 So Scott sent me a message while I was in ski trip and he was like, yeah, we're going to play this game and do a show on it. And then we did. So I was, you know, I had this idea for a board game that I've been half working on. And like I made more progress on it than any other game I've ever. Solid. Like the concept is great. So my basic idea was, you know, I wanted to make a game based on gops because the only game based on gops, which if you don't know is the game of pure strategy, because so many people are so mad about randomness and all sorts of other things. I'm like, well, the game you're looking for is gops, but gops is boring as hell. Let's make interesting gops by combining it with other stuff. And the only game that does that is El Grande, which combines it with kind of play again because I'm feeling El Grande. So El Grande is gops plus Colonel Blotto. Right. So I'm like, well, let's just take gops and combine it with something else and like advance wars or some shit. Who knows and make a better game. Right. So I was working on something along those lines ish. And then I'm on YouTube and I see this video about this board game called Raptor as in the dinosaur, not the call of the shadows. And I watched this like really short video that explained all the rules and I'm like, holy shit, that's like 90% the game that I was making. What the fuck? Oh, okay. And then on my way home, like this weekend, I go to the game store and it's just sitting there right on the shelf. And I'm like, well, I guess I'm fucking by that. It's cute. It's two player game. And I brought a home and I just brought it. We just played it two times just now. One time I was the Raptor and one time room was the Raptor. Yep. I like it. Yeah. This is like, you know, to play a game. It's not as good. Like if you're looking for a deep two player game, it's not lost cities. It's not battle line. It's not seven wonders duel. I don't think it's better than battle line. I don't know. Battle line is so tight. It's not as good as lost cities. That's for sure. Yeah. I think battle line is deeper than lost cities. So what this game, basely is, is it's gops plus. So gops Goofsfield game of pure strategy plus mouse guard, swords and stronghold. Yep. Swords and strongholds has the idea that it's one of those like symmetric, like perfect information games, except you're limited in actions because you have a small hand of cards from a small deck and you can only take actions that you have cards for. So it's like, which is great because it limits the scope of interaction. This game is the same thing. It's gops. Gops is basically, everyone has deck cards and you all just play a card and then the highest card wins. Yep. But you all have the same deck. So what's your strategy? You play the king first, play the two first. What are you doing there? Yep. There's a lot of strategy in that. But anyway, this game is nothing but strategy. It's your strategy. But a big problem, if you try to take a game and use the gops mechanic as your core mechanic is that there is definitely an analysis paralysis situation. Well, the difficult problem is, okay, so you're playing gops, right? And then gops is somehow influencing this other game. You have to design it such that, well, does the other game even matter? Or is just whoever wins the gops ends up winning the other game. So why even bother playing the other stuff? Just play the guest, play out. Otherwise the other other game might as well just be street fighter and it shows the health and the fighting based on what you played in the real game. Or do you make it such that, oh, well, actually the gops doesn't matter as much, in which case, why even have the gops there? You're now no longer, is it a game of pure strategy? You've got more, you've added in luck or whatever the flaws are of the other game. So in El Grande, the gops part is just bidding for first to go first, right? And deciding how the balance there is that the lower cards let you bring Caballeros from the what's it. And also sometimes you want to go last. You don't want to go first sometimes. So it's like that's only controlling part of the game. But because that's an important part of the game, but not the whole game, it works out. Yep. It can serve like a balance because typically the way these games work, even though there aren't that many of them, like that's why this game is notable enough for us to have played it. And you're talking about it now is that you'll have like low numbers to high numbers, but the lower numbers have better powers. So like a low number does a power, but a high number wins the thing, whatever the thing is. So in Raptor, they use a mechanic that I obviously I didn't steal from them, but me and also the designers of this game, which is Citadel's guy Bruno if I duty and another guy named Bruno Bruno Kithala actually has made what so Bruno Kithala worked with Antoine Bousa on Seven Waters dual, which is fantastic. All right. So you got also five tribes and shadows over Camelot. Well, that's not good, but yeah, but that looks like it's there. Well, it's in bridge list. So you got this other guy named Bruno Kithala plus the Citadel's guy. They came together and made this game. And here's how the game goes. Right. You got scientists and you got L Raptors, the Raptor and a bunch of babies, right? And really this, the five Raptor babies are the points. So either side can win the, if the Raptor makes three babies escape the map, then the Raptor wins. If the scientists capture three babies, they win. And there are five babies. If the Raptor, you're going to get three out of the five babies. If the mommy Raptor kills all the scientists on the board. So there's no scientists on the board at a given point in time. The mommy wins. If the mommy Raptor takes five damage and falls asleep, the scientists win. See is what you do on your turn. You got a deck of nine cards, one through nine. So it is the other person you play gops. You both play a card and reveal it. Whoever plays the higher number wins. The other person loses the loser goes first and uses the ability on their card. And you're like, well, that doesn't sound like losing to me, but the winner loses just a convenient way to express it. Cause there aren't that many games like this. Exactly. The winner goes second. But what they do is they take the number on the card they played. So say I play the eight and rim played the two. He does the ability on his card. Number two, then I take eight minus two is six. I take six regular actions, which are way strong. So you can see the danger here. Then we play again. And the thing is it's not quite gops because you only have three cards in your hand at a time. You know, it's like limited, got limited in real gops. You don't have a deck. You've got a whole hat. You just hold every card in your hand all the time. But what this does is if I held the entire deck in my hand, the game would take like I could spend a lot of time computing strategies. The game can get locked in really quick. It removes a lot of the guys. They take away. They do what I said before. They remove some of the pure strategy of gops to make it to add a technical element of, all right, I got a one and two and a nine. Let's play ball. Yep. What can I do with this? So, you know, the actions are like move raptor around, move scientists, shoot the raptors. Make fire on the board. Start fire, drive around in a jeep, right? It's just a nice little, you know, like, what's it, three, six, a nine by six grid with some obstacles and exits on both ends. You know, it's just, it's similar actually to, you know, mouse guard swords and prong holds, right? A few pieces you're moving around. You get more scientists onto the board. I'm liking this have a small repeat like cycling deck of actions, but a small number of those actually mouse guys, the three kinds of actions, and it's just sets of those in the deck. This one is you have nine unique cards and just keep cycling through that deck. So everything's going to come up eventually. And the only real randomness is what options you have right now, but by giving you three cards to pick from, it's not completely random. You just have to sort of decide what to do and like look at what the other person's played and just sort of make a tactical decision. Yeah. So the game, you know, ends up turning out. They have like lots of interesting decisions, right? The start of your turn, you have a really tough decision of what card to play. Then after you've played the card and you figure out what you're going to get, it's like, you got another hard decision, which is like, well, what the hell do I do with my five action points? And then even at the start of the game, it's like, where the hell do I place my guys? It's like, there's all sorts of interesting decisions on like every single freaking turn of this game. So it's way fun, even if it's not necessarily like the deepest or the hardest core. It's like for two players, an asymmetric game that's got replay value and is interesting. It's like, yeah, that doesn't come around too often. I would guess even if you own law cities and mouse guard and all these other two player games that are great battle line, it'll be easy to get someone to play. There's no, you know, like you're not, you're going to get bored of all those and you're going to want another two player game. And this is the one now. I do feel like there are probably degenerate strategies. So yeah, this definitely seems now that is heavily mitigated by the fact that you just might not draw the cards you need. But at the same time, there are definitely going to be some pretty locked in strategies. If you play this more than like five times, it definitely seems that the Raptors, right, are sort of like the agro team, right? So the Raptor wants to go early and because you only start with like four scientists on the board and you can almost always just like kill one right away due to the initial placement rules. Yup. And it's kind of hard to get more scientists out because depending, yeah, you have to lose with those cards, which is right. Anyway, but so the Raptor has to go agro. They got to kill scientists quickly, move quickly and like get all the babies to one corner and start shoving them off the board, you know, fast. If they can't move fast, the scientists winning becomes more of an inevitability, right? It's like if the scientists don't lose in the early game, they just need to hold on and it's very hard for the Raptor to win as the game goes on because the one big rule is that for the bait, the sea Raptor to wake up a baby, the Raptor has to go near the baby. So the scientists can put Raptors to sleep everywhere and even if they can't capture them, they can't leave easily, right? So they need to get them off the board quick and like all together quickly like, hurry up, my babies come, you know, let's all get together and run away. If you don't do that, bad news. It seems like a very powerful like first run strategy. You know, we always talk about like in those winning panels, how when you play a game the first time, there's usually one like really great strategy that works until other people kind of figure out the game. Like the obvious thing to do as opposed to the obvious thing in this game is to shoot the Raptor first, ignore the babies because as you keep getting sleep darts into the Raptor, the Raptor slower and slower. The Raptor really is a hard time moving if you shoot like just shoot it as soon as you can and it will basically be almost impossible for it to move and then what does it do? Yup. It has to get a healing somehow, which does do a big healing card. Just how you're going to play it. It's not hard. It's not easy. Yup. So but the game is super fun. Like for the likeness of this game, I'm really impressed with how fun it is. Yeah. I mean, they made a lot more progress on this idea than I did. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because they really constrained what they were doing. Yes. They made a very limited number of power. I was making a much bigger game, but it was so similar. I was like, wow. In fact, my only complaints about this game at all are that the rules are not very well written. Really? Okay. So actually, I think the rules are way, but no, so qualify that by like our ridiculous standards. They're way better than like potion explosion. There are a couple flaws in the rules, but overall, this is like 90% well written rules, right? So here's the problems I have. One, they are actually really good about using the word tile and the word space when appropriate because a tile is a whole tile that has nine spaces on it. Yup. And tile and space adjacency are both things. Right. But just be, you know, they never mess up. What is the turn? Right. Well, okay. They never mess up writing the rules when it comes to tile and space, but it's just confusing because like you're in your brain, it's like tile space. You have to actually like consciously pay attention to that to not mess it up or you might get really confused like, wait, adjacent tile. He has to be right next to me. It's like, no, they actually mean the adjacent tile. When Scott was the raptor and when I was the raptor, we both made that mistake to our detriment. Yes. We took an action and then realized, oh, that's not going to work out the way I expected. Right. The one rule that actually mess up, well, they didn't mess this up. Well, they use the word turn vaguely. You're getting ahead. There's other rules you got to type out first, right? Because I think that's the worst one. No. So is, uh, when you play the same exact number as your opponent, you discard the card and it isn't 100% clear that whether you should draw a third card and then play another one or if you shouldn't. So, but obviously you should because otherwise you could theoretically get three ties and be left with an empty hand. So you all right. So obviously you always have three cards in your hand and if you tie, you draw another one before you play another one, but it doesn't explicitly say that, right? You know, so that's just a poor writing, but obviously that's the ruling. It couldn't be that like I said comes down into it doesn't define what a turn is. Right. Also uses the word round. Yes. So here's the one problem that we couldn't answer. There's a card that let make forces your opponent to play their card first instead of simultaneously, right? On the next turn. So I forced rim to play his card first next turn. He does it. I play, I choose to tie him. Okay. We obviously both draw new cards, right? But does rim have to reveal this card to me or was that it? That is on the rule doesn't say. So that's really the only thing that was ambiguous game. Geek people have a lot more questions that we didn't even run into. For example, do I replenish tranquilizer bullets? No, you have the five scientists die for good. No, they don't. I think these board game geek people just don't parse rules. They just didn't read the rules. There's only five bullets in the game and the the raptor only takes five hits and I'm pretty sure the rule book even says yeah when you heal, give the things back to the science as you can shoot you again. Oh my God. One guy is like, I found a degenerate strategy. Always play your highest card. No, no, that is not. I will gladly play this game with you, Dennis. Yes. Yes, I will. Oh, he's playing his highest card. Okay. Yeah. So no one appears to have asked the questions we're asking. They're all asking dumb questions that are trivially answered by the rules because they didn't read. Can fire be placed on occupied spaces or must they always be placed on empty spaces? It says clearly in the rules, no two things may be in the same space period ever done. It's clear. So the rules are like 99% not 99% but like they're really well written compared to a lot of other games and I can say they're garbage rules. They're far from it, but they're not perfect. They're above average rules. Yeah, they're way above average. You know, we ran into more problems with potion explosion than with this game. Potion explosion. Just like I couldn't even write, but this game I can even all day. Now potion explosion. I'd say about three quarters of the questions you had were technically answered, but in obtuse, confusing or non-sequential ways in potion explosion. This one had very few conflicts, but one of them was like we resolved it, but it was kind of unresolvable. I'll forgive it because the game's pretty fun and I like the theme. Right. So if you're looking for a two player game, it's got some death and some strategy and some dinosaurs asymmetric, like take some gops, take that like foxes and snakes game. Yep. No, that's the one from wheel of time, the real version of that. Not the wheel of time one. You can get this game. You know what? I think the only negative of this game is that the box is not. It's not enormous, right? It's smaller than like a four, you know, Puerto Rico box. It's bigger than it needs to be, but it's bigger than it needs to be. But more importantly, it's even if it's, you know, even if you were to shrink the game into a smaller box, you know, re box it. Yep. It's still like kind of too big for a two player game. It's not portable like a lot of cities. I keep battle line in one Ziploc bag that you can't keep this game in one Ziploc bag because you got to get the tokens and all these little boards and it's in the cards. So it's like you can get, you can probably fit it maybe in something smaller, but I still think it's too big for, you know, to be portable enough for a two player game. And then you have to set it up on like a table of like substantial size. You can't just like like lost cities. You can play in the, and like a cafe for this. You need like a real table. It takes up as much space as like a real kind of game, but it's two player. So that's sort of like as this physical problem. Oh, Bruno Ketala is totally in the forum directly answering rules questions. Well, ask, ask our two questions. So for example, someone just asked here, what do you do if you run out of fire tokens and you play a fire code? Do you know that's actually a good question? Bruno Ketala quote, you ignore the effect. Yeah, that makes sense because in other parts of the rules, it says like, if you run out of scientists, you can't place anymore or such stuff like that. Now that is, remember we did our design and game rules panel. That is a good sign. If a rule is ambiguous, you have to look to other similar situations and see if it's unambiguous. And as long as all those situations break in a similar direction, then you can reasonably assume the answer to the question even if you don't have Bruno telling you. Well, so while you're in there, just ask about, you know, if you use the revealing thing and then you tie, do you have to reveal the next one or not? Dude, motherfucker, don't ask him if you can move the rafter diagonally. Like that was the first thing it says in the rule book is that absolutely nothing in this game ever moves or shoots diagonally ever under any circumstance at the end. Bruno answered that one immediately and was like, I confirm no diagonal move, no diagonal shoot, no diagonals every all ad get like no diagonals. That's the first thing it says in the book. Jesus Christ. Read. Oh my God. Yep. Anyway. Oh my God. Even in this thread, just to clarify. So someone else is like, but what if I'm killing or eating? Is that diagonal? Like, no, it says absolutely nothing in the game as diagonal. Everything is orthogonal. The end goddamn board game geek. Like, come on, guys. Like it's one thing to be a rules lawyer, but to be a rules lawyer, you gotta be literate. Lawyers can read. That's how they do. Both brunos like post constantly in this far. All right. Well, I'm going to go and post our questions if you go. Good on you guys. Also, we should. I'm just going to buy Law City's duels and we'll play it and do a review of it because it means Seven Wonders. Seven Wonders dual. Yeah. Law City's is already a dual because everyone is dual. So, so great. Also, the power grid card game is not too it might be. Is it two player? I heard tell two player would not be advisable. The point is we played power grid card game, but not with two players. It was fun. And it's power grid without the map, but only the other parts of power grid, which is fine because I'm fine because the map is the part I like the least. I'm tired of the map. I have optimized the map. I play the map perfectly. I don't care. Like the map is just something that I might fuck up a calculation and be off by $1. The map. The map actually makes the game more political because someone like blocks you off and like, well, fuck me. Yep. And turn or, you know, whatever. So, yeah, PEC South actually brought us many games to review and we skipped all of them to talk about this new game that's pretty good. It's from 2015. It's relatively recent. Oh, I thought it was like super new, but maybe not. It's from 2015, according to the BGG. All right. Well, I guess it might have gotten reprinted recently and that's why I'll have to check. Yeah, maybe I do not know. Or maybe it was out in 2015 in like Germany and now it's 2015. It's gotten published in the U.S. finally. Yeah, it could be like that. Let's see if there's any note here, but I think I'm done. I think we're done with the show. All right. You need two player games. Get the Raptor. Yep. The Raptor, the Lost Cities. It's definitely, if you're going to narrow the list of like games that are two player that you should buy, it's on there. It's not the best, but it made the list. You know what? It's better than the Moose game by far because the Moose game has got some problems. It's better than the Moose game. 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.