 The reason I want to review Black Friday is that it neither sounds, if you don't know who made this game, it neither sounds nor looks like the kind of game that me and Scott would like. Well, no, I mean, it's a game made by Friedman Freese. Oh, yeah. You don't know who made it. So Friedman Freese is this guy with green hair who made Power Grid, which I think in German is called funkin German. All his games, all his games begin with the letter F, not all of them as we learned. No, not all. His games are, you know, FF something like fresh fish. Yeah. And they come in a green box, just like his hair. That's how you can tell when it's his game. So Black Market is another, I can't believe how many games this dude has made. But I thought he played every game, but no, there's another one. It's called Black Market. There's a short list of probably like six. What's the German name of Black Market? Fuck if I know. All right. Black Friday. I mean, is it something Friday? Like, I don't know. I'll try to look it up. Something else. Three day or who knows? But Friedman Freese is almost tied with Kenizia, I think for reliably able to scratch an itch that Red Men's Scott have related to gaming of the name of the first game in the frik tag. Oh, it's in a project. Ah, but yours is something years it from 2010. So it's pretty old. It's pretty old. But anyway, I'd never seen this game before or I've never seen it in a store. I've never seen it played. I didn't even know it existed. But then there it was. So what I'm saying that like, oh, this doesn't look like at surface value a game that women's got would play. If you look at this, you see a weird looking board that looks like it's from one of those Milton Bradley kind of games in the US, a bunch of paper money and a bunch of nonsense and a victory track. We didn't use paper money. We use chips, right? Yeah. Use chips, but paper money, paper money. Anyway, so what this game is about Black Friday stock market, Black Friday. As in the day, the stock market crash, right? So there's it's really hard to explain the exact rules. So I'm not going to. But basically what this game amounts to is that there is silver and over time, silver will increase in value. It starts off real cheap. What, like 20 bucks or something? 50 to 100. I think it goes from 50 to 100. I forget. Anyway, it starts off. It goes from zero and it starts going up. Anyway, it starts off cheap and gets expensive. When it hits the top, that's when the game ends, right? Yep. When silver hits its max value, I'm pretty sure that's one of the things that ends the game. And basically victory points is money is money, but silver is basically the money you have at the end of the game. So you can get money and you can use that money to either buy more stocks or convert it to silver. Once you convert it to silver, you can't turn it back into money. I can't sell. I didn't see any way to sell silver. You can't sell silver. But you want. So if you, in most games, you're trying to figure out like, all right, when do I like a Puerto Rico? I obviously early game doubloons are worth more and late game victory points are worth more. Obviously because victory points are all that matter. But if you go for victory points right away in Puerto Rico, you'll have no doubloons and no barrels, and then you won't be able to get more victory. It's like race for the galaxy. Don't do the X to consume on the second round. Right. You know, that's how most German Euro climbing games work is that you have to build this resource engine, crank it up just exactly the right amount of efficiency and then pull the levers that it starts producing victory points at the right time and the right amount, but still also producing resources to get even more victory points so that you can basically completely exhaust all resources at the exact end of the game to have the most possible victory points. Because there's a timer in the way. If there was no timer, you could just crank as hard as possible and then get a big infinite fountain of victory points, but that's stupid. In Black Friday, if you go for victory points early, you could just buy a silver right away, and it's so cheap that you kind of want to. But your upside is at most 80. That's still a really good upside. Yeah. Compared to later in the game, you buy one at like 90, and it's you get your upside at 10. Yeah, but I might have five shares of a stock that ends up being worth like 200 each. Right. So that's the thing is that the only other thing you can do really is engage in the stock market that's hella risky and is based on pulling random cubes out of a bag. Now the stock market in this game is shockingly. I'm not going to say accurate to the real stock market. It's not accurate in its mechanism. It's accurate in its motion. In terms of liquidity affecting price and momentum. And in terms of this game is designed to form bubbles. So I start buying a stock and it goes up a little bit. So I buy a stock, which means I get a cube and we put a cube in the bag. Of the same color, same stock. Rim buys one and we put another one in the bag, right? And now if there's a lot of cubes in the bag, this stock has a good chance of going up. But then if everyone keeps buying it and the cubes come out of the bag, which makes the price go up, right? And then people buy more cubes and the price goes up. But now there's not a lot of cubes in the bag. Because the price is up, fewer people are buying. So the game comes down to. So because the price went up from people buying it, people start selling. And now there's black cubes in the bag. And when black cubes come out of the bag, prices go way down. So you're trying to buy stocks that have cubes in the bag. And then once the cubes come out of the bag, you want to sell right away and things get cray. Yep. And a stock's price can move a significant amount. But all these, it's really hard to explain all the ways the stocks will move without just teaching you, literally, the entire game. There's a crazy grid of numbers. And they move up, left, down, and right. And it's all weird and stuff. And there's events that aren't really encoded in the board that you just have to know by reading the rule book. It's like when the third cube is taken, then this thing happens. And we reprice all the stuff. But unlike a lot of board games, the one saving grace is that as long as at least one person at the table fully understands all those rules, they can facilitate all the parts of the game that are complicated. And even if you don't fully understand what they're doing, you can still understand enough to realize when that you figure out, OK, I don't completely understand which cubes are moving where. But I know enough to know that this stock is bubbling, that one's tanking, that one's on the rise. And you can just tell, right? Before there was, as we played the game a few times, it wasn't until like towards the end of the first playthrough that I fully understood how all the rules of all the cube movement. But I knew something was about to crash. I was still 100% right about what was happening in the market regardless, because it moves naturally. The game has a lot of great moments, like I buy a stock and Scott buys the same stock right after me. Everyone's like, oh, shit, green. So the first time he played, I won. And what happened was his rim bought a stock. And then it was then he went first. And it was everyone else's turn. And I said, all right, everyone, rim bought what color? I forget. It was like pretend it was blue. I'm like, all right, listen, everyone, let's all go in together on orange. Everybody orange rim went blue. If we go blue, we're going to put a bunch of blue cubes in the bag and help rim all of us orange. And we'll all get a bunch of money and rim won't. And sure enough, that's exactly what the hell happened. It was totally great. And I won. So what's really fascinating, too, is that the game's very the game looks like. And when you first start to learn, it even feels like it's going to be very fiddly number heavy in terms of like someone who's not good at math could have significant analysis paralysis trying to decide what to do. If you try to analysis paralysis this game, don't play this game. But the game it's good enough to just know it's going to go up a little, up a medium, up a lot, down a little. You don't need to know the exact number. Fascinating how well very simple heuristics on the board like, are there a lot or a small number of green cubes on deck for the green stock? Are there a lot or a small number of them in this other area? How many black suitcases are in the bag? Really simply heuristics like that gets you 99% as far as trying to calculate actual probability. Where is the price of silver right now? The game seems to, because the numbers are too like, odds are really difficult to calculate to the point that I don't think anyone playing this game could feasibly do it. The fact that it's effectively impossible for the majority of players means that people won't even try to do it. And this game I think is really good at fostering surprisingly nuanced heuristics in players who don't fully understand the logic of the heuristics they're using. I think another great thing about this game is simply that it has the classic drama we see so often of pulling stuff out of a bag. Oh, bag drama is one of my favorite things now. I think we're seeing you, Frades. What's the one with the digging for treasure? Oh, Theven. Theven, right? Any game where you pull stuff randomly out of a bag is the awesomest, right? I'm way into bag pulling right now. So, I mean, even Rah. Rah is like the worst bag pulling game. But basically, even though there were situations where it's like, I know that bag is like 100% blue cubes. Oh my God, this is going to happen. And then after they finish pulling stuff out of the bag. Black suitcase, black suitcase, black suitcase. It's like all black suitcases and blue ends up going down. Even though it's like, oh my God, why? Why? And, you know, it's like crazy shit happens. And you totally get boned against the odds just like in the real stock market. And that creates a lot of drama, which is fun, even if it's not the best in terms of like making it a skill game. Yeah, but unlike the real world stock market is not a school skill game. It's full of luck and risk and nonsense. Unlike say Camel Up, which has a very high luck factor for that sort of drama. This game has a very high skill factor despite all that nonsense. Well, because that's pretty much the only luck is the pulling things out of a bag, right? I can't think of any other luck sources in the game. Well, you start with an initial loadout of some stocks. Oh, your initial loadout is random, but it effectively doesn't matter because everyone is not an FF. Schwartz or free tag. Oh, okay. Black Friday. It still has an F. That's gotta be the word for Friday. So black Friday. Well, Schwartz definitely means black in Germanic languages. Yep, black fro and they use currency symbols. Okay, that's cute. But yeah, the game is just kind of like pendante. This game had a similar feel in the sense that this was a game that greatly exceeded my somewhat low expectations and was way more fun than I expected. And as a result, got way more of our precious Pax tabletop hours than I expected. We played this game, what, three times? Yeah, so if you're a person who likes stock market type things, right? And you like playing one of the stock market games or you buy stocks with fake money. Oh, this game is gonna scratch you so good. And then you wait for the real market to move and you play that game over multiple days, right? And you say, who has the most money at the end of a month? Everyone starts with $1,000 of fake money. This gives you all the more fun than that in only a couple hours. And the only thing you're missing out on is the real world stock market stuff, right? You can play this game real quick if everyone you're playing with is smart. You only need one person to 100% know all the rules. That's important because... But that person better 100% know all the rules perfectly. Yeah, because you're trusting them. You're also trusting them to not cheat. But most of the weird complexity that you might imagine this game has, like I said, it distills really simply into heuristics that are digestible. And this game, in terms of the ebb and flow and deciding when to shift from money generation to better victory point money generation because it's all just money in the end, it's similar to St. Petersburg. Yeah. Like you have your two modes and you're flipping between them. The other great thing about this game is that your turns are really simple. It's like, come see your turn. It's like, you can buy some stock. You can sell some stock. You can buy some silver. It's like, there's not really... It's a lot like ticket to ride. We're in very modern design. We go around taking very small actions on your turn. There isn't a lot of like, hmm, I'm going to move this, but where do I move it kind of stuff? Yeah, and a consequence of that is that there's a lot of table banter. It's like, I'll buy a blue cube. That's my turn. Go. Lots of table banter and player interaction. Like, come on, Scott. Green's hot. Join me. Buy some green stock with me. We'll make out like bandits. Except we went against rim. We did the smart thing. Don't get on the rim team. Everyone getting up on rim and that totally worked. Like in that picture, which is what you should be doing every time. I tell you to do that. See how well it worked. Do it again. Every single game we play, getting up on rim. In the three ongoing long form Civ games I have, the first one, the big crew one that they came up on rim. So the entire world has been at war with me for like a hundred years. Good job, world. Literally the entire world is at war with me. Good job, world. Good job. And yet, despite that, the only consequence is I lost my worst city. I'm still actually doing fine. Do better at the game, people. In the Patreon game, I feel like I'm running away with it. No one can stop me. I'm sure the other people are just not that good. So one person who I know is good just got F'd because basically Egypt was like on this continent, like in a line to the south of them was me in Persia. And I just rolled Persia. So I'm right up on Egypt's border and Poland rolled someone. So Poland and me are these two massive land, like war empires. And Egypt was this strip of culture between the two of us. You know, Black Friday, I think it would be a fun game to play online. If it was an online version, I could just play, you know, you could play one in like an hour or whatever. Especially if a computer did it for you, it would be so fast. But I feel like playing it physically with people is the only way this game is found. But what I'm saying is that I would really like it even more if someone made a somewhat similar stock market game where there's like a fake market and stocks go up and down. Except it's more real time if it's digital, right? So how are you a little more mule trading? Right. You basically pretend like there's a fake stock market and everyone, the game, the day, you've got it. You've got dials on all your stocks, buy or sell. And it's like, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. And basically the stocks, the stocks are moving in real time and you're basically simulating like a day of day trading or something. But obviously it only takes an hour that the clock has sped up and then you play. As long as that feedback loop, because this game, I just can't stress enough, I'm not even gonna try to explain the details of the feedback loop of how stock prices get determined in this game. You just gotta read the rules. The cubes move around a grid based on how many cubes come out of a bag minus how many black suitcases come out of a bag. But it is a fascinating mechanism. If I ever get the chance to interview Friedman Freese, the first question I'm gonna ask you. How did you come up with this? Yeah. How did you play, test and design this specific mechanism in sports or free tags? Cause I made a lot of games. So I'm good at genius game maker. So yeah, I don't know if this game is for everybody, but if you like stocks and you like, you're okay playing games that are a little bit hard to understand. Well, I'd say you got, you like to play for an hour with, you know, four or five, six. Is it go to six people? Eh, let me check actually. If you are the kind of person who shows up at your friend's houses. But I don't know how you're gonna find it. If you're the kind of person who shows up at the friend's houses with the games, or you're the one who like runs games for people, this is a must buy because you'll know the rules. You can do the annoying part. And people will really have fun with this game. Like people who play board games, I feel like. Yeah. But I think that this might not be a fun game for people who chafe at things that are complicated. They're like, eh, I might buy it. Cause I fit two to five. How do you get to find a copy? Uh, I bet I can find a copy. All right. Well, uh, Amazon right now, $54. That's not the worst. It's not great. I mean, I paid one like 80 for La Cheetah. And I've played that three times in my life. Okay. Well, whatever. I'm hungry. Yeah, but this is a good game. Yeah.