 So as great as this game is we don't have to talk about it that long, but we were at packs unplugged and well even before packs unplugged a lot of the enforcers, you know, they scouted out at BGG con, which was just to make a curated collection to recommend to you what games to play. No to get new games that are otherwise unattainable. Yep. They went to Essen and BGG con and the game they raved about that was new and unattainable was Nicosu dice. So I first look at it was sitting there next to goats and goats right there goat and goat. There was and I'm like, oh, so goats is the speed runner. Goat and goat is the goat game. Yes. So I go and I'm like, well, that's the game. That's I can't play otherwise. Let's play it and we read it. And oh, yeah, it is definitely the bomb. Then we played it and it's telling because I kept taking people over there and teaching it to them. I was sitting there teaching random people to play it at one point. I've never played a game in first look like that many times before because usually I go to first look usually it's hard to get into first. Yeah. But if once I play a game in the first look, it's like, okay, I know the deal. And then I just like buy the game or something. But there were a lot of other games that could have played it packs. I kept going back over to play Nicosu dice with different people. So here's the pitch. It is a trick taking card game. A lot like, you know, Yooker hearts wizard bridge. One of those. So first I'm going to explain it very briefly. The way I would explain it to someone who knows trick taking games. It's a trick taking game with Trump. You bid on how many tricks you're going to take. But there's a mechanism for that bidding. You have to follow suit. You don't have to Trump unless you want to. But you get a hand of cards. And then you draft a bunch of dice and the dice have the same set of suits as the cards. So my hand might be the four of blue and the two of white and the three of yellow. And in front of me I might have rolled a three of yellow and another three of yellow and a six of blue. The card. And then when it comes around to my turn to play a card into the trick, I could play a card or a die. Scott leads a blue six. That's a die. I play a blue four. That's a card. Emily plays a blue two. That's a die. Like that's the game. Right. Well, also the cards go from one to seven zero to seven zero to seven zero to seven and the dice go obviously one to six. So there. So if you roll out, if you got a six yellow die in front of you and you push it out, someone plays a yellow seven, it's like, well, no dice is going to beat that. So here are the other things, like the final pieces of this. This is like the unique part of the game. I remember that no KOSU in Japanese, I guess means leftover. It's all about the leftover dice. Right. So when you draft, you start by shaking up all the dice and pilling them out. You take a few away and everyone starts with two random dice, but then you shake the rest and not all the rest. You leave, you pull a few out. So you shake the rest that you're going to use. Yeah. And everyone takes them one at a time in a draft. Right. And the one that's leftover is Trump, whatever number and color that die is, is Trump. So if the blue three is leftover, blue is Trump and three is Trump. The best way to think of it is that all threes are now also blue. Yep. Except for the blue three, which is now God tier. So this isn't as complicated. There are some games that have superior and inferior Trump. If you made a video game out of this, what you would do is like if Trump turned out to be blue three, suddenly all the blue cards and all the threes would like turn gold and the blue threes would turn like, you know, crazy, right? Like on fire with sparkles, right? Because now they're all in the same suit together. So even a yellow three would be in the same suit as a blue two or a blue one or a blue seven. Now, if you if you've played a lot of trick taking games that have complex Trump, then this game, like it's not a problem. But for any like we saw people who have not played games with complex or multifaceted trumps before had trouble remembering that the twos were blue. Well, I think I had a little only a minor amount of it was funny. You would fuck it up. Well, I had to explain the rule to everyone and I understand the rule perfectly. I think I had I blame it slightly because we played the original, you know, from the box, official Nicosia dice. And I only had a tiny bit of trouble. We only messed it up a little bit. We've been we get obviously the game. I made an airsatz version of this game out of some chicken and a bunch of dice. The game isn't out yet. Right. You can preach. Actually, there was a preorder that sold out within a day. Now there's another preorder. Another preorder tomorrow. So I'm getting in on it. We'll post the link for that preorder for anybody. If you can go. It's not clear how excited we are. This game is a must buy. Yeah, and it's going to be super cheap. But anyway, we played with rims like hacked together copy using whatever dice. I know what you're about to say, but I looked at the pictures of the real cards and real dice and my copy. There is no material. I couldn't. I can't tell you a specific difference between them. It was meaningful. So I, but so, but we did mess it up more with the put together copy that I figured out why I was thinking about that a lot. When we were playing it in first, I can't tell you why because it looks the same to me. When we were playing it in first look, we played it super slow because we had all just learned it. And every time we played it, we played it again, super slow. And everyone was like paying a hundred percent attention. And at magfest, I just get busted out on the table all the time. I played it like seven or eight times. It could be. Who knows? And I kept playing it with random groups of people, but we played it more like we play wizard or like normal games, like people get distracted or talk to each other. You deal out the cards, you get to random dice, you draft the rest of the dice. The last day you're drafting. There is an odd number of dice so that such that there is going to be one die left over after everyone is drafted. That die is the Trump die. Then you play the game and what happens is that the leftover dice. So you've got five dice in front of you and a card. You start taking tricks, right? As you would a normal trick taking game, must follow suit. So if I play blue, everyone has to play blue if they have it. Otherwise they don't. And if you don't, you can play Trump unless Trump was led, in which case, follow with Trump. If a lot of situations come up where you have what you don't want to follow and you don't have a card to follow with, but you have a die to follow us. You have to follow with the die because a die is just a card in your hand. So if I see that Scott's got a yellow die and I'd like I'm worried that he might be de-suited. I know he's not de-suited in yellow. Well, if you know that like blue is Trump and you see rim has a bunch of blue dice in front of them, it's like, well, it's like part of his hand, part of everyone's hand is just open, but only part of their hand is open. So here's the final like magic that makes this work. Right. So after you play, you keep taking tricks and eventually at some point you, each player will have one die left. You don't get to play that die. That die goes aside. And now whatever the number value is on that die, regardless of color, is your bid. So Scott is a six and a one in front of him and I play a card that forces him to play the six. His bid becomes one, which might totally fuck. Right. So that bid is you're trying to win exactly that number of tricks. So if you're winning a lot of tricks, you want to have a die with a high value on it and not use that die. You want to set that die aside. Also, you take more than six tricks. You can never be correct. Your maximum bid is six, but there are 15 tricks in a round. Yeah. Also 14, 14 before you start after you draft, but before you start taking tricks, you can say, hold up, I want to bid zero, in which case you just pick one of your die and set it aside. And now you just play the turn normally and you're trying to take zero tricks, but obviously if you take even one, you've missed. So the game is not as punishing as wizard, because wizard, you only get points if you're a bid, right? When you play a game like wizard, if you need to be correct, but a wizard, you can bid any number. It's way easier. Yeah. Right. You need to be exactly correct. Otherwise you lose points here. It's way harder to be exactly correct because you have less control over your bid. Yeah. But if you fail to get the be exactly right, you still always get one point for trick you take. So it's like, OK, my bid was wrong. But guess what? I took 10 tricks, 10 points. Now, if you bid zero and get zero, you just get 10 points. But if you're the only one who is correct in your bid, you get 40 bonus points. Right. I forget exactly how many. I think it's 40, 30, 30, 20, 10. Right. So you get 10 bonus points for bidding zero and being correct on top of the points for being the only person who's correct. Yeah. So if you bid zero and you're the only one who was right, you get a shit ton of points. If everyone's correct, they just get the tricks they took. So it's more like a traditional trick-taking game in that jet taking tricks can never hurt you too much. It just might deny you bonus points. Right. But the bonus points are so large that that's that's how to win. You're not going to win if you don't get the bonus points unless everyone is so good that nobody ever gets bonus or everybody always gets bonus points, because I mean, which is the same as everyone never getting bonus points, right? So if no one ever gets bonus points, then it will just come down to who took the most tricks. There's one last nuance that makes the game work, because unlike a normal trick-taking game, there can be ties. The only other game that can have ties is wizard, or at least major trick-taking games, where multiple wizards get played. And wizard who ever played the first of those gets the trick. In this game, whoever, if there's a tie of what's winning the trick, the last card among the tied cards wins the trick. Right. So if Scott plays a super high trump and I tie his trump, but I go after him, I take it. It's easier to take tricks. It's harder to duck. Right. So there's a lot of difficult situations where it's like, even though people's hands are half open, you just see their dice in front of them. More like a third open. You have five dice in front of you, you have 14 cards. But they'll be a situation, let's say blue is trump, right? And rim plays, rim starts it off with a yellow two. And it's like, all right, I have no yellow. I'm desuited and yellow. I'm going to play my trump. And then I look around the table and I see the person next to me just has like a fucking way more powerful Trump just on their die facing up. If it was wizard or some other trick-taking game, I would just played my trump like, bam, but I can see the card or a die at least that beats my trump just right there. I could just say it and it's like, well, I guess I'm not playing this. Yup. And because- But it's like, well, what are you going to do? It's like, you wait. It's like, yeah, it'll still be there ready to beat you later. It's not like it's suddenly going to go, right? It's like you're going to wait for them to somehow use it before you use yours. It's like you're playing with it. Good luck with that. It's like you're playing wizard and one person's just playing hand open. You just see the wizard sitting there the whole time. It's like, how are you going to beat it? You see it. That doesn't help. That doesn't help you, right? It's like, yeah, you can see it. Can you beat it? No. And to make matters even more fun, the Trump power order is first the item, the card or die that matches both the color and the face value of the Trump is the super Trump. So yellow, we started calling it the bower named after you. But anyway, the blue three is Trump. Therefore, there's one card that is the blue three. That is the strongest card. Yep. But there could be several other dice that are also blue threes that are all equally strong. So after that, all the things that match the face value of Trump, so all the yellow three, the green three, the red three, all the other threes. They're equally powered and slightly less powerful than the one that matches both. So blue three is the strongest. Yellow three, green three, red three are all equally strong to each other, but subservient to the almighty blue three. And then it's numbers down from there. So then the blue seven, blue five, blue four, blue two, blue one, blue zero. Anything that's blue that's not a three comes after that. So all these factors combined make this like one of the better trick-taking games I have ever played. Oh yeah. There's just so much going on. You would have to play this for a hell of a long time to have any sort of mastery on it. And even if you're not only right, but even with the mastery, there's so much not luck, right? There is a little bit of luck against the random dice you pull from the bag. The two random dice that are yours and yours alone for each round, but the draft, you just get such a different game every round. It's completely different. What's going on? Imagine hearts with like drafting like whoa, like different crazy stuff happens each time because your different colored dice come out. A different one is Trump. It's a different person goes first. You know, you draft differently based on the cards and dice because you already see your hand and your two starting dice before you start drafting. So that changes everything. So it's like it's so fresh and does not get stale at all. Yep. And this is where credit designer, this is a Japanese game. Yusuke Matsumoto is the designer. Genius. And this game I think is going to open up a whole, I think a lot of people are going to start designing trick-taking games, borrowing from this because my stupid brain had never considered just making dice and using them in a trick-taking game like that's really the genius mechanic is yet the dice are also cards. Yeah. Like and this game is three or four player only. I feel like it really only works with four. I think you know, I would also only play with four. We'll try it with three could be okay. Three player hearts is great. Yeah. Two and five is right out. Yeah. Not even allowed. No. But four player gives this game the opportunity to mod this game in the sense that I feel like you could very easily make this a partnership game and it would be great. You could maybe because wizard is much I love it. You can't easily make it a partnership game for a lot of reasons. I don't have time to describe. I'd rather play a different game that is meant to be a partnership game. Yeah. But I feel like this could work as a partnership game. I want to play with it. I think a lot of clever people are going to play this game once go oh shit and you're going to see a lot of games. You could literally just say all right play the game normal four player and then you add your score to the person across from you and then there's only two teams. Yep. And that's the only change you make is yeah just your partners are the person across from you and you add your scores together at the end. And then so you can you have a you can basically have a instead of a twenty five percent chance of winning you know fifty percent chance of winning. But then you got to also to make it fun band table talk and yeah I'll just I'm happy to just play four player. I don't feel the need to my I don't feel the need to mod anytime soon because I am nowhere near being a master of this game. Obviously not that I'm even a master of wizard. I think I'm near a master at what hearts you Kerr and the list drops off pretty quick after that when it comes to trick taking games move still can't fucking play well like I might my skill and move is just random. I feel like there's no reason to play move. You have in the coast today. Well I think move brings different more thing like move is very I'm not saying it's similar right. It is very different and more complex but move as a superior and an inferior Trump. Yes, it was a coalition game but it's coalitions formed in the course of bidding I'm aware. But the point is is let in terms of I'm in the mood to play a you know a kind of meaty trick taking game and not just a sort of baby one. It's like I'd always rather play in a cozy dice than move. So even though they're mechanically not equivalent and there's reasons for them both to exist. There's just no situation where I would feel like playing this kind of game and choose move over Nicosia dice. I would but I'm way more into trick taking games than you are. I'm pretty into trick taking games. Yeah, you won't play you Kerr with me. No, it's a stupid game. Why would I play you Kerr when I could play Nicosia dice? I play with no hearts. So you like trick taking games. I like more trick taking games than you rather but Nicosia dice is just better and it serves the same purpose. So but I guess the real thing I would say is that you're asking me to go eat at like you know McDonald's when it's like but I have meat right here. I could make a delicious burger on the grill. Why would I go to McDonald's? Now McDonald's will be playing straight wist. I'm just saying it's like there's no purpose even though McDonald's would be playing go fish and calling it a trick taking game. You get the idea but I guess in terms of trick taking games wizard is still the one to use to get your friends who have never played a trick taking game to try them out and realize they and Nicosia dice is not an entry level right. You need to understand too many different game thing. It's not that it's hard where it's the pro gamers. I taught this to someone who didn't know how trick taking games work. That is real fucking hard to do right. It's just that you really you know if you want to be able to play this well and not be confused all the time you know you need to you already need to understand just the concepts of drafting and trick taking. So it's like if you haven't played any drafting or trick taking games before go play sushi go seven wonders you know wizard hearts go play those to learn under right. It's not this isn't some advanced crazy game only for geniuses it's just as in the complete entry level can be confusing if you don't have the previous prerequisite knowledge. So if I had to say like the mine feels or the moods I'm into play trick taking games if I want a very pure game I'll still just go to hearts hearts is my go to that game is great if I want an interesting experience that's really going to pull me in right now no cozy dice because there's nothing like it if I want an elevated partnership nonsense game I'll play Moo and if I just want any trick taking game I'll default to wizard because wizard does take more players than no cozy dice. Yeah I guess that that's the time to play wizard as we have five six people. Yep and honestly wizard's not as fun with four players unless it's four people or semi who are well wizard is definitely the best with more players because it's fewer rounds when you play wizard with too few players there's too many rounds it takes too long. Yep now I do like that but if I'm going to play wizard with four players I kind of want to play hearts more because hearts is more pure and despite like hearts will go faster in the end hearts hearts is way faster. Yeah but unless someone won't take their turn but that's a different problem could you not take your turn in hearts I've known so simple. Well when we played hearts for money in middle school some people would take a long time on their turn we're playing for like pennies we weren't we weren't high rollers but because you guys like I cannot stress enough it was for us and for a lot of people in tabletop and first look like the breakout game of packs unplugged I practically guaranteed it's going to be in first look at pack south and you should I don't know if it will be but we'll have our made up copy yeah I'll bring the other stops copy the pre order will not have arrived yet. Yep.