 So we played this game at review con called space cube. So this game is called sidereal confluence training and negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant. Now the story that was told to me about this game. I don't know if it's true or not, but I totally believe it is that someone was trying to make a big four five X game like you know master varian eclipse situation and they ended up making so much game. But then in the revision phase, they wisely trimmed away because that's what makes things good is remove all and remove all the cruft and so you get the pure magical essence and apparently they removed everything from the game, the combat, everything except for this one part of the game where you deal with space trading of cubes and machines and stuff and this free trading mechanic and removed all the other X parts of the game. So on the super, super high level, everyone has a unique asymmetric character with its own nonsense. Right. So I got handed this big old card that looked like a race from like, you know, a game like master varian and I'm like reading all this text and I'm like, oh my God, why do I have to play this? I don't want to let me let this be a video game. I don't want to have to learn all this while you're reading it. I flipped mine over and what I saw on the other side actually terrified me because there was way more shit back there anyway looked like game mechanics. Yeah, but I'm some reading this card and I'm like, why these stupid nerds? I can't play nerdy games like this anymore. I'm not in high school. The other I see is that the game starts getting unpacked. All these cards start coming out. There's like a million cards with a million symbols and in pile of cubes and I'm like, oh my God, and the fascinating thing about this game and before we move any further game wasn't bad. I had a good time with it. Like don't think that we're about to say this game is bad. No, I'm just telling you what I was feeling at the time as a chronology. But when I looked at the cards, it looked like ridiculous bullshit. The graphic design has much to be desired and it makes it look like a scary game and I like the thing is a scary game but not nearly as scary as it appears to be. No, that's the thing I'm trying to get at is the game looks way scarier than it really is. If it had a graphic design makeover and shrunk those alien race cards to be a bit smaller because they don't need to be that big and remove some of its heritage of being a space game that was about 4x or whatever, you would actually be able to see what this game is. You know, you can't judge this game by the cover, right? If you made it so you could judge it by the cover, then all those feelings from the start of it would go away and you just have the reality of it, which is it's a lot like just a free trading game. You trade stuff for stuff and see who gets the most victory points at the end. That's it. That's really all there is to it. So thus the very fascinating things about this game was that once we learned the core mechanics, which took a while, I'm very much reminded of the concept of naive art when there is a known craft with its own sort of assumptions and best practices like knitting or whatever. So it is entirely possible for someone who has never studied knitting, never read a knitting book, but has simply enjoyed the knitting of others and just started on their own learning how to knit. They might make perfectly great things, but they might do things in ways that would seem weird to someone who has more like domain knowledge of the craft. Yeah, because they don't know they're not learning from the past. They're just trying to learn on their own and rediscovering everything that has already been learned. And I don't know if that's what happened with this game, but quote 90 or does any form of visual art that is created by a person who lacks the form of education training the professional undergoes blah, blah, blah, but it feels like that's what this game is in the sense that the mechanics it has are not that far from mechanics that I am well used to in just my general board gaming experience and anyone who plays Euro games has encountered time and time again, but the way they are presented the way they are explained the proper nouns all those things made them alien to me until it was explained though the things are not called what I expect them to be called mechanics that I would expect to be explained simply or explained in great depth but end up being the simple mechanic I didn't expect them to be things like that. The other fascinating thing is that this game, the individual cards like the player boards give very specific advice on how you should play that character. And it was very not right advice. Well, mine was actually pretty much extremely right because all mine said was you're going to have this one machine out fucking use it as much as possible. Oh, okay. That's an advice you could actually follow. So you know what I did? I did nothing but get the cubes to fuel that machine and make sure that I fueled it every single round no matter what. So basically almost one. So here's how the game works, right? Is you basically have these cards and each card is a machine and it has a cube that goes in and cubes that come out. So you have my I'm just going to make up a machine off my head because I can't see any right now. I'm looking for one. Yeah. Blue cube comes in and purple cube and a victory point come out. That's actually a way good machine. Yeah. It's like, you know, this victory point is rare. Yeah. Victory point is super rare. There's big cubes, which are medium rare, small cubes, which are super common, you know, and you have all these machines in front of you. And what you'd really like to do is use every machine every turn. That would be ideal, right? Because every machine outputs more than you put into it. Yeah. There's no machine that is not beneficial to run, right? So you want to run every machine you can to basically increase your economy, get more stuff. If you have more stuff, you can do more stuff. If you can do more stuff, you can get more victory points and win, right? Also, every round, you're going to produce a bunch of cubes from these planets you have. They just spit out cubes for nothing. Also, every round, there's this sequence where you... I think I had some planets that I had actually had to put a cube on. Really? I didn't. Yeah. Anyway. I think I did. Anyway. I kind of remember this game was, I got to look at my phone. I took pictures of my board. Anyway, there's also a phase every round where you secretly do a simultaneous reveal of stuff to try to win new planets with ships or something. Yeah. There was a moderate amount of drama there that I actually did enjoy too. Yeah. But in the end, the main part of the game is there's a phase in which you freely trade stuff with everybody. You can make deals for the future. You can do a completely free trading, even more than Traders of Genoa. You can just trade whatever. You can do like multiplayer trades. Like, I'll give you four cubes. You can lend... Each of you give me one of these cubes and then I'll do this. You can trade planets. You can lend someone a machine for a turn that you then get back. You can... There's a one character as wild cubes that no one else has. They can trade those. It's like, you can trade your ships. What's funny is no one wanted his wild cubes. Like, no one needed them ever. No. You can trade friggin anything for anything. So you basically, what you do is you assign all the cubes you have to your machines to say, aha, this is how many machines I can run. Then you look and you say, well, I can run that machine if I had one more blue cube. You look at the cubes you're not using. And you say, hey, who wants to trade me a blue cube for these cubes I'm not using. And maybe someone else has a blue cube they're not using. And now both of you end up running more machines if you make the trade and so on. So every turn you're trying to make trades to run as many machines as you can. And then you try to get stuff in the auctions in the buying phases. But what you're actually trying to get, the only thing you are judged on in the end are these purple victory points. And there are not many ways to get them. The main way to get them is to discover new sciences. And what are new sciences? They're really just machines, right? There's a stack of cards. There's some weird mechanics around them though. If I was going to design a game like this, I would probably get rid of that and let it just be the core machines and not this somewhat complicated science. But anyway, the way to get the most points is to basically discover these science cards, right? And when you discover a science, you get this new machine because you discovered some science and then you get to use it. And then the next turn, everyone else gets that machine too, right? So you get the exclusive right to use it for a turn and then everyone else gets to start using it the turn after. However, that might not seem like, well, why would I discover this science if everyone else gets to use it? I'll just one turn later. Well, using it for the one turn is beneficial, but being the discoverer, you get a shit ton of victory points. Now, what do we say a shit ton? Whoa, a shit ton. Like five victory points is a big goddamn deal. You got a lot of points if you discover. And then you'll have turns where you have like 20 cubes in front of you churning around and the output of all that nonsense is like two victory points and you're very happy with yourself. The other thing is that to discover these sciences, you need to have a lot of cubes that are all the same kind. And that is hard to do because you crank all your machines and they spit out a pile of cubes, but those cubes are going to be all sorts of different funny colors all over the place. I was making a lot of green cubes. Yeah, but like to get at some of the sciences, it was like, you need 12 blue cubes. And I'm like, ah, I got a 10 and no one's going to trade me any. Like I was about to get someone to trade me one and they're like, wait a minute. And they didn't trade me because they saw that I would basically win the game if they did that and they were right. Yep. So thus the only real problem I have with this game, because again, the naive aspect doesn't really bother me. That's just sort of fascinating because the game was good. But when we played it, the machine management itself, the solo game of manage my machine, even if there was no trading is actually pretty complex and interesting in its own right. There are also the one interesting thing is that some machines, including your starting ones, could be upgraded, right? Oh yeah, that mechanic. You try it again. You can get victory points for doing that too. So like I don't like burn a science and upgrade in order to upgrade mine. I needed forest planets to like devour. And I was trying to give people to trade me forest. I had a ton of them, but you wouldn't give me enough cubes. I could didn't have enough cubes. Well, that was going to give you my forest planet that gave me free green cubes. Yeah. But you know, you see the idea here and this, the board, my starting suggestions seem to imply that people would totally trade me those and they totally wouldn't know the science upgrade pads are sort of interesting in that they, they give you another route to sort of optimize and build your own world and adjust to the semi randomness that might be coming at you from other players. The other thing is that when you start discovering lots of sciences or other players discover lots of sciences, some of those machine, the sciences, can be upgraded by discarding other ones. So it's like, it's like, I'll give up this machine I never use. And that allows me to flip over this machine and make it better. I upgraded all of my starting machines because I had these weird like double machines. I wanted to because I gave a ton of victory points, but I was only able to do like two out of four, I think, because people wouldn't trade me there. I upgraded mine because it basically like, I started spitting out more medium cubes. It was free medium cubes all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. My ability was that my, if I got a planet from the board, not from trading, but if I bought one in the auction, then basically I, it would be a double planet and spit out double the cubes. And that was crazy, ridiculously powerful, which is why I was trying to win a planet every single turn. Yup. However, my ships were like half power or something because I was the plant people. So I had to get tons of ships and trades with people and then spend them all. See the machine I kept cranking that it told me crank. It gave me a ton of ships every time I cranked it. So I always had a bunch of shifts and pretty much can get whatever I wanted. Anyway, so the other really interesting thing is remember how we said that the game gives very specific advice to the players? The game gives, I've never seen a game give this detail of helpful directional heuristics. It was like a strategy guide. So on every machine there'll be a ratio. It'll be like three to four or three to five or one to two or three and a half to four or three and three quarters to four. The game basically assigns an arbitrary value to everything that can be in the game like every kind of cube. And any machine, it'll give you this number that is a pretty good heuristic or representation of in general how much value add the machine is in an abstract sense. Also on your little player help card. Four to seven machine is definitely giving you more bang for your buck than a six to seven machine. Also on your player help card, there's a little chart that shows you what a fair trade generally is. It's like, oh yeah, trading three small cubes is about equal to a medium cube and like about two medium cubes is about equal. It's like the fanciest octagon cube that I never had to use for. And it's like, it takes, you know, it's like about this many things is worth one victory point. It's like, it tells you in this big long strip what's equal, how many of what is equal to what. And that is so nobody, if you pay attention to that you shouldn't be able to get ripped off because you know what values of things are instead of having to just guess. Like I've seen a lot of people that's good, I think, because first of all, I think you've got to avoid being trapped by that because there's times where it's like, well, I need to make this uneven trade because actually it pays out bigger for me because I can activate one more machine. But also a lot of people who play games with open trading have no idea how to value things at all when there's just free valuing. Now, if it's a relatively simple game, figuring that out is one of the skills of the game. I feel like if I had to figure that out, I just wouldn't have traded with anyone because this game's got so much going on. Yeah. But it's like, you know, people who play games with just like, where they have to value things on their own, a lot of people have trouble with that. Well, I think look at all those people what a fair trade is, protects them from sharky good players trying to rip them off. I think that the majority of games of modern art I've ever played have had at least one player bid more money for a painting than it could possibly be worth in the best possible circumstances. There's literally, I can think of almost no reason you should ever do that. It's like that painting, in a matter of what the draw is, if you get the perfect draw for the rest of the game, that painting will be worth 50. Why are you bidding 60? You're just losing $10. Why would you do this? Yep. You're giving me an extra $10 for nothing. Are you sure? And they're always sure. They always think they got a good plan. I never understood why. I don't, I don't get it. But I've never seen a game give this granular level of like base pricing or base heuristics embedded into the game and coupled with the player advice, which again is shockingly specific. I just don't know. I don't know how I feel about that in the long run. I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad idea. I don't know if it's a sign that maybe the game needs to be more elegant or if it's a way to take a messy game and make it playable with a smaller number of learning games. It's a complicated situation. All I can say is that the name of this game and the graphic design of this game and the heritage of this game make it seem like a scary, scary, complicated 4x space game when in reality it's just a game where you trade cubes, put them in a machine to get more cubes as efficiently as possible to get more cubes and hopefully you have the most victory cubes at the end of the game. And it's a really straightforward kind of game. If you like trading with people and bargaining, then this is the game for you, especially if you like wooden cubes and an outer space theme and asymmetry, a little bit of asymmetry. This game could be way fun for you. It's like, hey, it's not bad. But I think if they fix the graphic design and maybe reduce some of the text on the cards, it would actually be much more approachable. So if you're really in the mood for trading, trade to the Genoa or this. It's hard to say, though, because at the same time, a lot of the clutter on the cards is things like showing you what's on the back of a card that could be flipped or that heuristic, which I feel like without the heuristic, it would take a couple of plays before you could actually play the game. So the other real problem is that if the game is primarily about trading, among our group, which was all like super savvy, sharp players, no one was willing to trade unless they were fucking ripping someone off in most cases, which is how we do. So there wasn't that much trading. I would I would always, like almost always, if I couldn't get a good trade, I'd just say fuck it and work on my machine. And Matt gave some good feedback that by the time he had optimized his machine and knew what he wanted to do to trade, everyone else was done trading. It didn't care anymore. Why are you just slow? Matt, I feel like it's more that the machine and the trading are both equal cognitive loads. And unless everyone in the group sets the balance between the two in terms of how they spend their term and around the same place, either some people are never going to get to trade. I think his cognitive load was bigger because his cubes were wild. Whereas I mine was just like, Oh, I have I went basically went down each machine in order of efficiency and power and was like, can I power this one? Yes, I have the cubes for that assigned. And I just went down until, well, I can't possibly power any more machines and I can't possibly get more efficiency out of the machines. Let's look at what I have left and try to trade it to get ships and whatever I need. See, I would look from the perspective of here are things I want to do and here are things I'd like to do. And I would make a short note in my head of the kinds of cubes I need to do the things I'd like to do. And I wouldn't actively try to trade with people. I would listen. And if I heard anyone say the type of cube that I needed for the thing I'd like to do, I would look up and try to make a deal. But otherwise, I ignored what everyone else was doing. And then I had a second bucket of things I had to do and I can't do with my machine. And that was the only time I would actually go up and say, anyone got any green cubes? I need green cubes. Anyone? Any Bueller? Anyone? But I do. I do feel like a problem is if I were trying to play this game more seriously, there's another thing I'd have to take into account, which is the thing you take into account in every other game that allows trading, how close has Scott to winning? Yup. How many points does Scott have? It was very difficult to track the positional heuristic. I wanted to sort of spread my trades evenly, in the game, so that way I wouldn't benefit anyone else more. Because when you trade with someone and you're not getting ripped off, you're basically boosting the two of you ahead of all the other players. So if I trade with everyone evenly, I'm boosting myself, boost, boost four times because four other players But that's not enough. You gotta pay attention. And they're getting boosted once each. Is rim trading with Chris a lot? Because if that's true, you don't want to trade with Chris at all, probably. Because then if you spread evenly, Chris is still plus one. Yup. But there's almost, I don't think there's any way for a human to keep track of that. I could not keep track of who had what points really at all. It was too hard. And plus you keep, you get these victory point chips and keep them secret behind a shield. Yup. So yeah. So what I wonder is the people who are deeply into this game and really focus on the trading, I wonder if they just trade more without considering the true ramifications of their trading. Well, the victory points are behind a shield too. Yeah. Or are they perhaps the kinds of people who might be drawn to this kind of game or graphic design, the kinds of people who will let the game take six hours to ensure that they fully explore the trading and the machining on every turn. Because this feels like the kind of game to where there are people who will play it for six hours and enjoy every minute of those six hours. We played it much faster than that. I could not. If we played it again, knowing the rules now, we could play it much, much faster than it looks like. It looks like again, that will take six hours. We could play it in like one hour and maybe a little more. I think hour and a half, we could crank this game out if everyone already knew how to play. And I didn't have to remember anything and such and such. And everyone is willing to not try to track a true positional heuristic of all the other players because I don't think it's possible. I wonder if you could make the trading more interesting. You couldn't really fully structure it because then it'd be a very different game and it would probably take a lot longer. But if there were some way to implicitly advertise trades, like if you had a set of boards, you could like just put in front of you that's like, I want to trade this. Because I know if I could have looked up and seen advertised trades, that might have sped up my own turn. Instead of everyone yelling at each other all the time. But the one thing this game actually got me thinking about was not something I think this game should do, but maybe for a different game. You just talked about the knowing who you're trading with because you don't want to boost the person who's in first along with yourself. You want to trade with people below you or even with you to boost up and catch up to the people who are ahead of you if you're not in first already. Is a game where somehow you could trade but not know who you're trading with. You just see deals and you're going to make them or not make them based on their own merits not knowing who's on the other end and that just some kind of game. I'm sure there might be a game like that, but I've never played it. It would be cool if there was a game like that. Perhaps it could use some sort of market as a middleman to obfuscate who you're trading with or something. And thus, you wouldn't have this sort of like politics that would go in a game like that. But you still have all the fun of trading and making deals because you'd be like, all right, I'll trade three blue cubes for two greens. And it's no one knows it's you. And anyone who's willing to trade two greens for three blues is looking sees that and is like, hmm. But that also does remove what a lot of people like about these kinds of free form trading games, which is the negotiation negotiation. Well, I think here's the thing. I think if you did this, you could somehow keep the negotiation, right? But by making the recipient of the person offering the trade anonymous, I think you actually flip the negotiation to the other side, right? If I go to you in a game rim and I say, hey, rim, I see you got two greens. I'll trade you one blue for it. What do you do? You go, give me two blue. Yup. Because I'm the one asking and I'm asking you. Well, Yuki, you kept saying, hey, anyone got any forest colonies? I'm like, fuck you. Exactly. As I look at my five forest colonies. Exactly. But now let's say, let's make it suddenly anonymous with this market aspect, right? With some sort of intermediary and all you see out is out on the board the opportunity to trade those two greens for a blue. And maybe someone else sees it too. So suddenly no longer is it, I'm going to give Scott as little as I can for that blue I need. It's now I need to get that blue because someone else is going to take that deal off the board. And now you're suddenly putting three greens or four greens because someone else is going to put in three greens, right? So you just by taking away knowing who the recipient is, you can suddenly it's now more of an eBay situation and less of a give Scott as little as possible situation. Thing is that'd be easy in a video game. That is very difficult to do in a physical game. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Obviously, but that's why I wonder if some sort of player aid, like not a rule, like I don't want to add structure to this. I don't want it to be like reds public. Oh, we're like, I have two blue cubes. Yeah. No. Oh, reds public. And that's right. I have two. I don't want. I don't want that. Yeah. That that was interesting though. But yeah, not that. Yeah. But I really wonder if you put some soft mechanic where there were player aids like a pool of cards or cardboard things where you could basically advertise trades without having to keep yelling at everyone like you have a common area in the middle and I can just put like three advertised trades like I'm willing to trade blue cubes and I like here's three blue cubes and we're willing to trade. There is some physical mechanism for creating a trade advertisement and then you could shuffle them. Yeah. Right. And then you've splay them out and you know which ones are yours because you made them. Oh, I don't even want to shuffle. I don't even care about the anonymous part because even better. You know what? Maybe some of them are yours and you know what? You shuffle them up and you splay them out. Right. You accidentally trade yourself because it's stupid. I put down trade one blue for two green. Right. Yeah. Maybe I want to turn a blue into two green. So I put it out there and then I use it. No. I make the deal with myself. But I guess. Oh, but those are my two green. Yeah. Never mind. That's like buying your own stock through scotrade like you're just paying $14. Yeah. But because it is impossible to keep a reasonable positional heuristic in this game on all the other players and you have to just sort of ignore that aspect. I feel like you can avoid the politics situation by just letting it wash over you and focusing on making good machine. That's what I didn't. And focusing on good trades. That's what I did. But then to keep the spirit of the game instead of doing some structural change like you're talking about just having physical implements to be able to advertise trades without having to yell constantly. That would make this game cleaner to play. The only problem with that is that there is no table on earth that will have enough free space for said trade advertisement pieces. This game has got a lot of stuff. It takes up a lot of room. You need a big table. It's going to be cubes everywhere. We were playing games on a table that was big enough for us our group to play two separate giant games and yet a small game of sidereal nonsense literally covered every square inch of the table. Granted it was two three player games and this was one five player game. I do not own or know of a game that I would be willing to play that takes up more table space than this game. I think eclipse takes up more space in this game. I think eclipse might not actually take up more space than this. I think it does. Definitely. Maybe with the science area. Yeah. Eclipse definitely takes up more than this. Of course. I remember the way we got around that is we put the science area on the other side of the room just like on it so you could walk on a second table because eclipse is so big. This game doesn't need a second table. But this game is just all your shit like your your splay will be all over the place. Yes it was big. But yeah I enjoyed this game despite not expecting to based on my initial impression looking at the rules or the graphics. Yep. I would play the art. The art that is there like not the graphic design but the art the drawings is way good. Also the art of the the proper nouns and the world. I'm not the kind of person who cares about that sort of thing. There is a lot of world building nonsense all over the place. Everything's got proper nouns everything. And the proper nouns are very proper nouny. Anyway so yeah if you're into if you want free trading a big pile of cubes you know some sort of relatively hard coreish board gaming and a relatively unique experience. Yes because I've never played a free form trading game that has this scale of nonsense to deal with. Then go for this otherwise don't go for this but if you want to trade you can play bonanza or Traders of Genoa. Bust this game out if you've got friends who are a little bit bored of games like Traders of Genoa and have already played a lot of games. This is not a first baby's first board game. No. By any stretch. I am done. But I do want to play it again. I will play it again. I might play it again. I want to play it at least one more time. Sure I could go I could do. 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.