 We played this game. It's not that new. It's relatively new. It's from 2018. It's new to us. Our friends Chris and Anthony busted it out and we played it two times at PAX East. Now, for those of you who might not be super familiar with us, if we play a game at PAX more than once, that is already a huge glowing endorsement. Yeah, that means there was something in that first play that made us want to take a second look. Yeah, just spend precious PAX minutes playing a game we've already played is a big deal. First contact is real fun and basically it is. It's a Russian board game. Designers are Dahmer, Kuznastinov, or Kuznatenov. So I'm not great with Russian pronunciation. Kuznatenov? Kuznatenov, I'm sure. Who knows? Kuznatenov. Anyway, Russian game designer. It's very code names adjacent. But it's very, very code names adjacent. You like code names. First contact is a very, it even has a grid of cards that you randomly lay out and communicate through. If you like code names by this, if you like this by code names, but I've never played a game like this that was good before. Right. So what first contact is about that makes it so code names is a game where there's teams and you're trying to sort of use inferences to get your teammates to pick the correct cards from the grid. Yep. Right. And not pick the wrong ones. And you're up against a team that's also trying to do the same thing. Right. In first contact, what's happening is this is a team of aliens and a team of humans. And the aliens have a language, a written language that looks somewhat adjacent to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Right. A bunch of rune looking things. A bunch of rune looking things. It has an Egyptian theme, sort of like a Stargate alien kind of, you know, idea. Right. And the humans are looking at this grid of 25 cards and those 25 cards are items. And, you know, and it's like papyrus, cow, a whip, pharaoh, right? Stuff that would be in an ancient Egyptian bird, a fly, whatever. And, you know, since they can't talk to the aliens with English, all they can sort of do is point and gesture at objects. And the aliens have a written language that they can show to the humans. So what the humans are trying to do is to give the aliens the objects that they desire. Let me give you, right? They're offering gifts to the aliens and they're trying to give the aliens what the aliens want. And they're trying to learn the alien language to better figure out what to give. And the aliens are trying to get the humans to learn the alien language because that way the alien can get the gifts that they want. If the humans understand them, then the aliens will be able to ask for what they want and get what they want and not ask for like an ink and get a cow. Now, the brilliant part of this game, like I think what makes it like magic, is that the alien team and the human team are not competing against each other. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Among the aliens, there is a winner. Among the humans, there is a winner. Yes. The alien who receives all the things that they want because all the different alien players want something different, right? Oh, a different set of things. Yep. The alien who gets all the things they want is the winner on the alien team, the human winner. So there'll always be two winners. The human winner is the human who gives the most correct things to aliens. Right? So let's say it's three on three, which is how we played it most of the time, right? One of the aliens gets all five things they wanted. They win game over. Another one of the humans gave three correct things to each of the three aliens, the two losing ones and the winning one. That's nine correct gifts. And no other human had nine correct gifts. They win amongst the humans. Yep. So every player on the human side, behind their little shield, they have a big grid of the words. It's always the same 25 words, like weapon, English, metal, beautiful, fly, valuable power trying to figure out which of those 25 words corresponds to each of the Egyptian runes, hieroglyphs. Yeah, this is not, I'll just say glyphs. Glyphs is the right word. This is not one glyph per object. Like this is literally, well, we'll explain the human turn first and this will make sense. So on the human turn, all these human does one by one is you touch or tap or flip or point at between one and five objects and the aliens have to tell you the symbol. The glyph. Yeah, the glyph that represents whatever you selected. Right. So maybe I'll tap, you know, all of the animals and then, right? The aliens will all talk to each other and hold up a glyph in the air. I'll look at that glyph and I'll say to myself, well, that glyph must mean animal. Because we communicated by pointing at things. I pointed at a bunch of animals and the aliens go and they hold up the symbol for what? Yep. Only one symbol. You can't write a sentence in this case. But it might be that might be the symbol for alive or pointy. It may be there's only like a bull and a ram where the only animals and they consider that to be pointy. Even better. The aliens might disagree on what the answer is. And if that happens, the majority aliens first are like, here's the glyph for that. And then the idiot aliens like, no, no, no, it's this glyph. Right. So then on the aliens turn, the aliens don't write, will write each will each in turn one at a time will hold up a full sentence or, you know, one or more glyphs, right? Or phrase written in alien language. And the pro move is a lot of times the aliens will write a sentence that uses some glyphs that they're pretty sure the humans understand. I won that way. And some glyphs the humans don't understand. That's how I won. I taught the humans a glyph that they did not learn on their turn. Yep. And was able to use it to then win. But anyway, the yeah, the each alien in turn will write in multiple one or more glyphs, the name of the, you know, the objects that they want as gifts. And then each human will give one gift to that alien. And if they give the right gift, they get a point. Yeah. And if the alien gets the gifts they want, they get points. If you give the say, you know, it's a read me and remember both aliens. Rim wants, I'll keep using cow. And I want a whip and you give me a cow that doesn't do anything for him. Yep. Whereas in code names, that would be great for it. Yeah. The other interesting thing that makes this really fun and like really makes an interesting game is that you can negate any glyph by drawing a line over the top of it. So I could say that the like this glyph means alive, or I could say like, I could ask for something that is not alive and powerful. Yep. But like the moment where the aliens disagreed that was funny that made this game fun was, I think it was a pharaoh and a whip and a rod. Like those are the three things the humans asked for. So two of the aliens were like, that represents power. And the other alien was like, that represents danger. And that interaction and that give and take just makes this game really fun and engaging. Yeah. So the thing about this game is that I think it's, it's very code names adjacent. I think you want to play it with the same crowd, the same niches code names, right? The same social scenario you're going to whip out first contact as you would code names, right? So having both is somewhat redundant. But I think that I like first contact more. I think it's a more fun game than code names, at least for me, because the deciphering of glyphs and communicating in the alien language is more fun than simply choosing the right cards from a, from a board. But I think that first contact has less replay value than code names. As designed and presented in this box, though, like, well, partly because there's the same number of words every time. That's exactly it. There's the number of cards doesn't matter too much, right? Cause code names are a lot of cards, which I think does give this a lot more replay value than otherwise. But you're always playing first contact with the same 25 words, warm, defense, knowledge, fast, power, valuable, fly, I would say in a bunch of them to give you a sense of scale. It's always the same 25 words. Whereas in code names, it's just the cards are it. So it's completely different every time. So code names, I think is less fun. You get more plays first contact. I think more fun. You're going to get less plays before you're like, I don't need to play first contact ever again. Unless you just make a custom board that's like one row bigger and has more glit more words. I think another problem with first contact that we did not play anywhere near enough times, yeah, a problem. But let's say you do keep playing it and keep playing it and keep playing it a whole bunch, right? There were only so many answer keys in that box. Yep. You could reach the point where you've memorized, aha, if that glyph is that word, then I've memorized the rest of the key. And I because I've played this so many times is only one answer key where that glyph is that word. I know the whole language. Now I can just win if I'm the alien. I guess if you're the person, it wouldn't help you if you were the alien. But I think the idea is that there's a limited stuff in there and it can run out and it needs. I think it could only run out though. If you play this the way we play like heavy cardboard. Yes, I'm just a lot with the same group of people. The point is it could and will run out with enough plays unless it gets expansion. If you get some expansion or some modification, you can stretch this out in which case I would never want to play codename. But I think once this runs out, then it's like, well, codename is still fun, not as fun, but still fun. But I feel like where I play like the value, one of the things I liked about this was that we played it late at night on Sunday after PAX. And even though everyone was tired, it still totally worked. This is a great like we played it late at night both times. We played it when we arrived at PAX late and we played it right before we left PAX late. It's a good winddown game that has just like it'll keep people awake and keep people engaged, but doesn't require you to be like a hundred percent on point to play effectively. Right. And it doesn't feel as sort of shallow and, you know, thin as codenames. It has a little bit more brain noodling deciphering the language going on. Yup. I like this game a lot. I actually bought a copy of it. And also the theme is ancient Egyptians like specifically ancient aliens. Yeah. The aliens are the Egyptian gods. Yes. And the art is really funny. Like one of them is just like an Egyptian God just like looking at an onk like laying there like it's a cell phone. Yup. But yeah, if if you need like party games that aren't just like crap, this is like a must buy. Yeah. If you're playing codenames and you want something that's a little bit meteor a little bit, you know, something to wrap your brain around a little bit more than codenames is, but still fills that same niche of low effort kind of game. You can just bust it out. Yup. Then this is the way to go. And the pro the most fun is you you can get a like if you get an esoteric about it like it like sometimes players will pick a combination of objects where there is no fucking answer to that just to see what the aliens do. And also you could mod this game pretty heavily if you got bored with it like really easily just make new answer keys make new anything. This game has got a lot of potential. Yep. The only thing is like I said you you wrap your noodle around it a little more. Yeah. But I think it might be a little less accessible to say children's kids. I feel like almost anyone I feel like you've got to be at least 14 or smart like really like 14. But the point is I feel like I can't imagine like a 10 year old playing this minima minimum age for first contact is a little bit higher than codenames because codenames is super accessible to just about anyone you even have Disney codenames like anyone can play it. You have to you know understand the concept of matching glyphs to words and deciphering language. Yeah. To be able to play first contact so the barrier to entry is higher. But we're code names especially codenames pictures is super accessible to anyone first contact is but this game will work very well with mixed company like if you have a few a few like capable players and a few kids it'll be fine because a poor player will not significantly disrupt the game. And also it's so even if you it's super not really competitive that much right because you're only with other aliens. The aliens are competing with each other but not directly and most of the time they're cooperating to choose a glyph and it's just it's more it's fun like Chris at one point asked for like this giant fucking sentence for the humans just to see what happens. Yeah. And someone got it like it worked. Yeah. I intentionally taught the humans a word I needed them to know that they didn't ask for. And then I use that word to get the things I wanted. And the humans understood what I was saying and gave me the thing I wanted and I won. So that was fun. Yep. So this game is pretty good add to your collection all things considered. It also does not take long. Not very short. Half hour you can knock this game out. Yep. Maybe 45 minutes of people are really slow and you're teaching and some people have problems like it's it's pretty good. This has been Geeknights with Rym and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music Cat Lee for Web Design and brand OK for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes discussion news and more. Remember Geeknights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays gaming Tuesdays and the comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays. Geeknights is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Geeknights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night.