 There was a person named Sid Saxon, right? Who is the person who designed the game, Acquire, which you may have heard of. He was a famous legendary figure in the gaming world. I think we mentioned him on Geek Nights when his massive lifelong game collection was broken up and sold. 18,000 individual games in this collection. So the next game was one that's from one of his books that I went and I found an excerpt from in the internet archive and then transcribed and then prepared all the pieces for it. All it needed was a deck of cards and a stack of chips. And the game is called All My Diamonds and it's a very modern art adjacent selling, auctioning, bidding game, right? Which of course we love, right? And the way it works is you get a deck of cards and you throw the tens out. You get the tens out of there. So you got 48 cards. And if you got those 48 cards with no tens, there are basically eight sets of 12, right? You got a matrix of the suits and... Exactly. So there's the diamonds, the hearts, the clubs and the spades. Those are 12 cards each because the tens are out. And then there's the lows, the aces, twos and threes, the mids, the fours, fives and sixes, the highs, the sevens, eights and nines, and then the faces, the jack, queen, kings, right? And so therefore you've got eight sets of 12. And your goal of the game is to in your hand have 10 cards that are all in the same set of 12. So 10 clubs, 10 diamonds, 10 lows, 10 faces, right? And as soon as you get 10 of one of the sets, you put it out there. You're like, boom. And you collect the pot, right? Of chips that have everyone antied. It is a big ante. And so then you continue playing. Everyone continues playing. And there's a second pot. And the second pot is comprised of taxes. Because the way you acquire cards is that on your turn, you must look at your hand and pick one of the eight sets and take all the cards that you have in that set, at least one card also. You can't just pick a set you don't have. And sell it to everyone else, right? So you might say, all my diamonds, right? And take all the diamonds out of your hand and sell them as a lot at auction. Or you might say, all my faces. And you take all the face cards out of your whole hand and sell them at auction. And you get, right? All the money when you sell the cards, except one card's worth of money is paid in taxes. So if you sell five cards, you keep 80% of the money, right? If you sell two cards, you keep half the money. If you sell 10 cards, you keep 90% of the money, right? So, and the rest of the money you don't keep goes to the second pot that will be for the winner of, you know, the second winner basically. And it could be the same person who wins both times, right? Now the thing with this game is that all that matters is who has the most money wins. So you could actually not win either pot and just sell, be so good at selling and we're buying low and selling high that you end up making more money by being a card seller, right? Than by being a winner. And that's the thing. So, and that's the whole, that's the whole game. This game is worth playing to explore the concept, but we devolved into a giggling fit in our game because this game, when confronted by what I would say is a group of stone cold pros who have very good understandings of bidding and valuation. The bidding breaks down into a disaster and the game falls apart. And it was really funny to watch the game just like collapse around us. Right, so Sid Saxon says, all my diamonds is a game I conceived as a change of pace from poker. Although there is no similarity in the play, it satisfies the same urge for speculation. It's basically an auction where players must decide whether they can earn more by buying or by selling, right? But yeah, when we played it, it's like you could sort of imagine worlds where like other lines of play might have been possible. There's obviously some luck element. You could just be dealt some amazing hands or something. But the initial pot is just so much bigger than anyone who's willing to bid for anything. And it's like, you think, well, a bit more, but it's like- But if you bid more, like your winnings are so capped by the nature of the game that it won't work out for you. So- Yeah, it's like, if we got four players, right? And everyone puts in, you know, 15 anti, so that's 60, right? It's like, all right. So I have to buy with my money a winning hand, right? For less than 60. I'm not willing to pay out a total of more than 60 to get a winning hand. If I buy something and I don't either A win or B sell those cards I bought for a higher value, I just lost, right, money. So it's like every move has to be profitable. So it's really tight and there's not a lot of winning lines, right? And it's sort of like, are you gonna try to be a seller or are you gonna try to be a winner? If you try to be a winner, you're gonna spend very little, which means the people who are trying to be sellers can't make anything off of you. It was very, it's like basically whoever got that first pot ended up that it was so much money because we were also cheap. But if you weren't cheap, if you just tried to spend it all, it's like, well, there you go. You didn't make any profit. You're in the modern art situation of I spent $40 to win $32, great. Yeah, and the only strategy at that point is you would take a loss to prevent someone else from getting a pot if it would be profitable for them. But that breaks down too. And the game just kind of fell apart. And it was just, I still think. Yeah, so I think there was a lot to learn from the concepts going on here. I just think it needs some tweaking in like the numbers department and also in the auction department. But I feel like if you do those tweaks, will you just end up in modern art anyway? You might, because modern art kind of did this like as best you can do without adding more complexity, which isn't necessarily a good thing in a game like that. Yeah, so this is a case where, I mean, this game does predate modern art, right? I think it does. Pretty sure, 1969 versus modern art board game. But Canizia? Yep, modern art. Let's see, 1992. Yeah, so it's like playing the proto version of a game is great, right? As opposed to usually these days, we're playing like remakes and polished redone versions of games, right? Like we're playing the small world after the Vinci, we've already been playing the Vinci. This is the opposite. It's like, imagine if we only ever played small world. I mean, I guess that's a bad example because you like Vinci bad. So it's like, if you had only ever played Resident Evil remakes and then one day you go back and try to play the original one, right? It's like, you can see what was going on there. There's a lot to learn. There's value in that. But also it's not as good. Yep, but it's just not as good. I do think it is absolutely worth playing if you were interested in game design at all, just because the experience of playing it and then seeing how the bidding breaks down, or you might have a friend who's bad at bidding games and it doesn't break down and that'll be funny for different reasons, but... I think you could also tweak the numbers. And if you got a bunch of people to play it multiple times that you might be able to develop a meta, right? That could work. I think so, it's possible. The problem, I think the problem we ran into is that the game as written, I feel like the meta we encountered in our first playthrough is an extremely strong attractor for people who are skeptical of the value of the second pot. Yes. And I do not imagine a world where the first pot is sold for so much. Anyway, I suppose there's a world in which you sort of try to shoot the moon in which you pay a lot to get the first pot on like a break even and then get your money back in the second pot also. Cause you've got all these cards left over that you're buying for the first pot and you've got so many cards left over, you can get the second pot also to get your cash back. Yeah. But that would be tough. This has been Geek Nights with Rima and Scott.