 So you might recall that we in numerous lectures, in fact, I'll link to one of them from Pax East, which wasn't that long ago. We talk about games like Shadows over Camelot suck ass. Well, most specifically, Pandemic. Pandemic, Shadows over Camelot. To some similar extent, the Battlestar Galactic game. Yep, though that game is a little bit better than the other ones. Yes, that game, especially with the expansion, at least has more of a mafia feel to it. But I digress. We say that these games are crap. And Scott, what is our primary reason for hating on these games? Well, the communication rules specifically in Shadows over Camelot are vague and bullshit. Well, I feel pretty good about playing cards in that area. I feel about three goods, three times good. Let me go to the refrigerator. How many people want water? One, two, three, four, four people want water, but not rim. Rim doesn't want water, everybody. Rim did not ask for water from the fridge. Yeah, fuck those games. We have talked at length about why these are bad mechanics. This is why Bridge has set complicated metasignaling rules. This is why you're not allowed to fucking talk to your partner in Yooker. Yep. So what happened is we looked at this field to see our nominees and I saw a bunch of games on there and one of them was called Hanabi. And I was like, oh, I never heard of that. So then I'm in like freaking complete strategist, you know, for a netrunner or something. And I see on the, you know, every game store has that shelf towards the front that has the tiny games in a box about the same size box as say, um, what's the game with chicken with the red chips? Oh, no, thanks. No, thanks. And the same size box is no thanks. I see Hanabi and I'm like, oh, isn't that this field? This yarn nominee. How is it in this tiny as box for such a little bit of money? I will buy this in Amazon because the strat is overpriced. So I bought it on Amazon. Oh, spoilers. It later did win the spilled as yarn. Yeah, like fucking two days ago. It won this field this year, but I bought it and played it before it won and we brought it home and we played it. It's for two to five players. We played it mostly to player, but we've played it more than that, at least once or twice shows us to me. And he's like, it's a co-op game. And it's really straightforward. Well, at first I read the rules and on reading the rules, I said, I once I started reading the rules, I was like, oh, shit, it's fucking pandemic shadows over Kamala. And then I kept reading and I was like, this has a possibility of fixing that problem while still being that game. So I didn't know until I actually played it with rim to confirm the truth. The game gives you explicit, detailed rules on what information you can and cannot share. And more importantly, the sharing of the information is a game mechanic. You spend a token to tell someone a piece of information. Yep. Also, it explicitly says in the rules, quote, if you follow the rules closely, you can only communicate with your teammates when you give them information placing a blue token period. In other words, there is no ambiguity over what you can and can't say. Can I use codes? Can I say things like this? No, it's like you cannot communicate. That is as firm a statement as I have ever heard. Now, at the same time, it is impossible as humans to not communicate because, for example, I'll draw a card and everyone else on the table goes, mm hmm. That actually is useful information. It is. Or I'll be like, hey, rim, you have one red card. Now, I'll be thinking red card. If Scott says that on my turn, here's my thought process. Scott wouldn't have told me that unless he had a reason to tell me, I'm going to assume that he's smart and I'm just going to play this card blindly. Oh, so let's get back to the game. So it's Hanabi, right, which is the Japanese word for fireworks. It's got a fireworks theme. And the idea is that everyone who's playing the game is cooperatively trying to set off a fireworks display and to set off a fireworks display. There are five colors of cards numbered one through five. And you want to play the one, then the two, then the three, then the four, then the five of each color. And you're working on all the fireworks at the same time. So at the beginning of the game, playing any one is good. You know, once you've got some ones down, playing a two is good. As long as the one of that color is already down and so on. When you play a five, that firework goes off and you're all set. But here's the catch. Everyone draws cards and on your turn, you can either A, play one, B discard one or C, give someone information. Well, why am I giving people information? Because you can never look at your own cards. You know how many times when we first started playing this, I would draw cards, instinctively look at it. Yeah, you can never, ever, ever under any circumstance. No rule whatsoever allows you to look at your own cards. I see some guys made a clever. They made stands to face the cards outward at everyone else. Yep. I like to hold them in my hand so I can arrange them. Oh, I have this complicated three dimensional lattice where I'll hold the cards to remember. I put cards in between different fingers to remember what they are after people tell me about them. Because even after they tell me about them, he said, someone tells me, OK, Scott, you have two reds. I got to remember I have two reds and that those are the two reds. And the before one of those was a three. Yeah, so this one's a red three and this one's a red question mark number. OK, you know, as I got to keep shuffling these cards around in my hand. And then if I spend a whole bunch of turns giving other people information, I got it. If I forget what I've got in my hand. Oh, shit, we're fucked. Now there's these tokens and basically you have to spend a token to give someone information. And there are only eight clock tokens at the beginning of the game. And you give a piece of information. All you can say is how many of a card you point at of a number or color do they have? So I could say these three cards are red or this card is a one. You must give complete information. If someone has three ones, you can't be like you got two ones or you got one one. No, it's you got three ones if they have three ones. And you can't say anything about a card you can't point at. So I cannot say, Scott, you have no ones. Yep, because that would not include pointing. You have to point at cards. Right. You could say you can be like you have one green. You have two red. And you only get to give one fact each clock you color or number color or number. One fact. So I be so spend the clock. Tell Rami has two reds point at the two cards that are the red ones. It's up to him to remember that those two are red. And now it's not my turn anymore. That's it. That's a whole turn. You get into this great cycle where Scott gives me a piece of information. I play a card. Scott gives me a piece of information. I play a card. There's no more tokens. And Scott doesn't know shit about his hand. Yeah, great. What you have to do is basically you have to remember that card you have to play. Oh, give me an information. Then I play one. Then you play one. Two other confounding factors. There's three ones, two of every other number and only one five. So if you discard a five, fuck, you can't get a top score. Like you can't get the maximum score. But at the same time, if you discard two of anything else, you can't get the top score. Like if you discard two green fours, well, green. I guess if you discard all three ones of something on like I've never had a game where all the ones didn't get played. I can't imagine that happening. You have to be so dumb for that to happen. But yeah, we've never gotten a 25. The most we got is 22 and usually we get 19 or 20. The first time we played, we got a 20. And that's why this game is great. Now you can get a score of zero because if you play a card that doesn't work, for example, I play a red three and the red two is not there and open. That's a bad. It's a wrong play. The three goes in the garbage and we lose a fuse. And once you lose the third fuse game over, you get a score of zero. So the way we played this game and it's telling I really want to watch people who don't listen to this show that we're doing right now and who aren't kind of, I don't know, into analyzing games like we are because it's interesting to see how they would approach a game like this because we approached it so methodically without any preparation or forethought that I was kind of amazed like Scott and I and our friend Alex when we sat down to play, it was just assumed if someone told someone about one card, they should play it. If someone told him about two cards, they would keep that information aside and all these sort of obvious strategies just emerged immediately and automatically. Yeah, there's all these sort of implications, right? The other thing you have to do is you have to pay attention to the discard pile and also the cards that are face up and the cards in other people's hands, right? If someone tells me I have two reds, I look at the table and I see, OK, these can't be ones because I see all three red ones. Rims holding one, there's one on the table and there's one in the discard. So these are not ones. Are they twos? Well, there's only one, two on the table and the discard pile. So I don't want to discard either one of these because if it's the other two, we're fucked. But you don't know which one it is. It couldn't be a three. Yes, it could be a three. Could it be a five? No, because Alex is holding the red five. So these are twos, threes or fours. I don't know which ones. So that means, you know, rather than playing or discarding either one of them, you'll discard some other card. Now, it's hard to say if this is cheating, but I rapidly fell upon a strategy that I follow without fail, no matter what, when I play this game, which is the newest card that I have drawn unless someone gives me information about it is the first one I will discard if I have to discard a card because I assume my smart friends would tell me if the card were importance. There's another thing that I do, right? Is I keep track of which card is the card I just drew. So let's say, for example, I have in my hand like a red two, right? And we've already played a red two. So no one's really going to waste a clock to tell me about it, right? Just so I'll discard it to get a clock back. That's sort of a wasted action. It's not very efficient, right? Let's say I draw a red three, which we haven't played yet. Somebody's going to want to tell me that I have one pointed that card so that I play it. But let's say I have another three in my hand. What are they going to do? Tell me that I have two threes. I don't know which one now. Are they going to tell me I have two red cards? Well, if they tell me I have two red cards and I know that one of them is the one I just played and one of them is one that's been sitting in my hand the whole game. Now I can imply that one that I recently drew must be interesting for them to suddenly tell me I had two red cards right when I already knew about this other one. Now it was funny because we played this game with another friend of ours who hasn't played as many of these kinds of games with us. Equally smart just hasn't played in our gaming culture. And she took the opposite meaning. We pointed out information about one card and she assumed we were telling her to get rid of that shit and immediately corrected that and played the rest of the game identically to the way we were playing. Yeah, so it's funny. You can you'll be able to watch groups of friends converge on strategies in an unspoken manner. Yeah, but it's like nobody's using, you know, the thing you worry about like secret winking codes to like just so that they know what's in their hand exactly. You're cheating like that, right? I'm not allowed to communicate. I make a really good effort to poker face it. Like if I I mean, I'll say something like, oh, yeah, you are not allowed to communicate. That's cheating and it's co-ops. You're only cheating yourself if you cheat, right? You know, it's no traitor like in shadows over Camelot. It's like you're just cheating yourself. But if it goes around the table and nobody's happy for all their turns and no one's really playing anything, then you can assume that all the cards in your hand are bullshit in some manner. You also need to tell people right away if they have fives, so they keep them safe. That's your only secret. Your only chance of getting a really high score is to actually play some of the fives because when you play a five, you get a clock back and you only other way to get a clock back is to discard a card and discarding a card while it gets you a clock back and clears out your hand and allows you to draw into new cards that you need to play. Also hastens the end of the game without scoring you any points. So two points. You need to increase to win this game. You need to increase the number of actions you spend playing cards and decrease the number of actions you spend giving information and discarding. So I have two big points to make about this game. Point number one, a perfect score basically will come down to luck in the same way that coincidentally enough, the most recent book club book before this one, Player of Games, getting a full web. Everyone knew how to do it. It just needed the right circumstances. Exactly. You need the right circumstances to get a perfect score. You need to get a draw. A lot of games I've played, like I played a game with the Netrunner people, right? Who are also equally smart at gaming. They all knew what was going on right away. And someone just drew like four fives at the get go. And it's like, all right, that really bones us, right? But you have four fives, don't discard those. Be useless for most of the rest of the game. It's possible with that, with like you play with a bunch of people, everyone can draw like one, two, one, one, one, two, one, three, one, four, all different colors. And you could spend like the whole beginning of the game easily just playing them all really rapidly without any issues whatsoever. I feel like we almost thought about doing this. We can make a YouTube video where we show like strategy and Hanabi, but it would be awesome to some friends with a choreographed play where we've memorized the deck and basically just play it out like make up logic, like sit there and be like, well, because you said this and you said this and you said this, I can infer there for this and just play a perfect game without even thinking. But that would have been more effort than just playing the game until we eventually luck out and max it out. Point number two is that if you play this game a lot with your friends and you're getting scores about 20 and up regularly, you've basically solved the game, I think, at that point. I want to keep playing until I get 25. I do as well. But yeah, I don't think it's actually possible to get 25 regularly. You need to have that good draw, right? And you're not gonna get that good draw all the time. It's just not gonna happen. Now it is still possible in those situations, but the best part about this game is that situation where you're looking at someone's cards or everyone's cards and you know any piece of information you give them just because of the luck of what is in their hands will cause them to do a thing you don't want them to do because they will infer the wrong thing. That is the worst feeling in the world. That's why, that's exactly why. You might think that all this inferred information, right? This sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge is communication that is outside the bounds of the rules. But no, it's perfectly okay and it's the point of the game is because that nudge, nudge, wink, wink is gonna bite you as much as it's gonna help you. You're gonna find yourself thinking at many points, is Scott as smart as I have always assumed him to be? And then you say a piece of information and just hope against hope. If I tell Rym he has one green, what is the context of that? What information does Rym have? You know, what decision will he make? I can't make him, all I can do is tell him he has one green and point at it. I can maybe say it with emphasis like you have one green card, Rym. One, one green card. And I can make all kinds of faces, but I can't say discard it. I can't say play it. I can't, you know, if we come with a signal system, again, we're cheating ourselves, right? So what is he gonna make of that? You know, we had a system before where that meant play it and I want him to discard it. Now what? Yep. Now what? It's sort of the quantum information problem of if you prearrange your quantum states to use for communication, you've basically undermined the whole idea of quantum communication. So side note about this game. It is made and designed by Antoine Bousa. Do you know who Antoine Bousa is? Why Antoine Bousa? I was trying to look him up on board game. He is a user that didn't help me. He is a user, but if you scroll down, you'll see the games he made. Oh, Seven Wonders. He is the Seven Wonders guy. Smart guy. Seven Wonders guy. So look forward to anything from Antoine Bousa. If he made Seven Wonders in Hanabi and has a spiel this year, the guy is going places in the game design world. Absolutely. This game, if I had to describe the brain field, is incredibly stressful to play. You are putting your full attention. If you fuck up and start thinking about biscuits, you're gonna forget which one of those two cards you put to the sides of four. And then you're fucked. And Scott, I have both done that. At one point, Scott had a white four, the last one, a green four, and a red four in his hand. And he should have known which one was the white four from previous information, but I think he mixed them up because he's flipping around. He's like, I know I can discard one of these fours and he's holding them in his hands. And then he's holding the white one. He's like, so I can't discard the white one. And I know this isn't the white one. And the whole time, I'm just trying not to make a face. I'm just like, please don't fuck up. Please don't fuck up. Please don't fuck up. We got really lucky that time. Yeah, it's like, you know, I can't communicate with anyone about what's in their hand, but I can say about what's in my hand, right? That doesn't help anyone, right? So it's like, just during my turn, I'll be like, all right, I'm saying what I'm thinking and moving cards around. No one can help me. I'm all on my own, right? But I think that adds a lot of fun in giving the other people the experience you just said of, you know, being tortured by me being wrong or also being amazed by me being right. Like I fucked up and I'm also, I put a five to the side in my hand way early in the game. And at one point I must have just moved it. And then later I was like, all right, play in the five and I throw it down. It's like a two that we needed and the game was fucked. And I just had no idea. I just, I envisioned it as a five. I threw it down and I saw for a split second a five until my brain was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. That doesn't match. The eyes are giving us reports that perhaps you have fucked up. Waiting for confirmation. Yes, you have fucked up. Well, the other reason that I say what I'm thinking on my turn out loud when it's a complicated turn is to demonstrate and educate the other players as to how I think they should think about their hands, right? Like if I say, oh, I'm discarding this because I see what's on the table and now I'm showing other people, look, look at the table and make decisions the same way I'm making them. I'm not giving you specific information about your hand as it currently is in cheating. I'm giving you basically generic game tips, how to decide with the information that you have legally what to do the same way that I'm deciding what to do. The game is an excellent teaching tool. You don't want to spill this out when you suck. So far I've never seen a sucky spill this out game. Some years are better than others, but still. This is the kind of game that if I was teaching like game design or game play at like a college, I would make the class play this game and I would make them write papers on it and play it and practice it and try to get good at it. Because that illustrates card counting. It illustrates what information is and is not conveyed by certain pieces of information. It teaches you kind of from the other side how to solve simple games. It's also, you know, there are a lot of people I've met in the gaming world. It's hard to get them to play games because they sort of have anti-competitive bones in their body. And it's hard to get them to play tabletop games because that are, you know, good because they're usually competitive and the co-op games are not good. And this is finally sort of a, you know, a co-operative game that engages a lot of those brain muscles that are used in a serious competitive game like say a Puerto Rico. So it's a way to bring those people into the tabletop fold. You know, I think, you know, Settlers is a gateway game for the people to move from like a regular board game to a Euro game who are kind of competitive. I think this is actually sort of my new go-to gateway game to bring in those people who are like averse to competition. Though Spotted serves that purpose well because losing doesn't feel like losing. Well, yeah, so are the cards against humanities and actually King of Tokyo sort of is not too bad. Yeah. But King of Tokyo, I don't like it as much as an intro game because of the stack of cards with all the random powers. Well, King of Tokyo also has a problem we didn't anticipate. We talked about this on the show that almost everyone younger than us that we know has never played Yahtzee in their lives. Yeah. Which I'm just amazed by. You got a Yahtzee thing going on lately. I know. So I have a closing question for all you kids out there in case you don't see our panel at PAXOS and we die and the footage is lost. Does it matter if you take turns playing Yahtzee like the book says, or if you just play it all solitaire at the table like turn by turn and then at the end count up your scores? Is there any reason you should play completely singularly? I know. Pick me. Of course you know, ass. I know. Pick me. All right, guys. Hopefully we'll see at least one or two of you in Australia. And if you're someone who likes games, you should own Hanabi. Just buy it and keep it in your repertoire. It's a tiny little game. It's probably the most game in the least box, right? Any other game in this size box? I mean, this is better than no thanks, right? Bonanza would be, except it comes in too big of a box. Bonanza is in a bigger box. I think this is the most game in the least box I've ever seen. I mean, there's expansions within too. You can add these colored fireworks. Oh, we haven't even gone into that shit yet. Oh my God. Let me get a 25. Then we'll go for that. Yeah, basically the game gives you two ways. The game includes hard mode. Coops for hard modes. Fuck all four of them. Right in the ass. They're good. Yeah. But you know, hey, for a game that it's sort of like, oh, I get 25 and I never play it again. It's like, no, get 25, then do bitch mode. 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 OK 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.