 We played a game at, uh, I think I played it with Emily and a couple other people at Pax Unplugged. I saw it in first look at Pax Unplugged and then Matt, uh, the enforcer put it into the library for Pax East. But then I was like, Hey, that game, we played at Pax Unplugged. I got it. And he played it. And he's like, Oh, and he put it back in the first look after he saw that it was good. So, uh, this game, Rumble Nation, uh, what was the Japanese name again? Oh God, we got Emily to help us with this. Uh, something. It's complicated, but depended like the meaning of the name of this tank on Maydough. Yeah. So the, the, if you paste it into Google, it'll be like a world sound. Right. So apparently Tanka means like everything under the heavens and Maydough can mean like, you know, a rumbling ringing curses. Yeah. Like sort of like a sound plus a shaking was kind of, so you understand why they use the Rumble Nation as a, as a valid translation, but I guess the original Japanese meaning is more, you know, is, is, uh, not as corny, not as corny. Yeah. Rumble Nation is a very corny name in English. Uh, it's like they translated it kind. You could, you could see. Oh, I could see why you translate that. But the feeling of those words, despite having a similar meaning is way off. I feel like we should just call it the upheaval of all the lands under heaven. Sure. So this game is actually not a complicated or long game. This game takes five minutes to learn how to play from reading the rules, right? Four minutes to teach to anyone if you've read those rules and maybe 20 minutes to play. Right. If someone is super slow, right, the complexity of this game is like the complexity of like zero, that kind of level, but plus one, but in terms of like the meat of like the strategy of the game, it's like a super condensed and extremely tight El Grande. Oh yeah. Like distill El Grande down to its like fundamental essence and then add one really clever mechanic and then one really clever twist. You're getting a lot of game in a small space and being like, wow, that's not it's not a lot of game compared to games that are actually a lot of game, but for the amount of time I spent on it and the complexity of the rules. I really got a lot out of this and I don't get tired of it. Right. Well, you I think the replay value could run out. It could. I think if you played this a lot, you might go meh. But if you use this, I think as your warm up game, as opposed to something really, you know, a lot of people warm up with something super simple, like maybe like a six nymph. Yeah. And it's like this will get you, you know, ramped up more than a six nymph. Yeah. This one, and I guess what I like about it is that it is good enough to be your primary game, but it's so fast that it's good enough to be your primary game when you're playing with less powerful gamers. Yep. Or if you don't have a lot of time or if you're craving the brain feel of a game like El Grande, but you don't want to spend an hour and 10 minutes. You want to spend 15 minutes or you want to you want to get the brain feel of like the kind of game that you could only play if you had a bunch of nerds around, but you don't have a bunch of nerds around. Maybe you want to get like, you know, your siblings to play this and they're not super hardcore, right? Maybe you could get them to play this and get some of the brain feel you like, but also they could play it. Yep. And the game, you know, we talked about in the very beginning of the show at like elegance, and that's what we like in game design. This is one of the most elegant board games I have ever seen. Perfect. So here's how the game works. You got a map, right? And it's pretty simple. You want to have, you know, each, you randomly put numbers in all the spaces and that's how many points each space is worth. And they're two, two through 12, it's 2d6. So there's your replay value right there. Is it every time you play different spaces on the map or worth different amount of points? Obviously, the spot that's worth 12 is the best, the spot that works to who cares. And then whoever has the most dudes in each space wins the points for that space. GG. Yep. Colonel Blotto game. You're putting the most dudes in the spots and some spots are better than others. Now here's how it works. You can't just put your fucking dudes wherever you want. Yep. This is the clever mechanic. So 3d6, right? And every turn. And then you pick one of the d6s that you rolled to tell you how many dudes you're going to put out. So let's say I roll a one, a two and a three. I could put one dude out. I could put two dudes out or I could put three dudes out. No, that's not it. You're off a little bit. I'm off a little bit. A one or a two lets you put one out. Right. It's the number divided by two. Round it up. All right. So I roll a one, a three and a six. One, two or three dudes out because you get to divide the d6 by two. Yep. Right. You can't put more than three dudes out at once. Anyway, the other two dice that you leave behind, right? So I rolled, I rolled what? I said a one, a three and a six. So if I decide to put one dude out with the one, that dude is going to go in spot number nine because the three plus six is nine. It's settler's placement. If I want to put two dudes out, they're right, that I have to use the number three dice to get my two dudes. Those two dudes are going to go in spot number seven. And if I want to put dudes, I want to put three dudes on the board. It's going into four. It's going into four. So not only does this give you an interesting decision, but also luck each turn of three possible moves. And you can do a re-roll. But you only get one. If you can re-roll and your roll sucks, well, that sucks. Right. Because you, it limits your choices. You're not sitting there thinking like super hard on your turn because you've only got three options. Yep. Right? So you're not going to allow yourself to death there with all your choices. It also forces you to be a little tactical. Like you might have, you might be stuck doing something that feels suboptimal. So now you might have to base like your strategy for the rest of the game on what you've already done. This mechanic is also genius in that it is easy to put lots of dudes on the spots that aren't worth a lot of points. Yeah. And it's hard to put a lot of dudes on the spots that aren't like wherever the seven is. Right. Anyone can just be throwing tight. Let's say I want to, let's say I get lucky. I want to, I get to actually get put, to put dudes on the 12. You already have to roll two sixes, right? So I rolled two out of the three dice that I roll, two or sixes. I can finally put dudes on the 12 spot, the most valuable spot on the board. Right? So almost no one can ever put dudes there because how often is someone in the game going to roll two sixes out of three D six in the same role? So my two 99 and gone shurn clever is just staring at me from this. And then that third D is going to determine how many dudes I get to put on the 12. So it's like, all right, I'm definitely going on the 12. I'm using both of my sixes to go there, right? But my third dice is a two, so I can only put one dude on the 12. Instead of doing that, I could have put three dudes on like the seven or the eight or whatever it came out to. And you got a pile of armies. So their turns are real quick. Like just go, go, go, go. You keep going until you put all your dudes on the board. Obviously putting your dudes out on the board last means that you have more information on your turn. So whoever puts all their dudes on the board first gets a slight advantage in terms of tie breaking. And then also there are these cards that you can do that are just there's some cards face up next to the board. So these cards are very similar also to the El Grande cards. They do very simple things. They'll be four. Move two dudes on. We're already on the board. Yeah. Remove some dudes that are already on the board. So you can name names like take a prisoner or whatever, but it's literally like take a dude that's in a place that's not one of yours and move it to another place for you have dudes. Right. So these. So if you have three players, they'll be there's N plus one cards face up next to the board. There's a big deck of them, but you just flip up a few where N is the number of players and you never refresh them. And every player can use up to one ever. Right. So and once you use it over the course of the whole game, right? On one turn and one turn only, you can just say, you know what? I'm going to use a card on this turn instead of roll on the dice and use a card and you do what the card says instead of the dice. No one else can ever use that card. You can never use a card again. And that's it. So which is the rest of the game. You're going to be rolling 3d6 and choosing one of your three options. And it's interesting to see like sometimes I've seen people like make decisions based on what cards are available, but they don't want to commit to taking one because then someone else could take another one. Right. I've seen games where everyone blows their load on their cards right away. So now here's the final thing about this game that makes it so great. The twist. Everyone's finally put all their dudes on the board using this 3d6 choose two to for location one number of dudes. You may or may not have used a card and eventually everything set. The game is over. Every player has put all their dudes on the board. Now you start scoring. You look at the number two spot. You score. Wherever that happens to be. You start at the lowest one, the two spot. Yeah. The cheapest, worthless. It's only two victory points. And you say, who's got the most dudes in the two spot? It was Ram. He's got the most dudes in the two spot. Two points. Whoop. Ram gets the two points. Congratulations. Every space that is adjacent to the two spot, right? Where Ram has at least one dude already will now get reinforcements from the conquered two spot. Yep. General supply. Right. So if I win the two and the two is next to say the four and the three or maybe the 12. Yep. And I have at least one army. Hey, if you don't have any dudes in those adjacent spots, then you don't get any reinforcements. Right. But if you do have at least one dude in the adjacent spot, you're getting reinforcements. You might want to win the two because it's in the like on this map I'm looking at on the screen right now. The two is in the middle of an adjacent to five, six and 12. It has three adjacencies so you could get a ton of reinforcements and this cascade. So if you win the two, you put some armies in the three that's next to it. If you win the three, you keep putting armies out. So if like, let's say that the seven and the eight are both adjacent to the 12 and you win the seven. It cascades into the eight and the 12. Yeah. And you win the eight. It cast because you got the reinforcements from the seven. That will cascade even more reinforcements into the 12. So you have at least one guy in the 12. So you had to you had to put at least one in the 12 via dice or card at some point in the game. Otherwise, nothing. So you got to keep all this in mind while you're playing and the combination of four random cards come up, rolling the three D six every turn and the placement much like in settlers when you just randomly put the tokens out instead of following a pattern. That's why the game has so much replay value. You can't come into this with a set strategy. You know, you got to play the dice that you roll and just make the optimal move each turn, but you also need to have in order to make that optimal move. You need to have the vision to see how the board will score with all these reinforcements that do not appear at all until the end game. Yep. And so you got to be like, OK, you can look at the board and it looks like you're really weak somewhere. He's only a one guy. It's like they're like six reinforcements probably coming into that spot. They're adjacent. They're winning three adjacent spots to that. Yep. And you have to be able to visualize that end game cascade every turn when you're making your decision about, you know, I guess not in the early turns, but in the late turns where it matters more, you need to be able to visualize the cascade to make your decision about where to put your guys. So the other minor mechanic that's worth mentioning is that it has a tie breaking system, so there's never a tie. Well, like I said, whoever ends puts all their dudes on the board first, therefore made their moves with less information available. Yep. They had ties break towards them. Ties break towards them. So you're not heavily punished for and there are a lot of ties because there aren't that many dudes and there are a lot of spaces. So you're not heavily punished for just getting all your dudes on the board quick relative, not stupidly quick, right? But more quickly than the other players because the other players will be able to make, you know, if they're going like one here, one there, one there, they're getting better decisions and more optimally placing their dudes, but so they shouldn't have a tie to make. They're doing so slowly to make up for that. And what makes it an inter like what makes this all very balanced is that as soon as one player is done and takes that first tie break marker, no one can ever play a card again. Cards are just out of the game. You got a player card before. So when if you haven't played a card and you see somebody's running low on dudes, the most dudes anyone can put it once is three. So if someone has three or less dudes or four, you know, close to three, like four or five or six dudes left, then you might want to play a card real soon before they, you know, eliminate cards from an option you can use. But this game, like I would say it's something that if you regularly attend conventions or play board games, like it's almost a must buy just because it's so quick. So it's all really small. You can fit this game in a very tiny space, especially if you rebox it. Yeah, it's just a map and a bag of cubes and a little deck of cards. If I could be made the map out of cloth and three G six, you could make a map out of cloth for this and then just fit the whole thing in a tiny bag. Oh, yeah. The map is way simple. You could easily make a functionally equivalent map that was not the same map. And it's just like I was surprised how satisfying such a simple game is. This was the packs, like I said, mentioned when we talk about packs on plug. It also goes up to like four or five players or four players. That's pretty good for four player 20 minute kind of game. This has been Geek Nights with Rima and Scott special. Thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening.