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GameHead Games Wave 2 Sneak Peek · Operation Game Night

• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: We're back in better than ever and joined by a very special guest today, Paul Solomon from Game Head Games.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing, how do you do?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hello.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_02: Happy to be here.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to the show.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 0:31
  unknown: Pleasure.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: I think you were you were one of our very first guests that we ever had on the show.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: We were lucky enough to have you early on.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: And now, almost two years later, you're back.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you were one of my first podcast, you know, guest spots as creative director of gamehead.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm excited to be back.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we're excited to hear about what gamehead has in store for the future.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but you know, joining me as always is uh co-captain of the ship, Clayton Gable.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing, Clay?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: I'm doing good.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, Paul's come a long way since the last time we talked to him, but we have stayed the same.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's important to know that we're still in our humble roots here, but Paul is back, and he truly is better than ever.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, shout out to his podcast, Decision Space.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: I know the first time you were on, you you told us about that.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: And ever since then, you guys have been like my podcasting idols.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: I'm just blown away by course.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: Not gonna bother you up too much here, but yeah, we always fan ball.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: You become a little more, a little more.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, well, let's bring us all back to uh reality and do some recapping of what we've been playing this week.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: So, Paul, I want you to take it away.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: What games have you been playing this week?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I was just at my mom's like cottage nearby in Illinois, and a bunch of family is in town, including my cousin's daughter, so sort of my niece, and she has wanted to play a lot of games, and she's playing like Clue and other things, but she said, Have you ever played Ribbidi Flibbity?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, No, I had never heard of Ribity Flibbity.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's made by a company I had not heard of.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's a board game.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It is, I will call it the Candyland Killer.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: You should never and anybody that's even thinking about Candyland should just get Ribbidi Flibbity.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, basically, everybody has two frogs, and there's this linear path that you're trying to get to the end of.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's a race.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you get to the end first, you get five flies, flies are points, uh, flies are points, and then four and three and two and one, and when when the last five spots fill, the game ends.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a race.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But along the way, there's a bunch of little flies on certain spaces.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, like if I can land on that purple space, then I will get a fly along the way, and that's good.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the way you move is you just play cards, color cards from your hand, Candyland style.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so when I play red, I just jump to the next red.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if somebody's already covering that red, then I ribbity-flibbity jump over those guys to the next available red.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can get these chains of jumping very far up the board, and you get a choice of which two you're going to move.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So every turn, you have three cards in your hand, and two frogs can move.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a very quick scan of your six possible turns.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's not very complicated, but it is not nothing.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it is, I really enjoyed my one play of it, ribbity flibbity.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Also, all of the pieces are like kind of squishy.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, I don't know what they're made of, but even the little fly tokens are like a little bit squishy.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it's sort of a rubber thing.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: But ribbity flibbity gets a full endorsement from me.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: All right.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: On the Solomon scale, what are you giving it?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I can't really give it a three on the on the Solomon scale.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Famously a one, two, or three out of three.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Ribbody Flibity, by the way, I don't even believe is on board game geek here as I check this.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have to give it a two, which is very reasonable for a game of this weight.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, okay.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: How old is your niece?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: Did you say?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: She is uh 30.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: She's about, I think she's about nine.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_03: Nice, nice.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that sounds like a pleasant time, Paul.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: It was good.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of like uh a little bit of magical athlete going on.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: Like kind of shenanigans.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_02: I like it.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, just really simple.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not rolling move, so it has like actual decisions that you're making.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this thing is from uh continuum games, and it's it's not very expensive on Amazon.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like 16, 17 bucks.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ribbity flibbity.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: Well, anything to kill Candyland's good in my book.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's right.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: Without the racial undertones.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Clayton, what have you been uh playing this week?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so I you know, Paul, was it you on Decision Space that talked with the Happy Camper folks?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, Jason Schneider from Happy Camper, yeah.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_03: So Happy Camper, you know, after you turn me on that, again, big listener of uh Decision Space, but uh played jungo trio, loved those games.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: I saw they did a game with Matt Leacock called the Four Doors.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, and so Matt Leacock, you know, the king of co-op here, he's done you know your forbidden deserts, islands, skies, jungles, all the forbiddens.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Legacy.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, oh yeah, don't forget that one.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_03: Uh pandemic, I mean, all those games.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: But the four doors interested me.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: One, because it was Happy Camper.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a I'm a brand loyalist.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: If I find a company, I'll probably just buy their stuff.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_03: And two, it was a small form factor for a co-op game.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_03: So it comes in a very small box, not much bigger than Jungo or Trio.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: And if you've played any of Matt Leacock's other games, it feels very similar.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: Essentially, you have this tower of cards, and they're stacked one on top of each other.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: There's four doors that are four different colors, and it and then you have you each have a player, you do three actions on a turn.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_03: Each player has their own special ability.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_03: They will seem very familiar to people who have played other Matt League Cock games.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_03: One of your special abilities might be do four actions on your turn instead of three.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_03: Another might let you move to a location as if it were one move anywhere on the board.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but yeah, so you're essentially trying to collect sets of these different colored cards.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: So if I get four red cards, I go to the red door.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: I can turn in my four red cards, and I collect a relic at the red door.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_03: You have to collect a relic at each of the four colored doors, and then you all your pawns go to the top of the tower and light the beacon with a luminous flux spell.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: And throughout the game, I think one of the neat features of this is that your player cards and the bad cards, if you will, the shadow cards are all the same.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_03: So they make good use out of out of this single deck of cards.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_03: So you have this deck, and when it's the shadow turn, the deck flips cards out, and if it's a purple card, it goes to the purple door.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_03: And each purple card can either go to the right or left side of the door.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_03: And when three cards get on the right or left side, if a fourth card would come up, that door starts to close, and you start to lose your chance to get the relic in that door.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: If another if another purple comes up, then that door closes for good.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_03: And if you haven't had the relic yet, you know, you're you're done for.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so that's essentially what you're doing.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_03: And those cards are also in your hand, too.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_03: And so some of the things you can do are, you know, they'll have a little lantern in the top left, which will let you illuminate different doors, which is how you get rid of the shadow threats that are popping up at the doors.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: So kind of buying you time.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there's some you know special spells on them that let you like dig through the discard pile or hand off cards to other players.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_03: Again, nothing that breaks the mold entirely of your typical Matt Leacock co-op.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: But I did like it.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: I played it a couple times with my kids, they enjoyed it.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's like 30 minutes, small form factor.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's a I think it's a nice game.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I haven't played this one, but I tend to like the smaller versions of games like this.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like I really like Forbidden Island for its simplicity.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: I like that more than Pandemic.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: Pandemic Hot Zone, I think is really good.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I like the smaller ticket to rides as well.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So$4 I probably I probably like it.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, give it a go.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_03: I I look forward to hearing about in your co-op episode.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: I think I think Forbidden Desert was like the first game I ever bought that I had to get rid of because it was just so worn down.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: Like that got so many plays that the little tiles you could tell which ones had the X's and stuff underneath them because they're always being handled and touched and like fraying at the corners.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Man, those forbidden games are so much fun.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, I designed a game in the Forbidden series just on my own, because I had hoped to pitch it to Game Right because I thought like maybe they were done, maybe Matt wasn't working on it anymore.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Long story short, it didn't go anywhere.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: But here in my house, I have a finished prototype of uh Forbidden Jungle game before Forbidden Jungle was announced.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's you know, it's kind of fun.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: The the uh the core, like evil, you know, each of them has a a day, a danger that you have to do.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then this one, it was vines that grow in between the tiles and block you off, and then if they surround a tile, it becomes like really blocked off, and you have to go stop it and run out of tokens and stuff.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: But that's cool.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Matt was already doing other things, so he didn't need me.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, come on, Matt.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody needs Paul.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Forbidden Jungle ended up being kind of like a weird mini nemesis with uh Lee Cocky and uh special abilities.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was that was pretty cool.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: And like the aliens grow as they get bit, you know, as you go along.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was sort of um originally he told me it was gonna be uh like a space station.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it was Forbidden Station, and I guess those were robots that were gonna be attacking you.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he, you know, we had our meeting, and whether it was my doing or not, he did change it to Forbidden Jungle.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: I think you had a lot to do with that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh cut the check.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: Cut the check.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: Come on.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, have you speaking of liking the smaller version of games, have you played the Fate of the Fellowship, the opposite of the game?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: I have not.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I hear that that's I was huge, hugely popular.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't played almost any of the bigger ones, like the rising tide one that's in uh the Netherlands or the Rome one.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but fate of the fellowship, people say that's amazing.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely on the bigger side of things, so yeah, it might it might be straying from your your wheelhouse more than you'd like, but I should I thought I thought I thought it was cool for the theme and what it was doing, but yes, I'm definitely more in the four-doors camp myself.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_03: Travis, you've been playing anything, man?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: I have.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: I played Grunts, which is All Play's new two-player kind of skirmish um rock, paper, scissors combat game.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh super simple, plays in like 15 minutes.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: You have uh one of those cloth mats that they've been kind of going to at AllPlay that sits in front of you, and then on the on the mat is a seven by four five grid.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: So you have 35 spaces.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: The row that's closest to you on your mat is your like back line, and you are deploying troops, tanks, trucks, and aircraft that are going to try and capture control points that are out in the middle of this map, kind of in no man's land.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh on your turn, uh you take two and one uh actions.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: So either you place two troops and you move one, or you uh move place one troop, move twice, and you can move the same uh you know troop or asset twice if you want to.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's kind of this big like web of rock, paper, scissors where every asset is good against two other things, but weak against one thing.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: So you have your let's say your grunts, the titular character of the game, those can attack trucks and uh other and other infantry units, the grunts, uh, but you know, are susceptible to the fighters that are flying overhead and the tanks that are on the battlefield.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the grunts will move um either orthogonally or diagonally, but if you have a captain out there, which is a you know control is the same as a grunt, when you move the captain in a direction, all the grunts can move in that exact same direction at the same time.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: So kind of timing when you want to use that ability to move uh your troops forward to control those points uh is key.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: The cool thing about this is that there are modular pieces.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: So uh let's say I have a tank, the tank comes in like this little square and it's got magnets on top.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: And that tank, I can either make a troop tank and it puts a little turret on top, or I can make it an anti-aircraft gun.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_02: So it has this little kind of barrage-looking thing that goes sits on top.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so as the aircraft fly overhead on these kind of diagonal lines that are predetermined, these paths that are set, um, that anti-aircraft gun can shoot down the aircraft overhead.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And the goal of the game is to control these points at the end, uh, you know, the control points in the middle of the map at the end of your turn.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if you control two of them at the end of your turn, you score one point.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: If you control all three at the end of your turn, you score two points.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: You the game is played to three points.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: However, if you can get your captain, the grunt character, all the way to the enemy's headquarters on their back line, you automatically win the whole game because it is very difficult to do, and there's a lot going on and a lot to think about to maneuver your pieces through this battlefield to get the captain all the way to the other side.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I think it's pretty cool.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the trucks can like carry your troops and they move two spaces instead of one.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: So you can jump ahead a little bit.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you can move somebody all the way across if you can get there.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, basically, if one of your troops runs into another uh uh asset that can be attacked, it will automatically destroy it.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: You know, everything has one health, it just kind of goes off the board.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: Tanks, trucks, and aircraft only appear on the board once.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And when they are killed, they're effectively effectively out of the game.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Grunts can be recycled, uh, captains are all are also one-time use, I think.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think it's pretty cool.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_02: Plays in like 15 minutes.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's uh cool, like almost checkers style, um, rock, paper, scissors combat.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_02: Um, some of that stuff is a little tough to keep track of in your head.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: There's not that many assets, but like you kind of forget, like, oh, this tank is now a aircraft, you know, anti-aircraft gun versus the the troop tank.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I think it's cool.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's an it's another one of those I'll play small box games that I'll probably keep around for a while.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: It it it reminds me a lot of that um general orders World War II that came out, like I don't know, uh probably eight years ago now.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that one was that maybe not that long ago.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: It was probably like four years ago, but that one was really cool.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: It it's kind of the same concept.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: You're like deploying assets and and cargo and troops and stuff, and you can airdrop people behind enemy lines, and like that one's a little more in-depth.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: This one's much more simplified, uh, but yeah, I I think it's great.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: I thought I like this.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna keep it sounds really cool.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I like the it's sort of a little very simple units, troops on a map, miniatures, skirmish game, but um really clean kind of rules.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I like that you don't have cards that you're playing to do this and that, just one and two or two and one, and just the little twist you described of move the captain and everybody can move with you.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a that's just that alone's a pretty cool little twist.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's it's really interesting to watch things be pre-positioned because like the aircraft fly along these predetermined paths, either to your back line or off to the sides.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you are moving into these one of these like kind of strafing runs, um, that fighter aircraft might come over the top and take you out.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: Or um if you have a bomber, that bomber might fly over the top of your truck and take it out.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so positioning and timing those moves accordingly to capture those uh control points are i there's some thinking involved for sure.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: Dang, I did not realize you were talking about this the whole time, and I went to it and I was expecting the the mid-range, the normal all play box.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I did not think it was gonna be in one of the small boxes, yeah.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm even more impressed now, but I will say I hate the cloth mat.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: I am I I just was so upset with all plays.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_03: I love all play, but the golden goal, like I couldn't even barely play it.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: It was just that little soccer game.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_03: Everything just kept falling over on this little cloth mat.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, come on, Paul.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Do you do cloth mats?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: What's your have not?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I have not done a cloth mat yet, and I don't I don't even think I've owned a game with a cloth mat.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, I try to I try to fit a lot in these little boxes.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: So like friendly fishing has a pretty gigantic board.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um cloth's tough.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Cloth's tough.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: You'll have to move us to like uh iron these things, like pull it out and like you know iron it and then scarch it, and then you can turn it into like a fold up piece of cardboard.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the upgraded components on this one are super nice, like big chunky wood pieces with the with the um magnets on top, and it even comes with like metallic stars that are your victory points, completely unnecessary to the uh playmate of the game, but it adds to my enjoyment at least because I yeah, I like a good upgraded component.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so are the standard components punchboard or are they wood or magnets or what?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of them are.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_02: I so I think the base one comes with the magnetic tanks and stuff because you have to be able to swap that out.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think that the grunts themselves um and the victory point stars are punchboard.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's yeah, I mean the the the upgraded components are nice, but I don't think they're necessary.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: No, no that goes, right?
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_03: Punchboard on cloth is criminal.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I love gazebo.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was my up to this point, up to this point, has been my favorite game of 2026 so far, but I it was unplayable for me with the cardboard pieces.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: I needed the upgraded, like domino feeling tiles to actually play that game.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: They just they don't push down the cloth, and it just is disgusting.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I could I could go on and on.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_03: I just uh okay.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I take it back.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: The the aircraft and the victory points are the punchboard ones, okay.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: But in the upgraded one, you get actual wooden aircraft and metallic uh victory points.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, cool.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's nice.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: Are we ready to talk about game head?
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's jump right in and go to our main objective, which is talking about game head wave two.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: So, Paul, why don't you start us off and tell us coming out of wave one, you saw a lot of success.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like I saw game head games everywhere.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um what have we learned from wave one that we are now taking into wave two?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so wave one, we launched last like about basically a year ago from from here.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was six games, uh, foolish fool, venture angels, first class letters, uh Trinket Trove, no loose ends, and did I already say Venture Angels?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, one more.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Corgi Pile Up.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Corgi Pile Up.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we did party games and Thinky Games and Casual Games, and our best seller by far has been Trinket Trove.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think we just sold 10,000 total, and then uh we just got international orders, so those those things are starting to happen.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and second to that is Corgi Pile Up.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the big lesson is which I sort of already knew, is that you have to have unbelievable art.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the only thing that can put a game in someone's hand off a shelf is the the theme and the title and the art.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then we also had a huge success with No Loose Ends, which is one of the greatest trick-taking games of all time.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what we don't know yet is like if that's going to hold year over year over year, because the people that want an amazing trick taking game also want the game that comes out after it.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, with limited shelf space, it's hard to see like what things will continue.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: But for the next wave, um, we're doing five this time, and probably gonna chop up into like um smaller amounts of games more times a year.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're not quite sure yet, but um similar types of stuff.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll I'll give it just a quick overview of what we did.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we did have, I I think Foolish Fool is a party game for us from wave one that can be really successful, but has not really found its crowd yet.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's because it's really immediately accessible.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: There's basically no rules, and you flip a card, read it, and the rules get introduced as you play.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: So you can learn it in 15 seconds.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the game I'm about to show you is that same way.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is gonna be our most successful from this wave.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is size-wise from Scott Brady of Hughes and Q's and Boop.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And um, it's a really simple game about estimating the sizes of things, everybody gets these strings, and you are asked what's the size of a unicorn's horn, and you stretch it to give your answer, and you just want to be in the middle.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if your answer is too extreme, too short, or too long, you lose one of your wisdom tokens.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and as far as art, we try to give it this sort of uh schoolhouse rock inspired uh look, and a owl here who is uh again sort of inspired but distinct from the Tootsie role pop, the Tootsie Pop Owl.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that one's it's it's amazing, and I played it with my family.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them don't like to play games, and that was a big hit.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: The uh the other one um in the sort of amazing art category is uh friendly fishing from Alex Randolph and Bruno Feiduti, who did Venture Angels.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this one has art from Alicia Jiro and a good unique hook.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is a re-implementation of Tonari from uh same designers, basically.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that came out with different, sort of darker art from Quanche Moria, and I had it um and really liked it.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so when when we got a chance, it was like, let's let's do it.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, it's it's gorgeous.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the hook here is basically you just move.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's a grid here of all these fish, and you move and catch a fish, and move and catch a fish, and players just take turns very simply moving and collecting fish.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: So whips around the table.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the game, I score my tokens and I score the tokens of the person to my left.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so rather than trying to move the boat in a defensive way and prevent them from getting things, I always want to set them up for a good turn.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Every point they score is a point that I score.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then when they move, they want their left buddy to catch something nice too.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh it's sort of a semi-cooperative thing where I care about the person on my left, but they don't care at all about me.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's in our casual line.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh Pet Quartet, also really good art.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: This one from um designed by Robert Brouwer, uh, and then art from Bianca Papillardo, who is an amazing artist.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think she's worked on games before, but she's from Argentina, and she did 88 uniquely illustrated cards here.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is a lot like Coloretto.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it has a triangular deck like Flip 7, where there's three threes and four fours and seven sevens.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And for each number, you want one of them or four of them.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: So of the six sixes, you want to have four of them, or just one.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so that may be a little hard depending on how many of them people already have, and how many you have, and where you are in the game.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it has all the different cards are uniquely illustrated and have funny punny names like this is my dog Bernie, and his character is called Prince, and this is Sonny Pollins, and this guy is Axel Rose, our pink Axlotl.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And Axel Rose will be one of our Gen Con exclusive pins for Game Med.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, two more, and then we'll sort of dig deeper if we want.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've got Wild Magic, which is our Kanitia design.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: First time I've worked with the great Dr.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: Kanitsia.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this one is a rework of Vampire from the year 2000.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: It has Amazing Art by Jackie Davis, and it's a set collection card game where you're trying to collect cards of the same color, and when you play them down, you get powerful effects from the Guardian tokens, but you don't want to have the weakest of that color because at the end of the game, whoever has the weakest of that thing discards it and scores nothing.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really interactive as you play the way you're looking at what other people are doing, and you're playing cards into a shared space where other people might take them.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Peck Quartet and Wild Magic actually share a lot of DNA, but the first one I want to actually dig into get dig into here is uh Trick to the Future from Taiki Shinzawa, because I talked about no loose ends being an amazing trick-taking game, and this is my favorite trick-taking game.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited for this one.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: You like this kind of gave us a hint at this one when you came on the first time.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so excited for this.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: So this thing is uh it's truly incredible.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I will show you.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: We have art by George Bletsis here.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: You can tell from the uh title and the theme, it's sort of inspired again by Back to the Future.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this is not a DeLorean, this is like a uh town and country, and on the side here, Buick, town and country, it doesn't say Buick, it says trick.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um, let's see what we got.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the inside of our car.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we did a lot of like, okay, this is the actual dashboard from something, and we've chosen some select dates here, and you can see like this is like the fuel gauge that this town and country would use to time travel.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: So our point chips are different clocks from different times.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have the 1980s clocks and sand timers, and then sort of the infinity.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: And every player gets these dual-layer player boards that show their temporal transistor, which they're gonna use to they're gonna fuel it up with these rods, these Catan Roads style rods, um, like you saw in the picture.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna play a trick-taking game, must-follow trick-taking game.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: The four suits are past, uh, which is actually the yellow gear one, sort of Victorian style, um, present, which has got this wooden VHS look, uh, future, which is sort of futuristic, and then beyond, which has a sort of purplish.
• 27:13
  unknown: Where are they?
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: A purplish sort of, well, you can imagine what beyond might be.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, almost spacesh looking, but out of time.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh play must follow trick taking.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: I lead with uh three of the future, you have to play future, but the big hook of this game is of course that you can time travel.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when you play this zero, you can take one of those white fuel rods and put it right across the center here, and now it's an eight.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have this built-in um agency, this power.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: You're not just forced to play your hand as the cards that they are, you can change the numbers by spending fuel.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, the cards all have on the side of them, find a good example.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, on the side of them have little numbers that will that work that tell you what you can turn it into.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, that's cool.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's good.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's useful.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that was an upgrade from the uh original game.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: You also have the six.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: The six is cool because the six, if you look on the side, what does it say there?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: Eight and nine.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, to turn it into a nine, you just flip it over, and then it says eight and six over there.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: So cards can be played both ways.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: So you could say the deck is zero to eight, but actually the six is a nine.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_03: So that's already kind of man.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the big the biggest twist here maybe is that your leftover fuel rods are your bid.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is like every time you win a trick, that's a successful time jump, right?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but when the round is over, you need to jump back to your home time where you came from.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so if I win three tricks, but I only have two remaining fuel rods, I can't make it home and I'm lost in time.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you can spend fuel to score to like win tricks, but if you spend too much, you'll be lost in time.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have basically more sticks left than tricks you won, you score some points.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Two points per trick and a point per stick that you collected because you get the sticks that people put on their cards.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: So two per trick, one per stick, if you have like more, you know, an excess of fuel.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: But if you get it exactly right and you do a perfect journey where like you won two tricks and you have two leftover sticks, you score double points.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're encouraged to like push yourself right to the edge to score maximum points, but if you go over, then you get nothing.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it has a sort of bidding feel, but you don't have to look at your hand and bid at the beginning of the round.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it it progresses.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Another way to say it is that like you can you can reduce your bid to spend uh you know, to spend these fuel rods.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a really cool thing.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Again, Taiki Shenzhao was the designer, the master of trick taking games.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: That one has been talked about a lot.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is Mike Delisio's favorite trick taking game of all time, a guy who's played a lot of them and has started showing up on a lot of these Gen Con lists.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really excited about that one.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we uh we just did a ranking of what 35 clay, so 35 different games.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: 35 different trick takers.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and no loose ends was three.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, that's awesome.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: It was three for me.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: For anybody that likes no loose ends, this is like a no-brainer.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same designer, and as I said, I think it's it's better.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And and like some of these other games, it has an immediately obvious hook where the first time you put a stick on a card, it just like feels amazing.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the more you hear about the details, the more that it catches you.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's also nil bidding, where if you want, and again, you don't have to announce this at the start of the round, you can try to win no tricks, and then you score three points per empty space on your fuel gauge.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's it's almost like thematically you've been selling the fuel to other people and they're traveling.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so if I sell you a fuel rod, in other words, you win it in a trick, that's probably a point for you.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's two, but I gained three points for having that empty space.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, so I mean that yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: You if you win a car, if you win a trick, exactly you get the rods that people used.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can have a place where, you know, maybe people are just trying to lower their bid to get down, they don't think they're gonna win stuff.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: They put some some uh fuel rods down, then the next person does, and then I come in and win it.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so maybe I only win one trick in the in the round, but if I'm able to collect five fuel rods, now that's seven points.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: And if I do a perfect journey, now it's 14 points, and that could be really good.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then yes, if I if I go nil and win, no tricks, I can get up to 18 points that way, which is just a really fun part of the game.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: How many how many points do you play to?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you play three rounds typically, but uh you can you can do a round per player so everybody gets a chance to deal.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of different ways you can do it.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's that one.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's dig in.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I want I got one.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, go ahead.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: No, totally, please.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry, Paul.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_03: I'll I'll let you get back on it.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: No, I want I want all the questions.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_03: So understood that you get the sticks from any trick you win.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: Do they go back into your fuel cell that you can use that round, or they just count towards scoring?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: They've been spent.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you have kind of unspent fuel rods on your temporal transistor player board that you're ready to spend.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then, but once they're used on a card, they're just collected and set aside.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's actually the original game didn't have player boards.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's the reason that I added them was players would often confuse their unspent rods with their spent with the collected rods.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so the original games just had like your unspent ones sit on the table, and the ones you collect sit on top of the tricks, but um, you know, you can nudge those and all kinds of stuff.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: So we came up with the idea thematically for this to represent how much fuel you had on this gauge, and then also made it dual-layered so that you know they would stay aligned and not you know look horrible for folks like me that would hate that.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_03: You can you can carry on.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: No, my pleasure.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and ask all the questions.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: So um Pet Quartet was the next one I wanted to talk about.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have you guys played Coloretto?
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, love Coloretto.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, Coloretto for me is really awesome.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh a great example of just like a simple system that you can get really cool emergent play from, especially from the way that you're like looking at what other people have and what they want, right?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it it's it's this passive interactivity where we all interact with a center board, but other people feel the impact.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: So uh in the game, there are little conductor tokens, and we've got different screen printed meeples of different goofy conductors, and they're gonna be auditioning musical pets to possibly adopt.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so those go out in the middle of the table, one per player.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then the cards look like this.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: So here's one of the 10 singers, and you can see that that is Blue Jay Z.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: And they all have really good punny names like Katie Parrot, yes, uh, other, let's see, we got Justin Beakbird, we have Burb Dylan, so all the tens are singing birds, and again, there's 10 of them.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um Wing Newton, Bertie Flylish.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the the threes are all like snakes playing funny things like uh weird percussion instruments.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's Coral King.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Rick Aspley is in here somewhere, lots of fun ones.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the way you play, though, is on your turn, you either draw a card and add it to the center of the table, or you end the round by taking cards from the center.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that part is exactly like Coloretto.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the the piles in the center can have up to four cards.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: But again, you're putting these things together.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: This mic is or my camera's out.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're putting these things together so that someone will have to take both of them.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the hook, again, is that you want to have exactly four or exactly one of these cards.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: So when there's 1313s, for example, it is gonna be very hard to have just a single one.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if you go for the four too early, then you're probably gonna get your fifth and score no points.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you get to eight, still no points.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very much about like, okay, what's left in the deck?
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: How many have I seen so far?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Who still wants four, who doesn't want four?
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_00: And for fans of Colorado, it's just like an obvious yes.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's just immediately fun and good, and I think more interactive in what it is, because in Colorado, you for the things you're collecting, you always want more, pretty much, unless you're playing like variant scoring.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: But here, everybody has kind of like they want the exact amount, and the quantity of the cards is maybe more or less.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it has has some little tweaks that are different.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's also um a little two-player mode in here, and then Maestro tiles, which are not in Colorado, those you put them in front of a conductor token, and then they change the rules for that for that conductor.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: So one might say draw a card.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_00: So if I if I take the cards from in front of that conductor, I have to draw a card from the deck and keep it.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Or one might say max two cards, so it can only have two cards there.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: One might say pass a card to the left.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so that can be really devastating for the person on your left, really good for you if you get rid of something, or maybe you have to discard a card, which could be good or bad.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: So um that's fun.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the last thing I'll say about it is uh there's an advanced scoring mode where uh if you have a quartet, it's four points.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have a soloist, they score their full value.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So a soloist of one is gonna be or I mean a soloist of the three is gonna be pretty easy, and that's three points.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have a soloist of the 13, it's 13 points, but probably you're gonna end up with a second 13, right?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's that?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: What's the soloist score normally?
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: Without everything is is one point normally.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's just how many do you have?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how many successful animal types do you have?
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then they will score their points.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_03: And the success is either getting one or four, one or four, exactly right.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, I I like that that scoring.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_03: You like you said, that's so much more interesting than just getting more is better, you know, because you have that worry about okay, am I gonna bust this and go get too many?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, what did you call this type of deck?
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this one's a triangle deck.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_03: You can a triangle deck, okay.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, some people call it a uh a pairs deck because there's a a game called Pears that um has like many, many games that come out of this this style deck.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people at this point would call it a flip seven deck, which flip seven is good enough to deserve that.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, it's certainly been pretty popular, but extremely yeah, that quartet sounds great.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I what a what a interesting way to you know add some replay value by introducing the maestro deck.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I love when games can pare down to a certain a specific play point or number of players, and so the two-player edition is excellent.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's right up my alley.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_00: The key of the two-player thing, if you've ever played Colorado two-player, it's similar, but it basically simulates a third player without having a third player, like they don't take any turns, but there's three piles.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you're playing with two players and just two piles, then out of the eight eights, we're either gonna both get four or and score, or neither of us is gonna get four and we're not gonna score.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like maybe it's one and I score, and you have seven, and you know, but probably not.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's not very interesting.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: So uh when you play two players and there's three piles, then some of the cards no one gets.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really important in sort of counting, counting the game.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_02: And those are not revealed to the other players, correct?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's revealed when they're played face up.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's but it's just like on my turn, I can put it on the left or the center or the right.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's a pile that can have two cards, a pile that can have three cards, or a pile that can have four cards, and I put it down, the next person goes.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: But when I take a pile, I'm out of the round, and when you take a pile, you're out of the round, and whatever cards are in the last pile are discarded from the game.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_00: So some things, like out of those eight eights, maybe only you know, six of them will be taken by players.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: I like it.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Cool.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's look at friendly fishing, eh?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, please.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: Beautiful um art by Alicia Giroux.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_00: She is, I've learned I've learned, such a talented artist.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a sneak peek at a game here that she's working on us with uh working on for us as well.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: So this one, um, again, it's a friendly day out on the pond together.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is our six-fold board.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's obviously big and it fits in our box somehow.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_00: There's the smaller size, which is the original size from Tonari, and then a bigger size, which lets you play with five players, which the original game didn't have.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a cloth.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's not cloth.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is wrapped edge punch board board.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's high quality and good.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh there are just a ton of these awesome fish tokens that you populate the board with.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's uh simple ones, common ones that are red, yellow, blue, green.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: The oranges are a majority.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then there are special extra tokens like the kingfish.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can kind of see the kingfish have gold foil on them.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's also shiners, which have like a glitter foil on them, and they're all spot UV.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then we have this awesome screen printed boat token.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's in the boat.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we're all in this boat on the board, and you just move and take a fish token, move, take a fish token, et cetera.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: And everything scores different ways.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like these ones are just your standard triangular.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: My camera's really struggling to focus.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, standard triangular, majority is for that one, but the special ones do some special things like this one, which I think is shiners.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: The first one you get is distracting, let's say.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you actually lose points for it, but then the next one is worth a bunch of points.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you get all three, it's a lot of points.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, if Travis is going before me and I'm gonna score, he's gonna score my points too.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna try to set me up to get more shiners, right?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the uh junk is negative three points.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of hoping to set my buddy up to miss one so that his buddy gets one.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the dinkers are cool because they're a few points, but they're so small you could just throw it back if you want.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you can move one step and then say, nah, and then take another turn, um, which helps keep the board sort of connected.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: The lunkers is like one big prize fish uh that's hard to hold on to.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_00: So only the last player to catch a lunker gets the five points.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: So if I have one in front of me and Klay catches one, then I discard mine.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: But then if Travis catches the last one, Klay discards his two.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um the uh skip jack, basically, uh you're able to like skip through water to get it.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only way to collect them.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And basically, this board is getting chopped up, um, sort of like hey, that's my fish, in a way.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's getting broken up, and you can only move one space onto a fish.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it becomes harder and harder to move.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: And these skip jacks keep things connected a bit more.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then the last one is those kingfish I showed you, and they are worth uh no points, but if you get all three, you just win immediately on your own.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in a two in a four-plus player game, you only need two of them.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: So that's friendly fishing.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_02: If the person to your left gets all three kingfish, do you share a victory?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: You sure don't.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you sure don't, uh just for points.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be probably pretty easy at that point.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this has been all over Instagram.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: I've been seeing this one out there like crazy.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: This one has been on a bunch of lists, and it's again, it's so beautiful that um you want to check it out, and then the gameplay is engaging and unique enough that you know you you keep pulling it out and showing it to people.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, no, it's so simple too.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_03: That's key.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I'm always to asking designers when they pitch to me is like, um, what are the hooks of the game?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then what are people gonna tell their friends about the game?
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, I when I come to game night and I say, Oh, you guys have to try this because it has whatever.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I need to be able to say what that thing is, you know, and that can be that can be hard to do sometimes.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: So with this one, you go like, okay, so it has amazing art, and I'm gonna score my point.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Points and your points.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they go like, huh?
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's different.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't heard that.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you can tell people more things about that.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's look at uh let's look at size-wise, which well, it takes about three seconds to teach.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's not a ton to say here, but what's the size of a bowling pin?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: What's the size of a mermaid's fin?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let's find out.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so everybody gets these strings.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's eight of them.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: They have a ring and the bead, and you slide it like this.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when they say what's the size of a bowling pin, you know, I might go, okay, it's like that.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody does that without being seen by other players.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you put the rings on this uh wooden thing.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: I sometimes say put the ring on the thing, and then you hang and compare.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: And okay, this person thought a bowling pin was they thought it was very small, let's be honest.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, everybody has a bunch of wisdom tokens, which are just little tokens with an owl on it and a question mark.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: And whoever is the shortest and the longest loses one of those.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: And um then you just dump these out on the table and you go again, and you go till someone loses their very last bit of wisdom, and then the wisest player wins for people with the most points left, wins the game.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the cards are uh like this.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: So sort of just one style-looking card, you know, I can't read it backwards and it's upside down for you.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_00: What's the size of a pickle?
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: What's the size of a mermaid's fin?
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: What's the size of a wig or a magic wand?
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the things that's important for people in our hobby is to know that there aren't, this isn't a trivia game, and it's not about knowing the right size.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is about knowing what your friends will think.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I wanted to put in things like what's the size of a wizard's beard or a magic scroll or an elven dagger, etc.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then we use a really simple system where the top of the deck looks like this, and you flip a card over, and then this tells you which one to use.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you don't have to choose.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: We know that this time we're using high heels.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: And when I played it, I played it with my five and a half-year-old nephew, as well as my oh, I don't know how old she is.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: Don't don't listen to Aunt Lisa.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: She's probably 75 or so, like maybe she's younger.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we all had fun.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's one again, it's like that's been on a lot of lists, and it's the kind of thing that nobody owns a game like it.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think every gamer will want to have that and can teach it to anyone in three seconds and play it and have just a ton of fun.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_03: That is, yeah, that's got such a good hook, and I think it's gonna be wildly popular.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is the hope.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you gotta sell games for a long time to make it worth it.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and uh hopefully that one does it for us.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_03: That's the evergreen right here.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_03: Let's hopeful.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_03: I feel it.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: If we can keep, you know, one evergreen per wave, I think we'll we'll come out ahead for a nice long time.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so wild magic um comes with this lovely fold-out wrapped edge board.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and this is just basically in the middle of the table, you're gonna put cards underneath these.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: These are the sort of six types of elemental magic.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: You have wall, I can't always remember.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's see, shadow craft, lava flow, lava flow, flame work, alchemy, cultivation, and water form.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and you can see at the bottom that there's different rarities.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there's not not as much shadowcraft as there is water form.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: And um, the cards are just basically those elemental resources in the different colors.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, water form cards, alchemy, and uh shadowcraft.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: And for each one, there's a two, a double strength one and a single strength one.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so you'll have, can I find a good example here?
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: You'll have like one piece of art for that guy, and then a strong piece of art for the for the other one.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: And on your turn, you you're gonna have a hand of cards, and you either, this will sound a little familiar, draw cards or take cards from the middle.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's similar to a pet quartet style thing, or herbaceous might be a slightly better example.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you are going to uh draw two cards from the deck and discard one to the middle into its pile.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no choice where you put it, it's just reds go with reds and purples go with purples.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, or if you want, you can draw two cards and play a meld.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And a meld is just a set of cards that's at least three cards, all the same color.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and of course, if you have if you have a wild magic, it can count as any color.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that will be your points for that color.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: So every icon is one point.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you want a lot of points because at the end of the round, oh, obviously you win, but at the end of the game, uh, whoever has the weakest of each color discards them.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I don't get to add to that.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if I meld three green, then okay, I melded green, that's good.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's three points, but everybody has sort of can see where I put my flag in the ground.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if they can get ahead of me, then I'm not getting those three points.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_00: I cannot add to that later.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: I can remeld green, but I would discard what's already there.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: So okay.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: So option one, draw two cards, discard one.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: Option two, draw two cards and go ahead and meld all from your hand.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or option three, take an entire pile of cards from the middle.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: So take like all the blue cards out of the middle.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: But if you do that, you have to play a meld.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it's sort of locking you down time-wise in terms of like, well, I want there's so many good blues there, but if I meld blue, it's not gonna be that much.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have that much blues in my hand.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then again, only one more person cares about blue because every people, other people have already melded it.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna take the blue.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe I can wait a little longer.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: And like Pet Quartet, it's a lot of looking around at what people have.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it also comes with these um screen printed tokens for the power tokens.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when you meld, if you have the strongest meld of that color, you claim the power token, which is like a couple bonus points.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another thing players are trying to vie for.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of giving me uh first giants vibes, too.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, right?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, and and Ethnos uh has a little mechanic mechanism like that.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last thing that is uh added to this game from Vampire is these guardian tokens, and the guardian tokens will give you different effects that will trigger on those um elements.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, like this guy might sit above the blue, and when you meld blue, you just get to take another turn.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this one might you know let you draw two cards from the deck or take two cards from the face-up pools.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's 12 of these things, so there's a lot.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but they're also double-sided.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the one that lets you draw two cards, if you decide to play it with its dark side, instead you have to pass two cards to the player on your right.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it becomes like a detriment instead of a benefit.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is that people will not want to meld this color, and so more and more cards will pile up in the in the middle, and so it gives a different sort of texture to the game where that's there.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite ones is uh Solari.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: Solari lets you perform the action of a different guardian, so it's sort of wild, and then it flips over, and then the next time it's melded, it swaps places with something.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can put things into locations to sort of meld them next time.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's also one that makes the power token worth extra points or maybe negative points, and you can move that around possibly to change which power token's gonna score.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that gives a lot of like the maestro tiles, uh, but probably stronger influence on the game, what kind of uh different vibe each gameplay is gonna have.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, one of my favorite games to play with my wife is called like spirits, spirits of the wild.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_02: And it's kind of that uh man call it, not mancala, but like set collection with the stones in the cup.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: And in the recent reprint, they like quadrupled the number of spirits that are spirits of the wild.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_02: Spirits of the wild, there you go.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I like the name too.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_02: That that yeah, I love that um kind of changing powers and that like affect your decisions.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_02: Man, that that's awesome.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that one's really fun.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: And again, you know, like all these games, it has has awesome, awesome art.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the stuff that we'll have at the booth in addition to our other stuff.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I should say, did I have them?
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have them?
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: Do I bring them?
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we have also some promos that people, if they're gonna be at Gen Con, can check out.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: We have a free promo for people that um bought Trinketro before or buy it at the place, and that is Willy, which is Steamboat Willy.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome inspired, or actually, he could be Steamboat Willy because Steamboat Willie is in the public domain.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, all the characters, of course, are merely inspired by other characters.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: We have Stilton, who is like Roquefort from The Aristocats, and also has the hat of like the Great Mouse detective.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: We have Bianca from The Rescuers would be her inspiration, and Bernard is in the original game, so they kind of get to go together.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have Cosgrove the Mole, inspired by Mr.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Mole from The Wind of the Willows, and also, you know, Mr.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: Toad's Wild Ride, let's say.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Thimble is uh inspired by Thumble.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh no, sorry, this is Thumble, inspired by Thimble from the Legends and Lattes book.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then my favorite is Philly, inspired by Five O'Mauskowitz from An American Tale.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_03: Excellent.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_03: Holy cow, I have not been brushing up on my mouse literature enough.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_03: You don't know the mouse?
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_03: I did not know all of I did not know a lot of those.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think I knew Steamboat Willy, but well, we have um we have another six in waiting for a wave two of these things.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: So all these were again, we're giving out Steamboat Willie for free, pretty much, but the other ones are two bucks each, ten for the set.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last one is uh an additional set of tokens for corky pileup.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this thing's three bucks, but it just lets you play with 10 players right out of the box, or just more pretty colors.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: So that's well, that's what'll be there.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I have one more thing to tease with you guys here.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: Give you a little scoop.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a game.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um I believe we're gonna have this at PAX this year.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because it's not enough to come out with five games in a year.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta do a couple more at least.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh there's some point tokens here, which are little wheels, but um, it's of course just prototype stuff.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a game by Taylor Reiner, who uh is a developer on the fellowship trick taking game and designed Sears Catalog.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm trying to think of what he's uh best known for.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_03: Otherwise, Maury, too, is a developer, right?
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, he does that, he does a lot of those games, and he um developed Lobby Snacks with me, which is a trick-taking game coming out from 25th century.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um so he's like he's like Mr.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_00: Trick Taking, you could say.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a game he designed.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is called Pit Stop Rally, and it was originally called Best at Another Time, it was about bats talking about movies.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it had kind of a funky Taylor-esque theme.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: But this one, you'll you'll recognize some of the um inspirations.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it is a race.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's a guy, sort of a coyote-looking guy, strapping rockets to his car, and we have a squirrel here with his acorn car.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's a little bit Looney Tunes inspired, a little bit wacky racers.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have um, in addition to Mr.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: Squirrel, we have a uh turtle on the you know tractor, getting pretty good speed down the road.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: We have the uh octopus in the submarine cruising pretty good.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's cool.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the last one is our sort of Diddy Kong inspired monkey on the banana with the coconut wheels.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um so this is a pretty simple standard climbing shedding game where um I play either a single card or like a set of the equal cards or a suited run of cards.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe I play two, three of the same color.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then Travis has to play a suited pair, a suited run of two cards that is higher than two, three.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe he plays five, six, and then it comes to Clay, and then he plays a eight, nine, and it comes back to me, and I pass because I can't play anymore.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe I just don't want to play.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is very common for how these things go, right?
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then you just are trying to stay in the round so you can keep playing cards.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: But what Taylor did, and what he did with his other game Sears catalog is he says, Let me take the painful part of one of these climbing shedding games and let me make it good.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_00: So usually passing sucks because now you can't play, and you're sort of like shedding games are races where you're trying to race towards getting all your cards and now you're just sitting behind.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: So instead, let's make it a pit stop, which is good and might actually let you um catch up.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: So these tiles will go into the middle of the table.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let me find some good ones.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_00: They'll go into the middle of the table.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when you pass, you choose one.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can take this tile, and now you're gonna lead the next, the next, you know, trick, you would call it.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: But um, when everybody has passed, you're gonna be able to start the next one, which means you're gonna decide if we're playing threes of a kind or playing singles or whatever, or you can take a wild card, which obviously you'll be able to play as anything you want.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: The wilds look like this, which is why Mr.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: Wild Coyote here was trying to strap a rocket onto his car.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so when you pass, yeah, you're taking a break, but you might be fueling up your car to do really well.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's also another type of wild you can play with, which are zeros, and zeros kind of beat the best card in the game.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say that we're playing and the highest cards are 17.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: If Travis plays something that, like maybe he plays a pair of 17s, I can play a pair of zeros to sort of start everything back down.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things in this game is that um a lot of shedding games, when everybody passes except one player, it stops and you start over, you know?
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but this is like a race.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so if everybody takes a pit stop, I can just keep on racing towards the finish.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so if everybody's out, maybe we're playing singles and it goes Travis plays 13 and Clay plays uh 15 and I play 17, and then Travis passes, and then Clay passes, and then I play a zero, and we're back, and it's just me, and I go two, three, seven, nine, and I just play my whole cards out like that.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: So um you can keep on racing and see if you can finish it up.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: When you play with four players or more, you can start betting on each other.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh and so that means when you take this action, you'll put one of your three betting tokens on a player, and when they uh finish the race, when they lose all their cards, go out, then you'll score some points based on how many people they beat in the race.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so um you can actually do that to the point where I've been on clay so much that uh I might come out ahead when he when he actually finishes the race.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then there'll be one promo card, uh, well, promo tile, which is the discard a meld tile, and you have a crocodile driving a croc-like car.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a little sneak preview of pit stop rally again from Taylor Reiner with art by the incomparable Alicia Jiroux of Friendly Fishing.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds great.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds awesome.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_03: Paul, I am fired up.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_03: I I mean, you your catalog speaks to me so much in the games I like.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, it's so cool to have you on.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_03: And will I see you both at Gen Con or what?
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_03: No, unfortunately not.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um but we are we are planning on go to PAX.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll have all these at PAX and hopefully uh one to three more because I just finished the rule book on a game called This or That Showdown, and listeners of Decision Space will know about that.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sort of uh uh green team wins style be in the majority groupthink game, but with a single elimination bracket.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's really, really, really fun.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then also um, I should say that from April Mitchell, and then also a game designed by Alex Hart, who is the board game Somalier, might I suggest a game on social media?
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this is an improv style storytelling game.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's a lot like Wilmot's warehouse, but easier to get into.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you come up with a setting like maybe a um the DMV or uh a like a fortune teller's first reading, stuff like that.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then you flip over these cards with art on them and you say what they'll be.
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_00: So like one of them might be round, so you say it's a crystal ball, and you flip over another one and it looks like a fork, and you say it's a fork.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then you take those cards along with other ones, and one at a time you flip them out and start telling a story about what's happening.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the cards you've seen before, you play face down.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have to like, when I say magic ball, try to remind you that this is the magic ball card because the very last card will be one that we saw before, but didn't see this round.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we have to, right before we get it, I'll try to sketch a little picture of what it is and then flip it over.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we go, oh, it was the fork.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if if anybody was able to remember that and sort of hit the punchline, then we get to keep going.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: We do one more round, and all of the cards we saw before are face down.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we build the whole story out again, leading up to one big final punchline.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if you do that well, you get to write the name of your sketch on this sheet, and if you do it perfectly, you get to write the name of your improv troop on the inside of the box.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_03: Nice.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's great.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I I remember playing this at PAX.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_03: You were I I did get a preview of a lot of these games at PAX.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_03: I think all of them, I yeah, pretty much all of them except for the pit stop game, uh wasn't there.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, Paul Rapid fired me and my wife through these.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_03: And I still remember something about a grandpa and maybe a pastry when we played that game.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_03: So I mean it really it's it sticks with you when you when you get that.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_03: It's crazy.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the lines in the in the rule book, it's explaining, you know, it's explaining the goals, and then there's all these speech bubbles of people, and and someone goes like, oh wait, there's memory in this.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the the next bubble is like, yes, and we're gonna tell a story that's completely unforgettable.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really true.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, you remember the stories that you told, like, you know, months later, because it's really fun and memorable.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_02: I I I know that you guys have talked about this on Decision Space, but like the party games that really thrive are the ones that get you talking after the game is over, right?
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_02: About like, why did you think that a bowling pin was only six inches tall?
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_02: Or like, how did you how did you figure out that that was the fork that was face down?
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: And those decisions that come after the game is over is what makes those games stand out and last, you know, for generations, you know?
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_02: That's amazing.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_03: Cool.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Paul, can I just give you my quick rundown of some feedback?
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um from the first wave, yeah.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_03: My favorites were Trinket Trove, uh in line with the public there on that one.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_03: That one's so much so much fun.
• 1:04:14
  SPEAKER_03: And then No Loose Ends, obviously.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_03: For sure.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_03: And after getting demoed all these and hearing you talk about them again, I think Pet Quartet and Wild Magic are gonna be right up my alley and get a ton of playtime.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I know size-wise is gonna be the like party games go through phases for me, like because I get sick of party games after so long.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but all the people, all my family members, like that's what they want to play.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_03: So every so often I get, you know, I went from just one to so clover, right?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_03: And we've been playing things and rings, but I feel like size-wise is gonna have a pretty substantial run as the party game of choice when I'm around.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm real, I'm really excited about this.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_03: And Trick to the Future is obviously gonna be awesome, too.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's gonna really rock for you.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, man.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I brought the whole game head suite to um my Christmas vacation.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_02: We like rented a house with my family.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_02: We played through all of them, and even those that don't play games loved games like No Lose Ends.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_02: Even like they have never really even played trick taking.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_02: They're able to get into it and understand the concept of like, I gotta cover these up because I bet that I was gonna, you know.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so that one was a success.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the venture capitalist was a success.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Venture Angels.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_02: Venture Angels, I'm sorry.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_02: That's good.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_02: And uh yeah, Trick It Trobe, of course.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone fell in love with the art and and loves all the cute characters, and we're all talking about like, where's this one from?
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_02: And uh man, I'm gonna have to buy that uh those promos eventually to add to the box for sure.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then we just uh I can't remember the organization that we partnered with, but we just um worked with an organization and sent them 250 copies of Foolish Fool to put in like these care boxes to send to troops to play.
• 1:05:59
  unknown: Oh.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: So Operation Tabletop?
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that I don't know, but it sounds like it could be.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_02: Dang, that's awesome.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we just had uh we just had the guys from Operation Tabletop on the podcast, and they do something similar, kind of like giving back to veterans through board gaming.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_02: And they were right up our alley.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, thank you for supporting our service members.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_02: Do you want to talk at all about uh lobby snacks?
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, sure.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_02: I'd love to.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't think I have my prototype.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know where it is.
• 1:06:34
  SPEAKER_00: It might be at school.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_00: But um my copy of uh Lobby Snacks, it has my name on it, it says, you know, by Paul Solomon with Taylor Reiner, which is a way to sort of like give him a nod for doing so much with the game and put him on the cover of the box, even though he's not the designer.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but when I had Taylor sign it, and this is not a finished copy, um, I had him write his his signature over my name.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that's like a fun.
• 1:07:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so Lobby Snacks is uh my trick-taking game that I designed as I sort of like got into all these Taiki Shinzawa games, and my buddy Pete showed me all these games.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a uh, roughly speaking, it is a trick-taking version of like high society or QE.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: It has that big twist where the core idea was um win tricks, but don't win too much, because if you kind of win too many tricks, you bust and you don't get any points.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the way that that actually works out is there are three suits.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are um popcorn, candy, and soda.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_00: And you're going to see a movie, you want to get good snacks, but don't spend too much on the snacks, or you won't be able to afford a ticket to the movie.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: So um in the center of the table, there are some prize cards which range in value from one to five, and they show a suit on them.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it might be a two-point soda, and that soda will be the trump for that one trick.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody plays a card, but this is may follow.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you can play any card you want all the time.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_00: So if I lead Candy and the Trump is soda, you can just play a soda, and that's that's fine.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um when you win a trick, you take the prize card and every other player's card and you put it in your score pile.
• 1:08:21
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those are points for you.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and as you might imagine, smalls are like one point and mediums are two, and larges are three.
• 1:08:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the card that you played, it goes in your spent pile face up.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so, in other words, maybe I won with a large soda, but I spent three bucks to get those uh cards that I won, right?
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: So then we play another trick, flipping over more cards.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_00: So everybody's winning tricks, and every card that you win with is face up in front of you in your spent pile.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, at the end of the round, whoever spent the most winning tricks gets no points.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're the big spender.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so again, like some of these other games, it's a lot of like looking at how much people have spent and are they going to want to win any more tricks?
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:09:09
  SPEAKER_00: Can I afford to spend a lot to win this trick?
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is it worth it?
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's some cards that are negative value.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you play those, like an empty candy wrapper, um, a crumpled up soda um cup, if you play those, it actually lowers the value of that trick for someone's score pile.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can win with a negative card, because maybe it's Trump, um, that actually lowers your spent value.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's really cool already on its own.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then if you bust, uh, yeah, you spent so much that you didn't get points this round, but what you did get was like a VIP rewards card.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so now you get a card in your hand that you can play to win any trick uh with a$1 spend.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like a super trump.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_00: We know you will have to spend it, um, and that can be very good.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like some tables will find that so powerful that maybe players will try to win as many tricks as they can in the first round so that they can get it, thinking it will swing them back, of course.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: But if Travis is gonna win as many tricks as he can, then I can win as many tricks as I want and go just under his spent value and still rack up a lot of points, right?
• 1:10:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very interactive and and dynamic.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's I think it's still in crowdfunding with 25th century games on the um Tigris and Euphrates, right?
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Tigris and Euphrates, yes, campaign, and uh, you know, it'll it'll fill it'll fulfill when it fulfills here in the in a while.
• 1:10:35
  SPEAKER_02: I already backed it, so I'm eagerly anticipating my copy.
• 1:10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only 10 bucks on the campaign, which is like a really time me up.
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, did you back Tigris in Euphrates Travis?
• 1:10:48
  SPEAKER_00: I have never played Tigris and Euphrates Travis.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Did you get it?
• 1:10:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I backed it.
• 1:10:54
  SPEAKER_03: I got it behind me, the old one, but I've I can't say that I've played it to the extent that it deserves.
• 1:11:00
  SPEAKER_02: I've only played it a couple times, but yeah, and it sounds like they added highly they added some stuff to kind of streamline it a little bit, okay, akin to yellow and yancy a bit.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_02: So sure, yeah.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm I'm curious to see.
• 1:11:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, those productions are always gorgeous, but yeah, curious to uh get my hands on it and see all that they added in.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they crushed it on raw.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_02: So I know unbelievable.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's my favorite game.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you've listened to the podcast, so you know, but I I met um Chad, the owner of 25th Century Games, because when Ra was crowdfunding, I was incredibly obnoxiously saying it every turn, like, you've got to do Priests of Ra, make the Priests of Ra.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like the standalone uh sequel.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta put those tiles in, and it never happened, but uh it may.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I did back the dice game, which they're gonna have Ra the Dice game, they're gonna have at um Gen Con.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not that I'll be able to pick it up, it's gonna be shipped to me.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's not like their uh their import collections that they bring back, those are really cool.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_02: They do a lot of those, and so like some weird games that have been lost to time and you know reiterated on and have kind of fallen by the wayside that they bring back and make new, and that I played them a couple times and I send them to Clay or Jared, but yeah, uh man, what a what a cool concept to just like kickstart old games.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_03: I love it.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_03: Hey, one last tough question for you, Paul.
• 1:12:24
  SPEAKER_03: In the world of all these great board game publishers, what is is what's your niche and what is the strategic vision of game head?
• 1:12:32
  unknown: Yeah.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_03: Where where do you see yourself like really slotting in?
• 1:12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for now, it's all these$20 games that we say they're 5 520, which is like five minute setup, five minute teach, 20-minute play.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're like 20 to 40.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that primarily is a really consistent thing for folks to understand about what we're making.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah party games, casual games, thinking games.
• 1:12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but as the sort of person signing all the games, doing all the art direction, I want to make stuff uh that feels a little bit timeless, that we think could be on a shelf for a long time.
• 1:13:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's not like I don't know, this month's worker placement game that has a hook that is kind of special.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so many things get made in the world and put out there and end up in landfills or wherever that I want to make sure I want to make sure we make stuff that kind of deserves to be around and deserves to be on people's tables.
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh really, really charming games that a lot of folks can can enjoy.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think you're I think you're nailing it in the first two waves here.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I just didn't know if you know if you ever got like an itch to be like, maybe I'm gonna publish this massive Euro just as a as a crazy yeah, crazy like publishing goal for game 10.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, my start as a designer was like$40 plus larger games, like uh Honey Buzz, I think it might be$50 or more now, but that's a bigger table, you know, medium weight euro.
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then I did um Genotype, which is probably even heavier, bigger table, and periodic is still uh more expensive and and big.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then Santa's Workshop also is big.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_00: I developed that.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so we have had some ideas for$40 games, and um the$40 games will be in uh this size box, double wide box, and so it'll still fit in our displays and it'll still fit on your shelf alongside these other things.
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they fit two wide in a calyx, and so that'll yeah, that'll be good.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the I had one lined up that I thought I was gonna do, and I decided not to publish it, but I have a Kenitsia game lined up to be our first$40 game that is uh in development now, and it will be called Squirrel Scouts.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh, Squirrel Scouts is uh it's a re-implementation of the Tower of Babel.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:15:12
  SPEAKER_00: So if you know that game at all, we're gonna be uh there's four resource cards, and they are like, I think they're courage, uh creativity, uh kindness, and effort.
• 1:15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And um, there are different projects that you can work on, like making cookies or building something or a charity thing over here or whatever.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so players have a hand of these cards and they choose a project to go work on.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna try to earn a merit badge by contributing to the cooking of brownies.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so the cooking of brownies requires like maybe five effort or something, right?
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I ask people if they want to help me.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I say, does anybody want to contribute effort to help me make the brownies?
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if they do, then I can take their cards and I don't have to spend my cards.
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's nice.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a little area majority there that they'll get some participation in, some credit, essentially.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'll get the merit badge, and that's good.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the key hooks here is that if they make an offer to me and they're generous, and I say, no thanks, I don't need you, they get brownie points anyway.
• 1:16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so you'll earn points for rejected offers, which means sometimes I want to offer a lot to you just so that you'll reject it, and I can score points and keep my cards.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there's uh an interesting catch there.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_00: The theme is obviously sort of uh it's it's not like a Tigris and Euphrates type of theme here.
• 1:16:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not seven wonders of the world theme, it's Squirrel Scouts, and I hope that that won't lose people, but I think the gameplay, I think this actually can be a really awesome family game.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: It can be like a gateway game where people are again attracted by the art and the theme.
• 1:17:04
  SPEAKER_00: The box can is gonna kind of look like a Girl Scout cookie box, and um because it's that shape, and then um, but then they'll play it and it has sort of this Catan-esque trading of cards and really simple objectives, and you're trying to set collect on these merit badges to get points along with other stuff.
• 1:17:25
  SPEAKER_02: Nice.
• 1:17:26
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds incredible.
• 1:17:27
  SPEAKER_03: Consider me teased, yeah.
• 1:17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Squirrel scouts, yeah.
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I uh once upon a time I went into a game store and they had Camp Pine Top, and it's uh the art hooked me immediately.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, it's a game about scouts at a summer camp.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and uh it yeah.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_02: If just like that, yeah, yeah, themes and and art and the combination of which can get somebody interested in a subject, like even if it's like order fulfillment and uh seven wonders builder games disguised as something else.
• 1:18:01
  SPEAKER_02: Man, I man, I'm so fired up.
• 1:18:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm all tongue-tied.
• 1:18:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my goodness.
• 1:18:06
  SPEAKER_02: Should we go over the fence, Clayton?
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's go over the fence.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_02: We we could talk to you, Paul, all day uh about games, but I want to hear what else you've been doing outside of board gaming.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 1:18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, I mean, this is slightly board games, but I I did like a board game camp with kids over the summer, and that was really that was fun.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Usually that's like actually the hardest that I work all year because I teach 50% and then I do full-time board games, and then in the summer, there are these two weeks where I do full-time board games and full-time camp.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's like too much.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_00: But this year it was it was more manageable.
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what else have I been doing?
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's like the middle of the summer, right?
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm about as far away from teaching as I can be.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I just had my first uh stress dream game about the school year where um, and you get these every year.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_00: This was early for me, but uh I was at a different school.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was it's not, it's was not really like a real school in the St.
• 1:19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Louis area, but it was sort of inspired by some.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_00: The kids were not nice.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_00: This is always a key part of the of the stress dreams.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, luckily, it was just a stress dream.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I just saw the Odyssey, which I thought was really, really good.
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was awesome.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think I was more thrilled with it in the theater than on on like when I left, but definitely go in the theater, go check it out.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: It is awesome.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Odyssey is just such a cool story, you know, it's such a cool thing.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that that was awesome.
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last thing, if you guys have never seen Nirvana, the band, the show, the movie, but yeah, it is so good.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_00: It is sounds like you've seen it, Travis.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Clay, you have not seen it.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_03: No, I have not seen it, but I've got two-thirds of this podcast telling me I should.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the best experience you can have with this movie is to know basically nothing about it, and which I think is what I knew.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then go in and watch the movie.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it is like, first of all, it is just really funny.
• 1:20:12
  SPEAKER_00: These guys are really funny, and the writing is so clever, like the things that they put together are so clever, and I guess you know, here's what I will tell you is that Nirvana the Band is a band in a sketch, okay?
• 1:20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like a YouTube sketch, Nirvana the Band.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then, uh, and you've seen these guys before, by the way.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_00: They have some like memes that show up on things, but uh, and then they had a like a TV show or something, or they had like a web show.
• 1:20:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that was Nirvana the Bon the Banda Show in like 2009 or something, or like two, whatever, like way a long time ago.
• 1:20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And now they have the movie, and um this connects to those other things.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's basically all you need to know.
• 1:21:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, all right, yeah.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's streaming now.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think it might have just come to Hulu.
• 1:21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's get you and let's get the listeners the answer to that.
• 1:21:09
  SPEAKER_00: And Ravion of the Band, the show, the movie now streaming on Hulu.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, perfect.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, because I paid money, but you don't have to.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_03: I don't have to, as long as I have Hulu, which I do.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_03: I am I I've signed up for everything.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_03: So that's it.
• 1:21:24
  SPEAKER_03: There you go.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_03: That's gonna be on the watch list.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_02: How about you guys?
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Anything over the fence for you?
• 1:21:29
  SPEAKER_02: Clay, don't embarrass me in front of Paul.
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_02: Did you finish your audiobook this week?
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_02: I did.
• 1:21:35
  SPEAKER_03: I finished seriously, and my accountability last week worked because I was sitting there, and you know what, Paul?
• 1:21:43
  SPEAKER_03: I hate to tell you this, yeah, but I had I I was mowing and I wanted to listen to Decision Space.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, I was listening to the deck episode.
• 1:21:51
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, no, I gotta tell Truth out.
• 1:21:55
  SPEAKER_03: I told him I'd finish this audiobook.
• 1:21:57
  SPEAKER_03: First one I finished in a long time.
• 1:21:59
  SPEAKER_03: I'm a notorious at quitting audiobooks.
• 1:22:01
  SPEAKER_03: What's the book?
• 1:22:02
  SPEAKER_03: It is Shoe Dog.
• 1:22:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh okay, I don't know.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_03: It's by Phil Knight.
• 1:22:06
  SPEAKER_03: He's the uh founder of Nike.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, and it's just kind of a memoir of his life and starting up Nike and everything he went through.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_03: So it was good.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_03: I'm glad I finished it.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_03: I I have a sense of accomplishment, I have a sense of appreciation for Nike.
• 1:22:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think as I'm a brand loyalist, so now that I've just done that, I'll just be a Nike guy from here on out.
• 1:22:27
  SPEAKER_03: So that's awesome.
• 1:22:28
  SPEAKER_03: You can expect to see that on all my stuff.
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_03: But I do have one more exciting over the fence.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_03: I saw Hades Town in there was a five-day theatrical release of the original Broadway cast.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_03: I had never heard of this, but I think musicals are starting to become my thing.
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_03: I've become in the last couple years, just my eyes were just like blown wide open.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_03: I saw Hamilton, and then I like it's just like, wow, you people can do that with music and just like a stage.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
• 1:22:59
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I saw my local high school did Hades Town a few months ago, and I was like, this was amazing.
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_03: I could not believe one, they were so talented, and two, it was an incredible story.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_03: And then just so happens they came out with this theatrical release of it.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's out for five days, maybe like it ends tomorrow or something.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_03: But um, I saw that last night, and just my god, I am just blown away every time I watch a musical.
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_03: It just and this one was so good.
• 1:23:29
  SPEAKER_03: The songs are catchy, the story's great.
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's about Orpheus and Eurydice, it's like a Greek myth.
• 1:23:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but yeah, told with like a New Orleans jazzy type music.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, super good.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_03: Recommend seeing, I'm sure it'll be out on streaming eventually.
• 1:23:44
  SPEAKER_03: But if you can't make it to uh New York or wherever they do these things for real, uh try and catch the streaming of that because it was before the show.
• 1:23:52
  SPEAKER_00: We were talking about stuff that has like 100% on rotten tomatoes, and this was on the list.
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it was the most recent thing with 100.
• 1:23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:00
  SPEAKER_03: Dang, yeah, it's really good.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_03: What about you, Travis?
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so I finished my long read for the first half of the year, which was Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurdy, which is a uh that's like his seminal work.
• 1:24:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, he has a bunch of other westerns that are kind of in the same universe, uh, but Lonesome Dove is his like monolith that stands alone as his like shining star of authorship.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's about a group of cowboys that take 3,000 cattle and they move them from Lonesome Dove, Texas, which is on the Mexico border, and they herd them up to Montana to start a ranch in the unsettled territory of Montana.
• 1:24:44
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it's a long one, it's like 103 chapters, which makes me feel like an eight-year-old telling me you how many chapters I read.
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_02: But uh man, what a phenomenal book.
• 1:24:55
  SPEAKER_02: I had started it multiple times before, never was able to push through.
• 1:25:00
  SPEAKER_02: I think I got to like maybe when they started the drive, which is I don't know, 10 chapters in or something.
• 1:25:05
  SPEAKER_02: I finally did it, I pushed all the way through.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_02: And the second you like I was right there, you know the meme where the guy's like digging and he's about to get to the gyms, but like stops and turns back.
• 1:25:15
  SPEAKER_02: That was me because the point that I stopped all those times was right when the turning point and the hook happens and things start happening to these characters.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there is a mini-series that was developed a long time ago by maybe MGM Studios, came out in like 1989 starring Tommy Lee Jones.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um I would say that the the mini-series does not do it justice because there's so much going on in these characters' lives, and to see it played out in like maybe four hours in a mini-series just does not capture the gravity of some of these situations that these characters end up in.
• 1:25:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I I really enjoyed it.
• 1:25:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm already on to my next read, which is um Winter Snow by Yu-Kiyo shakashi.
• 1:26:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so I went west to east, so I did not mean to do that, but I did it.
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and Winter Snow is the first book in a uh tetrology from Yukih Mashaki.
• 1:26:16
  SPEAKER_02: You're doing your best.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yukio, yeah.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yukio wrote a tetrology called like the Sea of Fertility, and this is the first uh the first book in that series.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_02: So I don't know if I'll read the whole series, but I want to get through this one first and see if I like it.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_02: And then the other thing that I wanted to brief is that uh my uh daughter is almost two years old, and she woke up this morning and she I said, What do you want to do today?
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_02: And she said, I want to bake a cake.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so when your two-year-old daughter asks you to go bake a cake, you go out and you buy some cake mix and you bake a cake.
• 1:26:51
  SPEAKER_02: So we baked a cake today, and it was great.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I want to say that there's there's never a bad time to just bake a birthday cake for nobody in particular.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_02: Just go make yourself a birthday cake and eat it because it's great.
• 1:27:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's cool.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, happy.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, before we go here, guys, I want to give a quick shout out to uh Stack Up.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is the military charity that we worked with combating veteran suicide through gaming.
• 1:27:15
  SPEAKER_00: So, shout out Stack Up and everybody over there that's gonna get foolish fool.
• 1:27:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, great.
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:27:22
  SPEAKER_02: Did we do it?
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_03: I think we did it.
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_02: Paul, you want to give one last shout out to where you're gonna where people can find you at Gen Connect.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, come to Gen Con.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_00: We've gonna have a hanging banner so you can find us across the hall.
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Gamehead booth 1629.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to our 11 titles, we will have pins.
• 1:27:41
  SPEAKER_00: We have actually a trinket trove pin, we have the uh Axl Rose Pec Quartet pin, we have another elephant pin that I'm not sure exactly what it's from.
• 1:27:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have all of our incredible playmats as well, Gen Con exclusives, lots of stuff.
• 1:27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we will have a giant size-wise to demo as well.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is two times as big.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you got six foot strings, and you can do stuff like what's the size of a pig?
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_00: What's the size of a mini fridge?
• 1:28:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um, that's really fun.
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hope to see you guys there.
• 1:28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for having me on.
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_02: For Operation Game Night, I've been Travis, he has been Clay, he's been the one and only Paul Solomon from Game Head Games.
• 1:28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Paul, thank you for joining us.
• 1:28:26
  SPEAKER_02: I am so fired up for Gamehead Wave 2.
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh hopefully we can run into you at um PAX Unplugs.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_00: No question.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, all right.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get out of here.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for listening.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_02: Like and subscribe, and we will catch you next week.