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5 Things About 640 · Pick Up and Deliver

• 0:04
  Welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
• 0:07
  as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode too while I stroll
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  around. I'm Brendan Riley. O. Good morning, listeners. It's a
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  lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is just it's up a little
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  bit, but it's relatively dark because we're overcast today. So I guess when
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  I said lovely day, I meant temperature wise, not weather wise. It
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  looks like it's gonna rain. Hopefully it won't rain on me while I'm walking
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  talking to you, but it could definitely could. So I thought I would
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  come out today and talk to you a little bit about games. I will
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  confess that I've been I feel a pretty proud of myself keeping to three episodes
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  a week over the summer. Sometimes in the summer I slack off a little
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  bit, but because I got behind in my normal production schedule, we need
• 1:00
  to hit three episodes a week for most of the year in order to get
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  caught up. Normally, by June, I should be about episode fifty of
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  the current season. Instead, we're mid July and this is episode forty of
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  the current season. So I'm making up good time, but I'm gonna have
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  to keep up this pace if I want to get back on the idea that
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  I finish a season around the end of around mid to late December. In
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  order to maintain that schedule, I'm gonna have to keep on trucking. So
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  I was looking through the available information about this, about what I might do
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  an episode of my regular segments all seem a little like I've done them too
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  recently. I try to spread them out a little bit so I'm not doing
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  the same thing all the time. It's not time for another literature review.
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  It's not time for a four hundred back. I did one of those less
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  like ten or fifteen episodes ago. Like, I try to keep them spread
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  out a little bit so that nothing gets too repetitive. But that means I'm
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  I didn't have a specific thing to do today, and I didn't have a
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  topic that came to mind, but needs must and so this is funny.
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  I just googled the number six forty. This is episode six hundred and forty
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  of the podcast. So I googled six forty just to see what will come
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  up. Well, one thing. At first, I googled the significance of
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  the number six hundred and forty, and I found out about something called angel
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  numbers. Apparently, in some spaces in spiritual communities, people believe that specific
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  numbers represent messages from God or supernatural entities or whatever, and somehow the number
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  six forty fits that category. I'm not really sure why, and I did
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  not read too much into it. Not really my bag, but I guess
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  this episode is significant in that way if it is for you, Hello,
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  welcome. But then I just googled the number sixty four oh by itself,
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  and I thought I would reflect on what if the first five results after you
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  get rid of the ads in the Google search for six forty were significant to
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  board games. Here's what we have, so start with. We have KFI
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  AM six forty talk radio. Now I look this up. I was a
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  little worried that it would be the sort of hard charging, right wing left
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  rate talk radio, of the sort like Newt Gingrich kind of or Rush Limbaugh
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  style radio. But it doesn't seem to be. But it's unclear what it
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  is to me. They don't have an about section, their web page is
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  pretty rude of entry, so I'm not really sure what it is. I
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  think it's in Los Angeles over the air, and I did not take the
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  time to listen on the iHeartRadio app, So I don't know if KFI AM
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  six forty talk radio is a good station or a bad station, or ideologically
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  aligned with me or ideologically opposed to me. I don't know anything about it,
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  but I do you know. It's about radio, and I was thinking,
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  I don't know if there's any board games about radio station, and it
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  seems to me that is an interesting subject to make a board game about if
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  you were somebody who was so inclined. There's a really interesting idea of a
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  trying to run a radio station. And I guess you probably have to have
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  two versions of the game. You'd have a talk radio game and a music
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  radio game. The music one seems most interesting because you could have elements of
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  sort of choosing your genre and dealing with marketers and trying to get advertising for
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  your station and trying to pick up audience share. Probably the game is I
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  don't know if the game is more interesting if everybody has the same kind of
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  radio station, or if you're competing for the market but you have different kinds
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  of radio station. But it seems like because middle management is such a fruitful
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  space for interesting eurogames, it seems like radio running a radio station could make
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  for a really interesting game premise. If somebody were so inclined, I can
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  see how that'd be really interesting. I might even enjoy playing such a game.
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  I don't know that I would want to put in the work to make
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  a game, so I guess I'm offering this idea out to somebody if you
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  were inclined to make a game about radio stations. There's a theme I haven't
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  seen before. In looking at board game I discovered that they're at least with
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  with the word radio as the main word. There don't seem to be a
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  lot of games about radios or perhaps any So that's interesting to me that radio
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  station does not seem to be a genre that people are making games about.
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  Of course, it's you might call it a dying medium because people are listening
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  over the internet, But I feel like the radios radio stations are still in
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  business, that it is a thing people still enjoy, even if the delivery
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  method has changed a bit. So okay, if I am six forty.
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  Radio doesn't seem to have overt overlap with board games but I'd be interested to
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  hear how it might. The next result in Google was the six forty area
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  code. Six forty area code covers parts of New Jersey, Trenton, Atlantic
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  City, and Pleasantville, which of course made me think of what board games
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  have to do with Atlantic City. Of course, perhaps the most foot board
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  game there is, Monopoly, is about Atlantic City. Right that you are
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  buying and selling properties, and the street names are all Atlantic City streets.
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  The idea is that you're you're I guess you're buying and selling Atlantic City.
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  There's also the famed kickstarter that was sort of a parody or an anti Monopoly
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  game called Doom Came The Doom that Came to Atlantic City. This is a
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  famous early kickstarter that went badly and caused all kinds of trouble. I don't
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  know anyone who's played the game, but it's a great title, The Doom
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  that Came to Atlantic City, And I think it was a sort of lovecrafty
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  intake on Monopoly. So yeah, Atlantic City is deeply tied to board games.
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  I don't know much about Trenton as a city, but I do know
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  Pleasantville. Only because I don't actually know Pleasantville. I know the movie Pleasantville,
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  which was a movie from the late nineties in which Toby maguire plays a
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  goodie two shoes character who his favorite thing is this nineteen fifties sitcom and sort
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  of leave it to Beaver style family drama or family comedy called Pleasantville, and
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  he sits down for a marathon of the game, and he and his sister
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  are accidentally teleported into the game and their modern views disrupt all of Pleasantville.
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  The movie had its gimmick, which actually works really well, was that people
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  from once people become sort of liberated from the closed mind of the Pleasantville space
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  to actually turn color. The whole movies and where the TV shows part is
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  in black and white, so as people become liberated, a turn color,
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  which is a pretty cool effect. So that's the movie pleasant vill. The
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  game that seems most tied into that particular perspective is Welcome to which feels like
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  it's playing on nineteen fifties Americana in its style and what it's building. Despite
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  having a female architect on the cover of the game, it gets still trading
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  in that nostalgia. But it does make me wonder what else is going on?
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  What other places do we see this sort of esthetic that we could use.
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  I mean, I think the other one I can off the top of
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  my head that feels like it's trading in nineteen fifties nineteen sixties Americana is food
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  chain Magnate, which the art style has that kind of nineteen fifties style to
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  it, at least the original one. I haven't seen the deluxe upgrade that
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  they did the Kickstarter for, But other than Welcome To the other game that
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  I know of that takes place in New Jersey or it feels connected in New
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  Jersey is Cape May, which sounds like a really good game. The reviews
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  of it that I've read enjoyed it quite a bit. I haven't played it
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  myself. It is from Thunderworks Games, and I've generally found that their games
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  are pretty good. Although I didn't like role Player as much as I like
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  Segrata, I feel like Segata has a better implementation of that kind of mechanism.
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  I do like Cartographers quite a bit, but it seems like the six
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  forty area code is a lush place for board gamers and board game designers,
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  and if you feel like playing something in that area code, you could play
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  Monopoly. You could play Cape May or with a little bit of semantic drift,
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  you could play Welcome to the Next result on the Google search for six
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  forty was six forty credit score? Is it good? I did not click
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  through to the page, although the little summary that was provided underneath the title
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  of the page said six forty credit score is fair. It's not good,
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  not bad, it's fair, so right in the middle, I guess.
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  But I was thinking about as you think about credit scores, there's a couple
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  games that come to mind as something you could play if you're thinking about that
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  side of things. One from a finance side. I always hear how good
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  Stockpile is, though that's a stock trading game more than a game about credit
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  or credit scores or economics. More broadly, the second game, if you're
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  thinking about credit score as a way of rating people's quality or people's level of
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  achievement in terms of finance, then credit score would be tied very directly to
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  your other people's opinion of you, which means High Society is probably your go
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  to there. As a reminder, High Society is an auction game where each
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  player has a set amount of money and you bid on works of art and
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  other things, and the idea is that you want to have the best stuff
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  at the end of the game, the stuff that's worth the most points.
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  However, right before we determine who has the best stuff, first we look
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  at who has the least amount of money left, and if you've spent more
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  money than anybody else you have the least amount of money left, then you're
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  out of the game because you spent too much money, which is a really
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  great twist because you're constantly trying to figure out if you can spend something or
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  if they have to hold back so that you don't get put on the bottom
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  of the stack. The third game that I would point to if we're playing
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  a game about money and credit would be QE QEA st answer quantitative easing.
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  It is the process of, I believe a government printing more money in order
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  to solve a problem. The game is an auction game, but everyone bids
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  on things in secret, and at the end of the game you have to
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  have the best the most points based on companies. But again you lose if
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  you spend the most money because the bidding is all almost entirely secret. As
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  the game goes along, the amounts that people are spending on their bids rise
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  dramatically and it gets to be it ends up being very funny. Quantitative easing
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  Quantitative easing or QE is a really delightful game. It plays relatively short.
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  There's a great reveal at the end as people it tally up how much they
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  spend, and it's very enjoyable. But again, it's sort of about credit,
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  or feels connected anyway to the credit score of six forty. All right,
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  next up, the next result on the thing sort of like radio station
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  was a business, This was six forty meets. I did not follow through
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  to the thing about the butcher shop. I just saw that it was a
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  butcher shop, so I don't I didn't look where it was, and I
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  did not know why. I did not inquire why it's called six forty meats.
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  It feels like one reason you might call that is if it's at six
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  forty that's the address. Six forty. Junction Street or whatever. Junction Street
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  is a hilarious street name. I think Intersection Street would be funny too.
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  I'll meet you the intersection of Junction and Intersection. Anyway, Six forty Meats
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  is a butcher shop where they sell different kinds of meat. Obviously, it
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  leads to the obvious and interesting question of what kinds of butcher shop related things
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  are there in games now. Of course, getting meat from animals is a
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  key part of lots of games. Agricola certainly has professions where if you're a
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  butcher you can get more food out of your animals than if you're not.
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  I'm always reminded of my favorite rule in Dungeon Pets that helps with the management
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  of the meat in that game, And if a creature ages out, it
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  is sent to live on a farm, and you, you know, a
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  completely unrelated rule add one meat to the meat market. I think that's all
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  is very funny. So there are games that involve butchering or butchers is a
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  regular part of any kind of game that no wolve's farming. Converting animals into
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  meat is a thing that you do. Sometimes the animals themselves are just meat.
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  It also occurs to me that a lot of times the symbol for food
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  in games is a little meat like a little drumstick, which I think is
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  kind of funny. It's often a bag of grain too. Those are the
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  two most common symbols. The weirdest one is the game mosaic in which the
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  symbol for food is either wheat or a fish, and I think a fish
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  represents three wheat like they're the same currency, but the fish token is three.
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  Very confusing. Nonetheless, I was also thinking about what would a game
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  involving a butcher shop be like. Of course, there would be a customer
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  service element, there would be a keeping stock element. Probably the keeping stock
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  would be the most interesting because you have to buy animal stock, and if
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  the game had worked in an amount of time that takes to go from buying
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  a multi having product to sell, then you have to manage the flow of
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  that and of course adding more employees would help you do that faster, but
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  it would cost you more. It feels like the management of a butcher shop
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  is an interesting if you're going to have a game sort of simulating retail.
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  Management of a butcher shop is an interesting one because the product that you produce
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  has to be prepared, as opposed to managing a grocery store would be interesting.
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  Still, you have to order the food, I guess, but the
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  preparation is just putting it out, whereas in the butcher shop you'd have to
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  order the food so to speak, and then you actually have to prepare it
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  by butchering it and then getting it ready. So it feels like six forty
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  meats could inspire an interesting board game it and there's already a lot of butchering
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  that sort of thing in games already. Finally, the fifth result in my
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  search of six forty is the year six hundred and forty. Wikipedia has a
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  page called year six forty DCXL, which is there, which sounds like an
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  expansion to the DC Duck Builder. Whether all the heroes are the Giant Heroes
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  DCXL, or maybe it's the DC Duck Builder but the cards are tterot sized
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  something like that. Anyway, as a year, pretty boring, honestly,
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  if you read the summary of what's going on, there's a handful of entries
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  for each continent, but mostly different wars that had happened, and or changes
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  of political leadership, kings deposing other kings, that sort of thing. It's
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  just a matter of not a lot of history was recorded during that time.
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  Nonetheless, the two things I thought were most interesting, some ice cores in
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  Switzerland have shown that there's a lot more silver detritus in the air in that
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  area, meaning silver mining had picked up or it signaled a return of economic
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  prosperity that we hadn't seen in close to one hundred years, which does lead
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  me to think of kot and Ahora, which is a game from CGE that
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  came out last year and it was about silver mining. Now I don't know
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  if it was set anywhere near the time of six hundred and forty. That
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  seems unreasonably early, nonetheless interesting. The other thing that struck me as potentially
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  game interesting is there the death of Abbot Winnock. Winnock was a Welsh saint
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  who was an abbot and did a bunch of other stuff, But one of
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  the main things Winnock did was to run a greenery and apparently the big miracle
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  that he accomplished was when he was older, he lived by himself and was
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  constantly grinding grain for the peasants, even though he was too old to properly
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  operate the mill, and no one could understand how he did it, and
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  it turned out it was turning by itself magic or something. I don't know.
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  That was one of the great things he also, apparently someone went to
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  investigate how it was that he was doing it and they were struck blind and
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  then he cured them. So interesting set of things related to Abbot Winnock,
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  which make for perhaps an interesting character you might make a game out of.
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  I don't know how you'd make a game out of that, but interesting none
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  the less. Well that brings me to the end of my board game meditation
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  on the year six forty. Well, I hope you found that interesting.
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  I always like to look at different things through a set a single set of
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  lenses, so like looking at the world through the number six hundred and forty
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  and seeing what you find. I think there's a valuable and interest to be
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  found there, which is why I am publishing this episode. Did you like
• 17:25
  it? Did you hate it? Do you want to hear something like this
• 17:26
  again? Do you never want to hear something like this again? Head over
• 17:30
  to board game Get Killed three two sixty nine and shout out otherwise, thanks
• 17:33
  for joining me. I'm a watch today. I hope your next walk because
• 17:36
  this pleasant mind was Bye Bye you by rattle Box