 All right, so the games we've been reviewing lately are the games that we can easily play semi asynchronously online Yep, and synchronously games online are difficult because you need to get a lot of people together with technology and such and such Asynchronous games are on websites. You take your turn whenever you got time You can do it while you're at work, right? You're while you're at work in quotes Yeah, you know you do you do some work and then ding it's your turn you look over you take a turn in a browser You turn back back to your work, right? Perfect game for stuck at home Yep So we've been playing these train games and now we moved on to a game that I've known about for a long time Like I kind of knew the deal with her then I've heard the name of it before I'd seen it but I just hadn't played it and because of all the things we said about 1889 and 1846 and 2038 those three reviews you can read or listen to there are transcriptions on YouTube It looks like I didn't check how good they are, but I saw them there But you can check those reviews out But one of our complaints about the train games is Around how we really like the stock stuff more so than the operating round is almost just like bookkeeping So now we played rolling stock where the bookkeeping and the so-called operating round is Abstracted away to almost nothing and this game is basically just about the companies and the stock shenanigans Right so in most of the 18x train games you start the game with some sort of auction for private companies and As the game goes on those private companies are folded into public companies and they disappear and that's the end of them They're sort of like that their purpose is that in a in a non random game because they're not these games have no randomness whatsoever Right to sort of start the game in an asymmetric way, right? You know, not just the turn order already provide some asymmetry But the fact that you have to start by auctioning off these unique Private companies and everyone gets however many they end up buying right means that everyone starts in an asymmetric position Which sort of is then the the spark that sets off the asymmetric non random game Yep, like that like the grain of sand inside of a pearl exactly so Enrolling stock the way this game works is much like the 18xx games And it starts off with an auction for private companies But that auction for private companies continues throughout the game There is a stack of private companies and they keep turning out new ones and each turn One of the phases that the important phase where most of the game happens is an auction for the currently available Private companies between all of the players only the players can use their money in this auction Right the money in your personal wallet the corp the public corporations that absorb the private companies Right cannot bid in this auction. Yep, right so What happens is the flow of the game is people start with money. There's no public companies whatsoever You participate in these auctions to acquire private companies the private companies spit out money But much like these private companies while also serving the purpose of the private companies in a in all their 18xx games They also serve as abstractions of the trains. Yep Like there's no they have just an income and they have synergies with other Companies like every company with some of the other companies and have their well, hold on you're getting ahead of yourself here Right, so the private companies spit out money and they rust like the trains do over time at the amount of money They spit out goes down. Yep. So like a company will make you have to get rid of it'll give you income like three dollars every turn You just get three dollars awesome That's cool, but then as the game goes on their income drops and drops and eventually becomes negative Yeah, and then you want to dump them much like the trains in an 18xx game You get a train the train that you bought that a company bought generates Revenues that turn into dividends and then the train rusts and it goes out of the game and you have to buy new Also in an 18xx game you usually have tracks right and what the tracks do is You know based on your position on the board sort of determines how much money Different trains can get right two companies might have the same trains But one with a better board position might be spitting out more money because it's better aligned on the map Rolling stock the private companies again Abstract away the map because they have the synergies that rim mentioned So company a if you if you own both company a and company B together in a corporation They both they get like a little bonus to how much income they generate right? So company a if you just hold on to it privately to yourself will spit out X dollars Company B might also just spit out X dollars you hold on to them yourself and You just get the income that they spit out until they rust and you get rid of them But no big deal right but if that was the whole game then the whole game would just be bid for the best private companies The end and hold on right there would be no public basically just be Pizarro Or it would just be the auctions in power grid and nothing else Right, so what you do is you form public companies you can form them just whenever arbitrarily I like kind of like that. There's not like these specified ones like 18xx as you just you just like I'll start the bear company I'll start the wheel company. Whatever, right? And when you start those companies you have a stainless stock price right because now they're public people can buy shares issue shares Money goes into the company. It has its own wallet Yeah, and the corporation this public can absorb the private corporations and in fact to form one you must start by putting a private company into it and then That income that the private company was spitting out now goes into the public company's wallet But if a private company is that synergize with each other because they are abstractly in good positions together on the Map that doesn't exist, right? They go well together They will spit out bonus dollars that add up to a lot of dollars And the fiction is like these two railways interconnect with each other or like this airline would actually overlap with like these rail routes that complete But honestly the theme literally does not matter at all. These are just acronyms that synergize with other acronyms and they all have colors Right, but if the right acronyms get into the same company together more money comes out So by starting the public company you can get more value right from those synergies Then just holding on to money fountains for your personal game Yep now starting the company like starting a corporation is pretty cool because it's a real IPO like if you do it You put your you put the company that you own personally into this corporation you pick one like bear or wheel Yeah, it go it goes public right and the other way the IPO works is basically you get a share and the bank gets a share and You pay your money to the company for that share and the bank pays its money to the company for that share So by IPOing you basically get other investors in so the company has more cash Then just what you put into it the whole point of an IPO is to raise capital It does it's a pretty elegant mechanism how it works And then what you can also do is you know you started this you know I took one of my companies that I wanted auction right I put it into the company It went public right and in exchange because I gave up a private company. It's no longer under my control I'm given a share in that company So I didn't really lose anything because that share has the value is the exchange I get for the company I put you also pick the price the company opens at what is the starting price of this stock? Yeah, well if you're the president. Yeah, you can issue more shares all that stuff But the point is is that now that the public company has one private company in it The way it gets more private because in order to have the synergies it has to have more than one private company in it Huh the way it gets more than one is that you can if you're the president, right? You can decide which private companies that public company will buy with its money just acquisition You can buy them from other corporations or you can buy them from players Which means if you're the president of a company you can buy a corporation that you the player Own directly and just agree to it. You can just be corrupt as hell Right. That is basically the flow of the game as you buy private companies in this auction Corporations public ones cannot participate in the auction therefore You take your money you buy companies You put some of them into they go public together create synergy to create more value You then get money out, right? This is the important part because you have to make sure because the only way you can participate in the auctions for more companies Is if you personally have money in your wallet, right? Owning shares you can't use that money in an auction unless you sell the share and you can't sell your last share in a corporation You know money that's in the company's wallet, right? Because it got a because the bank bought some shares Right, which gave the company money that you can't use that to buy companies at the auction You need money in your personal wallet to participate in the auction and then You buy companies in the auction and now well now you don't have enough money to buy another company, right? You sell the company you bought to the corporation to get the money out of the corporate wallet into your personal Wallet for the next option. There's only four ways to get money into your personal wallet Like there's not a lot of ways to get money back in this game You either you either own a company that's just spitting out revenue Which is not going to help you in the long run like it helps some depends But you probably it's companies that don't have if a company isn't really doing any synergy Then there's really I don't see much reason to have it be in a public company You might as well just keep it on your own because I guess unless you use the IPO to have more money than you could have otherwise to acquire something somewhere else Yeah, if you you might want to use another a low synergy company is the IPO company, but yeah, otherwise That's you're gonna get the better value just by holding it right you can Like scott said you can buy companies Your corporation can buy companies from you or other players corporations might buy a company from you If that's the one you can buy any which way All always number three Every round one of the things you do is decide how many dividends to issue So if you say the dividend is four dollars The corporation pays four dollars to each shareholder on record Which as you might recall since the bank gets half the shares Unless other people have bought shares you own a share and a bank goes to share if you do a dividend of four dollars You get four dollars the bank gets four dollars the company loses eight dollars Right. The other way is obviously it's a stock game. You could own shares that increase in value and then sell now This is where the game is that is hard. 18x. That's very hard. 18xx games have a Abstracted and like it's so abstracted that it's realistic, but only in an obtuse way stock market Uh, most games have just completely fake stock markets The stock market the way stock prices work in this game is shockingly realistic It's pretty real. It's not a hundred percent real because it's still an abstract But it's real close to the real world because basically there's a lot of parts There's a lot of parts of it that are very I'll describe it vaguely because you can read the rules Like what's linked to a pdf if someone buy there's a there's a line of prices No, two stocks can have the same price Yep, right if someone buys a share you go up to the next available price Which might mean jumping over other companies if they have the prices that are right in front of you Right when you sell a share it moves down in price to the next available price Um, however, if when you buy a share Right, it moves up, but you pay where it moved. Yep the price that's and when you sell You get the money of where it moved. Yep You don't get the money of where it moved just like the real stock market the price you see if you look at What's the price of a stock? That's just the last price it traded at effectively So say star corporation is sitting at $28. I want to buy a share The next price up on the chart is 31. So it costs $31 to buy a share And then the price becomes 31 want to buy another share I gotta pay 34 more dollars and the price moves up to 34 Yep, you don't and it whereas in 18xx. It's like you can sell five shares all at once You get the price that is you get the list price for all those shares And then the price moves down a whole which I guess in olden times and shitty So like early stock markets you could do stuff like that like I sell scottishare And then before scott can tell anyone I send a rider on a horse to sell joey jojo share And I sell them shares at the same price right until they talk to each other. They have no idea they got screwed Right, but in 18xx if the price of a company is 100 and you got four shares You can sell all four and get 400 dollars in this game It's like no you go around buying or selling one share at a time The only annoying rule is you can't sell the final share of a company if no one else has a share in it And then yeah, you can just buy one sell one buy one sell one But obviously if you buy sell buy sell you're just losing hemorrhage You're just hemorrhaging just like in the real stock market the whole idea of a bid ask You know the spread there's a bid price and an ask price right the price is 20 I'll buy a share. Well, you paid 21. All right. Well now I'll sell that share Here's 20 dollars. You lost a dollar right the price is 20 again. It's like So, yeah, that's how that works and then so in order to make the other in order to make money and stocks you need to Buy several shares of a company issue more of them then issue dividends over a long period of time Right and you have to make sure though that the total value of the company itself There's these little charts on each of the stock prices cards Right, that's why they're unique and it will tell you if your company is this much value at the end of the turn It will move up one up two down one or down two Right, so the value the total value of the company's holdings Which is it's cash on hand plus the value of all the companies it owns Right the total value of what the company has going on determines relative to its stock price Whether it's undervalued or overvalued and that it will move so if your company has a ton of cash But not a lot of companies you can pay out big dividends and that stock price is gonna tank Because the investors know that you just have a bunch of cash and you're squandering it But if the company has like super low cash Right, but it has a ton of companies in it Then it's first of all those companies are generating probably a lot of synergistic income every turn that you can pay out in dividends But whether it they do or not those companies have value And thus the stock price will move according to that value to the right position regardless of where it started It'll slowly get to where it belongs Relative to how much it's worth. So if you can buy low and sell high You can make money by selling shares at the right time as long as you were able to issue enough shares I made the mistake in the first game. I opened a company. It had two shares one for me one for the bank No one else bought a share. I didn't issue more. I couldn't buy more So my price went way up, but I could never sell my only share of the company even though it was very valuable worse If you issue couldn't make any money and I couldn't buy participate in the auction And then I was done issue new shares that drives the price down and it dilutes your dividends So if I issue another share now, there's three shares issue another share now There's four shares every time you issue a share the bank gives the share price to the company like you issued another share It's out there But now if I pay a dividend if there's five shares out there One dollar dividend cost me five dollars and if I only own one share I only get one of those dollars All right, so the things about this game There's more rules, but like that's pretty much the game Well, the one the one key thing is that those private companies that come out in the auction Right are set up in a deck and they're set up into different sections of different colors And as the you get to the each color is like the next phase of the game Right as the colors are do you get through each set of colors? And while each little set is shuffled the colors are in a certain order So the companies just get more expensive as the game goes on the price keeps going And it's huge like early companies have an income of like two and it costs like eight dollars The later companies have an income like a way out like an income of like 12 and they cost like 60 dollars to buy There are big big jumps between the colors right big jumps So the result of that is that not even if You're competing well with the other players in the game Right the game can beat you right if you don't keep enough money in your wallet if you don't have a way to get money into your personal coffers You and they get to like the next color The prices on those companies and the next color might be so high That you have no conceivable no possible route literally no possible route to ever be able to buy one of those Even if nobody was competing with you in the auction because you just it's just like well that costs 40 dollars minimum There is no way for me to ever get 40 dollars ever in this game. I'm just done right you have to play this game in such a way That you stay afloat Right, it's like you're not fighting with the other people so much Right, you're trying to tread water and after you successfully continue to tread water as the seas Continuously rise and never stop rising if you can continue treading water and stay alive in the game Then you can fight with the other people and try to dunk their heads up But you have if I just the first game I played I just drowned on my own We both just kind of I just down like we both hit a point where well There's literally no way for us to ever buy anything for the rest of this game Yep, so I think that the problems I see in this game Uh, because it does have a lot of fun. I enjoy this game. I would play it again. I want to play it again However, I think it is deeply and fatally flawed in a number of ways that some people may be tolerant of But I'm definitely not you know in power grid We've talked about this a long time ago power grid is a really fun game But once you get good at it like really good at it the game literally comes down to I spent 100 of my dollars this turn scott had one dollar left over that turn Scott's probably losing the game now because the game becomes very dollar tight like that's the level of granularity of success This game right but power grid is only like that at high tiers of play This game is like that no matter what if you are off by a dollar in the first auction You might just mathematically be eliminated from the game Right, so I think that you know, I'm not opposed to being eliminated from the game I know a lot of people hate player. I love it Uh, right. I think this game one of its flaws. It doesn't have player elimination It needs it because you could be stuck in a game where you literally cannot affect the game anymore But you are not officially eliminated And so if you wanted to play to the official conclusion of the game every game we've played of this It's has reached a point where we've just said. Oh, yes, obviously that player is one And there's nothing anyone could do about it even though the game is far from officially over and we just end it And it's like well, that's really that's like you play monopoly, right? Monopoly has the exact same fatal flaw. That's the worst thing that is wrong with monopoly is also wrong with this game That is not a good thing. Yep, but it has another problem to around These games definitely are very spreadsheet heavy in that the game itself is very like mathematically pure and you can calculate things But in some games, there's no randomness except for the the cards coming from the deck What order will they appear and you can see the future on those so it's not very random But the trouble is oh lord total aside. I'll get back to this later People are commenting on our train game reviews on board game geek I didn't know that was even a thing All right interesting. I'm gonna skim those comments in a minute. So uh have fun with that basically Some games like it's just analysis paralysis like you can calculate so far But like doing a multi-turn full calculation of all player actions and possibilities Will maybe give you like a 1% higher chance of winning the game. So it's not worth it Exactly. You see Right people talk about analysis paralysis a lot and the the usual pattern you see is exactly what rim described Is that if you play the game and you are good at it, you have some heuristics for what's a good move What's a bad move you can play pretty well. You can get close to optimal play or maybe even optimal play Uh, you know by making a quick decision or just you know looking around at your options and sort of picking the best one Right with various methods But if you sit there and analyze every possible option Down to the last dollar down to every cent down to the individual victory points and say, aha I thought of one that got me four victory points. It only took me 30 seconds to find that move But I spent 10 minutes. I found a move That gets me five victory points, right? That's usually most most ever del has that problem to the nth degree You literally can just fucking sit there forever And you might actually find a path through all those unique and semi unique cards That gets you one more victory point than the other options But that is table stakes in this game. You have to do that in this game be able to engage with the game Exactly because of the increasing prices on the private companies, right? Every player, right? Must do analysis paralysis Math math math math spend a lot of time thinking Right down to the last dollar Exactly how much am I going to spend in this auction? What's my turn order? How much will I what what stock price? Will I open this company at how many shares will I issue? There's so many options of things you can do You have to explore each and every one of them, you know Spreadsheet all the way out to before you make your move because a failure to do so won't mean one less victory point Or one less dollar or I lose literally crashes to zero that turn It crashes from 90 to 5 percent and then from 5 percent to 0 percent over two turns right It means well that means you're not going to have enough You know the next turn the cheapest private company available will cost a minimum of 21 dollars and you'll have 20 dollars So you can't even participate if you even had the and that's the thing if you had the 21 dollars Right that could you know to buy that cheapest company? You might not buy it Someone else with like 30 dollars might just buy it for 22 But you but you mattered you forced them to buy that company They couldn't buy another company because that would mean letting you have that one Right if they chose a different company for say, you know, $27 that you couldn't even afford They got that at face value, but now they're giving you the 21 at face value helping you out a ton So now they have to buy that 21 to keep you out of it right and When they do so they have to buy it for 22 above face value because to not bid 22 would mean you could get it in there for 21 based on the turn order possibly right So having enough money to just clear that edge Every single time requires a lot of analysis just to stay in the game Yep, but even then even if even once you get to that point because the game's so dollar tight What'll happen is Even if you make a slight miscalculation But otherwise they're staying ahead of that ledge like you're playing the game. Well, you've learned it You're spreadsheeting it. You're doing your math You're not going to get screwed like you can engage in the game meaningfully all the way to the end You're behind by two dollars of net worth by the third round You'll never catch up. There's no way to catch up because since the game is so locked tight While there's this like I could make a million corporations corporations can sell stuff between each other There's all this stuff that can happen in the stock market. I could like Unload a company that sucks on someone and then like sell all the stock and do cool stuff Someone could be trying to start a new company and buy all the Privates from their old company into the new one and you could try to buy that old company out before They're able to transfer and steal all the private companies. Yep. They issue extra share You buy but in practice and I was looking around online and it's not just our games It seems like that's pretty common Very rarely do shenanigans like that happen because they can't often happen If the players are all actually playing well They seem to only happen in games of this where all the players are doing very badly or For whatever reason some of the players are making very poor decisions Yes, there's if you like we said do all that analysis you can basically protect yourself from any sort of shenanigan That could possibly happen Right is no one can is not really like an attack someone can do that you can't defend against the only thing that someone can do Um in this game is to gang up on you with some sort of politics situation, right some cooperations Uh of people who are not in first place could unseat someone in first place, right put their put their monies together Um, you know in some way right just like someone who has been Mathematically limited from the game early could do some king making in this game, right? Which is you know, I like a king making But I only like it personally when the king making happens and the person doing the king making still has a chance to win Right, they've chosen. Yeah, I see where you're going with this political path They've chosen this political path through the game even though they could they themselves could still win After following that path if somebody king makes and either a sacrifices all their chance to win to do so Or b king makes after already having crossed the point where they could no longer win like well I can't win this game I'm gonna put all my stuff in with rim to make him win or to make rim lose That just seems like a spoiler and it's like now you're not winning because at least in a room By starting your own route if you're behind but you've played competently like you're not just like derping around in the game then Holding back winners and just trying to keep the game going Gives you some chance some avenue to sneak a win in if everyone else stalemates like there's There are still more plausible paths to victory than in games like this But there's also this problem that I see where I and there's all these shenanigans that seem really fun like in 18 xx games The most fun thing in the world to do is to fuck someone over and force them to buy a train Or force someone to own a company. They don't want to own But if the players are even remotely careful, you really can't pull that off Nope It only happens to people who are who are new at the game or don't know what's up Once I learned that it took me quite a while to figure out how that worked But basically that doesn't happen to me anymore. I'm like perfectly protected throw a shitty company at me in 18 89 Like it just can't happen Nope, it's I already know I know how it works now and now it never happens And I can't do it to anyone else because they know but then we get a situation where I like the train game but the most fun of the table is when The turn starts and someone says oh, shit I see what's about to happen and then someone gets screwed by that But you never see that happen when everyone's good again unless people are making mistakes So we have this broader problem of there are fun systems and levers in these games Much like sellers of katan where trading is really fun where if you get good at the game You never pull that lever again. Like you know that lever is just poison. There's no reason never touch it Well, it's like, you know, I think baseball actually is an example of a game that has a lot of the same things going on if you ever If you ever watch a yeah, if you ever watch a little league baseball game something that happens a lot in Not the lowest level of little league Which is just kids who aren't but like the middle school kids who like could be really good high school players Might like they're trying but they can't hit home runs yet because they're tiny tiny kids Well, well, they can't they can in the little tiny field But the point is um Some things that you'll see happen for example are like successful steals of home Right some things else that you'll see is that kids will get a walk, right? So the pitcher will walk the batter The the kid will run to first base even though they just got walked And it's and they'll just keep running to second like without stopping and this will often fool Uh, a pitcher, right who is not, you know, who's just a kid who hasn't it wasn't aware in high school My go-to move was I would walk casually toward first when I got Well, I walked and then I'd walk a little bit past it And I would just suddenly sprint a second and no one ever was able to stop me right and major league baseball You see that Never you haven't seen stealing home in like it's super super rare But it has it hasn't been common since like if a pickle happens in a professional baseball game That is the highlight of the fucking month Right exactly it happens pretty rarely the happens more pickles happen a little bit Not that often still pickles are one of the most fun parts of baseball But they're they really can't happen unless you make a mistake Right, so that's what I'm saying is that rolling stock even if your players aren't pro Right because the bar to just stay in the game is high anyone who's not pro can't do anything in this game So as a result you only get the game where everyone's pro and only boring stuff happens Right the exciting stuff. I'm really curious All right, I mean have tons of ideas on how to sort of take the core of these If you didn't notice we're playing a lot of these games lately for research for an idea we have Yeah, but I just think it like what if you just instead of making the game money tight, right? What if everyone started the game with like a fucking thousand dollars, right? Just don't change anything else just make everyone a fucking tycoon like you're rich money's not tight All right now bid on these companies, right? It's like if you don't do it doesn't matter how much money you start with as long as everyone starts the same And it's like well you can't just sit on your thousand dollars because if you want to win you have to increase your money somehow But also it means now there's a lot more dynamics around issuing more shares and buying shares and fucking other people shares over Everyone's rich you can't kick anyone out of the game because they're all fucking rich You just have to work the system to make more money than someone else despite Being more rich, right that you can't kick anyone out. They're not going to go bankrupt. They're a zillionaire Everyone's a zillionaire you're feuding tycoons But you still have to play the game because you still have to make gets a thousand and one dollar somehow Like what did you're not going to get it by sitting instead unless you hope everyone else loses money And you'll just sit just what disappoints me the most is we can form all these companies But there's almost never a reason to form more of them You're like is it you can't They're later in the game there is but there isn't a reason to form like a whole bunch It's like you could legally form like five companies right away But like that won't do anything except make you lose and in fact in the last game we played I formed a big company that's actually doing really well late game Only because why not? I mean I was already guaranteed losing the game and it was just a system I could interact with Star corp doesn't matter or mean anything to anyone You know I uh the first game I played I started the company and I followed the basic heuristic of trying to make a stock price go up So I did I got a company and I made it stock price go way way up I was I was trying to play a responsible a responsible corporate. No, no, no, I got a role play a joke That absolutely did not work and I just got completely screwed So it's like the the not only do you have to spreadsheet the whole game to stay in it But your basic, you know real world heuristics of own a company and make the stock price go up. That's good It's like no, it's not right. You have to do any not intuitive things are the way forward Right first Chris points out in the chat I kind of agree with if you started people with too much money in this game I feel like Never investing and never doing anything except maybe buying a couple of companies would actually be a Optimal strategy because of the math Because I remember this happened when I was a kid in middle school this one random day It was in like the eighth grade advanced math class and they busted out monopoly They made us break into groups and they were like everyone play monopoly and uh the winner from each table Will like get a lottery ticket to get a thing like there was a prize Like there's a real prize that people wanted like a serious prize I don't remember what the prize was it was like it was like the equivalent of like Don't have to do homework for a couple weeks like it was some big deal thing So everyone starts trying to play monopoly and at our table. I'm like guys monopoly sucks. We don't want to play it Uh, let's show and there was a secondary prize. Here's the other piece The secondary prize was whatever player had the most money among all the winners would win some other prize in addition So I just said let's all just Agree that we never take any actions in this game There's a guaranteed five-way tie for first and all we do is go around Collecting the 200 dollars from go over and over and over again Oh, yeah infinite go and uh, yeah, we Made sure there was a five-way tie at our table And we had an order of magnitude more money than anyone else and the prize was cancelled Everything was called off and we all got in trouble No, they should have uh thought about what they were doing I would have I would if I saw kids doing that I would be like You guys I'm getting you five prizes. Yeah, that if I were a teacher I would definitely reward the kids who were subversive in clever ways I mean we could that's I think our show is over but definitely Uh, there is you know, I think one of the great injustices of that I think a lot of pete nerds especially right have experienced in american school is Adults punishing children for children being smarter It's like you're there to learn and then they punish you for knowing more than adults do right Good adults will reward children who are smart or outsmart adults and say good job As long as the kids didn't cause harm doesn't need to be that much The reward could be like the teacher aside being like yo kid You don't have to do homework for the next two weeks. Don't tell anyone that would have been enough I would have stopped causing trouble Anyway, but yeah rolling stock if you want to play this game rolling stock.net has an online implementation because the game is It's so abstract It's you don't need anything the fiction of this game is meaningless Yes, you can read a pdf to get the complete this as a few pdf's that are available to read the whole rules And then you can play online for free if you want to play this online for free contact us and we'll play I'll play with you Uh, and well we can chat and we can talk to you and I'll give you tips Based on my two or three plays of it so far. I think the game is What I've learned is only much like the 18xx games. I like it But I think it is fatally and deeply flawed in specific and profound ways While I enjoy it and it's interesting It is more instructive than it is enjoyable like I am learning things about game design playing these games I'm also seeing the flaws in them and I still feel like between 18xx games and this There is a game that can be made that is good in the traditional sense Not just good in the I want to bang my head against the spreadsheet and see what happens sense Right. Well, I think that's because all these games have in common some core Mechanics that do not exist at all in other genres of games Period, right? And so if we can extract those And just fix all the stuff around them and get rid of the problems Then you can make some truly like unique amazing popular which I still think comes down to everyone could enjoy It can't actually be a tabletop game. It needs to have primarily tabletop sensibility But real-time markets or more slightly more complex stock markets that don't have fiddly rules Like no two companies can be the same price at the same time That would go a long way toward making this better. I think there there are ways to do it But anyway, let's uh, let's go find. Yeah, I'm getting hungry. So yeah, stay safe out there Enjoy uh, enjoy some rolling stock if you guys want to play we will play a game And we can all be in misery together as literally no one can afford the last companies This has been geek nights with rim and scott special thanks to dj pretzel for the opening music cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos be sure to visit our website at front row crew Dot com for show notes discussion news and more remember geek nights is not one but four different shows Sci-tech 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