 So, good friend Matt came over the other day and he introduced us to a game that I had never seen or heard of. Me either. And he described it as it is co-op in the way that Hanabi is as opposed to the bad way. And it's World War One themed. Yep. World War One themed. And the art is by the Charlie Hebdo guy who was very tragically murdered by terrorists not that long ago. And I like that guy's art style. So everything combined, this is pretty much a must play game. Yeah. I mean, that's so we like, you didn't know that person never did art. Like when they mentioned that, I'm just like, what? Which guy? And I'm like, really? That guy did art for a board card game. You look at this art and you're like, oh yeah, obviously. Yeah. And the art is great. Like this game, but if, if nothing else, if we said nothing about the mechanics, the theme and style is just perfect. So there aren't that many World War One games that aren't just horrible, like war glorification simulators of very specific battles. That old Grognard's. Yeah. Usually, I mean, we have one, we have that one that we've never actually played. We've read the rules. Is that a Civil War game? What? No, that's, that's literally like the Verdun battle stuff. That game we've got. We just, we've never played it. Maybe we should do a live stream of us playing that Grognard game. Anyway, but the gist of this game is that you are all a bunch of World War One soldiers, but the game is not about fighting the war. The game is about not dying until peace breaks out. Your only goal is a much more accurate World War One simulators. Yeah. So it's a co-op game and it has like pretty good information economy, but basically challenges come up and you have got to keep making sacrifices until eventually either you die or peace breaks out. And that's it. It's a really good game and it is one of the rare co-op games that involves parsing information and intentions from other people without having any of that fiddly shadows over Camelot. I am three sure that we can make it through the battle. So the way it works is essentially you'll have, you'll each get a character and each character has like a minor power and you have a deck and the deck is two decks. You have a deck of challenges. And if you get to the bottom of that deck, there's a peace symbol because if you see the peace symbol, you've survived the war. You get to go home to your families. There's another deck of bullshit. They're the same cards, the deck of bad things as you fail at tasks or a crew tasks that you didn't deal with. You keep drawing from the bad deck and adding to the deck that's covering up the peace. So the more you keep failing, you're trying to run out that peace deck to see peace. But as you mess up, car just keep coming on top of that deck, making it harder and harder and harder. And if you run out the bad deck, it's just a picture of death at the end and you all die and it's game over. So essentially you have a hand of cards and you're trying to get rid of cards. Yep. You want to get all like cards in your hand. You just want to get them out of your hands. But every card you play out of your hand goes into a public area. And in that public area, if too many of one thing appear and there's a lot of three strikes, you're out. So it's like if there are three snows, right, there's environments and there's obstacles like if there's three bullet shells, whatever you lose. If there's three whistles, three, which are raids, I guess. Yeah. Whistles or raids shells are like artillery barrages. Right. Gas is obviously gas. It's like if there's three of anything you lose and cards, some of the cards only have one thing, but most of the cards have at least two and some of them way more than two. Some of the cards are just bad. There was a card that had all three things on it. Yeah. It was just the worst. There's a card with like two weathers and a thing on it. It's like he's right. So it's like on your turn, you play a card and you add it to the tableau and now it's like, okay, well now there are two cards out there with snow and two cards out there with bullets and the next guy looking at his hand and every single card has snow in it. Yup. It's like, well, I have to play a card on my turn or, you know, now you can talk and coordinate, but the very specific rules are you cannot talk about anything in your hand. You cannot share what you've got in your hand at all. Yep. It's pretty clear. Yup. And there's another action of like doing the support thing. When you play the support thing, you cannot say what you played. Other people might be able to infer it from other actions you've taken, but you cannot actually say, I'm pointing it left or I'm pointing it right. Yep. So on your turn, you'll either play a card from your hand and as long as you don't hit three of one of the bad things than as good as continues and you're trying to get rid of more people can play more cards now, or you can withdraw. Withdrawing means you don't play any more cards. Everyone else keeps going around, but you're safe. You don't have to do anything else. You're out. But if you still have cards in your hand, it's less than perfect, right? Ideally, you would withdraw after playing your entire hand of cards. We're never able to do that, except maybe around one. So the way the turn, the way the game actually is structured is there'll be a team leader and the team leader essentially makes a bid. Like how big a task are we going to go after? How many cards are we going to start within our hands? Yup. And then you're going to draw a higher number because if you go through more rounds, the game is much harder. You want to beat the game in less rounds. You want to play more cards and fewer rounds in order to be able to win. If you do it like two, if you do little, little rounds with just a few cards each, each round will be easier to deal with. Sure. But every round you're getting more cards in the evil deck and it's just like, uh, uh, yep. You have to pull off like a round of, you know, five, six cards, something like that. You got to be very tactile about it. Like if you had a few bad rounds in a row, you got to take on a really easy challenge to try to clear the decks because the more cards you have in your hand, when you all finally withdraw, because you keep going till everyone's out of cards or everyone withdraws, all the cards you've got in your hands contribute to how many more bad things you put on top of that piece, just pushing peace further and further away. It is very difficult to express until you actually play the game because the mechanics are so novel. How well it simulates the feeling of sinking into mud. It sucks. You are trying to crawl out of this pit and mud just keeps sliding in everything you do. The worst is when it's your turn and like you're so smart. You're like, how we're going to survive everything because we're so smart. It gets to your turn. It's like, well, I have to just kill us this round. There's no, I have to play a card and they all kill us. Yep. Especially when, so even worse, some of the cards you play, they don't add anything to the center. They just change the rules. Yeah. By restricting you even further, like, oh, yeah, by the way, uh, you can't withdraw unless you caught your hand has two less cards in it and just like, uh, or by the withdrawn, but I have three cards. Now I had to play one of them and they all kill us. Yep. And, or like, by the way, you have a phobia against gas now. So gas attacks always have a plus one out there forever. So two more gases and you're done. Yeah. It's like, instead of two, three strikes, you're out for gas. It's two strikes. You're out for gas and the other guy's got a handful of gas. Yep. Oh, and if you get too many of those phobias, you're dead and the game's over and everybody loses. The whole squad has to survive the war or you immediately lose. Yeah. So there's a couple other minor mechanics in that when you withdraw, there's these support tokens and they point left or right and you basically secretly decide who you're going to support on your way out. So if a majority of these are pointing at the same player, that player can like sort of clean up some of those evil rules that they have on them, like their gas phobia or whatever, or they can recharge their good luck charm. And then you pass the ones you use to that player, to the player you pointed at. But if there is no player who got them, who got the most, the plurality of those, right? So if each player, if you're playing with four people and like one person has two and one person has two, no one gets anything. Yep. And you're not allowed, you're not allowed to communicate this in advance at all. So you just sort of have to majority of people have to support the same person. Yep. Knowingly. Every character has one sort of clover leaf, like a good luck blow it power where you can blow this power once and get out of a tricky situation. Like you don't have to play a card. You can remove a card from play like you can blow it once. There's a way to get it back. But essentially, it's like a one time. Oh crap, I was lucky that time, but I'm okay for now. And there's also a pretty nice mechanic of there's these speeches. And every one of them is like literally a speech bubble from a comic that has the first sentence of the kind of speech that you imagine like a corporal would give to his troops in World War One when they're trying to hunker down and survive an artillery barrage and you got to give the speech. It give a short speech and then you can help one of your friends out. But at the same time, we played we wanted to use these and we kept getting some sort of restriction like sorry, you can't use those. Yep. And it's just like we used them like maybe once and I feel like we could we came really close to winning. I feel like we could have won with just a few more of those, but we were restricted and weren't allowed to use them by some other cards. Well, like one of the phobias is you become mute, which is pretty great because the rule is definitely one of the most fun things. And you think and I first saw that I thought it was going to be stupid like we didn't play test this at all. But actually it was it was fun and worked out well. It was fun and it was also crippling to our ability to coordinate. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you can't tell anyone what's in your hand, but you're still communicating a whole bunch. Yep. Right. But it's like, yeah, not only can you not give speeches because you're mute and you can't talk, but you're mute and you can't talk. So the actual experience of the game, like in terms of how it actually breaks down because you can like you can find the rules and read it. I had a remedy just get it and play it because it's good. But what you're basically going to find is that the game is this very delicate balance of trying to figure out each of you has some information, but no one has the full picture. And you argue with each other to decide how much of a challenge to take, knowing that you need to take more challenges in order to survive. But at the same time, taking a challenge bigger than you could actually deal with could be disastrous. And it really just has I wonder. I guess that obviously wouldn't work. We just picked like some enormous number like 10. Just do the whole deck. All right. So unless we clear it, the whole deck in that one go, which mathematically is impossible, I believe I believe it is then great. We withdraw and then we get we draw the entire rest of the bad deck and death breaks out instead of peace. Right. But I just really appreciate this is such a good example of a game that perfectly melds the theme of the game and the mechanics of the game. Yeah, you could. I mean, this game is so like doesn't have a lot of components. You could have easily put some any theme on this, right? It could have been like, you know, oh, you know, surviving pretty much anywhere or anything where there's some sort of pressure and you need to sort of, you know, get through, right? Like, you know, it could have been some sort of track like get across the jungle. I can make this a game about a data center and each of you is in charge of a server. Right. You can't have three heats. You can't have three losses of power. You can't have three power hard drive crashes hacker. Right. It's like pretty much any situation you could apply this to anything. But the World War One works really well. But but and so perfectly mechanically. But two, it is very interesting to me to see a game that is about war that is not about fighting the war and not about winning the war. You literally do not like you do not give a shit how the war is going. It's also very rare to see a game with a war theme that is co-op. That's not just team versus co-op. It's actually a hundred percent co-op war and where the theme is just we're in this together. War is hell. Right. Because like most of the war books and war movies that I experienced in my life are, you know, that like, you know, just shows the suffering of war. Right. You know, just one side and how shitty war is. You know, or is the worst, right? And it's not about fighting necessarily all the time. Right. But when you look at games, the games of war are always, you know, much more in line of, you know, glorifying combat and such. Yep. Right. And about winning and losing. I mean, the idea that reality of war, it literally doesn't even matter what side of the war these soldiers are on. Right. I'd like to see more games, both video and tabletop, you know, that are about war is bad the same way that movies and books are about war is bad. Like, you know, Johnny got your gun or whatever. Right. Yep. As a poor and less games that are about war. Let's win and kill everybody. I mean, this is basically all quiet on the western front, the game. Yep. Just and it feels, you know, it feels very like you throw down a gas cart and it's like, oh, gas attack. We just got to make it through. Oh my God, guys, we just got to make it. Come on. Just over the next hill and then we're all dead and it's over. We, uh, we never survive the war. Also very perfect thematic bonus. There is literally one card in the entire deck. That is not a bad thing. There's the Christmas card. Oh, right. If the Christmas card comes up, it's free parking. Just nothing happens and the next player takes their turn. That is the best possible thing you can do is have one turn where one player does not make things worse. Oh, there's also that trap mechanic. We didn't. So the game also has some push your luck aspects. And some of the cards, not only do they have a bunch of symbols on them, but they got this trap symbol, meaning you then flip over another card from the face down deck. It might just kill you. Yeah. Push your luck when you're near winning the game. That could be disastrous. There is a lot of pushing your luck going on. Yep. So I mean, I don't know what else we could really say, except that this game is pretty unique. I have not seen other games that are quite like this. No. And that is the primary reason why I think I want to recommend it to you. And independently, I actually had a lot more fun with it than I expected to. We played it a second time because the first time was so good and we didn't win. We're like, we'll try again and we still didn't win, but it was better. And I actually do. I'm probably just going to buy it because I want to play this. This would be a good game to play after quartermaster general because quartermaster general, which I also love is also war. It is war, but yeah, we're fighting the war. Of course, it's actually an interesting take too because it's just the logistical and strategic side of the war, but not actually fighting. It's a way, it's a way zoomed out war. Yep. But it's three on three. But it is, yeah, but it is also still, we are fighting this war to win it. So I think we should play this game afterward to cleanse the palette and remember, oh yeah, war is awful, the end. This has been Geek Nights with Rem and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Cat Lee for Web Design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember Geek Nights is not one, but four different shows, SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.