 So QE That's what the game stands for the game. Just called QE like you'll hear Table top nerds who found out about this game or know about it usually because of the Kickstarter They'll just say QE like hey you want to play QE? What is QE? It is Quantitative easing which is a word. I've heard before but what does it mean? So the gist of the game what is quantitative easing mean if someone says that in real life? It actually means pretty much the same thing that happens in the game. Okay, so In this game you are all sovereign nations and you're in charge of those sovereign nations sovereign banks Okay, you can print money. I'm like the chairman of the Fed. Yeah, you can print money. Cool You can just be like you can print infinite money This is imagine playing Monopoly where everyone has infinity dollars to spend all the time How is this game not stupid? So this game's core can see this is this is one of those like toy games This is a very very very very simple game that Largely serves to illustrate a couple of interesting points. I'm asking these questions facetiously. I play. Oh, yeah Yeah, I played and partly just to make this experience happen so basically you are a sovereign nation you can print unlimited money and You take turns look as a group a series of failing giant companies will appear and You bid on who is going to bail them out? So whoever bids the most money is so basically there's a company going out of business say an airline and The UK and Germany and the US and Japan are all like, all right We're gonna bail out this, you know airlines so they don't go out of business and then everyone Says how much money they're gonna spend to bail them out and the company says oh Well that US is gonna spend the most to bail us out We will move our airline to the US and be bailed out by them because if we went to these other countries They would give us less money and that's that so you just go around one like it'll be a player's term Don't forget into all the details that we will be able to explain all the details There's not that much to this game now, but everyone's secretly bids one player will openly bid and that sets the lines They write on number on a piece of paper it can literally be Any number any positive it could be it could be one it can't be zero It's not positive it could be 999 it could be 69 it could be 420 Kickstarter shows someone writing two billion It could be 666 it could be a hundred infinity. It could be any positive integer Everyone else I guess infinity is not an integer, but you know you get the idea Everyone else bid secretly the person who publicly bid then takes everyone secret bid looks at them all Determines the winner based on who bid the most Gives them that card that they just bid on which is worth victory points at the end of the game And that's it you just keep doing this Yeah, all you're doing is there's a card that is worth victory points You bid a positive integer of money you have infinite money on it Whoever bids the most gets the victory points and every turn one player sees all the bids But no one else does right so you have some amount of information because every turn there's a one public bid And every turn you know what you bid and you know whether you won or lost and you know what the public bid was And on your turn when you're making the public bid you see all the other bids So you get information about what other people are bidding but not all the information I saw rounds where I wrote 50 and I was the one like running the auction and the bids I received range from zero to Alright, you can do zero when it when you're not the public bid. No, so That's it. You just bid on these things printing unlimited money until they've all been auctioned off Right, so the things you're bidding on are worth victory points at the end of the game Some of them get bonus victory points if you make sets or if they match your country It doesn't matter has a particular kind of thing They're trying someone's like the airline specialist. They get more points from airlines Whatever the point is you bidding on things that are worth victory points But at the end of the game after all the things have been bid on whoever has the most victory points wins except Whoever bid the most total money is eliminated from the game before you score, right? So whoever is second place wins Well, it's boot a Babel Well, it's actually possible that you would bid the most money and not have the most victory point That is easily possible But basically so because you got to imagine well if it was just most victory points wins You would try to bid is the highest possible number every round You just try to bid as close to infinity as you can every round To guarantee that you're winning the victory points and at the end you win So I guess the fiction here is that whoever was eliminated printed so much money that they ruined their own sovereign nation's currency Well, you might think well, here's my strategy. I'll just bid Second, you know and every time I'm bidding on something I'll bid less Than the person who's going to bid I'll figure out based on the info. I know what the high bid is going to be You know one under that good fucking luck having played this game with smart people Well, if you do that If you always bid like a dollar under the high bid guess what you won't win any victory points Someone else with the high bid will take the victory points You need to make the high bid and win some victory points But you need to make those high bids in all those high bids when added up you got to make them low right And that way you actually acquire some victory point cards with some bids But when other people bid and acquire victory point cards That you want them to be spending more than you're spending when you're getting victory point cards But just this concept of whoever spent the most is eliminated then we score is so Well, it prevents the game from being stupid and allows you to have this mechanic of bid Whatever the hell you want because it's like, okay. I'll bid whatever hell I want Two billion. Oh, you just lost the game because now we're all bidding like 50 and 100 It'll never add up to two billion ever But it ends up being really fun as a toy game Like I want to play this again And I feel like it's something I'll bust out periodically because it doesn't take long to play at all And you can be clever like in our first playthrough We saw such things as someone made the opening bid one dollar So no one else had any measure to gauge how much to bid would be great Is if like the person to your I forget right or like whatever, you know Like if you're the first person to bid openly and one of the bids is like ridiculously high and it's secret But you know and you give that person the winning thing and then you it's like they bid a billion You start bidding like next round. You're just like a hundred million a hundred You could just also bid high numbers knowing you'll never have more money than that person Right, but you'll totally win all these victory points Right and if they keep going if they keep going with the number they started with like billions and billions It's like all right It's it's cool though. Like I'm glad this game like the Kickstarter succeeded It's it it's such a simple toy game And I feel like if I ever give a lecture where I need to illustrate these kinds of principles Right, this is way better than the dollar auction. Yeah, I really like these games where Uh buddha bevel was the same one. Yeah, it's like your tower of the gods build a tower Whoever builds the highest tower wins, but whoever has if your tower is too high God is offended And you lose so it's the highest tower that does not offend god from being too tall And it's like I really like that like oh, it's a race, but you don't want to be too fast It's a contest, but you don't want to be too strong. You want to be instead You want to be the strongest within a limit instead of a rubber band or a catch-up mechanism It's just a hard and punishing gate at the very end of the game Yep, it's like, you know, can you step on the accelerator? You know, how hard are you gonna step on it step on it as hard as you can But then hit the brakes and don't step on it too hard Right, it's like you got to push it down faster than the other guy like a game of chicken But not too hard so that it breaks But like that's the whole game. It's so simple I think the only other mechanic is whoever bid the least money you get some bonus points There's another bonus bonus we talked about once once each go around you want to bid zero Once because you get a bonus point for bidding zero once per go around so like we played four players So basically on 25 of the turns Uh, I bid zero so that I could collect those bonus points. I think I won You pretty much got to do I think I did win well because I forgot to do that one round Oh, I almost forgot to do it one round and then I remembered Actually, I didn't know the rule until round two, but luckily I bid zero in round one What was also fun is people who did not want to win an auction would often just write some bullshit on their cards Oh, I mean, yeah, we basically had a rule of if there isn't a clear number on your card Then it's a zero. Yep. So I would draw like a middle finger Yeah, or a genital talia Yep, those things happen a lot of bids of 69 I won with some bids of 69 and 420 and some other nice bids But it was an interesting experience Like I enjoyed this experience and I would play it again It's a high fun factor per second of time played and it's fast the problem I think the only negative thing about this game is that if you're looking for optimal play Right, there will be there has to be so much You could do probably like a doctoral mathematic thesis on optimal play in this game some game theory Your phd level stuff comes down and actually a lot of ways and to actually implement that math In real time as you play this game unless you're some sort of actual genius It would be impossible and if you did play with such a genius It would be frustrating as hell and eliminate all the fun Well, much like tim buck 2 This game would be very different if there was a player aid where you could keep track of information Oh, indeed And I would like to try playing it with that to see what happens because tim buck 2 That would eliminate the memory aspect which would be fine But but it might cause an analysis paralysis problem. Yeah, I don't think you want to well I don't think you have the math to like exactly calculate your you know, whatever Yeah, I could use it to make some pretty intense heuristics though. I think I definitely could improve Greatly, but I wouldn't bother wasting my time Because when we replayed like exact dollar amounts, right when we replayed tim buck 2 at review con without the player aid The game was very different because I could not keep all of the relevant information in my head and take my turn quickly Nope But with the player sheet There's literally like the game is just like no decisions are made complete tangent There was an article I didn't read recently But I saw the headlines and and summary that talked about some sort of people That have a condition where they basically remember almost every detail of their lives Like I don't know how that works or if that's made up our if if true Uh that would person would be excellent at board games So r scott backer wrote a non prince of nothing book that is about that and what hell it would be if you remembered everything But I think they said that there's like there are like 60 something people like that I don't know if it's true or not Well, if r scott backer's book is any indication it is a living hell I'm sure it is not pleasant, but you'd be great at board games Especially memory ones like say scrabble or tim buck 2 so before we get to yogi as an aside This game is in board game geek Of course because every game's in there and the forum has Forum threads in it like it does I forgot why I never look in the board game geek forum unless i'm looking for a rule Like a rule clarification because the first thread I saw is What are the industry tokens for it's explained in the rules? Yes, I learned that right away. It's one of the first things I learned like literally Did you not read the rules and then there's a bunch of questions about it The next one. What is the end game tiebreaker? What do I do if there's a tie? We've tied in two games and then the next post is Quote the rule book in the event of a draw the player with the lowest total bids is the winner Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. I would in fact that would be my first guess without the rule book Yep, and then the most fascinating thing And this one has a bunch of comments Someone said possible variant to remove player elimination. What player elimination? Hey, as this game doesn't have player elimination Has anyone ever considered introducing a native score for the player spending the most at the end of the game rather than Eliminating them from the game completely now Two problems with this person's statement Problem the first The literal whole point the core conceit of the game is that elimination Yes, also Okay, fine. Give me some matter of negative score for being the person who bids the most guess what my strategy is I'm going to bid as close to infinity every single round Nine to the ninth power to the ninth power to the ninth power to the ninth power to the ninth power to the ninth power I now have every single victory point in the game Congratulations. What negative score are you going to give me if it isn't negative infinity? I now have one more victory point than all the other players and I win Actually, in that strategy, you must eliminate if a lab you want to allow people to bid any number You must eliminate the person who bids the most for it to have any sense whatsoever This person does not understand math or games I'm sorry, but I just I kept digging through the four the discussion about this game in particular We're really sad Yeah, and they were all like that Oh and and also people who think they have degenerate strategies who clearly just don't really understand the game Maybe if maybe one of them is the phd that I spoke of how do you know? I got some ideas for not degenerate strategies, but If there is a player at the table who is not particularly clever, they are a plus strategy Well, obviously if somebody bids too high and reveals they're too high bids Then the strategy is bid as much as you can with that while bidding less than that Biggiant number, you know about yep, right? Uh, but otherwise, you know, if everyone's bidding sort of close to each other It's just sort of like Bid more on the ones that are worth more points for you Now if you want to play this game because it was like a fancy wooden kickstarter And I guess you could be into that if you want Why would you need a fancy wooden thing for such a simple game? You could you don't need to buy anything to play this game You just need some drier. You don't even need dry erase, but dry erase would be better There's a pretty good play that everyone seems to play. You just need some pens some papers and you know That's about it pens paper Yep This game impressed me enough to where we added it to the top of the 40 games You should play panel at the last second because I wanted to talk about what are the game is like this, right? Yeah, bid anything go nuts. Yeah offend the gods. Don't