 But anyway, at PAX, we played a game that looked like I looked at it, and it looked amazing. It looked like exactly the kind of game that is totally my jam. A bunch of our friends were playing it, and they all said, this game is great, you've got to play it, including some of them who are not known for their love of complicated, boring German games. Yep, so I played this game, actually. I don't think Rin was playing the time I was playing, right? I played in one game that didn't finish. After you already knew something about the game, and then I played another game of it the next day with only fast people, but also did not finish. Basically, let's just get to the point, right? I played this game, and we didn't finish, but I thought that we didn't finish because some of the people we're playing with were new. I was actually new to it as well. He's new to this game, even though I was playing quickly. And they were playing slowly, so I was like, all right, we're just going to end this now, because it's too late. We'll play this again another time with only fast people, and it'll be awesome. Because so far, everything in this game is super fun and awesome. So then we came back and it was the day after packs. Only awesome people were left. People were fast and awesome at board games. We played this game and it took for fucking ever. This game is so goddamn slow, even though it's fun. God, that I literally, my opinion of this game went from this is going to be one of my favorite board games. You're like, you said you're going to go home and buy it. I'm glad. I almost bought it that night. I just fell asleep before I remembered to in the hotel room. Yep. I'm so glad I didn't buy this game. So glad. So really, the game is called Ground Floor. Do we mention that already? Ground Floor is a game that is a sort of it's a pseudo simulation of a company growing, and you'll add floors to your building and specialize out your building and hire workers and then distribute those workers around the board doing stuff for you. Yeah, it's not in a normal traditional worker placement way, but more like you have an abstraction of you add an employee has three time markers that doesn't date what they're doing with their time. Yeah. So you spend these time markers to choose, you know, all around the board and all the different places and each different place on the board that you can put workers is basically like a game in and of itself. So it's like on this big board, there's a bunch of little tiny games and you can buy in to play those games by spending your two different currencies, the money and the information currencies and your time markers into those games to play them. And of course, if you play and do well at those games, you get more resources out of them. And the only game that really matters is the final game on the board, which is the construction game, which allows you to build new floors in your building and new windows for your building so that you can get victory points. You can also get victory points by upgrading things on your own card to make your games more efficient. But that's pretty minor. It's really all about playing a bunch of tiny games with your little pieces in order to get resources to get, you know, victory points in the last the construction game. So yeah, now it's interesting that the game has so many structures, yet actual victory points are relatively few and far between and are really only in this sort of construction phase, like adding floors and adding improvements to your building gets you a few victory points as a few other also makes it easier to get more victory points because those added floors to your building give you vast powers, powers greater than any other power available in the game. But that that there's such complexity in the game before that point and so little complexity there at the end was kind of surprising. It wasn't what I usually expect from games. Yeah, I think the reason the complexity drains out of the game is because as you get those improvements to your building, you actually can now ignore some of the other games. Right. So if you were to get, say, in the third phase of the game, the accounting floor, which I really wanted, but we didn't get to the third phase because too long. Yeah, we didn't even get to the third phase. Right. You can use that accounting floor to just get cash money, which means you can now ignore pretty much the factory retail part of the game, which is usually the best way to get cash because you now have your own supply of cash that all you do is just spend some workers and get cash directly. So screw that. Right. There was also other things that like get you add information to your income so you can get tons of folders all the time. You can now if you get that, you can now ignore the folder getting game, except when it's really obvious and easy to get a ton of folders out of it. So in that later game, you're pretty much just rushing to construct very quickly and ignoring most of the other bits except for the marketing bit, which you can't ignore at all. The whole game. Now, the way the game works fundamentally is you've got your little board with, you know, you're building on it. It's got this cute little thing with your ed floors. They like rise up out of the top of your board. Like the production values are super high quality. But you'll have your CEO and you choose to hire or not hire employees and the cost of hiring depends on the current economy and how many other people hired. And that's a trend in the entire game that things you do depend heavily on who did it before you. Sometimes it's affected by who does it after you and it's affected by the economy, which has its own sort. It's like a weather in the game that changes. Like it's a recession, now it's stable, boom times, depression. It jumps around. Yeah, but you can always see what's coming. So it's not like you can get surprised and screwed by luck. It's like you can only see a little bit into the future. You can see one into the future, which is pretty much enough to plan a turn ahead, right? Which is all you really need the plan, right? It's like, you know, next turn is going to be a recession. Money is going to be tight. Get money now during the boom times. So the problem with this game, and I want to talk about the problems rather than getting into more detail about how to play because the rules are very difficult to follow. We were taught to play by one group of people. And as a result, we messed up like four different parts of the game because they didn't understand that part of the rules. Yeah, rereading the rules and playing again. Those parts of the game were still messed up, but in different ways. Yeah, it's like I read I reread the rules to how to play the marketing game like three or four times and I read something different each time because different parts of the rule book that the rules for it were spread out over different parts instead of all concentrated in one, you know, direct area and the flow was way out of whack and we got it wrong a bunch of different ways, a bunch of different times before getting it right. Yeah, the fact that we couldn't get the rules straight in repeated play and repeated rereadings of the rules bothered me because I cannot think of a game that has given us that much trouble that we didn't just out of hand is missed. And just remember, this is all pros playing this game. Hellas was the last game where I had this level of rules. Well, the problem with Hellas is that the rules were just wrong, right? They were just the rules didn't fully explain themselves. You had to go get a rata online or something to explain it. But this game was theoretically resolvable. But the fact that all of us smart super gamer people are reading the rules together over and over again, had trouble agreeing on what the rules like the rules did have everything written down in there somewhere. But every time we reread it, we found something different that re explained or, you know, no, we actually were doing that wrong. And then we're doing a little more right this time, but we're doing it. And it's like, because the main problem is to do things in different orders and the order matters a lot. And sometimes the order it's just like popularity order. Okay. But it also matters on like, well, the popularity just changed. So do we change the order now? And do we do it in the order of this? You know, do we do broadcast then print then networking? Or do we do, you know, this person in all three and then this person in all three? Now this is the crux of the problem. It wouldn't be so bad if it were just that the rules were confusing, but the game was fine. The problem lies in the fact that while the rules are confusing, the actual mechanics, the rules are describing are extremely nonintuitive. As a result, if you try to intuit how it should go, you're going to get it wrong. Yeah. But if you try to read the rules and figure it out, you're going to have a hell of a time getting it right, because it's hard to grok what the rules are saying because they don't match with what you'd expect. I feel like this game could work. It's one of those ones where obviously it could work if it was a video game because that makes everything faster. Right. But even then it's just, it's not a fast game. Every round you've got to do all this stuff. Right. It took us like two hours to get halfway through the game. It's gonna be like a four hour motherfucker with, you know, even people playing on a computer. Maybe it's gonna be three hours. You can just play clips instead, right? As I was gonna say, but Raymond Scott, you play four and five hour games all the time. And yes, that is true. But in a game of eclipse, my brain is engaged the entire time. And I feel this deep sense of satisfaction about the decisions I'm making in this game. I was never satisfied with the decision I was making because I had almost no directional heuristic whatsoever to tell me if what I was doing was going to help me win. And if not, what I could do differently, that would be better. It's like when you play eclipse for four hours, you're getting your four hours worth. Your four hours is packed with eclipse. You know, it's a full meal the whole time. This is like eating snacks for four hours, you know, waiting for dinner. It's like, dude, I could have just eaten this, you know, this is it feels like a lighter game than it is. You know, the mechanically, it feels like a Euro game, you know, more like a Puerto Rico, it should take 90 minutes, but it just drags and drags and you're not doing enough stuff that it feels like it should be that long. So very unsatisfying, even though I guess, you know, mechanically speaking, if you follow the rules and you're willing to sit there for that long, it's not really that bad. It's actually pretty good. Now I worry that it is still bad. And my the reason I worry that it's bad is that having played through it and tried to figure it out, I realized that most of the game is not very complex. And the decisions are usually pretty obvious and direct. There are many obvious decisions. So what determines who's doing well? It seems to come down to the advertising agency and the quote unquote popularity metric in the game. And this is where the game just fails me. It's also the part where the rules are fucked up. That the metric there has the same problem that that Viva Java game had. In fact, I would say that this game and Viva Java share many of the same problems. This game uses a mechanic where you have a major slider, a metric of popularity, and you put your little color token on it to show you how popular you are, and you'll move up by moving your token steps to the right. But because this is not granular enough, you'll almost always end up being on top of other people. There'll be three or four players stacked on one spot at any given time. The precedence order of how that ties resolved is confusing, counterintuitive. I would argue the opposite of what I would expect from historical games. Well, I mean, you can sort of understand, right? Let's say we're both at popularity one, and you're on top of me. So you're more popular because you're on top of me. All right. That makes sense on an intuitive level. Okay. So you gain three popularity, right? Then I gain three. Well, you would think on the one hand, you gain the popularity first, which means you're better than me, right? Therefore, you should be more popular than me. But because I moved second physically, my token is now on top of yours. And now I'm more popular, which makes sense in a different way in that, you know, someone who's catching up, you know, it's a slight, you know, you know, we know there's no catch-up mechanism, right? But it's it's a slight catch-up kind of thing. Like, you know, the guy who got away first catch-up mechanism and that it narrows the playing field between, you know, percentage. Exactly. You know, you got the benefit of going ahead first because you went ahead first, whereas I'm coming up from behind. So now you have to, you know, use that benefit you got from going early to keep getting away from me. But game designers take note that just becomes an extremely annoying heuristic for people to actually deal with if they're trying to win your game, because it's very counterintuitive in practice. Never use the mechanic of getting to the point second makes you the winner of the tie to as a catch-up mechanism. Never do that. I've decided having run into a few games that have done it only recently. I've never run into this before. It's only it only seems like these recent games. Yeah, I think a better idea would have been to have the popularity just be, you know, popularity points, right? And people would just have these points and, you know, be some number and, you know, instead of having a scale from like, what does the scale go from like one to ten or something? Only goes up to nine. Yeah. Have it let it be just from zero to a lot, like zero to 100. So everyone has like a, you know, a very, you know, a much more granular scale. This and Viva Java both had that problem. The pot, the scale they use for this mechanism of determining who gets to go first in different areas is just not granular enough. Or in another way you could think about it is that it's too granular. If you think about Kailas, the turn order, there's five players, there's five spots. They're always in order. One, two, three, four, five, exactly. There's no one's on top of anyone or anything like that. There is an exact way to determine that order precisely. Power grid. What's the turn order? There's a number of these line up the people in specific order. No one's tied in the turn order. So I think having read through this and just played the game, I think the reason that this advertising agency that determines your popularity is so confusing because we're just talking about the popularity points. This is not all the bullshit around them. The fact that they decline and lose popularity every turn. Yeah. This is a game that has like seven tiny games in it. And this popularity thing is just one of those games. Never mind the fact that affects all the other games. Even getting popularity. You have to put guys onto this advertising agency and then populate them into one of three things that score popularity in a really extra doubly nonintuitive manner. Yeah. It's like you got to put your guys in here. Then once they're in there in the holding area, then they can go into the actual game. But some abilities that you go right into one of these areas early, but then you lose a bonus and it gets complicated. But I think that cost less resources that complicated bullshit is all there to obfuscate the fact that the rest of the game is pretty brain dead. Yeah. That it's like when you go in the factory, it's like the decision what to do in the factory is pretty simple, right? The warehouse is buy a box there. If it's that good way to get a box instead of using the assembly, right? And if it's too expensive, just buy the box from your own building instead. The folder game is pretty much just like if you need folders, you can get a whole bunch of them here. If you know and you know, see if you're going to give that other person folders and whatever that always fills up and the construction is get in there first. If you care about somebody taking a specific building you want to buy, if not, just get in there. If you can afford it because that's victory points, you want to get those as soon as possible. Yeah. Don't worry about not getting in because you have like a thousand actions. Yeah. There's like this. That's the real problem, right? Imagine if you're playing a Gricola instead of having a five family members, each family member had like five units of work each day. So you had 25 different workers and they were like 50 jobs and you could do, you know, you put all your guys on different jobs. That's why the game takes forever. They really should have abstracted more of this stuff to make it less granular overall. And I think you could have had a good game there. Well, that's one of the reasons simulation of company does sort of work out. Oh, the game was super fun. And this is the problem. The game is super fun in the first couple of turns until people have enough actions to actually use the advertising agency. And then the game bogs down. And that's the other reason it bogs down is because advertising is the only thing you can really do for free. So at the end of your turn, when you have all these extra time markers slash worker tokens and you have nothing else to do with them, you just dump them all in there for free basically. And then you still got to follow the turn order and go around procedurally because depending on what I do other people might do something different and it. Yep. It ends up being really unsatisfied. Very. Now I really think if you fix the advertising agency, there's no game there. And that's the problem. You could or what you could do is you could make the advertising agency the whole game. Just get rid of it. But the advertising agency is super unfun because not only is it not intuitive and is the popularity game just non granular and, you know, annoying and difficult to figure out. It also requires a large amount of procedural calculation on the place in the place of the players to figure out what to do with every one of their actions. And the thing is most of the time I was calculating, I actually not sure if this is something clever the game designers did or not is I would be like, okay, if I put my guy into, you know, networking directly, I'll get this. Well, if I pay this to get him into networking, then I'll get two guys in there. So if I do that, I'll actually just be losing a dollar because I could just put two guys in there directly. But rather than spending a dollar and a folder and one guy to get two guys in, I can just spend two guys. But the point of paying the dollars that you might go into print instead. Right. And I calculated all these different possibilities every turn and they all turned out to be equal except for a few where I would just lose a dollar for no reason. See now they're equal in a vacuum, but the problem is you get bonus popularity. They were equal in terms of the number of popularity points I would have received. Ah, but were you also taken to account the fact that whoever has the most tokens in each one of those areas also gets bonus popularity? I was. At least in those specific scenarios right that I was in, you know, I could not, I would basically have gained the same whether I put two workers directly into networking to one guy into the advertising. Would you have gained the same effectively if you would land on the same space as someone else and they were in print, but you were in broadcast instead of networking? I couldn't figure that out because the rules were all. That's the part that's the problem. Even if I figure out that if I do this, this is my optimal way to get the same number of popularity points is what I calculated, but I didn't calculate whether I would land there second or third or first, thus determining my actual popularity order. And in general some parts of the board it's a benefit to be the first one in in some parts of the board is the benefit to be the last one in and the game just doesn't take that into account very well. Nope. So I don't know what I can say about this game other than that I kind of hate it. I don't know if I hate the game and I'm definitely not going to play it again. I hate it because I enjoyed it so much and then after the first third I realized that the game is going to take four hours and just going to be increasingly tedious. Yeah, I don't hate it, but definitely never going to play it again. Apparently this game was part of a kickstarter where you got two similarly themed games from the same designer. The other game that came with this is Skyline, which is sort of a nice Yahtzee. I kind of like it. Skyline is actually pretty fun. Yeah, it's it's a Yahtzee. You roll dice, you re-roll the one, you know, but there's a little different rules to it. You're trying to build buildings instead of matching particular slots under your Yahtzee card. You can roll different kinds of dice. If you're looking for a Yahtzee type of game and you don't roll through the ages, you can play roll through the ages or you can play Skyline. They're both better than Yahtzee and they're pretty much, you know, feel that same niche or same roll. Thing is, I thought about buying Skyline, but it's 30 bucks. Fuck that. It's not worth it. 30 bucks for what amounts to a pile of dice. Yeah. And some cards. For that, you might as well just play Yahtzee. Yeah, or roll through. How much is roll through the ages? I don't know. Check it. Roll through the ages is 30 bucks. Okay. Wow. Neither of those. No, that's roll through the ages. Bronze age is an expansion. I don't see anything but roll through the ages. Oh no, that is roll through the ages. That is it. The bronze age. Yeah. It says the bronze age on it. I haven't played this game in almost two years, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Don't spend $30 for a Yahtzee clone that's quick, slightly so. Yeah. With a different theme. But it's just, this game is, try it if you have some, don't buy it. Don't buy this game by any means. No. Find someone else who has it, or pick it up in a tabletop library, get someone to teach you how to play it, and play the first few rounds. You'll see what we mean. It's super fun until you get about three rounds in. And everyone's got a bunch of employees and way too many time markers. And also that's when someone's like, you know what? I want to have my popularity. And then everyone's got to start playing that popularity game that becomes the whole game. It's not intuitive and non fun. The game requires so much calculation on the player's parts to have any chance of doing better than other players and winning in that part. And all the other rest of the game is just completely obvious brain dead decisions. 99% of the time. If you want to play a game that consists of a bunch of separate smaller games that tie into each other, just play power grid. Right. Don't play this. Yeah. And if you want to play a good worker placement game that isn't a curricula, just play Kalis. You can also play, I guess, la haves out there. There's a lot of them. I like to have okay, but I don't like it that much. I've only played like once. I don't know if I played twice. I own it. We could play it again. I own it. I thought I owned it. No, I bought aura at LaVara, which is also maybe you could play that too. Yeah. I haven't played those other ones enough to know if I like them more or less than it's hard to say because as much as I like them when I play them, whenever I think back to Kalis, I forget how much I actually really like Kailas. Kailas is really good. Yeah. I feel like I can play Kailas again. It's all about the castle. 20 cubes in the castle. That's right. Except that one guy beat us with the gold freaking jeweler. Yeah. That was a close really run affair though. If I got a couple more stone, I would have beaten him. Yeah. Plus he pretty much gold, gold, golded in a vacuum and we ignored him scoffed at him. In fact, let's let's end the show with best by saying netrunner still the best gameplay netrunner. Netrunner is a pretty good game. Scott's been playing XCOM, so we'll probably talk about XCOM and enough coming up next time. That doesn't begin with the letter n. I'm not playing that. All right. I only play games with the letter n. Scott's been playing the you don't count the when you're cataloging game in the title of a game. I'm playing. I am playing game called natural selection to and a game called and a game new XCOM. No, I'm playing and me unknown begins with the sound and an enemy. We probably won't do any more shows this week, because if you couldn't tell, I'm still kind of fighting off this flu. Not completely having fought it off yet. Well, well, Geek Knights will return to normal next week up until anime Boston will bring you a show about mocha comics. Probably again will be a little more high energy. Yeah, you know, it'll be good. We're coming back. Just give us time. We say also a lot of stuff saved up from the, you know, all this time of no shows that we can bust out. All right, kids, see you in a week. This has been Geek Knights with rim and Scott special thanks to DJ pretzel for the opening music can't leave a 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 Knights is not one but four different shows sci tech Mondays gaming Tuesdays anime comic Wednesdays and indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Knights is distributed under a creative commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Knights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.