 We played a game called PaxPammer 2, the second edition of PaxPammer. Yep, I played PaxPammer 2. I've never played PaxPammer 2, but I played PaxPammer 2, right? Which is designed by the same guy, Cole Worley, who made Root. I think he designed both of the games. 2 is like an updated edition, obviously. And 2 was kick-started somewhat recently, maybe like a year or two ago. And there was a second kick-starter for 2.0, which I did back. Over 3,000 backers, almost 250 grand. Right, which is for another printing of the game, right? So they did a kick-starter for the game, and then they did a kick-starter for a second printing. I already kick-started the second printing. It should be shipping soon-ish, I guess. But yeah, so it's a Pax game, just like Pax Renaissance, Pax Porphyriana, Pax Transhumanity. I haven't played that one yet, either. I played Transhumanity one time, I didn't understand. So it's in that series of games, they're Tableau building, you know, card games. They're, you know, where the heuristics are quite advanced. They all have a certain sort of sensibility to them, even though they have radically different mechanics in many cases. Yep. Have we done a show on any Pax game before? I think we might have talked about Pax Renaissance. I'll double-check and I'll link to it if we did. Anyway, so when I played Pax Pamir 2 for the first time, it was at Pax West. It's not related to the convention, anyway. And I played with someone who had played Pax Pamir 1, and they were upset about the differences. But every difference that they brought up that made them upset, with something that actually, when they explained it to me, I felt that two significantly streamlined the game and made it better, based on their description. So thanks to that, I mean, I'm slightly interested to see what one is like, but basically my, from the knowledge I have gained, not experience, but information, I feel like two significantly streamlines and improves upon one, and there's not much reason to play one, just play two. So what is up with Pax Pamir 2? This is a game where you play sort of an Afghan warlord type person, during the time of troubles. So we're talking 19th century, like post-Napoleonic war era, but after an empire collapsed in the region, and basically the colonial powers are all trying to play their game and mess around in Afghanistan for a lot of historical reasons. I think historically it was called the Great Game or something, but basically you had Russia and Britain both coming into Afghanistan, plus the Afghani people, right, and all shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, all kinds of political war stuff going on. And I don't know, I'm not versed in the history of it, I just know that something went down then, that was, you know... Well, actually the description of the game really says it best. In Pax Pamir, players assume the roles of 19th century Afghan leaders, attempting to forge a new state after the collapse of the Durrani Empire. Western history is called this period the Great Game, because Western history is mostly around fucking with native people and calling it some sort of game or diplomacy. But basically the game is from the perspective of the Afghani people making alliances and deals with these different foreign factions to try to achieve their own ends and have some agency in their own affairs and to manipulate these interloping foreigners. Yep, exactly. So that's the theme of the game, right? So how does the game actually work? If you look at the categories this game is listed in, in Board Game Geek, Economic, Educational, Negotiation, Political, Post-Napoleonic, Spy's Secret Agents, but even funnier, the list of mechanisms, Action Points, Area Majority, Influence, Area Movement, Card Drafting, Hand Management, and three more. Yeah, so here's how it works. It's basically a Tableau Builder, meaning that in front of you, you're going to be building a set of cards that represent like your abilities, right? Sort of like in, you know, the same way like Magic the Gathering is a Tableau Builder, right? You summoning creatures, right? So there's a market of cards and you start, everyone starts with the same amount of money and you go ahead and you buy cards from the market and the card, it does that same thing that Vinci or Small World does, where if you, a lot of games do this, where if you, something is brand new in the market, it costs a lot to go that deep, right? If you want something that's been sitting in the market for a long time, something low demand, no one wants it, it made its way all the way to the left side of the market without anyone taking it, you can take it for free or cheap, right? And then you play cards into your Tableau and you do what they say on them, right? What? Trouble? What the? I think my yelling told, got somehow activated Siri and Siri somehow played a song. A song I never heard. Now I've got to be real clear, we are not going to explain how to play this game, because that is way too much for a podcast without visual aids. We're going to talk about this, like, what it feels like to play the game and the kinds of things you do, but all the PAX games, they, like I said, they all have a similar sensibility, even though they are mechanically extremely dissimilar, but like it's hard to explain and describe until you play multiple of them, but your brain will engage with them the same way, despite the mechanics being so different. Right, so you buy cards, you play them into your Tableau and that gives you new abilities, right? And you use these abilities and the cards that you play to influence the board and the stuff you put on the board, some of that stuff is just your stuff, like cylinders that are like you, your tribes from your people, right? But most of the stuff you put on the board is like a British road, right? A Russian army, right? You know, if somebody has the most stuff in a region on the map, they take the ruler token from that area. And being the ruler means you have powers over that area, like you can tax people and stuff. Right, so the way you actually, there's all this stuff going on, your cylinders that you use to be tribes could also be spies that you put them on other people's Tableaus, they move around the board doing stuff like you're interfering with Tableau. Yeah, imagine a five-player magic game and you have one card that literally just slides along all the other players' cards that eventually does something, like assassinates the Shavondragon. Yeah, stuff like that. But the way the game is scored is that there are these three sets of basically like these, if you play the physical version of the game, there are these really nice kind of like resin, like, you know. Oh, the components are so good. I touched an early version of them at a PAX and it was just like, ooh. They're super nice. They feel almost stony and grainy, but not in a bad way. They're like extra high quality and fancy. And there's three sets. There's the Afghan ones, which are green, the British ones, which I think are yellow, or the Russian ones yellow, and the British ones are pink. Right, and it's equal numbers of all three and it starts with none of them on the board, none at all. Every player chooses to ally with one of the three factions at the start of the game. So whichever one you're allied with, you're going to be, when you build a road or an army, you're going to be taking one of those pieces and putting it onto the board. So if you're Russian, if you're allied with Russia, you take one of these bricks and you put it standing up long ways to be an army and you lay it down flat ways to be a road, right? Which, and then, you know, other players are putting them on the board too. There might be more than one player with the same alliance. All players get the same alliance. Yeah, we might all just be in with the British and just be colonial pieces. We might all be Afghans fighting against colonizers, right? You know, regardless, these pieces are going onto and off of the board, right? In the three different colors. Eventually, a card is going to come out of the deck that's a dominance card. If that, you know, and then if that card falls off the market, is purchased, or if somehow two of them are in the market at the same time, you do a dominance check, which is basically a scoring round. So the scoring rounds are sort of spaced out randomly, but not entirely randomly. Yep, it feels a little bit like Twilight Struggle has a similar mechanic. Yeah, it's basically like, yeah, there's going to be some number of scoring rounds and they're going to happen not too early in the game. They'll happen eventually and then there'll be this many of them spaced out and then the game will end. If we get to the final one, the game will definitely end, but the game could end earlier. And what you do during the scoring rounds is first, you say you look at the three, it's a perfect user interface for a board game. You look at the three rows of remaining bricks that are off the board and you say, all right, is there anyone who's like really got a lot of bricks on the board, right? Is there like a ton of British ones on the board? There won't be that many left off the board and they're arranged in three rows so you can easily see, aha, Britain's got way more on the board than everyone else just by looking at it instantly. And if they have four more on the board, four or more pieces on the board than any other person, then that means that they're dominant. So if Britain has so many on the board, Britain has dominance Afghanistan, right? Or maybe Russia has dominance. And then if someone is dominant, then what you do is you say, okay, someone's dominant, who is allied with the dominant force. So like in the last game, two of us were allied with the British. So the two of us get to have scoring basically. Yeah, if you're allied with the dominant, if someone is dominant and anyone who's allied with it is going to score some points. If only one person's allied with the dominant faction, they're going to score points by themselves. And if no one is allied with the dominant faction, I guess that wouldn't be possible for them to be dominant then because no one's allied with them. But I guess it could maybe happen. I guess no one would score points. But if no one is dominant, so they've all got all the factions sort of have equal-ish numbers of things on the board, then you just say, well, who's among you, among all players, who's got the most tribes and stuff, right? Who's the best? It's basically who's the best unless a faction is dominant, in which case only the people who are allied with that faction matter. Right, so you're doing all this other stuff in the game. Like when you actually play on your turn, you're doing all this other stuff, right? Yeah, sometimes you're putting roads and armies out on the board. Sometimes you're removing them from the board, but you're like messing with other people's cards, buying cards, taxing people to try to get money, right? You're doing all these other actions, right, that trying to become the ruler of a place, all this other stuff marching, moving things around, trying to give gifts to different factions, paying all this kind of stuff that isn't directly related to, like it's hard to draw a straight line in your mind between that and the victory condition of be in the dominant faction, make a faction dominant when the dominance card shows up, you know, make no one dominant, but then be just stronger than everyone else, right? It's really hard to draw a straight line. Shift your alliance. The alliances are spinners. You could just be like, nope, I'm with Britain now, fuck y'all. Yep, you can switch it up very quite easily. You have to give things up. Like if you gave a gift to Britain to gain their favor, and then you switch it up, your gifts go away obviously, because you're now Russian, right? Like the way this works is like some of the cards are people who are patriots of one of the three factions. Yeah, some cards are patriots and some aren't, so if you can only have patriots in your tableau, if they're allied with the faction you're allied with, so if you change your alliance, all your patriots go away. If you play a patriot from a faction that's not in your alliance, that causes your alliance to change immediately, right? But yeah, that's... But the alliance stuff is really fun, like the coalitions. I've never seen a game elegantly do what many people have tried to do of have a sort of coalition forming mechanism. Well, because games where there's usually alliances, think like Eclipse or Dune, right? Where Axis and allies, I guess you're forced into one particular alliance. Yeah, I wouldn't... That's not a coalition and then you can alter it. It's not like we start quartermaster general in Italy, it's like, nope, I'm with the allies. Right, risk and diplomacy with the informal alliances, right? But in all those games, you know, the alliances are sort of like, yeah, we're agreeing to work together, but in Pax Palmer too, it's like, okay, we're in the same faction. We're both trying to put more, you know, British bricks on the board as roads or armies, because we're both in with the British, but we're in no way like trying to help each other. I'm not trying to help you, even though Britain likes both of us. Yeah, we both give gifts to the British, but we're really both just trying to shut down those Russians and shut down each other. Right, so you have alliances, but in no time are you actually in an alliance friendly with another player. You're different leaders in Afghanistan who want to form an Afghani state that you are in charge of, right? Not the other guy. Just because you're both sucking up to Britain at the same time, you are in no way friends, right? And so that's why it works. That's why you can be on the same team without being on the same team. And then in terms of actual play, all the Pax games are similar in that every decision you make is a huge decision. Like every action in the game is deeply, desperately meaningful and will radically affect the course of the game or at least your own personal chance of victory. You do not actually get that many actions during the game to take, and there are ways to get some free actions, but even then you can't get that many, because a lot of times they'll be inconsequential. So the actions you do take are often enormous, right? Especially considering that like, yeah, it's like, you know, you put down maybe like two roads. It's like, that's a huge deal, two roads. So as a result, the game has a lot of posturing of like, you could set, there's something that you could do, but it would take a couple actions to do it, and there's something someone else could do that'll take a couple actions to do it. But you might start going down that road to get the other person to be prepared to defend against it and then do something else. Like there's that kind of interplay, a lot of betrayal, a lot of like, anticipating what someone's going to do and like changing the dominance at the last minute. Another thing that's very interesting about this game is like I think some other PAX games, and like many games actually, but it has a closed economy. So all players start with money, the same amount, and they use that money to buy cards from the market and that money goes to the market. And then if someone takes a card from the market that has money on it, they get that money. So there's no money entering the game like from the bank. It's like the money that's in the game from the start of the game is all the money. We use the tax action to take money from other players or the market. You don't take money from the bank ever, right? The only time money comes out of the bank is with these leverage cards. So if you play a leverage card, two money will come out of the bank to the person who played the card. But then if anything happens to that card, if it goes away, two money goes back in the bank. So what if I got a bunch of like British leverage cards and then Britain's just sucking it up and I really need a new ally? Well, I mean, not only am I going to lose all these cards, but now I'm also going to lose a bunch of money that I might not have, right? That's true. But the most interesting part is the fact that money isn't coming. It's like there's no like taking money from the bank frequently. The leverage cards are not because the game makes a game. They're going to play a few incredibly tight in that it's like some extremely interlocked gears and everybody takes a turn cranking these gears a little bit until the game ends. Could you imagine playing Monopoly where it's like everything in Monopoly that you know you start the game, you give everyone $1,100 and then you throw the there's no bank at all. It's like there's no collect from 200 from go. There is no collect from community chest or chance or free parking. There's literally no way to get more money except from another player landing on your house or hotel, right? Or paying you rent from landing on a property. There's literally no... Imagine playing Monopoly like that. You cannot get money unless it is money from another player, right? And that coupled with the way the factions work make Pam here unique among the Pax games. So I think if you are... I've never played a Pax game. You want to get into these because they are a lot of fun. The things to note is that A, the heuristics of not winning, not playing, but the heuristic of winning is going to be very obtuse because it is one or two steps removed from the direct actions you take in the game. You have to really do a lot of work and gain experience from playing quite a few times to understand how it is doing this lead to the victory points of the Dominic. Because like Pax Redisons, they don't make sense until you've played the game to kind of see how things go. Exactly. But it's like, oh, so I'm moving these armies around and executing people, and then this banker ends the game. But how could I have possibly interacted with that banking system? Yep. But it's easier to see those connections in the very streamlined Pax Pamer 2.0 as opposed to the other Pax games that I've played. There are some I haven't played that might be easier. Transhumanity looked the hardest in that regard. Transhumanity is absolutely the hardest. I have no idea what the hell to do in that game. I walked by you playing it, but I've never played it. Right. But also, the game is actually, you might be intimidated to not play it at all, but much like 18XX, it is much, especially this, again, this heavily streamlined, well-polished, not just in production value, but also rules Pax Pamer 2.0 to learn to play the game is, if you can play any other Euro-e game, a small world, a fucking carcassone, if you can play it, you can play this game. It's like buy a card, play a card. It's easier to play the Magic of the Gathering. It's like buy a card, play a card, do what your cards say. The cards are very flavorful. They're all like characters from historical figures from the time and place that are relevant with lots of flavor text on them that's a lot of fun. And the cards do things that are relevant to what the cards are flavor-wise, which is fun. Chris popped into the chat. Transhumanity is indeed the hardest for directional heuristics. There is no question it is the hardest. I could barely even play a card in that game. But yeah, you can play this game, right? Our learning game where two players that never played this before was pretty quick. Yeah, it doesn't take that long either. It can even end quite abruptly because, like I said, it can go to the final dominance check, the final scoring round. It can end on any scoring round if one player, if the player in first place, okay, if the gap between the first place player and the second place player is four or more points, the game immediately ends and the player in first place just wins. That could happen on the first scoring round. We might have just talked about something like that in a panel that's going to be live at PAX soon. Oh, maybe. Yeah, talked about game endings, huh? Yeah. But yeah, it's like, so in fact, if you are allied, let's say I'm allied with Britain and Britain is dominant in the first dominance check and no one else is allied with Britain, that would be five points for me. I would just win immediately, right? That's just an instant win in this game. So the game is a lot of like slow and thoughtful reaction to the state of the play of the world and what other players have done. But it's very slow. So this game is available. If you have not kickstarted, there should be possible to buy this game afterwards, I imagine, but you'll have to wait a while. Even the kickstarted people are waiting a while. It is worth it to get the physical edition if you plan to play it a lot, because it is very fancy and well made and it's not that large. Won't even take up a lot of space. You can play for free on tabletop simulator. There is an official tabletop simulator mod for this game. We played it. It's still crappy tabletop simulator, but it's about as good as tabletop simulator. This is the side, but I will say this. Counter intuitively and this sounds crazy. Tabled up simulator is actually way better in VR than it is on the desktop for almost any game because it has it's a lot of fiddly interface stuff. But in VR, you just pick up the pieces and move them. Like stuff just works. You don't have to know any tabletop simulator stuff. So Pax Pamer 2 terrific game as you would suspect from terrific designer. I want to play it again. I want to play it. I think after play, I definitely think it's pretty much this and Pax Renaissance are sort of tied in terms of they are like my favorite Paxes are the ones I understand the most, the ones I play the most. I think I'm going to lean toward this one more if they both get a lot of play because this one seems like... I think I like... Like Hansa Chatonica is a similar situation for me in that Hansa is a very reactive game. This is also a very reactive game. The decisions I'm making are based very solely on what other players are doing. And the cards coming up are just sort of like... Like they're setting the stage, but in Renaissance, the cards that are available dictate the course of the game much more directly I found. Sure. Yes. I would say that Renaissance, I prefer for two player and I prefer the theme of Renaissance. I like the Renaissance period more than I like... You know what is? We both know more about the Renaissance. So Pax Renaissance is like, we have more heuristics. Even if I studied both, I like the Renaissance more than I like, you know, Afghanistan. I'm more interested in it because I'm a white man. But in terms of more than two players and in terms of better streamlined, more elegant rules, I think I would lean towards Pammer 2 for a first Pax. I think I would agree because my first game of Pax Renaissance was definitely a you won't understand what you're doing and you'll lose and not understand why, then we'll play again. And that's exactly how it went down. I didn't understand why I lost. I don't dislike the other Pax games I've played like Transhumanity or Porfiriana. I do like them less than these two and they're much more difficult and harder to develop directional heuristics for than Renaissance or Pammer. So stay with Renaissance. My recommendation is go Pammer and Renaissance based on your preference and the number of players and if you really into them and you play them a whole bunch then go look at some other Paxes and see what the deal is like. And if you figure out how to be good at Pax Transhumanity let us know. I would love to know what you're doing in that game. How are you thinking? Yeah, I don't even know what's going on there.