 Yeah. So here's a game and I did a little bit of research on this game. So it was printed a long time ago. What year 2004? That's a long time ago. And it was called the box art looks like it's like an early nineties game. I mean, look at that box. It looks like an even older game. But the game was called gen sites fun Theven. Does gen sites mean archaeologists or something like that? Archaeological sites. I don't know. Something like that. And archaeological von Peterprins. Right. So anyway, so for two to four spieler. So the game was reprinted in a much better version in what year? Oh, sorry. For ages 10 and up trying to read this old German rule. Yeah, we don't care about that. It was reprinted in 2007. It's just thieves. So I think it's hard to hard to get an ad of print, maybe, but maybe it's not hard to get. I don't know. But we were able to, we had a friend at a copy. We played it a bunch. It's a game I had seen around before at conventions and in game libraries and never had actually played. So we played it. We played it like two or three times. Well, Scott played it and then he comes over to me later because I was doing something else. He says, Oh my God, we're going to play this digging game and he can't bring it up. And then like the next day I played the digging game and we dug. So the thing about this game is that it's just so thematically good. Right. The theme of the game is this. You are an archaeologist like Indiana Jones style. Yeah, fake archaeologists. You like except without the traps and the golden monkeys and the little dudes you move around have Indiana Jones. They're just Indiana Jones. Right. So you start in Yerp and you're going around Yerp researching things. Right. And chasing down rumors. Right. Or you're hiring diggers or getting graduate students to like, you know, be to follow you around. And maybe you're buying a blimp to keep on hand or you buy a car, which apparently is super awesome. Yeah. We didn't think was awesome. You didn't think was awesome. Well, I was told it was not awesome. So we'll talk about this later, but we started the game and Scott's like, I trusted someone. The car comes up and Scott's like, Oh, the car sucks. And I'm like, well, I was told the car sucked, but apparently that was not the case. Car probably be pretty great if I bought it in the beginning of the game. And then a car appears. And of course, our friend buys it right away. I was also told the shovel was awesome. So I got a bunch of shovels right away. Not that awesome. Yeah. Shuffle was awesome. But you know what? I only got two shovels. I got three and it still wasn't awesome enough. Anyway, so here's how the game works. You spend time, the game, depending on how many players you have is two or three years long. And everything you do takes time. So you move along the edge of the board whenever you do anything like where the victory point track is on regular German games instead. That's just time. So it's 52 weeks in the year. So you move, you know, if you do something to take six weeks, it's like moving from Moscow to London and then doing some research could take you like one week per space. You have to move, which could be like three spaces or four spaces. Moscow to London is pretty far. Yep. And then you spend time like learning about Mesopotamia. That takes three more weeks. So like a car. So you move your guys seven spaces because it took seven weeks. Yep. So some cards, like if you do a bunch of research in Moscow, even after you move to Moscow, you'll spend like six weeks doing the research. But if you just find some schmuck with a rumor on the street, it only takes like one more week and you go until you run out of time. So everyone is, you know, whoever's turn it is, is the person who has currently spent the least number of weeks. So if you've spent the least amount of time, you spend a little bit of time. And if you pass someone, they now spend a little bit of time and everyone doesn't move whenever they're currently the person who's done the least stuff. Yep. So whoever's furthest back always takes the turn. So sometimes you can do stuff twice in a row. If you do a little bit and then a little bit and a little bit and everyone else has already done a whole ton of crap, then you can actually do a bunch of different things while everyone else is waiting for you. Now that in and of itself is a novel mechanic. It's so thematic. It's like you're spending time going around doing stuff and everyone has the same amount of time to do stuff as everyone else because you can't end the game by going over or under. You end the game going exactly two or three years of stuff doing, but also as a mechanic, it is very novel because it sort of provides a turn order problem. It provides a lot of opportunities for a clever game designer. There isn't something like, Oh, you got to be the first player and I'm sitting to your left and then not to design a very well balanced or self-balancing game because sure, the shovel is awesome. Shovel takes a lot of time. So you could do like a big crazy move on your turn, but it might take a ton of weeks. And then everyone else takes like three or four turns before you get to go again. Right. Now the other thing you do is you can go down below out of, you can leave Europe. You can go to, well, Greece is still in Europe, but you can go to Greece, Crete, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine. Is there somewhere else to go? I forget. Right. Rome is part of Europe. It's not part of the archaeology dig places. And you just go there the same way you go around Europe. But when you get there, there's only one thing to do and that is start digging. Now the digging mechanic is the best. Now it's the best, but at the same time it does make the game a little random, but it makes the game a lot random, but it makes it thematically really fun. This game is all about theme. It's not about being a strong competitive game. Right. So I've already come up with some pretty strong strategies. I mean the strong strategies, but in the end it's the mercy of the desert. Right. So let's say you go to Egypt and you've studied Egypt a lot. You've studied for Egypt. Right. There's this little awesome wheel you use and you spin the wheel and the wheel says, Oh, you've studied for Egypt. Well, if you dig in Egypt for eight weeks, you get to dig this much dirt in Egypt. And the more you know about Egypt or the more time you spend, the more you get to dig. So the bag that you dig from for each site, each site has its own bag. You literally dig. There's an Egypt bag and you reach your hand in there and pull out a number of tiles equal to how many you're allowed to dig. Right. And you're digging through that bag. And in the bag, it starts the game with half treasure and half dirt. Any treasure you get is treasure you get. And it's worth victory points. Any dirt you get is dirt. Now what makes the game amazing is that when you're done digging the Egypt bag, you take all the treasures and you keep them, you know, you want to hold an exhibition or who knows what you're going to do with them. But all the dirt goes back in. You fill in the holes. And the next person who comes and digs in Egypt, it fucking sucks. Right. Cause there it is way more dirt than treasure in there now. So they need to dig even better than you dug to have a chance of getting anything. I once dug 12 tiles from a bag that had a reasonable amount of treasure in it and dug 12 dirt. I've also saw some people dig like six tiles out of a bag that was mostly dirt and get like five treasures. So it's like there's so much drama when digging, but it's just like the drama of doing real archaeology where you go to a site and you start digging. It's like, are we going to find anything? We don't fucking know. And then if you do find something like, Oh my God, it's a prize and for a completely intact or Oh my God, it's a whole sarcophagus that's plated in gold leaf only shit. So even further to make to really drive the theme home, it's got all these other little elements like it has a sheet that tells you what all the treasures are. They're all real treasures and they tell they have like names and there's no bearing on the game, but yet we would read like, Oh, you just found a blah and a blah and the ancient menorah blah blah blah. Now that's the thing about the game is that the theme of it is so good, but the mechanics are only okay. Well, I would say the digging mechanic is what makes you say the mechanics are okay because the rest of the game, I would like to make a more deterministic game that uses the same front half, everything but the digging. It's not just the digging that's random. It's also the cards that are random. Well, it's a third in taxes, randomness, or a web of power randomness. So let's say I go to London and I spend a turn researching Egypt, right? And then it goes around and everyone I spent a lot of time doing that. Everyone else does a bunch of stuff. It's finally my turn again, right? Now there's four cards available. The only thing you can do in Europe is do one of those four cards pretty much. And I look at those four cards and they're all in Moscow. And even though I might want to do one of them, I'm in London. I just happen to be in London now. So suck it out, spend some weeks and go over there. So I end up having to spend a bunch of weeks. Meanwhile, so now it's, I spend a bunch of weeks to go to Moscow to do this card. Then the card that gets flipped over next is, I don't know, Paris. Rims already in Paris and it's his turn now. And that card only, you know, so he just picks up that card for a lot less weeks than it would have cost me because, and that ends up, it doesn't seem that big a deal. But if it keeps and it might, you know, over time, the whole course of the game, it should even out between the players. It is also mitigated heavily by the fact that if you find a good card, it pushes you way up on the time track. So whoever fell behind will probably get to do a couple turns in a row and reveal more cards. No, that's not saying is if a good card spawns on you, right? Not only do you get that card without having to spend a lot of time, but now it's your turn again. You can get to do a lot more stuff in a lot less time if the cards turn up your way. Well, that's the danger of taking cards and going ahead. If you take good cards and go ahead, you easily give everyone else way more opportunity. You might not have no choice depending on what cards are available on your turn. So it's not just the digging that's random. It's which cards are there on your turn that is also almost as random as the tiles, but not quite as random to take like one, two or three weeks. Good cards take six. I think it's close to being very optimally balanced. It's close, but it's not so perfect, right? There was, I was watching you make very poor decisions throughout that game. No, I was doing fine. I mean, so yes, there is decisions to be made that matter a lot, but it is also a, it's like a half luck, half, you know, skill game. It's not, it's not like a 80% of the luck to the game. The luck of the card getting. I don't think the luck of the card getting is not nearly as big as the digging luck. I'm not going to be on that. I would say that I'm saying that it's minor. I'm saying it is not huge. It is not major, but it is large enough to be significant. I wouldn't even say it's that significant. I would say it's barely significant. I'd say it is. I think it's a bigger deal in thern and taxes and web of power. It is a bigger deal in those, but it is still a deal. It's a deal. It's not a big deal. Yes. Technically, you're correct. It's a deal. It's a deal, right? So you could lose a game because bad tiles in your turn, but I also think we were playing four player games, right? We've only had two years. If you're playing with less players, which it gives you the third year and also not only more time to do stuff with that third year, right, but also more chances at the cards because less competition. Also, while it's that it becomes much less, it won't be a deal in less players. Well, also, so interesting thing we played. This was like the magfest of playing more like old style classic German games. And what I've noticed is that five players or six players is what everyone's shooting for these days because people have bigger groups. But most of the best German games I can think of and most games that have stood the test of time are four player games. Yeah. We played this with like four or five players. I think we played it with four. It only takes up to four. Okay. I think it's getting at most of the games we played at this magfest. Take four max. I think this is best with two or three. I don't think I think four. I think four stresses the resources of the game too much and it makes the digging much more punishing because now you've got the same amount of competition for the same amount of treasure they don't put in more treasures and more dirt and more player game. It's the same bag, right? Because this game is a race. It is not highly political. So it does not fall into the three player game trap where a three player game is actually a two player game plus a safety monkey. Exactly. So yes, I agree. This game is probably a lot better with three player just because it'll be more fun. More people will get a chance to go in the bag and get treasures even though, you know, the scores will be higher. You'll get to do more stuff. Right. It'll just be more enjoyable with more players, less players cut off too short with four players. Yep. It's kind of like how Bonanza is real fun with six and seven, but it's also kind of broken. Bonanza with five is ideal and perfect and one of my favorite games. I think this game is ideal with three, even two. I think this game give me really good. Two would be real interesting. I haven't played it with I think three is the ideal, but I still think two is good. I would prefer two to the four. Board game geek says best with three to four, which is interesting because I think I wonder if there's any special rules for the two because we didn't actually play the two. Yeah. But but the three I think is the sweet spot. There's a big difference between three and four player. I wouldn't say best with three to four. Yeah. I think best with three and then four is kind of like it's playable, but it's not as good as the three. But if you're especially an aspiring game designer, you should play this game for nothing else than to see a game that's so perfectly matches theme. Like yeah, the mechanic theme meshing here is so perfect. Like here's another example. So few games that line it up so well. There is a third another part of the game. There's a bunch of other parts. We didn't obviously tell you the rules when you play Puerto Rico and you choose craftsmen. Do you really feel like you're crafting? No. But when you choose to dig and spend six weeks digging in Egypt in this game, you feel like you're spending six weeks digging in Egypt. And when you go around Europe researching, you feel like you're traveling around Europe researching. But there's also these exhibitions. So you'll be digging in Egypt and suddenly you see, oh, there's an expedite and an exposition going on in London right now. And if you've got the stuff to be able to exhibit there to loan to their museum, you've got to get your ass back to London, be there before anyone else who also has the right goods, lend your stuff to the museum, and you got to spend three weeks at the exposition expo. Yes. Expo because I'm doing expeditions. I think it's actually just exhibit in a museum. It's not an expo, but yeah, it's all kinds of, you know, side things that you can do that are kind of interesting and fun to get more victory. And they're all so tight with the theme. Yep. But also the mechanic of you spend time going around a board is a very interesting self-tuning mechanic that you could use. It's a lot of old German games had stuff like that. I recall I started playing a bunch of them again, where even if the game wasn't like super prescriptively designed for balance, they'll have these mechanics where anyone gets too far ahead. It's not like a traditional rubber band that just sort of pulls you up. But it's more like the more powerful strategies have an intrinsic game cost that sort of causes them to balance out very nicely, even if you didn't think about it too closely. I think what makes this game such a, you know, such a good thing, if you can find a copy by it, right? Because on the one hand, it is a competitive game, though it's not super perfect, amazing competitive, like I say, a netrunner or something like that, right? But it's competitive enough that someone who likes to play games to win can play this game and think a lot about strategies and make interesting decisions, have a good time. But also because the theme and the mechanic match so well and the fun of reaching in the bag, that person who usually was only willing to play cards against humanity or maybe camel up, camel cup, something like that. It's a fish canonically camel up. Right. Someone who's usually only playing, you know, the easier, more luck-based, you know, not skilled, not, you know, hardcore games like camel up, you can get them to play this game because it's so fun to go in the bag and do the things, right? And then you can use this to get both of those people to play the game together and have a good time without that conflict that usually happens. And it's not a lot of games in that sweet spot. You'll see a neat design pattern. So there's a lot of games where like you're like a lumber, games where you can take some number of things. And if you're clever, you can sort of make a combo of the exact values of them. Like power grid is an example, power grid is a game where you can spend exactly all of your money if you're very clever a lot of the time. And it's a huge advantage if you did so. Like if you set the stage for that play to happen later, this game does that in the sense that if you fall way behind in time, you might be able to look at the board and come up with a combo where you get to take two or three turns and then you land directly on top of someone. Exactly. If you land on top of someone on the time thing, top is last place. So you get to take yet another turn. Yep. I feel like a heuristic to know who's doing well is who landed on top of another player the most because that is the person who's doing the power grid thing of spending exactly all of their money more than once in the game. Right. So think about it. You're sitting there looking at the board and you see a card you really want, right? And there's three cards you don't really want so much. So you go and you're in Europe. You're not ready to dig anything yet. So you just go and get the card you really want. You move two spaces and take it for five turns. Now it's not your turn anymore, but you didn't pay attention. One of those cards you didn't want was on the start spot you spawned and only cost one week to pick up. Even though it wasn't a great card that you really wanted, you could have gotten that card basically for free, but because you weren't paying attention, you didn't get it. And you just let it sit there. And it's like, you could have had two cards instead. You only got one card because you weren't, you know, being careful. So that is sort of almost a common design pattern, irrespective of the mechanic that causes it of does the game have a mechanism to reward the player for being exact about something that's difficult to predict or difficult to calculate. Power grid does it and this game does it. And I wanted to add a new thing to the way we review board games because on one of the panels I was on, this guy was not on a mag vest. Super smart guy, Luke Peter Schmidt at fun to 11 said something really interesting. Most games like most tabletop games, like commercial ones, not necessarily the like weirdo German ones we play, but like in general, they pretty much assume that the games got like three plays, three to five plays tops, and that people really won't play it much beyond that, except maybe bringing it out. Like games that get past that three plays barrier are real close to being classics for all time. If you're talking about games above a certain level of complexity, but below a certain other arbitrary like this, there's a lot more. I'm taking this quote kind of out of context. I think this game has four to five more plays by me before I'm done with it. I think the number of plays this game has is entirely dependent on how many friends you have, because it's like, you might get tired of digging in that bag, right? You know, and it might lose its excitement a bit, but if you bring some new people in, it can refresh in the excitement because reaching in that bag is just so awesome. So thus the way I would put that is this game has three to five plays from a purely intellectual, like I am a gamer playing this game perspective. And any new person is going to want to play it at least two to three times, but it has unlimited play for me as Scott was alluding to in that if I'm with some people who have never played this game and I own this game, I'll just bust it out. Now it's not going to be, you're not going to bust it out with two people who've played it before and one who hasn't. Nope. But one who has played it before and two or three who haven't. Yes, you're going to bust it out because they're going to have so much fun going in the bag. Definitely. And digging in the Egypt and finding nothing dirt, dirt, dirt. And that's everyone's chanting when you go in the bag. All the other players like dirt, dirt, dirt. At one point, Scott took the bag I was about to dig into and put a curse on it. And sure enough, I drew like nine fucking dirt curses. King Tut got you. King Tut. So we're going to try to do that and all over reviews from nylon of really talk about how many plays this game has got in it. Because I feel like that's one thing that's a metric that we could have used a lot more. We could have used that very effectively in our older game reviews. I'm trying to go back and think about some of those games because then a couple of years down the road, we can go back and say, Hey, how many times did we play that game? Was it really five players? Or was there, was there some like high end strategy we didn't think about? Like, did we play it more? Because like T&E right now is one of the, like T&E and Puerto Rico still have infinity. I'll play those right now. But there's also games that could have a lot of plays and we just don't for whatever reason, like, you know, we could play a lost cities like just whenever. Yeah, we just don't. You know, if we go to anime Boston, we're gonna be playing a lot of lost cities, I think. Good idea. Yeah. And that mushroom game and we're going to bring all the two player games. Netrunner. Yeah. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Cat Lee for web design and brand okay 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. 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