Latest / Operation Game Night / A Local Game Store Gets A Second Life

Transcript

A Local Game Store Gets A Second Life · Operation Game Night

• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast, the podcast that is dedicated to getting you to play more board games.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Travis Smith.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Joining me as always is my co-host, Clayton Gable.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Today we are joined by a very special guest, CJ from Let's Play Games and Hobbies in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna hear from him, but first gather your crew, clear the table, put your battle rattle on.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's time for Operation Game Night.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Clay, how you doing?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_04: I'm doing good.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_04: I I did you committed to this new intro.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: Uh I like that.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for that.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_04: I'm good.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_04: I'm excited to have CJ on here today.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_04: CJ, formally welcome from me.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: He's been picking my pockets there in Hanover for the past year.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_04: That's that's my my go-to place to spend my birthday money, my Christmas money.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_04: Anytime I have extra money, I'm hoofing it down to Hanover to see CJ and his crew at Let's Play Games and Hobbies.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: So, how are you doing, CJ?
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: I'm doing well.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you guys for having me on.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_04: Of course, he's not only a board game store owner, he's also a fellow podcaster.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_04: So be sure to hey, you know, I I've been I listened to them, they were good.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Quite a bit of a hiatus here.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think our last one was in March before Gamma.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, sometimes sometimes it's hard to get these things out.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: We'll get back to it.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh let's uh go first.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to uh debrief our week in gaming, then we're going to hear CJ's story and let's play's story, and then we'll go over the fence and talk about what we have been doing outside of board gaming.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: Clay, why don't you kick us off?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me what you've been playing this week.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_04: You know what, Travis?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_04: I would love to.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_04: I have been playing what might be a hot new game.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: Um, let me bring this up on the share screen here.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_04: So I've been playing hell of a deal.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_04: This is the latest cooperative poker style game.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_04: Uh comes to you from, let's see, Cameron Reed and published by Smirk and Dagger, art by Leon Lim.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_04: Lim, yes, Lim's good.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, so it I don't know.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_04: This, this, I was drawn to this.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_04: I had birthday money.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um, my wife got me a gift card, and I was like, you know, this was kind of a big production.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_04: It's like a$70 game.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_04: I was feeling myself normal.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_04: I've been I've been picking up a lot of low card games, a lot of this, a lot of that, and hell of a deal just was really calling to me.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_04: I like the gang, but I don't play the gang that much.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_04: So I don't know what made me think all of a sudden cooperative poker was really gonna take off for me.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I don't really have a lot of poker players in my life, is the problem.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_04: Every time I play the gang, it's like I'm playing with people that don't understand that two pairs are pretty good.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_04: And and they're like, you know, everybody's like crapping on their hands.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_04: It's hard to determine the rank order of your hands in the gang.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_04: But in this one, what you're doing is you're going through like a little boss battler.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_04: So you go through six rounds trying to get through all these bosses and hell of a deal.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_04: And the way it works is that each boss has like a minimum hand strength.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_04: So you start out, you see like worst case scenario, the boss you're gonna face, misfortune or whatever, she's got a three of a kind, and they're queens.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_04: So you know throughout the course of you know playing this hand of poker, you have to at least be able to beat that, or you're going to lose the round.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_04: So, how it works is everybody's dealt their pocket.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_04: And in this game, you get a pocket with an extra card.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_04: So you got a card up your sleeve, so you get three cards as opposed to your normal two, and then you do a bet.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_04: You say, All right, I want to stay in, I think based on what I have in my pocket, I can contend with the minimum hand there for the boss.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_04: So everybody goes around, you bet.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and then you go into oh, let me reference my thing here because I always forget there's like specific poker terms for this.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_04: Then you have the flop.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_04: This is the exciting part where now you see what the community cards are.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_04: So you throw three cards out on the table.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_04: This is where you get your most information.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_04: You're like, okay, now things are looking good.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_04: I might have a flush here because I've got two clubs in my hand.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_04: I see two clubs out there.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_04: Let's rock and roll.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so you then you get another chance to bet.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_04: Then you do the turn, which is flipping one more card over for the community.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_04: I Travis, I don't know why you're laughing.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_04: I just I'm describing poker.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_04: People might not know poker.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_04: I maybe played Texas Hold'em like five times in my life growing up.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_04: So these words are novel to me.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_04: I might continue, Clark.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_04: Continue.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_04: So there's the turn, you bet, there's the river, you bet again.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_04: The river is also one more card revealed.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: So at the end of the day, you have five cards in the community.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_04: You have your three cards in your hand.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_04: You can make a poker hand using two of the cards in your hand.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_04: So even though you have three, you can only use two, and whatever's in the community.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_04: And then you do the showdown.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_04: You see if you actually beat the boss's hand.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_04: So the boss was also dealt a hand of cards.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_04: What they end up with is almost never better than what their minimum hand strength is.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_04: So you that's I played three times now.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_04: I've never seen the boss get just dealt a better hand than what they have on their starting card.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_04: So usually if you can beat that, you're in pretty good shape.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and then you do your penalties and rewards.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_04: So the goal of this game is to get souls, I think.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_04: Kind of you're getting souls in order to get through the final boss, but it's kind of a weird system where the first four bosses, it doesn't really matter if you lose all your souls.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_04: Like if you lose to the boss, you have to pay a penalty of two souls per person for everybody that lost to the boss.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: Well, if you don't have enough souls to pay in the first four bosses, it doesn't matter at all.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_04: So you're you're don't it doesn't really matter until four, five, and six.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_04: If you don't have souls to pay when you lose in those, then you actually lose the game.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_04: You also can lose the game by getting all the way up on this temptation track.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_04: So the track goes to 10, and the temptation track allows you to you know do things like cheat, play favor cards.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you're gonna end up taking temptation when you lose hands, when you fold.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: So you're kind of managing that temptation track.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_04: There's ways to heal and do things throughout the course of the the six bosses to manage that track.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but that's another way you can lose if all the players are at the tenth space.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_04: I think um it's something like that.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_04: Um and yeah, you got curses, you got favor cards.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_04: So it's really clever.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_04: What I like the most is the betting system.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_04: So you're not really betting like a normal poker game.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_04: When you bet, your bets are to take actions, kind of.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: So you have a bunch of different betting chips.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_04: So you have betting chips that are gonna allow you to gain souls if you win.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_04: That's kind of standard.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_04: If I bet two souls and then win the round, I get two souls to add to the community pot that everybody's pulling from.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_04: If and then the other betting chips are the ones that kind of let you cheat.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_04: So you can place a favor bet in your bet area, and that lets you draw a new favor card.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_04: These favor cards give you abilities like you can treat clubs in your hands like spades, you can treat hearts like this.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_04: So they're just ways to kind of work around making your hand stronger so that you can hopefully beat the bosses.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_04: You've got devilish offering bets that you can do, which there's four devilish offerings that can let you go through the discard pile and take a card out of there.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_04: So maybe you saw the perfect card you needed, went to the discard pile.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_04: You place your devilish offering bet.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_04: Now I can go through the discard pile.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_04: I can add that to my already three cards in my hand.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_04: The thing I don't like, and it's kind of confusing, is that you get you there's ways to like keep getting more cards in your hand, but for the most part, you can only ever use two.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_04: So it can get confusing that you're like, oh man, I got like I've got like a flush right here in my hand, but you can only use two of them.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_04: Some cards that allow you to, you know, manipulate that.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_04: But that's kind of the crux of the whole thing.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_04: It you're you're placing bets that like allow you to take these actions, letting you reveal cards to your um teammates, um, you know, doing these type of things, letting you heal your temptation.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_04: And then when you lose, on the reverse side of the bet chip is what your penalty is.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_04: So if I bet to um reveal two cards, and then I ended up losing that hand to the boss, you flip over that bet chip and you like take the penalty that's on there.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_04: So maybe you take a curse card, maybe you take temptation, whatever it is.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_04: So you're kind of pushing your luck because the longer you stay in the round, the more bets you make, the more chances you have to have bad things happen to you at the end.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's not fun, but sometimes, just like in regular poker, you have to fold early on in the round.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_04: Like you get dealt your first three cards and you're playing against somebody and you're like, I mean, I almost never you know fold in that pre-flop, but um you could and you kind of mitigate the damage that might happen from you know betting something early.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_04: When you fold, you still have to suffer the penalties of losing to the boss.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_04: So if there was a sole penalty for losing to the boss, you still suffer it, but you just have less of those um chip penalties to deal with.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_04: And then you also roll a die when you fold that actually can give you like favor cards, but usually it's just bad stuff that happens.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_04: So, anyway, all this is happening.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_04: You're trying to get through all six bosses, you're playing poker, you're being clever, trying to manipulate your hands, trying to dig through discard piles, work with your teammates to just uh make it happen.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_04: So that's hell of a deal.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_04: I'm kind of up in the air on this.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_04: I I like a lot of what's going on.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_04: Biggest thing I like is the production.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_04: The production out of this world, it comes with like six neoprene playmats for everything.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_04: It's got nice, hefty poker chips.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_04: Like the production is just otherworldly, and the gameplay is actually pretty smooth once you get into it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_04: The first round through it was kind of like, well, what's this do?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_04: What's that do?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and it's the procedurality of it all.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but once you've played through a few losses, like you really get into a groove with it.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_04: CJ, have you played this?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_04: I know this was at your store.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't buy it there.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: I hate to say it, but my god, I can't believe it.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: I know, I know.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was about to say I don't remember you picking this one up when you're talking about it.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had already gotten it somewhere else.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_04: My bad.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yes, I have played this several times actually.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this is one of my most anticipated of the of the year.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I saw it at Gamma earlier.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, I picked it up at I actually backed it on Kickstarter.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: And when I went to Gen Con, they had it for sale, and I still didn't didn't have my copy yet.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I have bad FOMO and you know, a very very impatient person, so I bought a copy.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad I did because it sold out.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um I am glad and I'm not glad.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm glad I did because it sold out like two hours later.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm not so glad because I didn't play it until after my Kickstarter copy actually arrived.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: But now the store has a copy.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if you'd like, you can come in and just play it at the store for free.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what are your thoughts?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Did I miss anything there?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was Oh no, you explained it really well.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it is it's a beautiful game.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: They put a lot of care into the production of the game, the components.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was blown about blown away by the components, actually.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's very, very nicely done.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't I was surprised to steal the near free mask.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I shouldn't have been because I backed the Kickstarter, but that would assume that I actually read everything that went in there, didn't just see a cool game and hit bye, which is what I mostly do.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: How would it always go?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I've got a Kickstarter upstairs right now, and I uh it's a giant box.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I like this big, I don't even know what's in it.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it says Elder Scrolls on the side, so I'm assuming it's betrayal, but we'll see.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_04: Heck yeah.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_04: Dang, that's sweet.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_04: So uh has have you enjoyed this game as much as the hype has been around it?
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_04: Uh this is so last year was kind of like the year of trick-taking games.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: This year has been really the year of poker likes, is what we uh call them around the shop.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So you got like the gang, which maybe didn't come out this year, but it kind of got a resurgence in our store this year.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's this, there's a game called All In, uh, new game I got, Deco, which is basically just Bellatro, which that's been a lot of fun.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I completely forgot about that.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Somebody came on and talked about that a while ago, and I was so excited about it.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, what about uh Ace of Spades?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, is that poker ish?
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's it's kind of the same thing, like the the you're trying to beat a certain number of points with your hand, and it sounds like there's some similar systems where you can manipulate the suits in your hand and get special powers and stuff like that, but that's solo only poker against an enemy, so yeah.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: At least hell of a deal doesn't have like really racist undertones, so that's good.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was I meant I I saw that one at Gen Con last year and then sold out before I could get a copy, but I was lucky enough to order a copy before they pulled it off the web store.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I have a copy.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I have not gotten my replacement cards yet, but I also haven't looked into getting them.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I I haven't gotten replacement cards either, and I pulled it out of the box the other day.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: I had I had a lot of fun playing it.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, I was I kind of went in blind.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like I knew the system and I knew what the mechanics were, and open it up and I start flipping through and like playing these bosses, and you get to like two very problematic ones, and I'm like, oh Jesus, like how did the how did they get this past like just the lightest of QA?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: It's crazy.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, as someone who works in QA, I can tell you it's not that hard.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, fair enough.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_04: Oh man, real quick before we move on from here.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_04: Man, I feel CJ, I know you're being nice, but I felt like I really just rambled and botched that whole description.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: So no, I was listening and you explained it very, very well.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_04: Um, do you have a favorite of these poker likes?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_04: Is that what you said you're calling them?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the gang was the one I played the most, so I need to play them more.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I really do enjoy Ace of Spades.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: I had a lot of fun playing that.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, when I got it, I played I played it for a few hours straight.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's solo, so when you can play a game by yourself, you know you've kind of got a good game there.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Solo games I think are a little tricky sometimes.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think the gang is probably the most social one.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: This one is I don't think this is as good as the gang in terms of like a social uh event.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I felt it took me uh till the third play to kind of really start figuring out how to actually work.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_04: I've only played it with two players to actually figure out how to start working with my partner and like using the reveal two cards chips and and you know, trying to think outside the box.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_04: But the first couple times I played, it was just like they were playing against the boss, I was playing against the boss.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_04: Good luck, good luck, you know.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_04: You should play it.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_04: I played it at four all three times I've played it, so you should play it at four.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, yeah.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_04: I bet there's a lot more opportunity for cleverness, like seeing other people's cards and more cards getting discarded.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_04: Like I can see it being more dynamic.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, real quick, I'll just I'll just milk this segment as long as Travis lets me.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the gang deluxe.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_04: I swe I see it at your store every time I go there, and I've been on the fence several times.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_04: Is it worth it?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I unfortunately have not gotten to play the gang deluxe, but the it's the same game, it's just prettier.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I've seen it and I've seen all the components, I've held the components, I would say it's worth it as someone who you know maxes out everything.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've got collectors' editions of whatever I can get, you know.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_04: Well, hey, we appreciate that here.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: I'm I am very vapid, and I love I love a nice production.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_04: So even though I've only played the gang like five or six times, and again, like I said, the past few times I've played it, I play it with people who had no idea about poker, so it was kind of like an uphill battle, yeah, which kind of uh you know it didn't leave the best taste in my mouth.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_04: But I saw Gang Deluxe and I was like, I should probably get that.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_04: It looks beautiful, yeah, yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_04: Anyway, that's that's all for me.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_04: That's all on debriefing.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_04: Travis.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so I had a couple of game days last nights.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I had uh the opportunity to throw a game day for some colleagues at work.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_02: We found some time and the schedule, everyone was like, let's play a game.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: We haven't like done anything social in the unit for a while, and so I actually had the chance to pull out my box of games at work, which was sick.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that never happens, that has never happened ever.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: I think I remember like a game of risk going on on a table in the back warehouse once upon a time, but um, yeah, we had a bit of a social opportunity happen, and it was pretty cool.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: We had like six different tables, people were playing like different games all over the place.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I didn't facilitate all of the games, I didn't have table captains like uh Clay had during his big game weekend, but um yeah, we had we got people playing Uno at one table, like some deluxified thing of Uno.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: I led a game of um Hot Streak, which was a hit.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: Oh wow, nice yeah, we had a couple of the game head games going, and then we played a game of nerds.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever played nerds?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: N-E-R-T-Z.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_02: It is not really a board game, it is just a bunch of decks of cards in a bigger box, and with those decks of cards, you play solitaire in front of yourself, and then every time you get an ace, the ace goes to the middle of the table.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: Anytime you can play onto one of those aces following typical solitaire rules, you can throw it down in the middle of the table.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you're trying to clear out your like draw pile, I guess.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um typical, like typical to solitaire rules, like you have the cards that are flipped face down.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're trying to clear those out because those are worth negative points at the end of the game.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but you get one point for every card that you put onto an ace in the middle of the table, and they have to be ascending.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's crazy.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_02: People are standing up playing solitaire as frantically as they can.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: They're trying to throw as many cards out into the center of the table as possible.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: We you can play it as long as you want.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't know what the actual end game, like this is when we stop playing is, but we played like probably six or seven rounds in a row that takes like five minutes each round because people are just like flying through their cards and and moving so quickly.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: This game is frantic and cool, and we need to do a segment on like the best games that you can play with just regular decks of cards because yeah, we talk about stuff like this all the time.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we just spent 20 minutes talking about poker.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: Solitaire is right up there, too, right?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like, there's so many great games with just a typical deck of cards.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_02: We we get sometimes a little distracted with some of our fancy uh productions and our neoprene maths and stuff, but like there's some great games out there that are affordable that people can play with just a deck of cards.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I have never played this before.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of reminds me of like um Dutch Blitz.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: It's very similar.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's very similar.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I actually just got rid of my copy of Dutch Blitz, but yeah, nerds, you could play it with just regular decks of cards.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: Every person needs a deck, and you can play nerds, it's pretty cool.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, so that was kind of our uh game day at work, and then that evening I had the chance to go over and play some party games, courtesy of game head games.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, first we played Foolish Fool.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you can pull that one up, Clay.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_02: I would love to.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I think did you close it?
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: I think you closed it.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: I probably did.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: This is why I can't be on the ones and twos.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: Can't be on the ones and twos.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna go ahead and start.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we played Foolish Fool by Game Head Games.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, Paul Solomon came on the podcast and talked about this a while ago.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, designer is Corinton Labrat, and the artist is Piero.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: And this game requires no teach, like maybe 10 seconds of teach.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: You have this big deck of cards, everyone gets three chips.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you take this big deck of cards, you divide it into two face-down piles in the middle, and you go around, and on your turn, you draw a card.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And that card is going to create a rule for either everyone to follow or you to follow.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_02: And you put it down in front of yourself, or you put it in the middle of the table, and that rule you have to follow now.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_02: And if you get caught not following a rule, you owe a chip.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, one of your three tokens that you're given.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: And um this game gets crazy really fast.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: By the second time around the table, people are like talking like robots and high fiving each other between rounds.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we had somebody that was saluting.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, every time I Somebody else took a turn that was not me.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: I had to say whose turn is it?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um so like people are shouting at each other across the table and doing weird things, and yeah, this game gets really silly really fast.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's super light.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um the first person to lose all of their chips loses, everyone else wins.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's just kind of like a it's a I don't want to call it a filler game, but like it's like King's Cup, I guess, with like without the alcohol involved.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's just rules that you have to follow as you continue to send these cards around the table.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um one of the not mechanics, but one of the rules, I guess, is um if there's another similar card of the same color, you have to cover it up with the new card that was drawn.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: So like if there's a green card that is a rule for everyone, I read the green card and then I cover up that one in the middle so that everyone has to follow this new green rule.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um and sometimes rules were will trigger if I cover up a card or if I pass a card because the pink ones get passed around.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: This game is so goofy and so fun, and it was a great way to like warm people up for the night.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, Travis, yes, real quick.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um, to be honest, like we love Paul Solomon, we love game head.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_04: This is the only game head game I do not own.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_04: This just never really captured me.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_04: So is it worth completing my game head collection?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_04: And second part of this question, I know who you played this with, and there is no way Tyler appreciated this game.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, he got I I think people were being a little extra mean to Tyler because they were sending him cards that were like you had to be overly nice to people that you had to give cards to, he had to like blow kisses to people at the table, like it it just got so ridiculous.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: And he you could tell he felt a little uncomfortable, but it was yeah, that's that's not his wheelhouse for sure.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um, in terms of completing the collection, I think this is a great game.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like, this is a game.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: If you're going to have 20 people over to play games, this is a great one to do.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because it takes literally no explanation.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great warm-up game for game nights, gets people moving, gets people talking, um, gets people feeling like idiots real fast.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's really good at that.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I I I think this is the one that I missed out on the first wave.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_02: And we talked with Paul Solomon again.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, all right, I'm gonna do it.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: I had he he was talking about it and how much fun it is, and I was like, I'm I'm gonna do it, and I'm glad I did.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: It was fun.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: I this is a game that you can literally pull out with anyone, so foolish fool is uh so much dumb fun.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_04: CJ, is anybody playing this in your store?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_04: You know, one of the things I appreciated about your store was that you did have the gamehead games pretty early on, and I was like, Oh, these guys are for real.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_04: They they know what's up with gamehead.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like you to play this on purpose, but I just saw a cool box set and bought it.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't really know what gamehead was at the time.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, no, I haven't played this.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we have this one.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think you might.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah, I think you had the whole display going on there.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: We have the display, I don't think this is part of it though.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_04: Maybe it wasn't.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Let me check.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think I think because there's two displays, I think.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think we have the first one, I don't think we got the new one yet.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: This was an OG set.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, is it it might be in wave one?
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_02: So many games in that store.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_02: I've been on a game head kick lately.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_02: We played Trick to the Future, and I was so impressed by that, and just felt like going back to game head.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I this one and the next one that I'm gonna talk about were two both, they were both unopened games, they're still in the shrink, and so I like unwrapped them, punched them, put it, put them together, taught them, and played them in like less than 30 minutes.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: So oh, we do have this one, yeah.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: That's part of that.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_04: That's that.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_04: Look at that.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_04: I I don't want to correct you on your own store, CJ, but I'm pretty sure I saw it in there.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there it is.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_04: But you got my word.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_04: I I know it, I know it like the back of my hand.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_04: And next time you got my word, CJ.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_04: Next time I'm down there, I'm gonna pick one of these copies up.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_04: All right, don't let me out of there without it.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: All right, the other game that we played uh was called Size Wise, also by Game Head game.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_02: Designer is Scott Brady, artist is Sergei Siedlitz, and this game is also super light.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: I it has a weight of 1.17.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how this is a higher weight than Foolish Fool, because you literally you have three tokens, or I guess we had five.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: It depends on the player count.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: You start with five tokens, you flip one card off a deck, and then you have the face down card that has a number on it.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_02: The face up card has a bunch of different categories, items, things, and you take the number on the face-down card paired with the list of items, people, things on the other, and then you have a ball on a string, and you are trying to guess the size of a magic scroll, a traffic sign, a pencil, a pair of chopsticks, like you're just trying to guess an eye like the size of an item.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_02: You pull the ball on the string to the size that you think, you take the ring at the end of the string and put it on this little measuring hook.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_02: At the end, once everyone is complete, they lift up the little measuring hook, and the person on that is the shortest and the longest of those sizes that people guessed, both of them lose a token, one of your five that we had.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: And you just go around like this until somebody runs out of tokens, and then that person loses, and everybody else wins.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: This game is pretty fun.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: I I wish that we would have gotten some of the like kookier uh items to guess.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we had pretty standard ones like traffic signs, chopsticks, pencils, like that type of stuff.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: But they have some really weird ones like a dragon scale or a magic scroll, or Paul called out the uh the wizard's beard when he came on.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_02: So it does get a little goofy and weird.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, this game is so light and easy, and it was a we we just kept it light.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: We kept it light and breezy.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: We played foolish fool, we played size-wise, back-to-back, like half an hour for both games.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a it was a good game night.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_02: It was good.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_04: Did you get a sense for did the crowd prefer one or the other?
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_02: I think people preferred foolish fool, honestly.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_02: Really?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: I I think we had fun with this one.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and we had a couple instances where like we held up a little measuring stick thing, and we were like, oh my god, like they're so close.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, who's really longer?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like, who's at the bottom?
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_02: And um, we had a couple like more tense moments like that, I guess.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: But uh yeah, I think people really got into foolish fool because it just gets people talking and moving and interacting in weird ways that really uh gets people excited.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I I you've got me over the edge.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_04: I'm getting it.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_04: It's happening.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we're big, we're big game head fans, anyways, over here.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, try them out for yourself if you're listening to this and let us know what you think because we've been I've been enjoying these, and I I don't know if I've found a game head game that's just not for me.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I I really hope that some of these more niche ones get a get some more traction.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: Like Trinket Trove had its moment and uh still doing very well with the launch of Wave 2.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: I I really hope that some of these other ones get some love.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_02: Venture Angels.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: Venture Angels is great.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, nobody talks about venture angels.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, is that what it's called?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_04: Venture Angels.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_04: Venture Angels, yep.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, that was pretty good too.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, definitely on board for the game head hype wagon.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_04: This is these are the types of games that we get played the most anymore.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_04: So definitely right up our speed.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_04: This is the weight right in your wheelhouse, Clay.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_04: Yep, between one and two all day.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_04: All day.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_04: You could tell I was struggling with something over a two when I was talking about hell of a deal.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_04: That was the first time I played a weight over a two in a while.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_04: I was like, oh my god, oh my god, debrief this thing.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: Way to push yourself, Clay.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: Way to push yourself out of my comfort zone.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: All right, let's turn it over to our guest of honor, CJ.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: You said that you have not played many games, but you have some anticipated games that you want to talk about.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, um, this is a new trading card game.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: I I love trading card games.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: I play every new one that comes out just to try them.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think there's very few trading card games I haven't played.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't think I've I didn't really touch Digimon or Flesh and Blood.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: I played a demo of that at game at Gamma.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I love trading card games.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: I play Star Wars every single week.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: I play Commander every week for Magic.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Pokemon, I don't play as much.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: I love collecting the cards, but uh we have a great community of people that do play it.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this is a game that has really spoken to me.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: I am a huge horror fan.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is actually my favorite month of the year.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: I love all things Halloween, all things horror.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's funny, there's a podcast we did when we were talking about uh stuff coming up in Gamma.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: We were thumbing through the program to see the stuff that's coming up, and I came across the page and it said Hellbreak, new trading card game.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, I'm as a story owner, I'm a little bit burnt out on how many card games are coming out, even though I try all of them just because I I love them.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to see how different they are.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: But you can see we're thumbing through it.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, Hellbreak, a trading card game.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: And we're both and me and Mark are both like, oh my god, they gotta give it a break.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: No more card games.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I actually didn't even know what this was until I got to Gamma, and now as excited as I am for this game, their marketing has been pretty abysmal.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, like I said, that little page told me nothing, and I just kind of thumbed right through it.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: A game about horror monsters, a trading card game, should have caught me no matter what.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't, it did not until I got to Gamma and saw the banner that had the Bride and Frankenstein.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, wait a second, why is the Bride and Frankenstein on here?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I looked up uh and there was a seminar for Hellbreak that we're gonna go through and tell you all about the game.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I went to that and I sat through and I'm just I'm just blown away.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's like this is an IP-based game of horror monsters across all kinds of studios.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: They have 30 studios already.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like it's their main partner is Universal, so you're gonna have your classic movie monsters of Bride, Dracula, Frankenstein, Creature, Invisible Man, all that.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: But as you can see, they've also got Jaws.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's the Death Angel from a Quiet Place, they've got studios, um, they got Paramount, uh, Shudder, AMC, uh, Amazon, Netflix.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you're, I mean, you're getting Stranger Things, you're gonna get The Walking Dead, you're gonna get all these uh everything that you can think of.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: If there's a horror monster that you like or something horror that you like, it's gonna be in the game.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I went to the Gamma presentation, and I'm sitting there and I'm watching, they're going through the slides, and they're showing the cards, and the artwork is absolutely beautiful.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's all hand-drawn.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: There's no, I was worried it would be like just movie stills.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a lot of a lot of card games.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: They're just they just take the easy way out, and they're like, we'll just take a screen graph from the movie and throw it on there.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be good enough.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's why I love Star Wars, it's all hand-drawn art.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but Hellbreak, it's all like, and it's like paintings too.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's really, really, really pretty stuff.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they're showing the game and they're showing they said that we're gonna have a demo later, so I go and play it, and uh, it's just it's I mean, it's the exactly what I'm looking for.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is a uh you do something, I do something game.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of card, like not a lot of card games, they most do them now.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: But you've got magic.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: You always go back to they were the first one, so they have their I do everything on my turn, and then you do everything on your turn, and there's some interaction, but mostly you're just kind of waiting for someone to do something uh that till it comes back to you.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: But this and Star Wars, uh I'm gonna talk about Star Wars a lot because there's a lot of Star Wars DNA in this game.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: I found out that some Star Wars developers actually left FFG to go work on this game, which makes sense the way that it plays.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's it really screams just like a Star Wars horror game.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: But the way it works is you'll have a um, I wish I would have brought the decks over with me.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: You'll have you'll have a leader, a monster, a monster that you choose, and you'll have two locations that you bring, and you'll pick one of those two locations.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so you'll have your monster, a location, and then your deck of cards.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the goal of the game is to just get your opponent's health down to zero.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh monsters usually start with about 16 health, and the way you do the health is you take it's this is where they take a little bit from Pokemon, you take eight cards from the top of your deck.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Each card counts as two health, and each damage you do turns the card one way or flips it.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: So two damage will turn the card and then flip it over.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: One damage will just turn the card, and that's how you'll track your health.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there is um minions, events, assets, all the stuff you're looking for for like uh like artifacts and magic.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's the attack, defense power.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: But you'll play at these two locations, so your monster is always at both locations.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you can when you attack, you're attacking through a location to whatever you're looking for.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: So say you've got Dracula and they have a rat or a or a shark on the other side.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you want to attack Jaws, you can attack Jaws through the other other location and kind of bypass the shark that they've got on Amityville or whatever location they choose.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's uh several resources.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: You've got blood, mouse, this it's very, very thematic.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: There's a um one thing that's uh I've been really kind of falling out with Star Wars lately, and I think it's come to a point that one of my friends said when I tried to show him the game when it first came out, he was like, Where's the interaction?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: Where are my instants and stuff?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: How do I interact with my opponent?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, you know, I mean, you just kind of have to, you don't.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know how to say it.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: You in Star Wars, you kind of just try to get ahead by killing their stuff.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but this game has at least more interaction than Star Wars.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't say it's the level of magic, but I don't know that it needs to be.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: But you can in Star Wars you can't block, you're kind of at the mercy of whatever your opponent does.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: You just kind of have to plan ahead.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: But in this one, you can like hold stuff up.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if they attack you, you can leave a monster up to block some attacks.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And probably the coolest mechanic of the game is a mechanic called jump scare.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually do have a card right here.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is a promo card that I got at uh Gen Con.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is the it's gonna get on my face, but um so there's this jump scare ability, so these only trigger while they're in your health stack, and if they get revealed from your health stack, so it's literally a jump scare, and then the ability triggers.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that's very cool.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: You can build your deck with uh these little abilities to like surprise your opponent as they attack you.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm extremely excited for it.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: I've got demo decks.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: I went to Gen Con and I made my wife play with me three times so I could get 12 demo decks to bring back to the store to teach people.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she's she's a trooper.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: She'll play games with me even if she doesn't want.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: I made her go to the Naruto card game too, so I could get an extra promo.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Dang, she's a realist.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds great, um, but it also sounds like a licensing nightmare for the publisher.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um that I imagine.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that this one's gonna hold up against the more recognizable IPs like Star Wars or Magic?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Magic's like seems to be dabbling in a whole bunch of other IPs, right?
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like they've got magic, avatar, and superheroes, and they've Lord of the Rings, like those things have been popping off lately.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_02: What are they just trying to like block magic from taking these IPs?
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: Like, do you think that this stands on its own?
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: What um what do you think is going on there?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not so like uh I'm not an idiot.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: I realize that horror is not the most uh it's very niche, it's a very niche thing, but there's there are no card games that have this niche.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody has like there's no horror card games.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Magic has your classic, your werewolves, some vampires, they're just generic stuff.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah people um people really love these characters.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you look at like Universal Hollywood Horror Nights, uh, there's the resurgence, like horror movies have been doing horror movies have been the best reviewed movies of the year.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: Obsession, Backrooms, Resident Evil, so all these things, horror is really it's very popular.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean when I tell people about this, I get scoffs, I get like, oh, okay, you know.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think for the people who I think this will do a good job of bringing people into card games who don't play them.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's it's what magic's doing with universe beyond.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, we want avatar fancier, we want Lord of the Rings fancier, we want Star Trek fancier.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know a ton of you know, people who watch Avatar who play Magic.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably like, but now they do.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: People coming in and saying, hey, I just want to get some Avatar cards.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: I only buy the Avatar cards, they only want a certain thing.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this will bring some people into a new kind of game who just care about like horror monsters.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean, a lot of people love horror movies.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: I watch me and my wife watch horror movies almost strictly.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've seen got hundreds of different movies, and I think they're really doing a good job with bringing these characters into a game that kind of makes sense.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's hilarious when I tell people that you can play Dracula versus Jaws.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people were I would I tell people I got a horror card game coming up, and I say, um, there's Dracula, and who do you think Dracula would fight?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody's like, oh, Frankenstein or you know, Van Helsing or something.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, what if I told you it was Jaws?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then I show the Jaws call card and they're like, Oh my god, what is this?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: Do you feel like they do a good job of like capturing the essence of those characters from what he's played?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: So far, there's some so it's like uh uh I want to talk a little bit about how bad their marketing has been, but it's not a it's god, I don't want to say it's not their fault because it's 100% their fault, but they've had some issues.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, the little bit I've played, I've played there's been four demo decks put out there's Dracula, Bride, Jaws, and Headless Horseman.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have all four of them.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: I actually put I I took three of each and built full 50 card decks so I can actually see how the game would be played when you build your own deck.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the card pool is very limited.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's maybe less than half the cards shown so far.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but so far, yes, I like Jaws is very aggressive and bitey.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like you're just bloodlust and um going for the kill right away.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: Dracula is very cunning and you're thinking about how to like get ahead and get resources ahead of your opponent.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Headless Horseman is all about like terrifying people and getting them off the field and just being this really scary monster.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then the bride, um, I'm not really sure what they were thinking with the bride, uh, but it's kind of hard because she only had 13 minutes in her own movie.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: So uh what you're there's not a whole lot out there for you to draw on, I guess.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there may be some stuff I haven't seen, but I did watch The Bride of Frankenstein finally, and yeah, the movie that's titled after her, she's only in the very end of it.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but she's all about the crypt and your graveyard, so she's about dead things, so it all makes sense.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then they've shown the monster from a quiet place.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's uh very aggressive, and they have very cool mechanics with uh like sound and like jump scares happening.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: And uh your opponent tries to talk to you, you can attack them.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they uh Jason Voorhees and he's all about equipment.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: So when he gets rent, he gets stronger as he gets different weapons.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: So he's you know, he grabs a pitchfork, he does something different, he has a machete, you know, stuff like that.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I do think they're doing a good job of making these characters feel how they probably should.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds cool.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'll have to check this out.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a uh competitive card guy.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_02: I know Clay's gotten into a couple different ones, but has fallen off over the years, and magic just seems like a huge barrier to entry.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Like it doesn't have to be.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: I people say that.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_02: People say that, but then like from the outside looking in, it looks like, oh my god, I I don't even know where to start learning this game.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe this is the way to do it.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like get in on the ground floor, get in while it's new, learn the mechanics, and like find some opportunities to play early, and then you don't get left behind and feel like you're on the outside looking in.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm about to check out Hellbreak.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: Cool.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, Travis, you're you're you I feel like you are more of the horror guy of this podcast, and this is more up your alley than mine, but I am a sucker for a new trading card game.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_04: Although I usually only play like I get one like versus set, like, and then I play it a couple times.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_04: And I like 'em.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_04: I like 'em.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_04: I just I can't keep up, you know.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know how you do it, but maybe someday you can come back on this show and we can just do like a a C C G question and answer session and we can go through 'em all 'cause I have like this is a they are a commitment.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: If you really want to get into it, it's not like a you buy it and just play it once.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's um They're just they're constantly evolving, so you gotta keep up with them.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I keep a I keep a wide berth around all the the counters that sell the the cards at every friendly local game store because it's just so you got people standing there like asking for a very specific card, and they want like this is going to do this for my deck, and like man, I that's way over my head, man.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: I want to buy the pre-made packs and I'll play them a couple times and then probably never touch it again.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: You talked about like pulling people in with IP, like I have a big box of the Spider-Man uh magic cards, and like I've never really played it, like it's just the IP pulled me in.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, I'm gonna check this out, and then who am I gonna who am I gonna play magic with?
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: Come on.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_02: But speaking of friendly local game stores, I want to talk about let's play games and hobbies in Hanover.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: CJ, you are the uh one of the owners and proprietors of Let's Play, and you guys have kind of a unique story.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: Why don't you uh share your story with us?
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh boy.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh so uh me and Mark own the store currently.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: We are not the original owners.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: We bought it uh January 1st, 2025, um, from the original owner, Miles.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's a good friend of mine.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh actually works with me now.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I moved up here for my job.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: I used to live in Maryland, in Glen Burney.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_00: I worked in Baltimore uh at a company called uh Cadon.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_00: They do um government like aerospace stuff, they make engine parts for aircrafts and all kinds of stuff, seals and rings and all that.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: But they were bought by another company, and they were we're moving up to they told us they were moving to um Hanover, Pennsylvania.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh now that's about an hour and 20 minute drive.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I mean me and my wife both work there.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we were like, we'll just we're just gonna move there.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're not we're not gonna make the drive, we're just gonna go go up there.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: So we rented a house, uh, this house actually, and we um we moved up here, and uh I'm you know, I used to go to my local game stores down at Maryland, and I would play uh back then I was playing uh a lot of Magic.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really play much of any board games.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: Board games was actually pretty recent for me.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I played a lot of um Magic and like Yu-Gi-Oh and the Dragon Ball card game.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, the Dragon Ball Z card game is still the greatest card game ever created.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: So sad it's gone.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: But that's a whole nother that's a whole nother thing.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I was looking for things to do.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh then it was uh I think it was 20, it was either 2019 or 2020.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it was 2020 because they opened in 2019.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: So there was uh May the 4th of Star Wars Day.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I saw uh post came up on Facebook about Let's Play was hosting a learn to play for Star Wars Legion, uh miniatures, Star Wars Miniatures game.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, that's kind of cool.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I missed it.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: I had something to do that day, but I went in the next week and I'm looking around.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now actually that I'd been to Let's Play a couple times and I had because I started getting into different card games and stuff.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: I bought Marvel Champions from them and stuff.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I hadn't talked to anybody there yet.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I went in for Legion, I went in, I'm looking at the Legion miniatures, and then one of the um other owners, Brenton, he came up to me and he's talking to me about it.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Yeah, I was gonna come in for your Star Wars Learn to play, but I missed it.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it's you know, I was just gonna like see about it.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, I mean, uh, you know, just can you come in Saturday?
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'll have it set up and I'll teach you how to play.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, okay.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't I didn't give him my name or anything.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't sign up or anything or anything.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: I just showed up Saturday around the time he said, and sure enough, he had it set up waiting for me, ready to go.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so he sat there and we he taught me how to play Legion.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then I bought a crap ton of Legion like right away.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_00: I bought an army, and then I started playing Legion there with him like every single week.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and as time went on, I would just go there and play Legion.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'd and I mostly played just the miniatures game.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: Legion Legion was mostly what I played there.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: I did a little bit of uh some other stuff, but uh Brenton and I got really close.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: I would go there a lot, uh play with him.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: We would then we would start hanging out outside of the store.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I would just spend the next few years getting really close to there by there.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then um there was a game Star Wars Unlimited came out.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we started playing that.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: And now around this time, Brenton had been uh looking to get out.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: So he got uh a job somewhere else and he left.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then it was just Miles and some other people there, and uh they were, you know, Brenton was like the Star Wars guy, so when he left, they kind of stopped doing Star Wars stuff, and Star Wars was my big thing.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I kind of stopped going to Let's Play for a while.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: I went to other stores because they were doing the games I wanted to play, and you know, one of my best friends isn't really going anymore.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you kind of go where your games are and where your friends are.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to other stores, I'm doing stuff, and then I had heard from Brenton that uh Miles was looking to get out.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: He uh was kind of done with it, he wanted to um move on to some other things.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I said, Man, uh I'd like to I would like to do that.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, I'd been playing this Star Wars game with Mark.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: Mark and him, Mark, me and Mark would go to another store every week and we would play and we would always talk about man, we we would love to run a game store or own a game store.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because we knew kind of what was going on with Let's Play.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, man, if we could have let's play or we could play uh own let's play or something, we would always talk about ideas, bounce ideas off of each other.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I asked Miles if uh if I could uh if he would be interested in selling it.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and he was, but he had already promised to some other people.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: So uh that's fine.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: I went on about my we went on about our other lives and we kept going to this other store playing games.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then um I get a call from Miles uh or text from Miles in December of 2024.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: It said, um, I still have it somewhere.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: It says uh if you uh do you and Mark still want the store?
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: If not, I'm closing January 1st.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I called Mark and I said, Hey, uh, I just got this text from Miles.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was talking to him for a couple minutes.
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he says if we want it, it's ours.
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um but if if not, let's play is gonna be gone.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: He's gonna close it down and move on to some other things.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going back and forth.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's a lot to the story that I'm not gonna tell because it involves some other things, and uh I don't I don't like to talk about drama outside, but there are some people who did not want us to do this, and they made that very clear to us.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we went back and forth a lot.
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we talked to a lot of people who said, Yeah, you gotta do it, yeah, you gotta do it.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then some people who were really pushing us the other way.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was your spouses, huh?
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: Actually, our spouses were very supportive and told us, uh but yeah, we were really thinking about it and we're like, man, and um I don't remember, I do, I'm sorry, I do remember the exact moment.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh unfortunately, I'm not gonna say what it was because of it ties into some other things, and I don't need to put that out there.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I'll tell you guys privately later.
• 51:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but there was a certain moment that happened where Mark and I were like, there's no way we can't do this, we we have to do it.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we uh got with Miles and we set it all up.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um we uh yeah, he he sold it to us, we took over and we uh dived in uh head first.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um and Mark and I have to this day are still working our full-time jobs while we're uh running the store.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's been god now, it's been a year and ten months that we've owned it.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um wow, it's been pretty insane.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lot more work than I thought it was gonna be.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like, oh wow, it's gonna be so much fun running a game store.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: You forget about that part where you're also operating a business.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_04: Man, there is so much to unpack there.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_04: And I did not realize, I guess I could have if I read a little closer.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I did know the story that you guys jumped in and kind of saved the store and bought it.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_04: I didn't realize it was that recently.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I started going to your store about May of 25, June of 25.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_04: And again, I'm like 45 minutes away, so I only go on special occasions.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_04: My wife is like, you know, we have a free weekend.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_04: I'm like, hey, you think I can go to Hanover and check?
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I literally just go to Hanover just to go to this game store, and it's so interesting to hear you say that your primary upbringing was in the collectible card games and the like miniature games, because the thing that drew me to your store above some of the other ones that are closer was just how great your selection of board games is, and it doesn't come off at all like it's one of those game stores that's just focused on pushing CCGs and tabletop miniatures games.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_04: So, how did you was that the way the game store was, or is that something you intentionally did to bridge the gap?
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I know as I was going there, their primary focus at the very beginning was board games.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they did almost strictly board games for quite a while.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Brenton was more of a he was more into like war games and miniatures and stuff, so he kind of brought that thing in.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um so and Star Wars, he loves Star Wars, so it it was really Star Wars was like the big miniatures game there for a while, and then um Warhammer kind of creeped in.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: They did a little bit of um mech warriors, I think is what's called.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, it didn't last very long.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um then Miles uh found magic.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_00: He actually wasn't into magic until he had already owned the place for a couple years, and then he got when he found magic, he really got into magic, and that's how magic came into the store.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Miles fell in love with it, and he was like, let's we need to start doing magic and stuff.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, it is a board game, is definitely the thing we have the most of for sure.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now, and um that is a lot to do with Cole.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: Cole is our board game guy, he lives and breathes board games.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: I have never met someone who loves board games as much as Cole does.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he is he plays board games 24-7, he plays them while he's working, he's got it on his iPad plan.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's either playing it on his iPad or playing it in person while he's there doing other stuff.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and he knows almost everything you could know about board games.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you need if you have a question about a board game, he will he'll tell you.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: He's done board game trivia for us.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he's been a real asset, and um we honestly that's a big part of why the store exists.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because me and Mark work our full-time jobs, we don't we didn't have the time.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a big conversation before we bought it.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: How are we gonna do this?
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is not a quit your job kind of thing.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is not gonna sustain one or two of us.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: We need an employee here.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um now Cole is fantastic, and we, you know, we talked to him, we said, Cole, I know you love we we know you love Let's Play.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: We love Let's Play.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to keep going.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we are not gonna be able to do this without you.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is there any chance you'll come back and you'll you know be our employee throughout uh for the foreseeable future?
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he was he was on board and he is he's there every single day.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: He opens the store for us and he gives us an insane amount of flexibility to be able to still do our outside stuff and focus on like operations and behind-the-scenes stuff for the store.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I I can't say enough good things about Cole and how appreciative we are to have him.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_02: Whenever we talk to proprietors of friendly local game stores, it seems like they are putting together like the A-team, right?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have the competitive card guy that's the expert, you have the board game guy that's the expert, you have the RPG expert, and like bringing them all together so that you have like somebody to talk to for everyone that walks through the door.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's that's such a cool way to build a community, is to like have that kind of point of contact.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: There they know that they're gonna be there in the store and can talk shop with them based on whatever their passions are.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_02: Umces where like you've had people come in that have been timid, shy, like maybe don't know anything about board games or competitive card games or RPGs or whatever it is, but now they are regulars besides clay.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, absolutely.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I I don't, you know, I come in, I buy my stuff once uh every couple months, and then I go on.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_04: But I have been interested in their Friday night board game nights.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_04: It's just a scheduling thing.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, go ahead, CJ.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that was actually me.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was the shy, timid guy who didn't know.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I walked in there and I'm just kind of you know walking around, just looking at stuff on my own.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Brenton was a very uh uh important force for the store with how friendly he was.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think he he really fostered a lot of relationships, a lot of relationships in that store.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, uh owning the store, I have met more people uh in the past two years than I think I have in my entire life.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: Different people, um all kinds of different people.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, you'll get people that'll come in and they're kind of like just getting into stuff and they're not sure about it.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then uh a very important part of our store and something that um Brenton and Miles started and we made sure to continue is um whenever someone walks in the door, no matter what we're all doing, somebody is getting up, walking over to them, saying, Hi, how are you?
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can help you find anything.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um we're not gonna we're not here to bombard you and like hover over you and like, but we want you to know that there is someone in the store who's here, who saw you come in, who is ready to answer any questions you have, and is happy to talk to you about whatever you want to talk about in regards to gaming or whatever.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we just want to have that um make it very friendly to where you feel like you're not just shopping somewhere where you feel like you've come into a place where you could be part of a community.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_02: Love that.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_02: That's awesome.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_02: I I feel like uh there's a certain segment of board gaming community that does not want to have those conversations, but like it's great that like they're available, right?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_02: Like make yourself available first and then back off as necessary.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_02: I know Clay doesn't like talking with people.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_02: This this all sounds like Clayton's nightmare.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's it's my nightmare.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was the hardest, that's still one of the hardest things for me is to get up and go talk to somebody I'd never met before.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, it's gotten easier, but man, in the beginning it was like, Mark, you want to get up and talk to Cole?
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it next time.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_04: You do you do it though.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_04: You're you could put yourself because I've come in there.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_04: You every time I've come in, it's the same thing.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_04: Like you I've seen Colt over there playing whatever game with some group of people, and as soon as that door opens, he pops up like a prairie dog and he's over there.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_04: Hey, what's going on?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_04: What can I help you with?
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I know you do appreciate that usually.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_04: I because me being an introvert, I'm like, yeah, I'm good.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_04: I'm just looking around, you know, whatever.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_04: But um, it is a nice touch to have that.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_04: What is something that like what's the these margins are thin, right?
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_04: Selling board games is not an easy thing to do.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_04: What's one of the craziest things you've tried in the past like year and a half to like really move the needle?
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_04: Like maybe it's a marketing push, maybe it was an event.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_04: Like, what's something novel that you and the team have pushed in the past two years to like market and motivate the store?
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's a very good question.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, who Mark and I are two idiots who have no idea what we're doing.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I would like to just say every single thing we've done is that because we uh Mark is way more business savvy than I am.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but even I think he gets in nervous head sometimes.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and got I as much as I like I appreciate Mark so much.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: He has really stepped up all this stuff is stuff that I work a in a factory job from uh seven to three.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't do all this stuff like uh call distributors and look at ordering and do reporting and all that.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: Mark is very fortunate that he has his work from home job, and even though he's doing that, he still has the time to go through reporting, call distributors, keep on top of ordering stuff to make sure we have the latest and greatest or restocks, or watch to see what's moving or what need we need more of, try new things.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_00: So um, this is such a team effort.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: We uh I couldn't do this alone.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Mark and I couldn't do this without coal.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it takes all three of us to keep this ship going.
• 1:01:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but yeah, uh man, I can't even think of some crazy.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've tried some crazy things that haven't worked.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've tried giant discount tables.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um God, we've given so much stuff away too, basically.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I really try and if I see that someone's interested in something, I'll try and, you know, you know, give them a great deal on something that hasn't been moving that I know they might be interested in, but they don't want to buy it because you know it's a little bit it's a little bit pricier than um other things, but uh it is really it is challenging uh to sell some of the stuff in this store.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_02: You got you even did the crazy thing of coming on Operation Game Night to preach your store.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's like probably the craziest thing you've done.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I see that you do have a shop available on your website at let'splayhanover.com.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: But are you planning on shipping games in the future or just local pickup?
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we do plan to do um online shipping.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: We've shipped one game actually.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's a clay.
• 1:02:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I I'll tell you the story about that one.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh it's interesting.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's kind of a challenge because the website itself, it's very bare bones.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: I've done what I can with it, but that's another job in an in and of itself.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh my full-time job, being at the store for as long as I am, doing all this other back end stuff.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this, this, this kind of stuff, like the social media and the online stuff, is really where we're sort of falling by the wayside a little bit.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we had the podcast going for a while, but that that eats up so much time.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's making events and all that, it takes it just takes so much time to do everything.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not enough time in the day, and you still have to be in the store and do all this stuff.
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: As far as the online store goes, um, like I like we said, we don't know what the hell we're doing.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_00: We just we bought our our game store and we're just trying to keep it going.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm teaching myself how to do all this stuff.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: I've never run an online store, I've never shipped stuff.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um before I took over the store, I'd never sold anything on eBay.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um now I've sold thousands of dollars stuff on eBay and shipped stuff out.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: But the online store is closed currently because it's our inventory is not the best.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh we took over a system that was not super well managed.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's not that's not anybody's fault.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's it's very overwhelming, and as Miles was losing help, it I can I can understand being on this side how things can fall to the wayside.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I place no blame on anybody, but we did inherit an inventory system that was a little skewed and mismatched.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_00: So and the way like these online things work is it kind of just draws from our inventory.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to work out all kinds of stuff to um put things in certain categories so that they wouldn't show up.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_00: These are some things that we uh have that we don't want to ship, like I don't want to ship Everdell Complete Collection.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's gonna be insane.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I also don't want to ship one bottle of paint.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that'll be you know a different kind of hassle.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or I don't want to I don't want to someone to buy uh one pack of a magic pack.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't realize it and now I'm sold out or something.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to find a way to get the inventory to um to match.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I even cleared out everything and I found that I was looking in and I saw people are still viewing items that I thought I took off the store.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it turns out the search bar was up there and they could just search whatever they wanted, and if we had it, it would pop up.
• 1:05:08
  SPEAKER_00: But the one item we shipped, we had somebody buy a ready set bet high roller edition on our website.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um the game retails for 120, I think.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: Shipping.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: I took it to the post office and wanted$90 for shipping in the smallest box I could find.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um Mark did a better job.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: He went to UPS and got a rate of six.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: We just ate it.
• 1:05:35
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, we're not gonna cancel it, whatever.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is our problem, this is our fault.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we did ship it out to the guy.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we we kind of did some research and we were like, oh wow, this game is going for like$300 on eBay.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_00: He probably just found it on our website and was like, I'm just gonna buy it right away.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: So kudos to that guy, he got an amazing deal.
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm glad he got it.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, that's so after that I just Kind of turn the store off while I figure it out because last thing I needed someone to buy Gloomhaven and then I gotta pay$300 to ship that.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'll figure it out someday.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_02: So what's uh what's on the future for Let's Play?
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_02: Where's where's the business going from here?
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we need a bigger store.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: Someday we need to move and get a bigger store.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's not in the near future, but that is in the in the future.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we I mean we're growing.
• 1:06:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um we are doing we're doing well.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing very well.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I don't like to talk numbers, that's probably a little bit tacky, but we are doing well comparatively.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh things are growing at a steady rate.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: We're getting more people to playing games, um, bigger turnout for events.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the space is the space is what it is.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's I think we're outgrowing it pretty quickly.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I think in the in the future, when we can, and that's the it's such a fine line because it's like the the the future plan is for me to one day be able to work there full time.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: God, I hope my boss isn't watching this.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going anywhere.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: Ron, I'm not leaving.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: Please don't worry about it.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but someday, I mean he he knows.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: He knows someday I'll probably tell him that I'm leaving.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: But yes, at some point in the future, I would like to work there full time.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's one of the big things holding us back is us doing two things.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh where, you know, we're putting half of our heart into it, you know, as much as we can put into it.
• 1:07:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still at work eight hours a day.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the type of job that I work, it's a you're there, and you know, no phones, can't do anything, so I can't check emails, I can't call people, I can't do all this, I can't do little little things throughout the day.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at work for eight hours.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it's it gets tough to to manage those two things.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: So in the future, I'd like to be there full time, and that'd be my you know, my job.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_04: Awesome.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_04: I can't I can't manage much of anything outside of my normal day job.
• 1:08:03
  SPEAKER_04: So to think about trying to run a store on top of everything is uh is crazy and ambitious, but I'm glad you and Mark took that leap because I think it's a great store.
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_04: Every time I'm in there, I see people engaging and having a good time.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_04: And again, you guys keep the freshest set of like board games in there, like stuff that's not stocked a lot of places.
• 1:08:26
  SPEAKER_04: You guys always seem to have that.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_04: So shout out to Cole.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_04: He's doing a great job, you know, keeping the essentials on the shelf, but also keeping the guys like me who are chasing the hotness there as well.
• 1:08:37
  SPEAKER_04: So it's a fine balance, I'm sure.
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_04: But if you're looking for a place to move, I would suggest York.
• 1:08:43
  SPEAKER_04: We have a lot of empty commercial commercial spaces up here.
• 1:08:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, as you I like my one mile drive from home to the store, so it'll probably be it'll probably stick pretty close.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_04: Hanover's cool though.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I Hanover's like a neat little town.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_04: I like it.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_04: It's no Maryland, Baltimore, but you know, we got a lot of chip factories and a lot of interesting things, and then let's play.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_04: And then let's play.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks for sharing your story, CJ.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_02: Are we ready to go over the fence and talk about what we have been doing outside of board gaming?
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_02: CJ, I'm gonna give you a break.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_02: Take a breather.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_02: We'll let uh we'll let Clay tell us what he's been doing outside of board gaming.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_04: I want to talk about a very special show I've been watching.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I was going to talk about lanterns.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_04: I was watching that on HBO Max.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_04: That was really good.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_04: I enjoyed it.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_04: I love the what's his name?
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_04: Kyle Chandler.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_04: Is that his name?
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_04: He was the coach in Friday Night Lights.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_04: Like, he's awesome.
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_04: The show was good, kept me engaged all eight episodes, and I was pumped about it.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_04: I was gonna talk about it.
• 1:09:54
  SPEAKER_04: But then I went from that and I was like, wait a second.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_04: HBO did another DC show a while back that I never watched, The Penguin.
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and a couple nights ago, I started watching The Penguin, and I cannot tell you the last time I was so captivated by a show.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I was pumped on lanterns, and it was really good, but like the penguin pulled me in so hard from the very first episode.
• 1:10:19
  SPEAKER_04: Like Colin Farrell as the penguin is just such a compelling character that you just I'm like entranced by it, and I just want to be there and like see his world.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_04: It's like a mix of DC and the Sopranos, and there's like no Batman at all.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_04: And it's just like this really up close look into this guy who's kind of deplorable, but there's times where you feel bad for him, and it's like, oh my god, it's like, man, I'm only on episode three, but I just had to give a shout out to the penguin so far.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_04: I hope they they land the plane.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_04: Um I'm sure, Travis, you've probably seen this already.
• 1:10:58
  SPEAKER_04: I have.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_04: Does it stay as good throughout all eight episodes?
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, it's so good.
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_02: The the whole series is phenomenal.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_02: I I could watch Colin Farrell as the penguin all day long.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my god, man.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_04: I I don't know how I was sleeping on this.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_04: Like it it is seriously, like just one of the most captivating TV shows I've watched.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_04: And the the little sidekick buddy he's got Vic is great.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_04: Like it's just such good character work, and the story's keeping me intrigued.
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_04: Man, so anyway, that's what I've been up to.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_04: I've been jamming on some HBO DC series, and I really like it.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_04: I hope they they keep going back to the well and kind of doing this.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_04: I don't I wouldn't, I don't know if it's like a dark or more serious pivot.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_04: I what would you call it?
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_04: Like they're taking these superhero things and just making them more realistic.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't even know.
• 1:11:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, it's like grounded in realism, right?
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Like even the Batmobile when Robert Pattinson takes his Batmobile off the freaking ramp and is flying through flames and stuff.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's a charger, really.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's like a souped-up, tricked out charger.
• 1:12:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like you know, spitting out oil slicks and stuff like you have in yeah, Batman's of old, right?
• 1:12:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's more grounded in realism, but still fantastical in that you have a caped crusader that's fighting crime at night.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, they need to keep leaning in on this because I think it's hitting in a way that others don't.
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_02: But they're kind of striding this line now where they had Superman come out and Superman was like right off the page, like the tidy, whitey red underpants and everything.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like they are splitting themselves between this realism and this fantastical comic book accurate.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm curious to know how they proceed down both of these lanes if they do and if they commit to one or the other.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_02: Because I know that Superman did very well.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if it did Batman numbers, but Superman, uh the Wonder Woman or Supergirl.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_02: Superwoman.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Super was it?
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_02: Supergirl, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:11
  SPEAKER_02: I had it.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I know Supergirl did not do quite as well as Superman, but um, yeah, we'll we'll see where they go from here.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 1:13:20
  SPEAKER_04: It's like very, very I have not watched a lot of like the DC films um compared to Marvel, like Marvel like bangs them out, they're entertaining, like all of them are kind of like you know, they're good.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_04: Like I'll I'll watch them all.
• 1:13:37
  SPEAKER_04: And DC, I don't know, I haven't seen many of them, but it feels like when I've seen like a Batman or DC thing, it's it's either like wow, oh my god, hitting it out of the park, or like kind of a miss, you know?
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_04: So it's interesting.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_04: Like Dark Knight, my god.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_02: That's DC's problem, right?
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like they they never know which way to go.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_02: And Marvel is pretty, I mean, for the most part, pretty comic book accurate.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_02: They take the stories right off the page and they throw them on the screen with some liberties, or they throw them in a slap chop and they put them all together.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_02: And DC does this thing where, like, do we really lean in hard on some of our goofier characters, or do we keep it gritty and realistic and ground-based heroes?
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that's where they get in trouble, is they they don't know what tone to actually set for their universe because that tone does not necessarily translate to the other characters, right?
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I I don't know.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's why they're they feel hit or miss, that's why they feel like tonally divergent.
• 1:14:47
  SPEAKER_02: So I I don't know where I fall on that argument because both sides are good, they both have their merits, but I I don't know.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_02: I have to think about that one.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, anyway, that's that's what I got for my over the fence.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, I'm gonna go next.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Uh CJ, you mentioned backrooms.
• 1:15:06
  SPEAKER_02: I watched that this weekend.
• 1:15:07
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, I love that movie so much.
• 1:15:09
  SPEAKER_02: That is so weird.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, I'm not uh Clay says I'm a horror guy, I'm not really a horror guy.
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_02: I try and like push myself this time of year and like maybe read some spooky books and like maybe watch a horror movie, quote unquote.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh my two that I allowed myself this year are The Witch or The Vitch.
• 1:15:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god with Anya Taylor Joy, which was freaking phenomenal.
• 1:15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh that is incredible.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_02: Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um and backrooms was kind of like intriguing to me because there seems to be a lot of YouTube series that are getting picked up for video games and movies and stuff like that.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_02: And this is one that started as a kind of cult hit on YouTube where people just film these strange-looking back rooms in like retail stores, right?
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like they go back there and they kind of create these separate dimensions of spaces, and it's just uncanny valley cranked up to 11.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_02: You I thought it was interesting that like all the wallpaper is yellow, right?
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like the short story, the yellow wallpaper is about somebody going crazy looking at a wall, right?
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like, and that's what most of this is.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_02: The architecture doesn't make sense.
• 1:16:28
  SPEAKER_02: Clay's got it pulled up right here, like the wall is overlapping with the lights, which would never happen in modern day design.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, the architecture doesn't make sense in that they walk down a hall and look up, and all of a sudden there's another hallway with doorways along the ceiling.
• 1:16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um it is bonkers and just I when I first started, I had never watched any of this YouTube series.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_02: I first started watching this movie, and they start with like some kind of found footage from like the early 90s, which I don't know when the YouTube thing started, but I'm like, this is not going to be scary.
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like, this is not going to be like, how can anybody find this scary?
• 1:17:08
  SPEAKER_02: It's just like a big empty room.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_02: And then, like, the more you stare at it, and the more you start to notice like oddities, there's walls that are like half-size, or like the ceiling is too high, or like the door is just ajar, or like slightly off-kilter.
• 1:17:24
  SPEAKER_02: And the more you stare at it, like the more disturbing it gets.
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_02: And then they start peeking around dark corners of these walls that don't make sense, and then you're like, okay, and it really draws you in.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the acting was so good.
• 1:17:38
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I wish I could pronounce this guy's name.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Ajafor?
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_02: Chivital out Ajafor?
• 1:17:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh man.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you're from that's not that's not good.
• 1:17:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's not good.
• 1:17:52
  SPEAKER_02: That was a bad pronunciation.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but he's from 12 Years a Slave and uh button children of men, and he does a phenomenal job.
• 1:17:59
  SPEAKER_02: He's so good in this, yeah.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I man, this one's gonna stick with me for a while.
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_02: I I need to maybe go back and re-watch it because it's it was so good.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um what what did you think of this one, CJ?
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I absolutely loved it.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_00: I uh I saw it in theaters, and then the second it came to streaming, I rented it, and then I also I have the 4K, I also have the vinyl soundtrack for it.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Dang.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I had really enjoyed it.
• 1:18:25
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know anything about it.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I uh went in completely blind.
• 1:18:28
  SPEAKER_00: I had heard like you know, all the back rooms, like the YouTube stuff, but I had never seen any of it.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I I watched this movie completely blind, I didn't even see a trailer, and god, yeah, the acting was incredible.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_00: He did such a phenomenal job.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, towards that later half, he became very, very interesting.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, god, his famous line, I love it.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_00: I see it on TikTok every day.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, speaking of characters showing up on my social media feed, I have also been going back to Star Wars Galactic Racer, which is a video game by the ex-burnout developers.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_02: This game is so good, I cannot get enough of it.
• 1:19:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like, yeah, I I pick it up, and I'm like, I'm gonna do one or two races, I'm gonna be done.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then an hour and a half later, my hands hurt because I'm gripping this controller so hard.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I mentioned social media because one of the characters is having a moment.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, yes, and that is uh Biddy Biddy Blaz, Biddy Blaze, Biddy Blaz.
• 1:19:27
  SPEAKER_02: And he is this like weird crocodile crocodile character uh that I just cannot get enough of.
• 1:19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And he his voice actor just never phones in a line.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_02: It is unhinged.
• 1:19:41
  SPEAKER_02: You just need to like look up this character, Biddy Blaz.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_02: Wow, and just watch like a YouTube sizzle reel of his line delivery.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_02: It is so unhinged and great, and he's like a character that's maybe three feet tall, and he's like a crocodile man with big you know feet with claws and stuff, and he is he is the highlight of Star Wars this year.
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like he he is the emergent star.
• 1:20:06
  SPEAKER_02: So I cannot get enough of this game.
• 1:20:08
  SPEAKER_02: It is so frenetic and crazy, and I'm actually like feel like I'm making progress in the campaign now.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_02: But this is what Star Wars, this is when Star Wars is its best, is either political thriller or weird unhinged characters.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like, that's the two things that it does very well, and this one leans into a little bit of both, more like more into the characters that uh really shine in this one than anything else.
• 1:20:36
  SPEAKER_02: And I love it.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_02: I I love Biddy and I love all these characters, and this game is so much fun, and I cannot get enough.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_02: That is Star Wars Galactic Racer.
• 1:20:45
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna get off my soapbox.
• 1:20:48
  SPEAKER_02: CJ, tell me what you have been doing outside of board gaming, which she's not doing.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, I play so little board games now.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_00: I need to play more.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I haven't spent a lot of time cleaning cleaning this door up, though.
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really trying to make it very pretty.
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh I feel like it's a little messy in there almost all the time, so I've been trying to make it trying to clean it up.
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but last night I went to Timeline Arcade uh because they got the new Fallout Pro pinball machine now.
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: I have my own Fallout premium model.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully he'll email me this week and tell me it's on the way.
• 1:21:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've been waiting a long time.
• 1:21:22
  SPEAKER_00: LE's keep coming out, and LEs and pros come out.
• 1:21:26
  SPEAKER_00: This is a limited edition, which uh I I can't afford the premium model that I bought.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely can't afford the limited edition.
• 1:21:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I uh I went to try it out because I've been really excited for it.
• 1:21:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh man, it is probably the best pinball machine I've played.
• 1:21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now I'm very new to pinball, so I haven't played a ton, but I've watched a ton of pinball stuff.
• 1:21:46
  SPEAKER_00: I have my Pokemon machine in the back.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that one, uh I'm glad that I never had a pinball machine before I bought that one because the things that they say are true.
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is a uh baby pinball game, it is very simple.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is the shots are very easy and straightforward.
• 1:22:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if I was heavy into pinball and I had like a Jaws or a Godzilla, which are very high-regarded pinball machines, I may have been a little disappointed.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_00: But that being my first one, I mean, it's just so cool to have like a pinball machine in your house that you can just play whenever you want.
• 1:22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Fallout is uh they got a lot, they packed a lot of stuff in a Fallout.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually the most they've ever packed, and um uh I think his name is Keith Elwyn designed it.
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_00: Apparently, he is like I said, I'm new to pinball, but everybody keeps saying he is legendary and like it's an Elwin table, it's an Elwin table, we gotta get it.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's um I don't know how into Fallout you guys are, how much you know about the Fallout universe, but it's a mix between the TV show and the video game as far as theming.
• 1:22:47
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot of clips from the TV show and then assets and stuff from the video game.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_00: But the uh the premium and the limited edition, um the parts I'm really excited for, they have a um a Fat Man launcher.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_00: So you shoot the ball up.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's this mechanic little mini nuke launcher, and it swivels back and forth, and it'll shoot the ball up and you'll load it into the Fat Man, and then you can use that to target.
• 1:23:11
  SPEAKER_00: There's little targets of like a rat roach, a ghoul, uh super mutant or something, and it'll it'll lock on and it'll shoot the ball across the pinball machine to hit those targets.
• 1:23:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like balls, yeah.
• 1:23:23
  SPEAKER_00: Dang.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, pinball.
• 1:23:25
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize how crazy pinball really is, especially modern pinball.
• 1:23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then there's a little uh under play field that's actually a vault, and you shoot it with magnets.
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_00: So right there is this it?
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's it.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll you'll shoot you that vault door will open up, you'll shoot the ball into the vault, it'll go down into the lower play field right here, and you use magnets, you use the flippers to shoot it around and do little different vault experiments.
• 1:23:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's cool.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is pinball is um way more than I think people I didn't realize how involved pinball was and the things that you can do with it.
• 1:24:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean these are like full-fledged games and they update.
• 1:24:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, like that that Pokemon I have, that's not the same Pokemon I bought six months ago.
• 1:24:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's a whole different game than I had then.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_00: They update the codes, they unlock new shots, there's new things.
• 1:24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that one's really cool because you can capture Pokemon, and there's a Pokedex in the Stern app.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you can see, you can track your progress on how many Pokemon you've caught.
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I can't wait.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this I hope he calls me this week.
• 1:24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um says it's on his way.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_02: Stern is like doing the most with its pinball designs right now.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh yeah.
• 1:24:35
  SPEAKER_02: I also follow the giant bomb uh website, and they did a pinball week, and I'm actually wearing their pinball week t-shirt where they played a whole bunch of pinball video games.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh one of their hosts is big into pinball and like has 15 different tables in his basement and is constantly getting sent tables for review, and they just did a big deep dive look into Pokemon, and I think they played Dungeons and Dragons that week, um, which is also freaking cool.
• 1:25:04
  SPEAKER_02: You can like save your character to your Stern app and take it wherever you go and pick up.
• 1:25:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you go to a bar somewhere, you scan your app, and boom, your character's right there.
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_02: So some of this stuff is incredible.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, they're doing the most right now.
• 1:25:19
  SPEAKER_04: What a crazy subculture.
• 1:25:21
  SPEAKER_04: Like, I like I these are the things that endlessly fascinate me, and I gotta be careful because I am one, I'm one to go down the rabbit hole, and I did not know.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_04: There's my poke, there's all the Pokemon.
• 1:25:33
  SPEAKER_04: Oh my gosh, you collect Pokemon in this pinball game.
• 1:25:37
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, you'll catch them and then okay.
• 1:25:39
  SPEAKER_04: And there's like 200 of them in there.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_04: That's too much.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_04: I can't know about something else.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_04: I'd get king.
• 1:25:45
  SPEAKER_00: So shout out the timeline, they're right down the street from us.
• 1:25:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they've got all kinds of machines there.
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, they've got a couple locations too.
• 1:25:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they got one in Gettysburg and in York.
• 1:25:54
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's a timeline in York.
• 1:25:57
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we uh take a pit stop while we're uh while I come and visit you, Clayton.
• 1:26:03
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, CJ, are you or any of the guys going to uh PAX Unplugged this year?
• 1:26:07
  SPEAKER_04: Because Travis is flying out and we're going up.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_04: Cole will be there.
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_04: I will not be there.
• 1:26:12
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:26:13
  SPEAKER_04: Nice.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_04: Well, we're gonna be here a day before we go, and maybe we'll head over to uh Hanover and check out timeline and let's play.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we should do that.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Did we do it?
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think we did it.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_02: CJ, thank you so much for joining us and telling us your story and the story of Let's Play games and hobbies.
• 1:26:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:26:36
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell people?
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_02: Can you tell people where uh they can find you on the internet or find Let's Play on the internet?
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, so let'splayHannover.com uh website is probably the worst place to look for us right now.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Facebook is definitely better and more frequently updated.
• 1:26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's also if you search Let's Play Games and Hobbies on Facebook, or I think it's also at Let's PlayHandover for Facebook.
• 1:26:56
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for joining us again.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_02: We really appreciate your time.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you guys.
• 1:27:01
  SPEAKER_02: This has been the Operation Game Night Podcast.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_02: I have been your host, Travis.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_02: He's been Clay.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_02: He has been CJ of Let's Play Games and Hobbies in Hanover, Pennsylvania.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we are out of the way.