 So we were at PAX East, and at PAX East we play a lot of games. Yep. And we could talk about a lot of those games, but today we're just going to talk about two that we played back to back. Basically, we're sitting there on Sunday. We got some time before the Omegathon. And in my wanderings of tabletop working in there, I had noticed a few games. So I went over to the library, I grabbed one, we played it. I went, returned it, grabbed the other one, and we played it. Because they were quick, and they looked like a lot of fun. They looked easy to learn. And they were dexterity grabby games. And we had the circle table, which was great for dexterity grabby games. And they were both pretty good. Yeah. So the first one is called Catch the Moon. And basically. From 2017, it's a recent game. Both of these are recent games. The other one was I was 2018. It was a nominee for the Cardboard Republic socializer Laurel. Yeah. So if you know our opinion on stacking games like Jenga or Via Palletti or Rhino Hero or any of these stacking balanced games, most of the ones that we've played, sort of have these similar mechanical problems, not in terms of the fun of the stacking or the skill of the stacking. Because that part's often great. That part's solid. It's really easy to do that. It's not. Via Palletti with the hook. Yeah. I love that hook. It's super fun and solid. The problem is the victory conditions and the actual rules for winning and losing a lot of these games are very flawed. A lot of them are you make it fall down, you lose, everyone else wins. That's unsatisfying. It's very unsatisfying. There's a lot of turn order determinants who wins. It's like, oh, right. A Jenga tower will become destabilized on about the X turns. You have this many players. You want to have turn X to be so that way it'll be the most stable on your turn. Games like Via Palletti that run out of pieces. It's really dissatisfying if turn order is what determines. It's like, aha, it became unstable on the turn before yours. So you lose regardless of your actual pulling skills. Yep. And turn order wouldn't matter that much, except stacking games, if people get good at stacking, then turn order is the only thing left to determine who wins. And it's also dissatisfying because most of them involve balancing and shakiness and then a thing collapsing. And when the thing collapses, it's like, well, GG. We can't continue. We don't have anything left. So this game we played, Catch the Moon. I'm not going to say it perfectly solves all those problems, but it does go a long way towards solving them. And it tries to solve them. And for that, I give it a lot of credit. Plus it's still really fun to fiddle with this game because what this game is, it is a game of balancing little wooden ladders. And they're all shaped slightly differently. It's a bunch of little wooden ladders. You start the game with two straight ones in this plastic cloud that sort of keeps them erect. And there's a lot of different starting positions for the two starting ladders. And then you roll some dice or something like that. It's dice, right? Yes. And they tell you how you have to place your ladder. It's like your ladder has to be exactly touching one other ladder, two other ladders. It's like there's a rule about how you have to place your ladder. But as long as you follow that rule, the important thing is one. Your ladder has to have some part of it higher in elevation than all the existing ladders in the thing. You nominate one of your hands as your grabby hand. And you can't ever touch anything with anything but that hand. Yeah, you got to use one hand only. But here's a different one. Grab a random ladder. You can't choose one. Most stacking games have rules like you can't fuck with the structure. Like you can't fuck with parts of the Jenga. You're not actively moving. In this game, you can do whatever the hell you want to the structure. As long as you only use one hand. And you only touch it with the ladder you're about to place. Yeah, you can't put your hands on the existing ladders. Only your ladder you're placing can be touched. As long as you do not break it or touch the cloud or the table with the ladder in your hand, drop the ladder in your hand, or break the rule of placement like touching too many at the same time. You got to obey the dice. Yeah, as long as you obey the dice, you can fuck with it as much as you want to get it on there. And you might think, well, wouldn't we just make a really ugly, weird structure? Hell yeah. Yeah, that's right. And there's a lot of crazy shit you can do. The instruction book is actually really good. It shows you a lot of different possible ways of placing your ladder in different techniques with funny names. What's the shameful something? The shameful stack? We use the shameful whatever, the shameful whatever it is many, many times. We just lay a ladder flat on top of another ladder. Yep. We did that frequently. Oh my god. We had no shame. We had a game where there were four shameful stacks in a row and then another structure. And then another three higher up. Oh, the shameful support. The shameful support. We did that a lot. Anyway, but yeah, this game is a ton of fun. The one thing that makes it really good is that let's say you fuck up on your turn. You go and you try to put your ladder and you end up knocking over a shit ton of ladders. Well, the way it works, there's no way to make the entire thing just collapse. That's true. Let's say I go to place my ladder and a whole bunch of ladders fall off. I just mess up real bad. All right, I scoop up all those ladders and just put them in front of me. They're now negative points. I don't lose. The game doesn't continue. Term order doesn't determine the victory or anything like that. We just keep going. And it's like you can still keep having fun. The game doesn't end disappointingly. But you also get a teardrop. Gods are disappointed in you. There is a clear winner at the end. And it's more likely that the winner is going to be the person with the best ladder placing skill, as opposed to the person with the most luck or seat position or anything like that. Because I think that makes it a much more satisfying dexterity. I'm pretty sure if I recall correctly, the rule is when the game ends, meaning all the ladders have either been placed or been fucked up in some way, then whoever has the least tears wins the game because they fucked up the least. If multiple people are tied with tears, then whoever has the least ladders wins the game. So this game is like 80% of the one in there. And the game also ends when you run out of ladders, I think. So it's like you place all the ladders. You can have the same number of turns. You can also have a ton of players going in this game. When does it go to like eight players on the ridiculous? I forget. We played with varying numbers of players and it always worked. I think six players. It goes to six. Best with three to four, which I could see. Right. Yeah, it's definitely best of three to four. But because you're going to get, if you play with too many players, it'll still be just fine as a game, but there'll be a lot of waiting and fewer turns per person, which will make it less fun. But otherwise, the game will still be solid even with six players. So I feel like this, I feel like I want to buy it because it is the best stacking game for us I've found yet. I do like it, but I feel like you want to just want to take these advances in stacking game rules and apply them to an even better stacking game. Yeah, the trouble is a lot of the stacking games I like the most are such that if someone fucks up, the entire thing is likely to collapse. Yeah, but you know, what if it's via Palletti and it's like, OK, if you knock something over, you take all those cylinder as a point to get a teardrop or something. I don't know. But yeah, just take these innovations and apply them to the to the genre to push it forward from where it is now. Yeah, props to Fabia and Rafaad and Juan Rodriguez for advancing the genre of stacking dexterity tabletop games. Like, I don't know if you realized you were solving these fundamental problems of the genre, but I'm sure they did you solve like the primary things we've complained about for more than a decade in the stacking genre. It also goes to show you, you know, someone like me sits there and looks at like a flaw in a game and like is like, I'll make a game that fixes this and I'll think about ideas. And I got won't unless I got the perfect solution. It's like, no, not good enough where it's like, they're just like, yeah, good enough solution. They put it out there and they publish it and they actually make something. Yup. And it's good. And then someone talks about it on a podcast or something to me sits there and still thinking of like, it's not perfect.