 So yeah, we played the XCOM tabletop game for real and we live streamed it. Yep. So this game, if you don't know XCOM, I hope you know what XCOM is. I hope you know. Anyway, so there's an XCOM board game. It's a co-op game with four players based on the recent reboot of the XCOM video game. Yes. You fight against the aliens. You're all on a team. So like pandemic, only it's real time. And we played a demo of it at PAX Prime and we now have the real deal and we played that and live streamed it. And it hasn't really changed that much since the version we played at PAX Prime. However, it was fun. Like don't worry, we're going to talk and say a lot of negative things, but in the end it is fun. We're going to play it a bunch more. Yeah. But a lot of negatives that were not apparent when someone who is an expert at the game from fantasy flight runs it for you became strikingly apparent in actual play. The game's got some pretty serious issues. Yeah. So the fundamental idea of the game is you're all four people. You're running XCOM. Wait, each one of us is four people? Yes. Okay. You're running XCOM, defending the earth against aliens because that's what XCOM do. And each person has a unique job. This is the first thing that makes it better than pandemic. Unique jobs. Each person is responsible for one thing and one thing only. Usually two or three responsibilities per person. And thus, you know, you can't really be doing everyone's job, right? I mean, you can play two player where you do two jobs each. You can do three player where, you know, but you can even do one player. Like in baby mode, you can talk a lot more, but you're playing for real. Like if I'm the military guy and I spend time talking to the science officer, that time matters a lot. Right. So in there are other, you know, the real time factor is the other thing that separates it from pandemic and pandemic. You can sit around for 20 minutes, discussing the best possible move. And thus really it's only a one player game and not a co-op game. In XCOM, even if you wanted to share all the information and even if you discussed everything, you don't have time to, and you don't even, you don't have the brain power within that time to figure out what the best thing everyone should do is. And you don't even have all the information yet because the real timeness doesn't come from like an MP3 the way space alert does. It comes from an app. So you have to finish doing one thing before you go to the next thing. So it's like, decide where to put your interceptors. Okay. Then it's like, oh, by the way, here's where the UFOs are. Fuck. Yep. They went somewhere where we didn't go. Hey, can I move a guy? No, you tapped that science already. Well, I got a time's up. Time's up. So what's real, basically what's really interesting about this is that in the end the game comes down to two phases. There's the push your luck phase, the press your luck phase, and the resource allocation phase. Only the latter is real time. Yes. So you do real time resource allocating, and then you resolve slowly and carefully. So the parts of the game that would be really fiddly, like should I attack with these troops or these troops in this particular encounter? There's no time limit on that because that wouldn't have been fun. You'd be like to have the time limit on that. The fiddly stuff doesn't have time limits. The like broad strokes, the where are we focusing, has an extreme time limit. It's a game where you have to have three friends, and you all have to trust each other to not be stupid. Well, four friends if you count yourself. Well, are you your own friend? I don't know. In this game, a lot of times you're your own worst enemy. Yes. Yes, indeed. So is the problems with the game, right? So problem number one is that you have these cards that give you abilities. And as the science gets to research, you get more cards that give you abilities. Wait, Scott, this card says used during an encounter. Does that mean any encounter or just a every science card had like some level of ambiguity that required us to pause the game and look it up. It's very clear that some cards are only used during the time phase because they have a picture of a clock on them. And some are only used during the resolution phase because they have two cubes on them. But what's not clear is exactly the wording on them is not specific enough that you don't know if you can always do it. Also, another problem with them is that it's because the ones that you use during the time phase, because you're under time pressure, it's very easy to forget that they exist and to remember all of them that are available. Yeah, you say that because you're the reason we died. Also, there are other players who can only really pay attention to their own biz because it's so fast. They might have cards to use during the time phase that would be best used on you. Just likewise, you might have cards for the time phase best used on them. So you actually to get the most efficient use out of them, you would actually have to pay attention to the other person's timed action and say, I'm using this time thing to help you. Oh my God. During the time phase. But how can you even pay attention to that while you're too busy thinking about your own shit? And then to also remember a card ability you have and also remember to use it on someone else because you paid attention to what they're doing during the time phase. The end result is that the concept is great because you feel it. You feel like you're in the situation room in Evangelion or XCOM. Yes, your doubt. Well, XCOM and Evangelion are basically the same thing. Sort of. Yeah. So you're down there. People can still make babies in XCOM. Yeah, yeah, you can. Technically, you can. For now. The crystal is I'll just get the room of golf isn't closed or whatever. But yeah, the problem. The only problems with the game, the only problems come down to fancy flight, wrote the words on the cards. And they're bad at that. They're bad at that netrunner in every other game also. And the instructions only exist within the app, making it actually really hard to look up rules on the fly and making it extremely likely that anyone you ever play this game with, only one person will have ever read the rules. Yeah. So the rule in the box, there are rules, but it's just a quick start sheet. All the actual rules are in the app, which means if you want to do a rules look up, you have to like pause, go into some options menu. It's very difficult to peruse the rules in there. It's just really bad. They should have been less cheap because fantasy fights also very cheap. And in addition to putting the rules in the app, also printed the full rules out. Even though one good thing about putting the rules in the app is that as the app, if you have rules updates, you can do app updates, which is cool. I'm all in favor of putting the rules in the app to begin with, but that can't be the only place the rules are. In the very least, some cheat sheets or something. Right. I mean, people are going to have an iPad or tablet to play this game. You could always just use a laptop with the web browser or you could use your iPhone. Yeah. You could use any pretty much any electronic device as access to the app. They made it as, you know, cross platform as possible with the web version even. So you could go to the rules on the web actually, if you wanted to. But people are just going to be there with the one tablet. They're not going to have four tablets. Okay. You should have printed out a rule book in there. Yeah. So as a result, the only way to experience this game in its fullest is to play it and fail at it and have to keep pausing and looking shit up like three or four times until you like get the game and remember all the sort of it. Right. But all four people get the game. Yes. As soon as you switch out a player. Well, fuck all we got it. You know, you need four people who have been through it who are XCOM hardened veterans elites. Yep. And know the deal. And then you can start to get the most out of this game. So people know what cards are to the point at which they can just say the name of the card. Like I use X and people know what that is. Then you can start to actually be good enough to save the world from aliens because the even on easy mode, the app is ruthless. So only by this game, if you have a group of four people, you really want the full set who is willing to play this game repeatedly and actually get good at it or at least competent at it. Once you get to that level, you can play this with other people who are competent at conventions or you can be the guy who runs the game for other people and teaches it to them. But seriously, the game is not a game until everyone knows the rules and you figured out all the like kind of poorly written details of the cards. So once you get past that, the game is really fun. Yeah, it's, you know, it's what pandemic sort of... I mean, it's not the great co-op like Hanabi is but it definitely beats all those other garbage co-ops like pandemic and shadows over Camelot. And it has this interesting like the kinds of decisions you're making, the brain feel of them, the way the pressure is is actually very realistic. Yeah. And it's not like it's sort of weird in that they found a way to... You look at a game like Space Alert where it's also real time decision making but you're basically programming on your turn in Space Alert which is kind of a lot to do in real time. Yup. And it's sort of tricky, annoying, tricky. Like it's like I'm making real game decisions like as difficult as game decisions I would make in any other Euro game but I'm time pressured and that's just sort of frustrating. Here, the time pressure combined with actually what is easy decisions. If you had all the time in the world to decide on things in XCOM especially during the time... It would be so baby game. It would be like, oh, obviously put the interceptors there because we can move one later if we have to. Yup. Well, Scott, imagine... That's where we get the most use out of them. Imagine World War II as a war if you zoomed out and had all the time in the world to think about it when you're making your decisions of where to send the armies and what day is D-Day. Yup. But it's like the decisions you make in XCOM are like just you have, you know, how much money do you have? We can put about four interceptors. Where do you put them? The place with the most UFOs. Really simple decision that gets really intense when you've all got about six seconds to make it. Yup. You'll have conversations like, come, how much money can I spend on interceptors? And you've already spent five seconds saying that. Yeah. So it's a real world problem solving like emergent strategy if you have to be able to very quickly figure out is the information that I have worth telling anyone? Because the time matters. Is it worth it to ask for permission or to do a thing? Do I even want to interact with people? You have to make these like really real decisions really quickly based on possibly limited information. Right. The other thing is that there's certain things on basically there's a lot of different areas of the board where things are happening quite like Shadows over Camelot. All right. You got the UFOs coming down that you have to get rid of or else they cause panic. You've got the base that's under attack that you have to defend or else your base will be destroyed. And you need to beat those missions. Right. And there's missions. The mission doesn't actually pressure you. You know, the way that the base being destroyed or the UFOs can end your game when you have to push back against them. The mission like you can do the mission or not it's up to you. But if you want to have any chance of actually defending the base or you're reducing panic in the continents when you beat a mission you get the rewards. You need those rewards or you will not have enough stuff to protect the world elsewhere. So the mission does pressure you once you realize that that is true. And it's very, very difficult to do all these things at once. What's also very interesting is that the players are fully autonomous. So I could just deploy all my interceptors. I could just be bam and send them all out there. I can do whatever. And then at the end of the turn it's like how much money did we spend too much? Well, we're fucked. Yep. So the game, the players all interact with each other in different ways. So like the comp, I feel like I'm going to specialize in like one or two roles. I think everyone's going to specialize in like a couple of roles. It might be boring to always do one role but it's still good to like play one or two of them a whole bunch to get good at them. Because like the science person, they need to learn all those cards because like the first few times they play they're going to spend a lot of time reading the cards and that's going to hose you. If you get to the point where you've memorized most of the cards, that's going to save you so much time and improve the decision making on the science side tremendously. Science has probably one of the hardest roles in the sense that you have to synthesize quickly the entire state of the game to figure out what technology you're looking at from your choices will help now and is necessary. Yeah, it's like this and you have to figure out how much like how much you should take from everybody else to make that happen. This one will work and come give me $3. Yeah, like we only have $4 left to spend and like the base is under attack, dude. Yeah, but it's like the decision you make is so simple. It's like pick a card and choose zero, one, two, or three scientists to work on it. So if you had even a minute to think about that, it would be brain dead simple, but you have about five to 10 seconds. So and you just drew the cards and you're still reading them. So you know what I kind of want? I've been thinking about this. Imagine using this idea for similar other kinds of games. Like imagine a game where you're all either Gundam pilots or on the bridge of a Gundam. Sure. Yeah. Any sort of real time battle situation involving multiple people, you could have the same basic structure and the app would totally help you out also. Exactly. It's like, all right, I'm in the Gundam. That's my job. You're firing the guns. You're in another Gundam. One person is firing the low and greens. And one person is moving the ship. Yep. One person is actually directing all the Gundam pilots, but doesn't do anything else. So the app is like, you know, charge us, shot at your whatever. Oh my God. Move left and do this. Okay. Yep. Now this happened. Oh my God. Do this. You have five seconds. Otherwise, another bad thing will happen to you. It's interesting to me that, you know, in all the time people have been trying to make games like this, XCOM actually did do it first. Like it has flaws, but the flaws are just purely implementation. The concept is so rock solid. Yeah. I mean, you look at things. People are like dying to get things going, like Artemis bridge simulator. And it's like, that's a big setup with a bunch of computers. Yeah. You gotta get a software. They had it at ZenCon actually. Yeah. They have it a lot of places. Yeah. We're trying to get it at Connecticut. Sure. Why not? It's really popular, but it's like, you can get basically the same experience with this XCOM game for way less money and effort. Yeah. One tablet and four people. And practice. So watch out for, I hope this pushes co-op tabletop games in a vastly different trajectory from where they've been up to this point. I just sort of wish there was like an app only mode. You know, it's like the tabletop part. I mean, it's like nice to play a tabletop game, but seriously, you could have just made this like a four tablet or a four 3DS game. You know, there's four people sit there with the tablets and do it. But why? 3DS could not. If you're going to a resolution in the screen, it's like, you know, it's sort of clever and forward thinking to combine the app with the tabletop part. But really, it's like, if you have software, you don't need the tabletop part. We could just go full software. Yeah. Well, part of it is that unless you had a very large tablet. It is. It is quite a large interface. That's true. You show all that stuff. There's a very non-trivial UX problem there. Yeah. That's somewhat true. Because it's kind of like member in Eclipse. We talked about how the idea that Eclipse in a big game of Eclipse, because you have to do so much in so many decisions and so much like fiddly stuff, you'll often pay attention to the things that are near you and you won't pay attention to the colony. It's like, oh, yeah. Pete and Shia are like having a war out there, but I don't have time to pay attention to that. So the physicality does add something that would be difficult to do currently with current tablet technology. It wouldn't be difficult if you had, say, everyone has a tablet and something on the TV, but again, that might as well be Artemis Bridge Simulator. Exactly. Yeah. This is a game because of the way it's set up, that you can feasibly check out from a tabletop library at a convention. Someone whips out their iPhone or iPad and then you just play. Yeah, literally any. You could just use a laptop with internet and go to the website. You don't even need an iPad is best, I guess. Probably the big iPad is best. I was using an iPad mini. Yep. But any device will get it done. And the app part is free. It's just the, you know, so you actually, if you don't want to buy this game, you can just go get the free app straight from the Apple Store or the Google Play Store or whatever and read the full rules in the app and to do the tutorial in the app. And, you know, just get the board game, which is just the pieces pretty much in a box. You know, there's nothing else in there. Yeah. And then, you know, decide after checking out the app, if you, so that's actually pretty cool. It's almost like there's a demo of the board game in a way for free. Yeah, this is this game. It's shocking how much new ground this game is breaking into. Yeah. Having an XCOM theme doesn't hurt either. No, it doesn't. XCOM. Also, it's just, I'm very, I can't express to you how happy I am that there is a game property. Of course, I guess it's based on another game in this case, but like a tabletop game. A licensed game that isn't garbage. Yes. I mean, we all remember the Adventure Time games. Well, they have Star Wars games that are good, Fantasy Flight. Yeah. The thing, Fantasy Flight, people don't realize this, right? Okay. So licensed games are usually most of the time not good, right? But Fantasy Flight games, the thing that they do, because they don't, they're not perfect in by any means, but the one thing that they do is they make licensed games. And not the way Cryptozoic does it, where we'll take any license. Like people who want games made out of their properties are lining up at Fantasy Flight to say, please make a game with our, you know, intellectual property. And Fantasy Flight most of the time says no. They pretty much, that's why they're doing things like fucking Star Wars, like the biggest IP you could possibly have. You know, it's interesting. And they're not doing all these others, right? It's interesting you say that because, you know, my other job, like I'm a product manager, right? Like I'm going all the other London Convention things. And what I've noticed over the years, like doing this kind of work, is that the people who say yes quickly and to most things are the worst at doing those things. It's like the people who bid really low on every government contract. Exactly. Like the fact, like I've got, I've made, I've gotten more deals by telling people no than telling people yes. And that seems to be true in every industry, except government contracts. Right, so Fantasy Flight says no to, but they end up doing, they do Star Wars, they do Warhammer, right? We were real close. Scott Johnson was holding the Star Wars, Capital Ships game, like a starter set for it. My friend, Chris, who you played X come with, has it. And he's like, what do you do on Monday? And I'm like, uh, busy. He's like, we do Tuesday, busy Wednesday, busy Thursday, packing for Friday. And he's like, I hate you because he wants to play it. I want to play it. All right. Well, it's a two people game. Yeah, I know. I'm thinking about buying it. Well, I mean, it's just a core set now. That would be like buying Netrunner at the start. Yeah, but this I might play because ship, capital ships with momentum, the problem is, is that even though there will be people in New York to play it with not that many, not as many as regular XCOM or Netrunner. It doesn't have this note. You're not going to find a lot of places with tables to play it on. Yeah. Well, you realize that's the same reason why I didn't buy pitch car. Actually, no, the only reason I didn't buy pitch cars because you get the full set is $300. Yeah. Rim, let's just buy a house in this, like a cabin in the sticks and use it for all, our partying and keep all the large games there. Yeah. What was Scott? Remember the banana stand? Fuck that. Here's what we do. Cabin in the sticks. We get everyone we know who is in our exact situation in New York. We all collectively buy a cabin, like in the fucking Poconos somewhere. Yeah. And it is just a board game Mecca. Sure. That's actually probably cheaper than getting a storage unit in Manhattan. Yeah. Well, this issue is like tax insurance. Those are not being electricity. I've looked into those things. Making sure it doesn't fall apart. We show up this squirrels living in there. I think those things are all manageable because remember, I was just in Lancaster for Zenkaikon. You forget how cheap everything is if you get even like 60 miles in any direction from where we are now. Way cheap. I mean, I went to that farmer's market and I bought what felt like a ridiculous amount of high quality food. And I had spent less than $20 on that. Yep. I got a beer and I handed the guy a 20 and he gave me a 10 back in my change along with a five and a quarter. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. All right. See you guys at Anime Boston. Please come play games with us. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Kat Lee for Web Design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontroadcrew.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.