 Streaming. I think the stream is working. Bye. OK. Oh, that's working. It's, uh, 15. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. I know. You just told me on my other device. It's Tuesday, January 15, 2019. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights. Tonight, we are back to talk about the hot tabletop game, Root. Well, they had come out like a year ago, right? Yeah. It's getting hotter and hotter. It's sold out, like, everywhere. I'm sure I can get one if I want to. Yeah. I think if the girls have one. So I don't need to get one. I definitely, if I got one, when would it get played? Any time I'm going to play it, I can play someone else's copy. That came out in 2018. Now, the girl, if you can just pull out that Root signal and the girls will show up. They'll be like, you're going to play Root? Root, you say. OK. Guess our opening bit. This is easy. I got one opening bit. And then we'll get into like our magfest and stuff. It's cold. Holidays, et cetera. Cool. So something very important happened. I want a bridge north of us was blown up. The Tappan Zee Bridge. Yep. Now, there was nothing wrong with it. It's weird. A lot of people kept saying, like, oh, that bridge sucked. It did suck. How? What was bad about it other than the fact that it's way too far north because of nonsense politics? So that bridge. And it was old and falling apart. Old and falling apart? It being old and falling apart never actually affected one's experience driving over it. There was mad traffic because it didn't have enough lanes. The new one, I don't think it has significantly more capacity. It has twice as much. And it has a bike lane and a pedestrian path. Right. There is a bike lane. The old one was one bridge. The new one is two bridges that are each larger than the previous bridge. The thing is, I am in no position to ever take advantage of that bike lane anytime soon. Why not? Just bike up there. It's a ways up. As soon as it's warm. What's on the other side of it if you bike over it? What do you mean? On one side is Westchester. And on the other side is like NIAC. Yeah. It's like NIAC to Piermont. Yeah. I want to. I bike farther than that frequently. I would rather bike over the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. That's the one I want to bike lane on. No, that bike, that bridge sucks. It's tall. I'm into it. It's hard to bike over the Verrazano Bridge. We've both done it. It sucks. Yep. This bridge is not tall. But yeah, there was a live stream. It got blown up. The fish is blowing up is actually not that interesting to watch. So originally they were like, let's blow up the whole damn thing. Then they're like, no, no, no, we'll hurt the fishes. So they were taking it apart one piece at a time slowly. And then using the pieces to make reefs for the fishes out near Rockaway and other places. But then they're like, oh no, we were taking apart this one piece and we heard a really loud bat noise and we checked it and the structure might not be too good. So if we take it apart slowly, it might just collapse while we're taking it apart slowly. So we're going to have to blow up this one piece and then we can take it apart after it's fallen in the water. But no, to be fair, that bridge was an old piece of shit in terms of engineering. Maybe next they got to work on the white stone in the Throgsneck. Yeah, right. Those things are held up. Man, if they blow those up, that'll be something to say. Those two are held up as far as I can tell entirely by paint. I feel like what they should do for the white stone in Throgsneck is they should make new bridges that go straight across and then make two more bridges because they're so close to each other. Oh yeah, just make one, two, three and then get rid of the old two. Then make two, get rid of the old two. Then make two new ones in an X shape. So you could start at one end of the, right? Make like a bow tie shape with four bridges with loops at all the corners. That way you can start on the white stone and end on the other side of the Throgsneck or vice versa. They're so close. They're like two, they might as well be next to each other. The only reason I ever used one or the other because one of them had more traffic than the other one was pretty random which one I ever used. I would choose based on where I'm going on the other side. So like if I'm going northeast, I'm going to use a Throgsneck because it's a little further out, right? And then if I'm going to like the baseball stadium, I'm using the white stone because it's right fucking there. Yup, I was usually going northwest so I ended up using the white stone. Yeah, yeah, it's like where you're going is which one you're going to use. So yeah, that Geek Nights quality content you're looking for, we're back talking about bridges. We haven't done a show in a while because it was the holidays and we were all traveling and doing stuff. And then it was magfest. Yup, we had the New Year's party that we had to go to. And now we're going up. We're going to pack south. You're not getting another show. It's like next week. Yup, we can basically we can only fit in one show between all these cons and not too far after pack south is Pax East. That's kind of far out. You're going to be getting shows in February and March. Yeah, it's far enough out. We will be doing shows. And the rest of January, you're going to get shows, right? So rest of January, February and March, there'll be Geek Nights. So we are back from Super Magfest. So I think it's worthwhile to, we don't, in the old days, we would do a whole show on every con we went to but go to a lot of cons, not a lot changes, but there's always notable things to talk about for any big con we go to. So Magfest 2019 was better than previous Magfest in a lot of ways, but Magfest has a problem that's starting to grow. Magfest has always had a problem. Yeah, but it's getting worse. It's always been getting worse. Yeah, it's getting worse, worse. Right. Well, I mean, that's the thing with getting worse is that every time it's worse than the last time. So here's the deal. Magfest is like the only non-packs gaming con we like. Like, Magfest is better than the worst packs in terms of the attendee experience, but it's not quite on the level of like, a packs West. No. But I really like Magfest and also Magfest is unique. Some of the things that Magfest, make Magfest unique are really awesome. Like, the panel content at Magfest, like, especially if you want like academic... Well, because Magfest is a non-profit, it has to justify its non-profit status. So it does a lot of awesome things to justify its non-profit status. Like, Magfest panels are mostly fan panels, non-gaming or like, just fun stuff, or they're like really... Like, they're the kinds of panels that we do. There's other people doing the kind of stuff we do at PAXes at Magfest. It's not just us. So the panels are great. Like, I go to more panels at Magfest than I do at PAXes. But what they don't have are like big, serious industry panels so much. They don't have big, serious industry presents at all. Yeah. But... It is all fan all the time. Yep, which is both a pro and a con. It's like, there's better content in many regards, but that content is often less polished, a little more raw. Like, PAX will have a super polished panel. If the industry came to Magfest, they'd be like, we gotta shut the shit down. This cannot have, this cannot be. Yeah, like, Magfest, you'll go to a panel. Chilling with fire. Magfest, you'll go to a panel that's really good, but it's a little unpolished because the panelists are literally hung over or possibly still drunk from the night before. But I love Magfest. I love going to Magfest. And generally, like, the arcade was rockin' this year. Magfest traditionally had a problem where Thursday was pretty weak and Sunday was pretty weak. This year, Thursday was a full-on goddamn day. Yeah, usually. It's like, I told people, right? Show up to Magfest late Thursday. Nothing happens early Thursday. And leave Magfest early Sunday. Everyone checks out at the hotel and then the whole place is empty on Sunday. There's no reason to hang around. Get home, get home. I got there at noon and, like, Tabletop's already bumpin'. Like, there's already panels goin'. Yeah, which, so next year, gotta get to Magfest earlier on Thursday. The Expo Hall said it would open at 2, and it opened at 2, and it was bumpin'. And last year at Magfest, on Sunday morning, Tabletop was 100% empty. It was just a ghost town. No one was there. This year, it wasn't bumpin' on Sunday. But it was there. But there was activity on Sunday, and then it was like the library was open. There was people there. You could play games in there on Sunday. There was also... And not feel like you were wasting your time or that you should have gone home. Like on Thursday... Sorry, on the last day on Sunday when I went in, the arcade was still bumpin', and I still had to wait in line to play DDR. Yeah, you always had to wait in line to play DDR, or Initial D. The time where you don't have to wait in line to play DDR or Initial D is between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. That is the magic moment. All right, I'll try to wake up early. As I've said, I remember last year I was like, well, 2 a.m., it's too crowded. So if I wait until like 4 a.m., there's no way anyone's playing DDR. Nope, there's still a line. Good God, people. But really, the only problem with Magfest now, like the fundamental problem, the only thing that I have to say, hey, Magfest, you got to do something about this, is that there are way, way too few staff for that crowd. You can't get more staff. It's not possible. As long as Magfest remains Magfest. Well, I think they could, but it's not my place to say because I am not staff at Magfest. I don't officially represent Magfest. I am just a guest at Magfest. I show up to do panels and have a good time. But the fundamental problem, however Magfest solves it, is a thing that PAX has got so solved. Yeah, PAX is not 24 hours. And PAX has money. It's not a nonprofit. But in order for Magfest to fix it, it has to A, stop being nonprofit, and B, stop being 24 hours. I do think there are other ways to solve it because it's not... Get a lot of money from a generous donor. It's not just that they don't have enough staff because they have a lot more staff than people realize. Due to the nature of how they deploy their staff, the staffer and the way the staff, like their staff uniform, and like the staff are largely invisible. They could make minor improvements in that regard, but because it's 24-7, you need so many more staff to... But you need most of those staff, like the problem time seems to be... Right, to do the... It's about like one enforcer at PAX. They do an eight-hour shift each day, right? It's like, okay, at Magfest, you need three people to do the same job because it's 24 hours. At PAX, in the back when PAX went until 2 a.m., we needed three full shifts per day. Magfest needs like five or six shifts to PAX's three. Yup. Now, they could get away with a lot less staff if the staff that they had were deployed a little more broadly or, importantly, they have to be way more visible because a big part of why PAX has so many fewer problems of harassment and nonsense going on is that even if there aren't a ton of enforcers like in an area doing stuff, there's always an enforcer within eyesight pretty much anywhere you go. Like, even if it's a little... Well, it's also less physically sprawling than Magfest, right? Yeah. All the PAX's, except for maybe West, right? But in West, it's like any... If you're in any of the official PAX areas indoors, there's enforcers about standing. But part of this isn't even from Magfest's fault. So, for example, Magfest did have a much better staff presence in the Arcade Expo Hall console free play, like that area had a good... That's the main zone. Yeah, it had a good staff presence and they'd handled things pretty well. The problem is, one, the General Convention Center area has, if there are staff, I literally never saw any. And two, Magfest is not responsible for having staff in the hotel lobby and bad shit was happening in that hotel lobby. Well, the hotel lobby is just an area that's connected to Magfest but has nothing to do with Magfest. The hotel needs to be on top of that and Magfest needs to bring the hotel accountable to deal with harassers and like... Though there are panels in the hotel part. Oh, no, I'm talking about the hotel lobby itself. Magfest can't... The staff aren't going to maintain order in that area. The hotel seemed to be just turning a blind eye to it. And there were harassing pieces of shit. It was mostly like, I want to say, 16 to 20 year old white dudes who were just like, didn't even have Magfest badges mostly and were just harassing people. And it didn't seem like anyone was on top of that. But other than that, Magfest was great and like every other area of Magfest stepped up its game. Like the arcade started on time. Well, because most of the staff of Magfest are curating and managing the content of Magfest. It's like, you know, you go to a panel room and it's like, yeah, there's people there running the panel rooms, right? You go to the arcade. There's people there fixing arcade machines. You go to the tournaments. There's people there running tournaments. You go to a place in Magfest for this Magfest content and there are Magfest staff who are running that content. There just aren't excess Magfest staff just walking around. Every Magfest staff member is like, do you go to the museum? There's Magfest staff in the museum, running the museum. There's no Magfest staff just walking around the hallway being staff. They don't have people for that. And I think the shortest-term solution would be Magfest needs like 10 people per 8 hours so spread that over 24-7 and make sure that, you know, people get breaks. They need a dedicated group of people whose sole job is to wear very visible IMA Magfest staff person shirts and just walk slowly around and be visible. That alone would probably solve a huge percentage of Magfest remaining problems that are visible to the attendees. And in terms of the invisible problems, who cares? Like, staff just hides all that stuff and it's fine. I remember all the problems attendees never found out about back when I ran everything at Connecticut and that's right. That's how to do it. But Magfest was a good time. We will definitely be back for Super Magfest. As long as they keep running Magfest. As long as Magfest stands, we will be there. See how long it stands. It's the overrun. I love this shit. I think Magfest can survive the long run. I think it's the thing that the biggest danger to Magfest is probably beyond Magfest control. And it's the same thing that's a danger to all nerd stuff. Big mass shooting. Big incident. Like the incident that happened at ALA, that anime con that we're going to talk about on our next Wednesday show. The fire. Yeah, we're basically one of those shitty harassing dudes set a bunch of cars on fire in the con parking lot because he was mad that a girl he was stalking wouldn't talk to him. Essentially. Yep. Shit like that is a big danger. I'm really shocked. Incidents like that have not happened more often. They do happen, but big ones haven't happened as much as I expected. It's going to happen someday. And I don't know what the con world as a whole is going to do when it happens. Metal detectors are not the answer. I point out this is one area where Magfest is objectively superior to PAX. Magfest does not have security theater or metal detectors and probably never will. I really, really am disappointed that PAX has these bullshit metal detectors. Yeah. And you think it's like Magfest probably needs it if it wasn't theater. Yeah. You could argue that Magfest needs it more than PAX does. Being half music festival, half gaming con, if any nerd thing needed metal detectors that were real, it's Magfest. Yeah. Magfest is the one con that's doing it right if they're not going to have they're not going to have fake security. They're going to have no security or the right amount of security, but they're not going to have fake security. That's one area where PAX I think really failed us is the fake security. Yep. So there is so much game industry news centered specifically around Activision Blizzard that we can't even talk about all of it. There's too much. And it's all evolving. Like a lot of it, we don't even know all the details yet. Right. So the trigger I think is the Morheim, the CEO of Blizzard. This was a while ago. He announced he was leaving, but now he's actually really left. Like he gone. Yep. And I think because of that, right now, the whole boat is going to get turned over. You got CFOs getting like kicked out. Like one or two of them. Yeah. Four. And it's like one of them ended up at Netflix. It's not really like it's some kind of shenanigans going on. So it's not yet clear why these people left specifically if they left because they were leaving or they were pushed out. Right. There are some suggestions though, no proof because it's, you know, HR private info that like someone who went to Netflix was like kicked out for bad, you know, behavior. And it's like Netflix. You shouldn't be, you know, people were like, Hey, Netflix while you're hiring this person who had was badly behaving. Right. There were some suggestions of that. Who knows if it's true. No idea. Don't call me with your lawsuits of slander or whatever. Yep. But Morheim leaving was interesting partly because Morheim. Yeah, Morheim. I've never met him. But I don't know really a lot about him. He's the Blizzard guy. He's like the number one Blizzard guy. But basically the has been until now. Now he's not a Blizzard guy. All the statements about like his leaving are just super neutral generic. Like he is leaving. Period. And that's it. Read what gaming sites have to say about it. Yeah. PN has to say maybe you'll get more info. Yeah. But according to the filing submitted this week on Monday, he's leaving the company on April 7th. Like he's actually leaving because when he announced his departure, he was then then this is typical in many companies. For various, you know, ease the transition, etc. There was no news release accompanying the filing, which simply read. I'm going to read the entire filing because it's short. As previously disclosed on October 3rd, 2018, Michael Morheim entered into an agreement with Activision Blizzard. Yeah, Morheim pursuant to which he would provide strategic advice to the company in an advisory capacity. Anyway, employment to the company will conclude on April 7th, 2019 full stop. Right. That's it. And also, in somewhat related news, there was this an employee of Blizzard who's working in the Hearthstone Esports Department, right? Wrote this big, like, story of how awful their job was and how, you know, it drove them to be have so much stress and be depressed and contemplate suicide and all this stuff and HR didn't do anything and how Blizzard presents itself as one of those companies that's doing it right. It's like, yeah, we're inclusive. Look at us. We're not evil like those bad game companies. But on the inside, still is not near perfect. Yep. Right. So it's just an account by the employee. You can go read it for yourself and gather from it what you will. I read the whole thing because it was actually written somewhat compelling way. Yep. I'm linking to the variety article, but there's a lot of articles about this thing. Right. Okay. So that's also in here in the Blizzard shake-up, right? Yep. And on top of that, you got the newest news which is sort of a double thing after it got booted out of Microsoft or left Microsoft or whatever happened there. Yep. Right. And they got the and then they went through all the trouble of getting Destiny into battle net. So it's like, you're looking there. It's like Warcraft, Starcraft, R-Stone, Destiny. Right. It's like, what's that one? This is one of these is not like the other. Right. And now they're kicking the bungee out. It's like going through all the trouble bringing them in. There's the question. Activision. I don't know what's happening. It seems like that, you know, there's so many shake-ups going on there. Who knows what the hell? And fun fact, we were talking about like bungee and what's their deal because as Scott said, well, we were preparing for the show. Right. So you don't know bungee is the company that made Marathon, which was an FPS for the Mac. All the people on Windows and DOS had Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake, right? The Mac people had Marathon. I never played Marathon. Marathon was basically like slightly better than Doom and nowhere near Quake. I literally never knew anyone who played Marathon because no one had a Mac. Anyone had a Mac had Marathon because it wasn't on PC. Remember, this is 1994. So we had a Mac in 1994. And then ironically, the people who made the Mac FPS ended up going to Microsoft to make Halo the Windows and Xbox FPS. So, funnily enough, before Marathon, I didn't realize they made Operation Desert Storm. I never heard of that. I mean, the actual Operation Desert Storm. Yeah, I played this game of the same name and a minotaur labyrinth of Crete and pathways into darkness 91, 92, 93, and then Marathon 94. Right, Marathon. Marathon. Marathon. So, I mean, full disclosure, I have never liked any game Bungie made, but I think they're good at like Destiny and Halo are very good at being what they are. Like if you like that kind of game, they're great. I have also never been any Bungie game other than Marathon. But I respect the track. Which I played because when I went to schools and summer camps, they usually had Max and they usually had Lands and we could play Marathon in Land Mode. See, I just remember when Halo came out, all I could think was, wow, that is really sad compared to every PC FPS that I already play. Right. Like, what is this game and who would play it? Well, people who only had consoles in the U.S. mostly. Yeah. Who had played GoldenEye, which was worse than GoldenEye came out. All I remember thinking was, wow, this game really sucks. Right. When GoldenEye came out, we had Quake One, Quake Two. We were like, wow, what's up with that GoldenEye? And then when Marathon came out, well, no, when Halo came out, it's like we got Quake Three and Counter-Strike. Yup. What's with this Halo garbage? But if you didn't have, if you were in a PC gamer, because back then PC gaming was not, like, even today, it's not that accessible. But back then, it was really not accessible. So. At least in the U.S. Other countries, they only had PC gaming. But basically, they don't like these games, but these games are very important to gaming and are very well made. In the U.S. Yeah. I don't think anyone, I don't think Bungie, even today, has, like, audience outside the U.S. From what I've gathered, Destiny is pretty popular outside of the U.S. Yeah. Because I mean, even in places that do consoles like Japan, I don't think they're playing Bungie. Oni wasn't good. I don't know what that is. You don't remember Oni? Show me a picture. You probably don't remember Oni. I don't know. You don't remember Oni? I don't know. Some people in the chat are like, Oni, Oni. Oh, the box art, I remember that. Wasn't it just a third person action walk around, hit things game? Yeah. I never actually played it. I don't know. But yeah. So a lot of the gaming press, like the undercurrent is that Activision has the worst reputation of the Activision Blizzard Bungie. Why can't we go back to the Activision that published Pitfall for the Atari 2600? That's my Activision. That's the good Activision. And it was all down from there. River Raid. That's good Activision Mac warrior two. Even then it was still good. Good Activision. Yeah. Shockingly River Raid holds up better than you would expect for an Atari 2600. Yeah. But Activision published Mac warrior two. Right. That was still good Activision in those days are 90s. Right. Mid 90s, late 90s. You know that Activision went to poop. So on top of all this investors into Activision Blizzard full disclosure. I own a I own a decent amount of Activision Blizzard stock. Investors are launching a possible fraud like there's a fraud investigation around the Bungie split. Why? Because they invested because Bungie came in and now Bungie's leaving. So because I own some stock and I work in finance. I don't want to comment on this at all. OK. So don't I'll comment. So I guess they're accusing them of fraud. I guess the argument would be I bought your stock because you were getting. You told me Bungie was coming in. Right. And now they're going out and now the stock price went down. That's you you lied to me. Right. I didn't get what I was paying for. I'm mad. And so I'm suing. Yep. Essentially and Variety Variety had all the good articles about this but there's an article about this specifically. You can read. And they go to court. They'll probably like you said this during the earnings call and it's not true. That's probably the kind of stuff that they're going to go for. Right. Yeah. There's all sorts of nonsense. So this is in your annual report. But look reality Bungie yep. So it's interesting. Your stock based on false information. This is the kind of stuff that happens when false or misleading a bunch of separate game companies each of which is good at what they do end up being together in the same company. And all of this is happening in parallel with the massive rise of e-sports where actually I think Blizzard is doing the most prudent thing. Well they're actually so for Hearthstone they completely restructured the way Hearthstone e-sports works this year. And drastically and they haven't even announced all of it yet. It's going to be nothing like it was last year. Right. Who knows what the hell is going to happen with Overwatch League. Yeah. But also a side news Overwatch League did one thing a small thing but a big thing. Small small in scope but large in effect. Nope. That no sports league I know of not even like NFL. Oh yeah. Yeah. I know what you're talking about. Right. So you can get a single page that you can go to a web page that's just a web page a small thing. That web page lists every instance of Overwatch League players being suspended reprimanded punished why they were punished what their penalty was in you know the whole history of everything all the players have done bad. Can you show me like a page that's publicly accessible that's like every NFL player all the fines and suspensions they got all year forever. Right. There's no such thing. Right. Show me the list of like all the hockey players who got fined or suspended this year how much what it was for. Right. No it doesn't exist. Right. Not at least not available to the general public. I'm like one easy to use page. But for Overwatch League they got it. Good job. A plus. So along those lines something really funny happened and I'll say this will be the last news then we'll get into route that you're all waiting for. So we one of our magfest panels like we put the YouTube video out it's there and it was the top 40 games you should play like the 40 games you should play and one of the ones we said was Overwatch because it is the modern incarnation of like action quake to and weapons factory and TFC and like all those other games like it's the it's the iteration of that kind of game that is playable today and this Gomer Gator came into my mentions hard. And they're like you said block them. So because because they followed the template and it was pretty funny but basically I discovered based on this Gomer Gator that a ton of shitty people are really mad that they are they have been banned from Overwatch because they were harassing people outside of Overwatch because Blizzard in turn not in just an eSports thing but they will go after people like their pro players who do shitty things even outside of the game like is doing a thing where you they're going to I think it's a I'm not sure if it's a hundred percent implemented yet but the story I heard was to go it you'll be watching say some Overwatch League on Twitch and you want to chat in the chat room you have to have an order in order to chat in the chat room they got like a plug-in that will prevent you from chatting in the chat room unless you have your battle net account connected to your Twitch account with a lot so if you get all means then you can chat in the chat room but if you say some racial slurs say for example they can now they now have your battle net account and they don't just ban you from the Twitch channel they ban you from playing Overwatch they can just ban you from battle net and all you lose all your Blizzard games but won't people just like make a separate battle net free account because the accounts are free and use that for Twitch chatting and so another actual account where they bought a thousand dollars of skins and crates when they not use that one for Twitch chatting so I'm not a hundred percent sure intelligent but as best I can tell you probably not that smart if they're racial slurring but you get the idea the best I can tell is that if you are banned and Blizzard identifies that you have another account and it's actually yours they'll ban them all they have to find them though yeah if I if I made a separate account called like rim and I used a VPN to go on Twitch how would they ever know that that's you know what my real battle net account is yep but and it appears to be working because a lot of Gormor gating shitheads are really really mad about this I mean you can get suspended from school if you're Rob Lickerstone yeah you can get suspended from school if you want that stuff on Facebook yeah so alright it's gonna be the review we're getting there but anyway things of the day so AGDQ 2019 just happened it was a way it was an A Plus AGDQ it was hype! I really enjoyed the first so the only thing the only negative thing I can say about the most recent AGDQ was that I was less impressed with the prizes. They're usually there's some prizes that I want the great I I usually pay, like I usually donate the amount to qualify for the grand prize, even though I know there's no chance to win, I'm donating, what do I do, right? But because the grand prize is still something like, man, it would be cool to have that, yo, right? This year, the grand prize was kind of admittedly amazing. It was like this replica master sword, like two scale plus Hylian Shield that was like super legit, like wow. And definitely was more valuable than the amount you had to donate to qualify, which I think was 250. But I only donated 100, because like, I really don't need that master sword. If I got the master, what was I going to do with it? I'd probably eBay and donate the money, right? It's like, what am I going to do with a fucking master sword? Cut yourself with it. Right, it's like they didn't have, you know, in the past, I would always be like, ooh, I want that. This time, yeah. But Scott, imagine a younger you where the want swords meter is still really high. Thankfully, young Scott did not have $250 to donate. Only maybe like $50. But one of the AGQ 2019 speed runs stood out above and beyond. Me and Ram. So I've, I haven't seen all the runs, obviously. There could be a better one, but me and Ram, of the runs we have seen, unanimously agree. Oh Lord, my comment. What the best run of the week was. My comment appears to be one of the top comments because basically right after, because I didn't watch this one live, but I caught the tail. I watched it live and then I watched it again. I caught the tail end of it live. To show someone else how good it was. And as soon as they YouTube, I watched it. I've watched it two and a half times now. Well, you watch it more than me. I have time more. My comment on YouTube on this video will say literally everything needs to be said. He is the most entertaining runner in AGQ history. That's true. Quote, there ain't no quiet time in this run. That's right. And quote, God damn. So big up shout out to grandpa and grandma. Our boy, Dr. Fat Body, has injected a new level of hype and just amazing commentary. He is lit. It's not just that he has, right? Cause you, I could go to GDQ and be hype. That's, you know, I have that skill at least to some degree. Maybe not as much as the master of fat body, but I could do that. He had the hype and he was pulling off the sub pixel frame perfect tricks left and right. Yup. And meanwhile, you know, cause ADQ, like there's a culture and the culture up to this point, all the runs have a similar cadence. Like they're doing the thing and the couch is talking and then the runner will be like, all right, time for the quiet time. And the thing is when the run started, he brings out this enormous couch full of people and I got this vibe of, oh, it's like one of those anime panels with too many people on it. He's even got a guy on a webcam, on a laptop on the couch. He's basically on the virtual couch. And I'm like, oh no. I'm like, I'm like, uh-oh, uh-oh. And then within five seconds, I'm like, oh yeah. Oh yeah. He takes a slower strat at one point to hit something because I do this for my little brother. He crashes the game. Because it's funny. Because just to show you that it's a thing, even though it costs time and it goes back to the beginning of the level select screen. It was the best balance. Cause I do enjoy runs that are like a super technical like four hour run where the commenter is literally just, let's explain this glitch. Let's explain this sub pixel nonsense. This run was the perfect balance of amazing display of skill coupled with amazingly entertaining situations. I would say if you want someone to introduce them to like, why does everyone watch this GDQ? Why do they raise $2 million every year? What's the deal with this? This is your first run to go to. Go for this run. The second run now, if not this one, there was one, I don't know if it was the last Summer Games done quick. I think it was. If not, it was the one before that. It was definitely last year where they did a Strider run. Oh yeah. They did NES Strider. And the guy doing it had never done it before, but someone was sitting next to him teaching him how to do it. And this dude, he was a speed runner, but it never speed run NES Strider in his life. And they taught him the speed run and then made him do it himself. And it's like a five minute run. So it's not a big deal. And that is like the perfect intro for anyone watching to the world of speed running. And like, how do you learn to speed run? How do you do it? Right? Like imagine if up until this point, like you go to the PGA tour and everyone gets quiet on the important putt and then someone walks up and they're about to golf and they're just as good as everyone else. Like they're a contender and they turn around and they're like, everybody get loud before I make this pot. Yeah, everyone just get home. Gonna make the pot. Woo. This speed, you gotta watch this. I think the rules of golf actually disallow that. Yeah, you probably. But Dr. Fat Body has elevated the bar of AGDQ commentary. So what do you got? What's your thing of the day? So, you know how you all, you know, go to museum, right? And they're like, oh, such and such is restored, right? They restore stuff at museums, right? All kinds of old artworks. Oh, that's your thing of the day. I saw that tab open and I didn't realize I had it open myself already because I was saving it to be a thing of the day later. You know, you know, restoring, you know, historic artworks, you know, sculptures, paintings, right? But it's like, unless you do that, or unless you're in the museum business, it's like, wait a minute, I actually had no idea how they restore a thing. Like, right, what do you actually do, right? Like, what is the physical process? What happens? Here's a guy. He works at Baumgartner Restoration. I think it's like his company and his job is restoring artworks. And there's a lot of videos on his channel showing him restoring mostly paintings. After I found the video you were linking to, I watched like 10 of his videos. They're really good. But this one is a really good one because the painting is a painting on a piece of paper that is glued to a piece of wood and is ridiculously old and grody. And he, you're like, what are you gonna do? Like, imagine me trying to restore this painting. Like, what do I do? Clean it with water? Oh my God, the part where he's like, I'm just gonna remove the wood. I gotta get the paper off the wood. It's just like, imagine, I can't even get a sticker off something I bought on Amazon. Code it up, code it up. This guy's gonna get a piece of paper with a painting on it that's glued to an ancient piece of wood, right? Anyway, so he's got this painting, which is the assassination of Archimedes, which is an awesome freaking painting actually. And he takes it from its grody state and restores it to a magnificent state. It's a lot like watching those knife sharpening videos and you get that same feeling of like, ah, the cleaning and the restoring, ah. But also a fascinating explanation of the process and what goes into it. And A plus to this whole channel. Yep. One of the other ones I watched, it's the, I think it's the restoration of the Mother Mary, which is another one that's on wood. But he wants to leave it on the wood for reasons. He talks about why. But he starts and he's like, so I'm starting with the face and normally professionals do the face last because it's the most important part. But this video will be more entertaining if I start with the face. And also I'm really good at this so that's not gonna be a problem. Also he has to like touch up the paint and he's like, yeah, we got this erasable paint. It's like, I'm like, well, he's like, if someone in the future decides that, you know, I didn't do a good job. Cause like, he's like, obviously not trying to paint over any of the paint that's over there. Not like that famous Jesus that the lady messed up real bad. Right. And he's, you know, he's just trying to fill in the blanks as closely to what the real artist did, right? You know, taking instructions from the person who owns the thing who's paying for him, his services, right? So it seems like the theme but he's like, he's like, I always use erasable paint. That way if someone buys this painting in the future and then doesn't like what I did, they can erase it and do a different, different thing. So the theme without erasing the paint from the original, original. I want to try a new thing. Gravel style. So regardless of what our things today are, I think we can always come up with a theme based on what we both picked. The theme this week was, or this episode, masters displaying the height of their craft. Sure. In the meta moment, the book club book that we haven't gotten to because we've been busy is 2001 of Space Odyssey. I said we would read it and I lied. I was wrong. We did not read it. I haven't read any pages of it since I said that. I've been too busy. Stay tuned. Way too much shit going down. None of you read it either. I know you didn't. They have. Someone has someone. The thing is I feel like the people are either, I don't feel like this people like us listening. I feel like the listeners who care about book club, read it right away. And the listeners who don't care about book club, don't read. I found a lot of people. And they're bad. The people I've talked to, what they tend to do. There's not a lot of people like us who read eventually. People don't, the people who really care about our book club don't tend to check what we're doing now and read it because they know our history. Instead, they'll go into the archive of the book club, pick a book that looked good, read it, and then listen to that episode. That's good because at least you're reading. As long as you read books, you get an A plus. If you don't read, you get an F minus. There's not like a lot in between. Even if you read eventually like we do, you still get the A plus. So we were just at Magfest. We did three panels there. One of them, which is a brand new panel is already on YouTube. I'm going to link to it. You can just go watch it right now. Wow. The other two panels will be on YouTube at some point in the near future. That's good. We're going to record at least a panel at PAX South and put that online. Yep. I don't think we're going to record learn and win Carcassonne because we already did that. We already did it. We don't need another video of it. No, we'll just concentrate on teaching Carcassonne. Yep. But the video of that one's online. Right. Also, we were supposed to do this towards the end of last year and I told him about it months in advance but he still didn't make time even though I was on vacation all week. So after we got back from Magfest, no, or just before. Yeah, after we got back from Magfest, we recorded judging anime by its cover which somehow this show has lasted like over a year. I guess we'd be actually- It's really fun to do. We'll keep doing it even though it's, you know, whatever. But yeah, we did it for the winter season of anime. It is already like two episodes out of most of the shows for the season of anime but we haven't seen any of them. So we still, we're doing a fair pre-judging. And I guess that's kind of okay because once I upload it, I've only got a little bit of work to do. Hopefully I'll do it tonight and get it uploaded tonight. If I can, if not tomorrow. Nope. And then once that's up, you will be able to see our pre-judges of the anime coming out this season. And then- There's some good stuff coming too. No, be like two or two, maybe even three episodes for you to just watch right away if you, something we talk about sounds good. And last and least, well, not least, this weekend, the reason there's gonna be no show on Thursday, we are gonna be at Pack South, where we're going- We mentioned that already. We are going to do two panels, but specifically the new one. So we're doing Learn and Win Carcassonne. We talked about that earlier. And we're doing a new one, Nostalgia Versus Game Design. It's Rims idea. I'm not too hype on it, but I get a free badge. 40 games was also Rims idea. And it seemed- And I wasn't too hype on it. I was hype on it, and I think it went really well. There have been panels I've not been hype on. Anyway, I really want to do my games or harmful panel, but I'm putting that one in for PAX East. All right, let's do it. But- Big stage. So at PAX South, we will be doing two panels. So they will be our 50th and 51st PAX panels, and they will both be on- What about panels total? My birthday. Panels total. So I have the list of all of them. Everyone, please bring Edible Birthday Gifts for RIM that I should eat. Yes. I will eat them. Yes. And RIM will not eat them. No, that we will both eat. Bring a birthday cake that says RIM and has, what, 37? I want to say- Put the number 37 on it and 37 candles, and then I will eat the cake. I feel like we have done, I want to say 370 panels total ever. So you can watch a Geek Nights panel every day for a year and not run out? It's terrifying. Because remember, there were old days where we'd go to an Otacon and do like eight panels. There was one Connecticut where we did like 20. All right. So yeah, go and find us on the internet if you maybe discovered us at Magfest or something, or who knows, or discovered us through YouTube. I don't know. Go to Google type Geek Nights. You will find us and our content on every single website that has content. We even got an Instagram, which I keep saying, I'm going to start using it and I forget. We even have a G plus, even though that's going away imminently. We don't have that anymore. We had a Tumblr too. I stopped updating the Tumblr and the G plus. The Facebook updates automatically, but even though you should probably delete your Facebook, that's the only reason I don't delete my Facebook so that page doesn't disappear. And even though Instagram is owned by Facebook. I'm pretty sure we got Twitter's. We're most active on Twitter and our forum. You should go to and sign up in our forum. There are no Nazis. I'm pretty sure the other our forum is rocking and there are no Nazis at the Nights forum. If you try to apply to the forum and get rejected, apply again and just make sure when you write your reason for applying, you write something that makes me know that you're a human who listens to Geek Nights and not who knows some robot from Russia. Yep. So and our Tumblr is probably a flagged as porn and going to be deleted anyway. So I wonder how it in my pixel meat tumbler. I'm pretty sure that's also porn. All right. What people waiting for. We're now we're going to talk about room for the rest of the show. Yep. Scott has finally played root. Well, I played it many times. I've played it at least three or four times. Yep. I've played it a bunch of times. I can't remember was I've either been green twice. If I played it four times, I was green twice. If I played it three times, I was green. Then I was the raccoon. And then I was the otters. I've been the Woodland Alliance and I've been the birds multiple times. I get the idea of how the birds work, though I don't know the details because I haven't been the birds. The birds are so fun. I only vaguely get the idea of how the cats work because I've seen I've played against the cats every time, but I've never been the cats. And I know nothing about the lizard folk. I didn't even read the rules about the lizard folk. But I know every other fashion works. I know nothing about the lizard folk. Other than that, there are lizard folk. So here's the deal. And that supposedly they're not that good. Root is the new hotness. It came out last year in 2018 and it like sold out immediately. It keeps getting reprinted. It had some plug that sold out. They even sold out of the raccoon plushies. Yep. The vag, the vagrant plushies, vagabond, whatever. Root got real, real big and popular in a hurry. It is popular big time. Yeah. And that's interesting for a number of reasons because if I had to, before we talk about what Root is like, you have to understand that the designer of Root is Cole Whirl. And if you don't know who that is. From Letter Games. All the other games that Cole Whirl has done are the ridiculous, weird, nonsense historical games that we play almost as experiments like John Company or an infamous traffic, which Scott hasn't played, but you should, it's fun. Pax Pammer, which I haven't played. Oh, one of the Pax ones? Yeah. You played Pax Pammer, I think. No, I've played Pax Porfiriana. Oh, Porfiriana. Yeah. Anyway, those kinds of games. Old, crusty war games that you would only expect someone with a long beard and a large belly and a broken chair to take off the shelf at the game store. No, but not war games that are on the shelf near the Napoleons and the Rommels in the back. But they're not war games like here's a bunch of chips that represent the stubble on Rommels. These are more like here is a detailed simulation of the opium trade in China. And you play European shitbags who are trying to literally buy fancy hats to increase their social standing and the terrible cost to China and the opium trade is just a side effect of that person made other than root is something you would never get on any table of normal, non crusty gore gamer, you know, Grognard players. Our friend Chris will bring these to the table. And I love these games, but they are an acquired taste. Right. Mostly because as we've now learned, the theme of them is crusty. Root is just another one of those games. It isn't really mechanically different at all. It's just that they put cute animal forest critters on it instead of putting crusty old war generals on it. Or crusty old. Literally, there's no war involved. It's just training opium. So this game, Root, is a combination of a highly political, extremely asymmetric kind of war game where literally every player is playing with completely different rules. There are a few rules you share in common with other players, which is that you're just trying to get to 30 points. That's the default victory condition, get to 30 points and win. And the default rules are like, if you do something on the board, every piece of cardboard on the board, you hit gives you a point. And that's true for everyone. Everyone has similar combat fighting rules, because you can just fight your dudes. But one faction gets points by building things on the board. Another faction gets points by just selling things in their shop. Yep. Another faction gets points. They're just they're not a faction. They're one dude, just one raccoon wandering around in the woods. And they get points for helping other people. Or potentially just fucking murdering people in the night. Or just getting items. Yep. One of the factions is a lizard cult. I don't know what they do. I've never read their rules. I don't know. So it's like everyone's playing with these completely different rules. It's like you're playing your own game. Yeah. You just happen to be on the same board. And the only thing you share in common with the other players is that board where like the rules are all the same, right? Like that raccoon guy, he's like, your whole your whole game is controlling this one dude. But if you fight, you're a dude. Yep. Now the game's not super complex. Most of the people who say it's complex have just never actually played a complex game before. I think it's complex for normal people. It's complex for normal people. It is definitely above the heads of a lot of people. But it is not above the heads of someone who was a nerd who can listen to a geek nice. But I've also realized, having played it a bunch of times now, if you can go to a gaming convention, it is not above your head. Well, here's the more important thing. The reason so many people think it's so complex is that it is a very difficult game to teach simply by the fact that it's so asymmetric. Yes. You have to teach this game. You have to teach. Like if you got three players, it's like you teach three games. You teach someone how to be the Woodland Alliance. You teach someone how to be the cats and someone had to be the birds. So my advice to you, if you want to play this game, is to, regardless of any other circumstance, and even if you don't like to, read the goddamn rules yourself to understand how to play and force the people you want to play with to read the rules themselves. And the other thing is that once you've learned one or two of the, you know, the, you can learn the rest trivially, right? I was able when I played the otters, I never played them before. I didn't get a new rules explanation. All I did was pick up the otter card, which is the trading otters, the river traders. They sell stuff, right? And I just started reading the card. I had already played the game two or three times as other races. And reading this card, just reading it, I 90% knew how to play the otters because I had played a few times before and I can read. And then I just had, I only needed an explanation of these details that I probably could have got if I had read every single word on the card instead of just reading, you know, the major important words on the card. So we've got this like asymmetric, political, like kind of crazy game, but it's skinned with the cutest animal art. My favorite art in the whole game. Okay, I'm curious. Is the card with the bunny bank. Bunny bank, the better borough bank. Yes, the bunny bank has the cutest bunny inside the bank is the bunny that's in the bank is like, hey man, money. I think for me, it's the one, it's the. Give it a second carrots. Birdie Bindle is really good. Birdie Bindle, not bad. But there's one card, not a lot of bad art at all. But there's one card and all the meeples are way good too. It's the rabbit ambush card where the rabbit rise, the rabbits rise up and kill all the troops. Cause it's just these really cute little rabbits like, Hey, but there were a little cloaks and they've just got this big fucking bomb. Yeah. This game is so cute. So all right, so let's go through the race. All right, let's talk about the real deal with the game. Let's talk about like how it plays out. All right, so you got this map and the maps, depending on which races you got in the game, that you're going to deploy your dudes onto the map, right? And then you're going to take turns. And on your turn, based on who you are, your turn is completely different. Yup. What you do on your turn. Usually you have some sort of, you know, actions you can take of various kinds and different ways of paying to take the actions. You know, and the actions usually involve moving dudes, fighting, you know, getting stuff there. You have cards and the cards are multi-purpose. Cards have text on them that does stuff. You can like build cards. You can use cards to pay costs of certain actions. Oh, the screenshot is both Bertie Bindle and Beto Vero Bank on it. Right, you can get some cards, you know, by doing certain actions. Sometimes draw a card will be in action, right? And you got to pay for those actions using various resources. Sometimes cards are the resources used to pay for the action. Yup. Right, so of course, you know, everything I said was super vague because every race is super different, right? So the high level, like we'll go through the races and kind of explain their high level deal. Right, so the first one you got to learn about is the red one. The Marquis de Cat. The Marquis de Cat, which is like, he's basically like the empire, right? He starts with cats all over the board. Yup, he's got this whole economy going on. He's got this giant castle, right? He's like deploying like all these wooden structures around and, you know, building stuff. I'm not sure how the cat wins because there's never been the cat. Cat's okay. Whenever I see the... I think it's hard for the cat to win when everyone's skilled. Right, it's like whenever I've played, I've only played against the cat and the cat's always been there. And the feel I get from the cat is they start spread out all over the board. They start strong and slowly decline. They slowly decline as basically everyone else is playing races that come on to the board, right? Like all the birds start in one nest and spread out, right? The cat starts out like a blanket over the whole thing and then everyone rises up and pushes them back. But they're still pretty strong because they're all, you know, they're the Marquis. They're like the empire. So they still, they participate in a lot of combat, a lot of making sure other people don't win, right? While also building up resources and doing whatever their thing is. So imagine like a big empire that starts strong is beset by all sides, think like Rome almost, and slowly collapsing, but they can win by consolidating their power, holding all these enemies at bay and making their alliances to eventually... They definitely need alliances because if everyone goes against them, they got nothing. I guess it's true of anything in a political game. Demo Weasel in the chat points out that's the card we all forgot about. Mouse in a sack might be the cutest card. Oh, there's a good one. I forgot all about that card. There's a good one. So the birds are sort of like the antagonists. Like imagine the story is the cats are the empire and they're in decline. The birds are like the elves, the elves, right? They're the ancient proud race. Right, they're hidden away in this one spot in Los Laureates. They've been knocked out of the world. They got angered and then they bust out. Yeah, imagine like they're the old empire that's trying to come back onto the scene now that the cat Romans are in decline. So their deal is they start in one spot and they expand and expand and expand. They have a shit ton of birds in that one spot. So you've got this bird empire and this cat empire. They're at war. And that is the primary crux of the game is the war between these two factions. You could play without either of these two things, but in all the games they've played, both of them have been there. Actually, if you look in the rulebook, depending on the number of players, there's a list of the options that work. Yeah, like with this many players have the birds, the cats and any of these other factions. It's best if you obey those, right? Yeah, it doesn't really work. Otherwise, it's not going to be too great. Depending if you have a lot of players, you could have two different vagabonds, two different raccoons that are independently wandering around stabbing people. Yeah, but like if you only have two raccoons and a trading company, that's going to be a weird, weird game. So the crux of the game is in the wood in the woods. There's this big war going on between the birds and the cats. The third main faction is the Woodland Alliance. These are basically the cute mice. These are the forest communists. So what they do is they start not on the board at all, really. They're just the normal Woodland citizens. They're the bunnies and the foxes and all the other people just living in the woods. And they get points by placing, basically when other people do stuff, right? They get these cards. Other people's cards end up in the mouse stack on the mouse card. The mouse, the mouse playing that, right? Like other people's cards and they use them will end up over there because they got to pay the mice. And then the mice will put, will use those cards to perform actions and they'll put their little fists in different cities on the board, like the little, you know, insurrection fists. So the mice, think of the Woodland Alliance. What do they actually call it? I forget the actual name for that. They're the Woodland Alliance. No, the name for the fist. Oh, the sympathy. So here's the deal. The war's going on. That city is now sympathetic to the rebellion. The war's going on. The more warring nonsense is happening between the birds and the cats, the more sympathy, the Woodland Alliance, the rebels who are trying to kick everybody out. So the main action that, you know, they put these fist tokens on the board and they get a lot of points and then they put little like, you know, little bases out and they get a lot of points for that too. And so they can win just by putting these tokens out. So everyone else has to constantly quell the rebellion. And if you don't, they will win. So imagine this, this is how the game gets political. The cats and the birds are at war with each other, but they will both sort of tacitly agree to maintain martial law in like the non-disputed territories so the Woodland Alliance can't get a foothold. So I got a war with Scott, but we both have to, while we're warring with each other, keep the communists down. Right, and what happens is, it's like, okay, I got a fist here and a little base here. I'm playing green, but there's a whole bunch of troops here from the birds. Well, okay, they're gonna, not only can I not do much about it, but they can totally destroy my stuff and get points and stuff, right? But let's say I get my fist up and there's not a lot of guys there, that's not too strong. Now I can basically rise up in that place and kick ass. So suddenly there's a bunch of mice on the board in that spot cause they revolted. The last game I played, I was the birds and Chris was the cats and suddenly the Woodland Alliance busted out real bad. Yup. So we both, You cannot let that happen too often, otherwise they're just gonna win. So we basically had a truce to go fuck up the Woodland Communists before they presented a threat to all of us. So we had to pause our war for the greater good. So then you got the vagabond. So the vagabond is We've got three big warring factions and the vagabond is just one raccoon. Literally you got one token that you move around the map individually. You're just a cute raccoon. You're like an adventurer. But actually you're not. You can choose a sort of a subclass when the game starts. Tinkerer is OP, not even gonna lie. It just is. I didn't even know it was OP. And then I looked through all the, I was the one time I played vagabond, I was looking through all the different choices. And I was like, I kind of want to be this one for theme, but Tinkerer seems strong to me. And then I Googled it, like which one is best? And it was like Tinkerer, oh my God. And I was like, oh, I guess I was right. Let me be Tinkerer. So the Tinkerer is about making stuff, right? So the way that the vagabond works is you have all these items, right? Now other people can craft items in the game for various purposes. They get victory points for crafting items. But if you get a vagabond in the game, suddenly the items do stuff. Every, all the items the vagabond has let them perform actions. The more items they have, the more actions they can perform, right? And do stuff. They got hammers, they can craft things and make their own items. If they got swords, they can stab people and do attack actions. If they got the boot, they can move around better, right? It's all the, you know, they start with a few items but there's more that they get. Some of them they get by going around and questing and some of them they get by trading with other players. But also, the main way the vagabond gets victory points is not just by building and getting these items, it's actually just by helping other people. And other people can't refuse your help. You just help them if you want to, right? You can deal with them, I guess, but I just went around helping people. And when you help people, you get mad victory points. So you got this, you're in it like a sole adventurer, whether you're a tinker or a fighter or whatever you are, you just one little raccoon token, you go around the board and you do stuff to help people and you get points for that. And if you can do more helping before anyone else can win, then you can win. So think about this. You're just this one little raccoon wandering around in the midst of this giant cataclysmic war. You're just trying to make your way and you're trying to help everybody enough to where no one quite wins the war. And then eventually you come out on top. Yep. So then we got the otters. So I played the otters most recently. The otters look real fun. I want to play them next. I came super close to winning. I could have won if I would have just like a couple more victory points here or there. You couldn't quite pull it off. If I would have micromanaged and fought a little harder, I could have gotten two points somewhere. I could have built a card or something. Yeah. But at the same time, if you'd been doing better, I was going to just pause my war with the cats. You had no idea that I had that many points in the pocket. Yeah, I did. I pulled out like eight points in the last turn, like bam. Yeah. But I could have destroyed basically all of your things. Yeah. But if I was 10 points away from winning, if I was eight away from winning, you would have destroyed all my things. Come on. Basically, the otters are traders. There's a river on the board. And you can't really, the river doesn't really mean anything unless the otter means a little bit. But if the otters are in the game, the river means a lot. The otters live along the river. They can help people travel on the river. They can travel on the river kind of. Well, basically, the otters put up their prices like, hey, it'll cost you X to use the river. The otters have various services that they sell. The services that they sell are like river traveling. They sell the cards in their hand, face outwards on a little thing, and those cards are for sale. You can't deny some, you set a price every turn. You set your prices for your services. But if someone wants to buy one of your cards, you can't say no, they buy them, right? And what's the other service you have that you sell? I think, oh, it's fight, it's we fight with you. You can hire us as mercenaries and we'll fight with you. So the otters have some people on the board and I need like, say they're on a place and there's some cats there and I'm the birds and I got to do it with the cats. I could just pay the otters and now the otters fighting me. On the otters, I just leave some otters standing around in a city that I know is gonna have some warring and someone else comes along and my services cost whatever I set the price at that turn. Someone pays the price, suddenly the otters get their spears and join the fight, right? So the thing is about the otters is that when you pay the otters, you pay them with your own dudes. You don't pay them with like money or cards. Your dudes that are not on the board right now, just like your wooden meeples, you give them to the otter player, right? So it's like, okay, I wanna buy a card from you, Mr. Otter. All right, give me three of your dudes that aren't on the board, okay? Well, first of all, your dude supply starts running low if you do this, right? You only have a limited number of dudes. So for example, in our last game, the cats got kind of desperate and they gave you basically all their dudes to pull off a big play. Which means even if they wanna put a bunch of dudes on the board, well, I'm holding onto those dudes too bad. And then when you're the otters and you wanna perform actions, you spend the dudes that you've got. Not only the dudes other people gave you, but also your own dudes. If no one gave you any dudes, you basically get two of your own dudes into your purse for spending, right? And then it's sort of like buying nothing from yourself for two dudes automatically, right? So you're gonna be able to do stuff. And you spend these dudes in various actions. Some actions that you might perform just sort of put the dudes into a holding pen and then they go back to the purse next turn. And sometimes when for certain actions, you actually have to give the dudes back to the player they came from in order to spend the dudes. So basically imagine like, I don't know, Corsica or Venice, you know, if there's a big war going on and you're outside, like not in the forest, you're like, hey, there's a war going on. And you slide in along the river and start selling weapons to everybody. And then eventually everybody fighting the war owes you so much money that you are in fact in control of the country. The primary way you score victory points when you're the otters is, you know, the same way everyone else scores victory points. But the number one way is building trading posts which give you mad points when you put them out on the board. So I basically, and building a trading post costs you other people's dudes, right? Just like all your other actions, building a trading post costs dudes. So I basically had a bunch of dudes and it was getting close to the end of the game and I put out like three or four trading posts all at once. I got a pile of points and was too short of winning. If I had just gotten two points earlier in the game, boom, I would have had it. But you only had that capability because the cats who were desperate spent a ton of money with you. Right, they would have had to either, right? If they would have still done that if I had two more victory points, right? I don't know. Maybe they, maybe you would have looked carefully. But that's the thing, the game. But also if I looked carefully, I would have had two more points by then. So basically what this comes down to is it's a pretty abstract, like well abstracted, asymmetric, kind of realistic wargaming game with cute animals and the theme works really well and the game is just really fun to play. It doesn't even take that long. Yeah, it's like people were so hype about root when it first came out. And I was like, my mood on it was like, I like the cute animals, you know, but I'm not unlike why is everyone so excited? How great can it be? And I saw other people who weren't our friends playing it and their games were taking like four hours. Right. You know, I was like, I was like, I got to see what the deal is obviously. Right. And then I played it once and I was like, all right, all right, all right. And then I played it again and I was like, all right. The second playthrough is when you see the fun of this game. And then the third time I'm like, you know, I think, you know, the first few games of it that I played, it was sort of like, all right, I'll play root. The time I played most recently with the otters. Yeah. That was the first time where I was like, bust out the room. Scott, wait till you try the birds. Next time we play. I don't really want to be the birds. They have that whole failing thing. So here's an example of like a detail because I played the birds twice and I really like the birds. They're fun. Their deal is they're a crowd. So you choose a leader depending on there's two, there's four things you can do on your turn. You can recruit like make more birdies. You can move your birdies around. You can fight people with the birdies and you can build stuff. And depending on the leader you pick, you have a wild card in two of those spots. So say I start with a wild card in recruit and battle. Every turn you must do everything in the decree or your government collapses. Right. So in the first turn I recruit and I battle. The next turn. I have to add another card to the decree. So now every single turn. So your decree keeps getting bigger. So you have to do everything you did last turn and more every turn. So now I have to recruit, move and battle. The next turn I have to recruit, move, battle, battle. And I can't only. The next turn I have to recruit, recruit, move, battle, battle. And even better, a decision you can make at the start of your turn, you must add one card to the decree. You may add two. Right. Now this is basically each turn. It's like, wow, I get more actions every single turn. It's like, you just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger. But then you're in your situation. Oh no, there's no one to fight this turn. It's like, I have to do a recruit, recruit. Oh, I don't have enough guys to recruit. Recruit, recruit, recruit, move. I don't have any legal moves. Recruit, recruit, move, battle, battle. There's no dudes in a spot that can battle because I didn't have enough move. Yup. And as soon as you can't do all of the actions, you fail. Your government just collapses. You lose a bunch of points. You got to pick a new leader and fun stuff happens. Yeah. So usually people fail a couple of times every game, except for the game I just talked about. Where I never failed my decree. Somehow managed to play the whole game and never failed the decree. And therefore one. The funny thing. I think if you're the birds and you never fail the decree, you're going to win. Yeah. That is real hard to pull off. It's sort of like a foregone thing. I got to a point to where I literally needed someone to attack me, to give me an opportunity to attack them back, or I was going to fail in the decree. You would have failed the next turn. I would have definitely failed the next turn. There's no way you could have made it in. Because I had built everything I could possibly build. All my roosts were on the board. I literally could not have built another roost. Yup. So my government would have collapsed. I think even if you fail just once with the birds, you're still likely, you're still close to winning. You need to, so you need to fail twice. I feel like a normal strategy for the birds is to pick a leader, have a strategy, push it hard, fail strategically at the right moment, start your decree over, and then use that to win the game. The thing is, if you start the decree over too late, it won't become big and strong enough. The right, you're taking too few. And you're going to lose a bunch of points right when you're trying to push yourself over the edge. When you fail, right, it's like, oh, shit. I don't have enough actions. It's late game and I'm taking like, piddly actions. There's no good. I think you need to get big and fail fast. So that way you could, the second decree that I got reset, the weak actions are still early enough in the game and you'll have strong, but barely doable actions towards the end. But it also assuming you can't pull off a miracle like never fail. Yeah, but then when stuff gets interesting is like other players, like maybe the cats will work hard by buying the otters support to make it impossible for the decree to work at a point when the birds did not prepare for that. And that can be fun and weird. So I think that the thing with this game is right, is like, even though I've played it three, four times, it's still like a low level, like understanding, even though I understand everyone's but the lizard folk and the cats kind of how they work, is that you have this so such an asymmetric, you're playing your own game thing going on that until you completely understand everyone else's thing, and everyone else understands everyone else's thing, then you can get into the play of like, aha, I know how decrees work because I've played birds like three times. Yup. I'm not the birds now, but I know how to fuck those birds up. Let's make sure rims decree fails next turn. I don't think he can make three moves if we do this. Cause like a watcher for him's like, shit, watch a first playthrough with naive players and three or four players, like the Woodland Alliance just always wins. Cause if Woodland Alliance is very straightforward, gets a lot of points and automatically wins if it's not quelled. If yeah, so you watch advanced players play this game and like the cats and the birds will both be like, all right, let's pause hostilities. We're gonna go take out the communists. The first order of business is like, always don't let green win. Now let's see who else will win. But then say swimming greens in the game, you might have a green. Yeah. You could play red, you know, you could play otters and red and blue. Forget the list of like what are all the combinations that work. Yeah. But don't let it, this game only takes a super long time to play if the people at your table just suck at playing games. I'm sure there must also be teaching videos on YouTube to help you learn. Yeah. You know, cause it is, you know, like I said, if you're a gamer, if you're listening to a podcast, if you're going to a gaming con, if you play other board games, you can play this game. Don't be scared away by it. The cute animal creatures should help you, but it's not the simplest. You do need, you know, some help learning it. But someone to teach you, read the rules, read them again, watch a video. But one thing I noticed that works, that I like about this game, like a big part of why I think it was fun, even though it's learning games. And I've never seen a game do that. Well, I've seen a few games do this well, but it's rare. You only need to like to have fun with the game. You only need to fully understand how to play your character. And you only really need the flavor text of the rest of the characters to have a vague idea of how to handle them. Like just knowing that you can trade with the otters and the otter player will explain how to trade with them. It's really straightforward. Knowing that if you do this, that will help that play. Yeah, if I trade with the otters too much, it'll make them strong, is enough for me to play in a game where there are otters. If I do this stuff, I'll be giving too many cards to green. Stop giving so many cards to green. If I do this, then, you know, the birds decree will be too easy. Don't do that. And that's the thing. The game, the fiction of the game, don't give the vagabond all the good items that they want. And this is what I think Cole Ware brought to the world brought to the table. That the fiction of the game itself and the flavor text gives you reasonably effective heuristics to play the game. Absolutely. Like that is a rare thing in games. Treasure that when you find it. Yep. So yeah, there's expansion, which adds the otters and lizards, right? Yep. The game's super hot. Yeah. The lizards are literally like cultists. They just keep printing these things as long as people keep buying them. The only reason I'm not buying one is because anytime I would play the game, I would be with someone who already owns it. So there's no reason for me to buy my own copy. You know, unless suddenly I've got like some people who want to play it with me who don't have one. Yep. And if you find the game takes way too long, like even after teaching games. Get better at games. Yeah, find better people to play with. Yeah. It doesn't take that long for us to play. I'm sure someone's implemented this in tabletop simulator. Or something. Sure. All right. I think that was a good show. A lot of people were watching the stream. All right. All right, guys. See ya. Yeah.