just so many packs. And when we weren't enforcing and paneling, we were playing games and our good friends Chris and Anthony, they bring the games. They said something to me. And it was a combination of words that did not at first make sense. They said, Hey, I got a Friedman freeze trivia game if you want to play it. So that's apparently not entirely true, but it sort of is true. Right. So his thing rim does not like trivia games in general. And I understand why he's the reason so it's complicated. I really like trivia games and also really hate trivia games. I was far as the quiz ball. Here's the problem with trivia games, right? Is there games of? They're not games of skill. They're not games of decision making. They're not even games of luck. It's just you either of a lot of them, most of them, especially trivial pursuit, the worst of all are just binary. I get asked a question and you either know the answer and succeed or you don't, right? Someone either asks you, like, Oh, what's the first boss of Zelda one? And you know, like Aquaman, right? Or somebody asks you, you know, what year did Louis Armstrong release his first album? And what was it named? Yeah. It's like the Rangers games. I love the trivia. That's like, how many goals did so and so score in this important game? And it's multiple choice. You're like, Yeah, I got this. And then it's like a three B four C five D six. Yep. And it's like, you either know it or you don't. It's binary and it's not fun or exciting or, you know, and you barely, you don't even really learn anything valuable. I guess it's, it's, it's fun and exciting. If the domain of the trivia overlaps heavily with the domain of knowledge of all the players. Correct. That is the only situation where those games are fun. Yeah. But even if we go to nerd trivia, right? So I've been to nerd trivia is very few times because I don't like them, but also I don't drink. So I was at a non-drinky one. It was a nerd NYC thing. Remember? I remember that. And one of the questions was like, Fist of the North Star something. Exactly. That was in my domain. And I was like, Yeah, no one else knew what the hell, you know, Fist of the North Star was. We were the only table that got that one right. But then they were asking questions about like Star Trek or whatever other garbage. And I'm like, I don't think I remember one of the thrones and I'm like, I don't fucking know. One of the questions specifically was name all of the Ajahs in the wheel of time. And that was before we'd read that fucking book. And in fact, unless you've read a lot of the books, you wouldn't know the answer. Right. I'm like, I'm just like, it's not, it's not a fun game, right? So this trivia game, unlike garbage, like trivial pursuit, right, fixes those problems. Now it's not the only trivia game to fix those problems, right? Jack Fox fixes many of those problems by a using multiple choice and be bringing in humor. Even when you have no clue, the humor can make it valuable. There's also games like wits and wagers where you're sort of guessing like over under kind of things on numbers. So and then, you know, that way it's not just pure. Do you know it or do you not? And it's fun for everybody. Some games really focus the domain. So if you are in that domain, like Starcraft trivia and you play with all your Starcraft obsessed friends, right? Simpsons trivia. Exactly. So here's a game called fauna and fauna is a game by Friedman Fries, who makes all his games begin with F and usually have two words like fresh fish and power grid. Full kill shop. Power grid is actually called something else. It's not called power grid. We didn't hold show. His games come in green boxes, right? But anyway, the game called fauna is an animal trivia game and we didn't play fauna. What we played is a game called America, a party game, something close counts. So everyone, everyone sitting at the table knows about America because we're all American. It turns out we did not. We're mostly American, right? And even the people who are not American, you know, they were living in America for a significant period of time and new American things, right? So this game is the exact or close to or exactly the same mechanics as fauna, but has American trivia for the map of the United States and is made by someone else. So the concede is pretty simple. The execution is basically flawless. So the concede is that the only problem it has that other trivia games also have is that you will eventually go through all of the trivia cards and then the game is done for you. It is physically designed so that one, the person who chooses, you know, which of the two categories to use, which is a great mechanic to have in any trivia game, because it allows you to direct the domain, which adds a little bit of strategy. Unlike Trivial Pursuit, where you roll dice to determine the domain. The person who asks the question is not prevented from also trying to answer because of the physical design of how those cards work. That's true. They can't see the answer. That's a baby's first mistake if you make a trivia game. Yeah. And two, the physical thing you put them in has two sides and every trivia card has two sides. So if you, when you finish a card, you put it facing the same direction in the other side, it guarantees you will cycle through every single question exactly once and then hit the end. So you will never get the situation that a lot of trivia games will get into where you play it again and a question you saw three games ago pops up again, but there are questions you have not seen. Right? You keep the cards in the box. You can do it in Trivial Pursuit also if you keep the cards nicely in the box. Yeah, but this game has a, like that is part of the rules. Keep that shit. You own a copy and you're the only one who ever plays it. You will eventually see a card you saw the first time you played. You could even like put a slip of paper there to remember where that spot is. Yep. And then you'll be like, Oh, we've played this whole game and then you can sell it to someone else. I'm pretty confident by the time I got to the beginning again, because there's a lot of questions. I'd have forgotten the answers to a lot of them. That's also true. Cause there's a lot of questions in this box, but the conceit is that once the question is asked and you pick from one of two topics, the question will be about a thing like Pez or something. Something American. The Olympics. A sport. And there'll actually be three questions. The answer to one of them will be a year. The answer to one of them will be a number. And the answer to one of them will be a state. A state in the United States, like Connecticut or Oklahoma. Five guessing cubes. It's a cube game. And on your turn, you choose one of those questions and you put your cube on. What do you think the answer to that question is? Now, you don't have to even be exactly right. For example, if you think that, you know, the Mets won the world series in 1986, which they did, there isn't a spot. That's the thing I would not know. There isn't a spot just for 1986. There's a spot that's like 1985 through 1990. They're all ranges. They're all ranges. So you just put your cube there on 1985 through 1990, right? Now, the next person has to put their cube out. You take turns. So they're like, damn it. I knew it was 1986, but I can't go there. They can just put their cube next to yours and still get points because they're one away. Or they could go answer a different question. They might be like, well, they got a lot of points for picking 1986, but I know that, you know, the state the Mets play in is New York and they'll put their cube on New York. And it's like, aha, I got points for that. And now people go, oh, I know it's New York also, but they can't put their cube on New York. So they put their cube on adjacent states like New Jersey. So you get, I think, three points if you are correct. Yep. And you get seven points if you're correct. You get a bunch of points if you're correct. Yeah. And you get a smaller number of points if you are next to the correct answer. If you're more than one space away from the correct answer, then you get no points and you lose your cube. Yep. And you only get, and if you lose too many cubes, you either, you bump back out to, I think, three, like your reset. Or if you're at three or more, you get one cube from your lost pile back every round. Now, here's another benefit of this game. Usually in a game of trivia, when no one knows the answer because it's something ridiculous, like what year did something crazy happen? Like what year was Pez invented? Everyone's like, I don't fucking know. Right? One person's like 1976 and someone else like 1908. It could have been 18 something. You don't even know. They had sugar then, right? It's like, uh, right. So everyone starts guessing, but you can vote and you can say, you know what? I think nobody got the answer exactly right. And you can also say, I don't think anyone's even going to be near the answer. And if you say that and it turns out to be true, you get points if everyone else is actually wrong. So you can just bet on people being wrong when no one knows the answer, which gives a strategy and fun element to questions that are bullshit. So they're not just complete wastes like they are in trivial pursuit. The scope of the questions is great. So like the number part, it's a scale and it starts like you can bet like zero one, two, three, but then the scale gets bigger and bigger. So on the top half, the gradations are 100,000, a million, 10 million, a hundred million, a billion. Right. So if you think it's between a hundred million and a billion, you just vote on a hundred million spot and you're good to go. You'll be exactly right if you're right. The years go to like, to the year the game was made and they started 1492. Right. Yeah. The billion spot, the spots of the very end actually count for like up to infinity or to negative infinity. So like if you think it was sometime before 14, whatever, you just vote on 14, whatever. And that goes all the way back to, you know, the creation of the universe. Now in terms of play, the way this ends up shaking down is that one, a lot of people will act like they know the answer. And then on the turn they'll be like, ah, I don't actually know. Yep. And two, you get context from other players, which is where a lot of the magic happens. Because even if you don't really know, like one of the questions that we were all, we were all super fucking dumb about this. We were super stupid. But it was where did, where did Jaws take place? Like, where was that book slash movie set? Yeah, we were so sure it was like Jersey. Yeah, it's definitely not. I'm like, it was not a southern tropical beach, right? Because you've seen the movie, but it was, it was still a beach in the summer. Right. Clearly Atlantic waters. It wasn't beautiful Pacific waters. So we're all like, ah, Jersey. That's it's warm enough. You're going to the beach. It felt like Jersey, you know. So half of us kind of knew, or at least thought we knew, and we're very confident, like put our guys right down there. Other people saw like, oh, both of them are guessing like the Jersey area. And they seem really confident. So I'm going to go to like Pennsylvania, which is right, or Delaware, right? Pennsylvania. Right. Well, yeah. It's right next to Jason. Right. It's next to Jersey. They were just trying to get points by putting their cubes next to the right answer. But in another one, like what it was, I think the question was literally what stage is the Pez Museum in? We're like, right. So someone hazards a guess and then other people are like, yeah, that feels right and guessing nearby. There is actually in Connecticut where I lived a Pez visitor center and a Pez factory, I think. And you can see like billboards for it. And there was an incident in high school where a kid went there and he brought a shit ton of Pez to high school and he's handing out sacks of Pez to everybody. It was crazy. So I vote, I voted Connecticut with confidence. I was like, yeah, Pez Museum in Connecticut. And apparently that's crazy wrong. There's only a Pez visitor center and factory in Connecticut and the Pez Museum is somewhere else. So basically what this means is that even if there is a huge disparity in knowledge, because some of the questions like around the Supreme Court of the Olympics, it ranged from someone who like literally knows everything about the Olympics to someone who literally has no idea about any history. Doesn't know what the Olympics is. Yep. And they can both play this trivia game together and have a good time. Right. Because if you don't know the trivia, you can use, you can play a game of cube placing strategy instead, you know, figuring out who do you think is right and just putting your cube next to theirs because you can't put out, you can't put out all three cubes at once. You got to put one cube at a time and take turns. Yep. You go around. So if you know a lot about the Supreme Court and you know the answer to two of them, then you're thinking now is which one of these questions will no one else know? So I'll get a second go to put my answer on the second correct one. The other thing is that any cubes you put out that don't score any points. You lose those cubes and you've only got five cubes because one of your cubes is a scoring cube on the scoring track. And then you only get one cube back from the graveyard per turn. So you don't want to all out. Yeah. So you do want to take at least one risk per turn because you're going to get that cube back. But if you take two risks per turn, you're sort of limiting your ability. So like there were times where like I could guess and get a point, but I used up all my cubes because you're always going to have at least three cubes no matter what. Yep. I've noticed people who went bankrupt early and were basically stuck on three cubes for the game almost never. I don't think they ever won this game. Yeah. Well it means they also put out a bunch of wrong cubes. Yeah. But usually they put out a bunch of wrong cubes like way early and never recovered. So it's like it's simultaneously this trivia game, but it's also like a real board game of like place cubes for optimal point scoring. Right. And you're sort of balancing these two things. So you got interesting stuff going on two different ways. Yep. So this game saw a lot of table actually played it like two or three times at a pack. So it was worth packs time. Yep. I played it. I want to say three times. I think three times it packs. Yeah. And I would have played it again, but we ran out of packs. It's also great because it's super accessible to people who aren't super hard gaming types. They might miss out on that cube point placing strategy, but everyone else is going to get into it like real hard. But the trivia part is like anyone can get into. And since if you're like us living in the U.S., you're going to know stuff, right? The other original version, which is animal trivia, might be harder for a lot of people. Some of our friends would know a lot about that. And some of our friends would not. But everyone is going to, you know, because we're Americans, there's going to be cards you know and cards you don't. But you're going to have some connection to the game if you live in or are from this place. But this mechanic is I mean the only you could make other you someone should make many, many trivia games using the same mechanic. Dude, if I could, I would just license it and make a series of games. The problem is in our state per city. I'd make one. The problem is like if we did like video game trivia, right? What are you going to put for the map? If we did nerd trivia, like what's the map going to be? We could do a number and a year for nerd trivia. But what's our map going to be? Yep. You might and if you just have three number things or like then it would be it would lose a lot of its magic. Right. You need to have some sort of map and money would be taken a game like you could do Lord of the Rings trivia and have a map of a map of Middle Earth. But it's nothing how much how much Lord of the Rings trivia can you make? Can you make enough to fill a box? I don't know. Confidently if you include a summer fucking rillian right and there's not enough locations in Middle Earth to you have to be really fine grained with the locations and only so many of them are plot points. So it's like you need like you know a really complex universe to compare to the route to get as complex as the real universe. I would market this to local color types. So there'd be a New York City one. It's a map of New York City broken. You could do a New York City one broken up into neighborhoods. Absolutely. You could make a New York City one. Every state every city that's got some history basically every single city in like New England. It might get boring because if you do like New York State like you're only going to have so many topics that are interesting and if you start doing ones that cover the boring areas it's like all right a bunch of worthless cards. But as we found actually the boring ones for America ended up being real interesting because even if like it was like Pez like other than you no one at any like anything we didn't do a lot of this. But if you actually you're supposed to read the cards in completely out loud at when you're answering after you're revealing the answer to teach you stuff and then you'll learn things. Yeah. We just read the answer like I was this day we didn't read the text underneath because we were running low on packs time. Yeah but if you do read the text underneath you will get fascinating and interesting information and educate yourself. So yeah if you avoid trivia games you know trivial pursuit doesn't explain its answers says here's the answer. Also we did not really encounter questions that were just broken or wrong which is a common problem. There is on the questions about the states. It does split it up. It tells you in advance whether it's the east half of the US or the west half. I think Mississippi River as the dividing line. I think at least three times. I think a I rally would have rather had those hints not be there. Yep. And B at least one card only one card we saw it was actually wrong. It the hint was west and the answer was Easter price verse. I forget. But at the same time I feel like that might be oh so that might be good for people who don't know a lot about American geography. But there are two sides to the board. The front side names all the states with their two letter acronym or initialisms. The bag does not have that only with the blank side only side only blank side only. But this game promote only no babies super fun. Like we really enjoyed playing this app. This is a game that I would like to actually get and bring to like Thanksgiving with family. Yeah. Right. Like bring this because it's a real game that like I would enjoy playing but also a game that everyone else would enjoy playing who's not game. This has been Geek Nights with rim and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music can't leave a website for web design and brand OK 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. 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.