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5th of July (themestorm) · Pick Up and Deliver

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I'm going for a walk. You want help me back in a bit.
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How you finish your day? Yep, Bush, your plungers of the park.
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M welcome to pick up and deliver the podcast where I pick up my
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audio recorder as I step out for a walk and deliver an episode to you
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while I stroll around. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, actually
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good morning. It's a lovely morning here in suburban Chicago. I mean,
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it's humid. I'm gonna be pretty warm by the time I get home.
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But uh, it's a lovely day and the sun is sort of half in,
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half an out. We've got those kind of puffy clouds, but relatively
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strong cloud cover. It wouldn't surprise me if it rains later in the day,
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although it could be going away. I think it was more cloudy earlier,
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so it might be breaking up. We'll see, we'll see what happens.
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Noneth. The last time, I think I'm pretty safe in the next
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twenty minutes from some precipitation. So why don't you and I talk about games?
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That's right. I don't have a particular there's not a sting. I
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said, that's right, Like I was going into a regular segment. I'm
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not. I'm just here to talk about some games. And I was thinking
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about what is going to be the best approach today for talking to you about
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games. Because I've done all my regular segments recently, I didn't feel like
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it's time to do another regular segment. So I was thinking about what I
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might do, and I realized, the Fourth of July is coming up.
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I'm recording this a few days before it comes out, two days before it
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comes out, in fact, and so it occurred to me, well,
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tomorrow was the fourth or is a song? Maybe I'll do a Fourth of
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July theme storm? And then I look and I did one. I did
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one a lot time ago. I did a Fourth of July special in episode
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sixty five. So that was six years ago or seven years ago. This
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is season seven, yeah, seven years ago, and so I did this
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already. I didn't go listen to it, but I was thinking about what
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might I want to say about a Fourth of July theme starman. Frankly,
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given the state of things today, I am not super keen to talk about
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politics. I am hopeful that things will go well in the next few months,
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but nervous about the way things have been going, particularly in the more
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regressive parts of the country. So I did decide I did not want to
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do a fourth of July episode, but did give me thinking about the specificity
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of days, and so I just took a look and I said, what's
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some stuff that happened on July fifth in history? And I figure this might
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be amusing to do. It's sort of theme storm around a specific day.
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And what I thought I'd do is make a list of significant historical events from
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that day and talk about them a little and a game that I think good
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would go with them if you wanted to celebrate them. I will admit this
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is an idea that's a little bit stolen from a TikTok channel that I enjoy.
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I don't know the name of the channel. If you look in the
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show notes, i'll put it in there. But on this channel, these
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two women who love board games have a thing where the each day they post
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a video where they say this is today in history, and they'll either do
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it is a you know, it's National cupcake Day, or sometimes they will
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say here's something that happened in history, and then they'll talk about a game
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they would play with it. I didn't realize until literally just now as I'm
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walking, that I was stealing that idea from them. I mean not that
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this day in his Way Street is that, you know, unusual an idea,
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But it occurs to me now that I am getting very close to what
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they do in a micro level in terms of they each pick one game for
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the day, whereas I'm doing a whole theme store in an episode about it.
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But I will acknowledge perhaps somewhere in my brain said that's a fun idea.
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I'm gonna swipe it. So do go look at the show notes and
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check them out on TikTok. I don't know if they have stuff on other
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channels or not, but their TikTok is fun. Jane and Jen are their
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names. So nonetheless, if we were looking at July fifth, what would
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be fine to talk about from a history perspective, There's a bunch of things.
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Actually. So the first event that caught my eye was in nineteen ninety
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six, Dolly the Sheep was public was cloneduncem enough, Dolly the Sheep was
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cloned. It'd be hard to understand now what an immense idea that was in
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nineteen ninety six that someone had cloned a sheep. Cloning was cutting edge technology
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at the time. It still is to a degree, but we have learned
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so much more about DNA manipulation and biology that cloning as an act seems relatively
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harmless now, or not harmless, but a pedestrian for high end scientists of
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course, nonetheless one that happened. When the Scottish scientists announced that they had
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cloned a sheep, the world took notice. So I was thinking about what
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is a game? I know there are games that I've played that have clones
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in them, and for a while, the only thing I could think of
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was Android Netrunner. Android Netrunner has a whole faction that's all about clones or
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androids as they call them, but they're biosynthetic, so they're well like replicants
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from the Blade Runner universe, and they have a kind of cloned element to
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them. But I was trying to think about other games where cloning is uh
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part of the game, and the two games I could think of were Loop
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inc And Star Wars. The Clone Wars now Star Wars the Clone Wars is
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one of the pandemic world or pandemic style games, so it is essentially an
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adaptation of pandemic to fit the Clone Wars movie or Clone Wars idea, and
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then made into a game that way, so you know there are clones in
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that game. But then Loop inc. Also has this idea of clones running
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around causing trouble and you have to defeat them before they overwhelm you. Clones
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as a science fictional object are pretty interesting, particularly in the like the biological
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clone is one thing, it's not it's not as frightening to me because ultimately
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it's just it's a replication of a previous biological entity, but it is itself
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its own thing nonetheless, And like in Jurassic World two, the revelation of
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certain kinds of cloning is seen as frightening. And in fact, the whole
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Jurassic Park, Jurassic World series, and the Dinosaur Island games are all kind
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of about cloning, and they all turn on this notion that unfettered cloning or
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uncareful cloning or unthoughtful cloning is dangerous, deadly problematic. Is science taking the
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power of life into their own hands and possibly causing trouble with it. So
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the idea of cloning has been around for a long time, but sort of
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seeing it in games. Maybe today is a day to play a game about
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cloning if you have one of those three. Next up, this is an
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event I never heard about or didn't know anything about. Apparently, in nineteen
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seventy eight, a group of people occupied a traffic intersection in Denver to stop
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traffic and draw attention to and protest the fact that the bus system in Denver
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was inaccessible to a lot of people. The group apparently called the Gang of
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nineteen, which is a pretty badass name for a political group of uh peaceful
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protesters. And I say that, not having read too much about it,
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they might not have been peaceful protesters, but the idea of this seems pretty
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solid and interesting and l something that was worth reading about, but also worth
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playing a game and celebration of. Now, perhaps the game would ideally be
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in celebration of civic protest, and there aren't that many games that focus on
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that sort of thing. I know there's a game about the stonewall protests in
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New York, but I did think about you could play games about buses just
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to sort of think about buses in your city. And there's two as a
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lighter game you could try out. Let's make a bus route, which is
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a Sachi and Sachi game I believe about planning bus routes through the city and
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the ideas each player is planning a different bus route through the city, but
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you have overlapping routes as buses do, and you're trying to most make the
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most efficient bus route that's going to get you the most points, even as
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the whole city is available to similarly or on the other end of the spectrum,
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there is the splatter game Bus, which I've heard a number of good
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reviews about, and as I listen to and explore the idea of splatter games,
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Bus seems like one of the ones that would be more interesting to me.
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Like many of these games, it seems to have a weird mix of
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mechanisms and be a little bit on the crazy side. I think there's time
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travel involved with these buses and something about taking people to the bar after work.
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I think it looks it sounds pretty delightful, and if I had a
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chance to play Bus, I probably would take it. So that's bus A
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good way to celebrate Gang of nineteen, the Gang of nineteen nineteen seventy eight
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protests Action Nextcept in nineteen forty six, the Bikini swimsuit was introduced, named
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after the Bikini A Toll I believe it is a two piece bathing suit that
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was, I expect, seen as pretty scandalous in nineteen forty six and has
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been part of American culture and world culture ever since. Now, if you're
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going to play a game related to this, it seems like a game about
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beaches would be the thing. And the best game I can think of to
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play about beaches is Santa Monica. Santa Monica is a tableau building card collection
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game in which you are arranging different businesses and features on the Santa Monica pier
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that are designed to help introduce or designed to get you the most points they
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can by what they're next to and who is visiting them different elements of the
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Santa Santa. Different elements of Santa Monica score differently depending on their neighbors,
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and these little pieces that represent tourists and locals and VIPs who move around on
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the board and score points. Things could be you know, what does work
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somewhere? Hey, I would say, as far as I know, Santa
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Monica doesn't actually feature any bikinis in the game. So if you're looking for
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a game that's about bikinis specifically. I'm not sure what I would suggest,
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but if you want to look at something about beach culture, it feels like
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Santa Monica is the game to play. It's a nice light drafting game.
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It's a lot of fun, and it's easy to teach. So that's my
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suggestion. Josh Wood, I believe, is a designer of that one,
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and it's from AEG. Next up, in seventeen seventy five, we have
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the Olive Branch Petition. So the Olive Branch Petition, as I read about
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it, was an act by the Continental Congress, the last sort of Hurrah
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to try to stave off the American Revolution. The Continental Congress recognized that the
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revolution was going to be rough on Americans, it was going to be expensive,
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it was going to be deadly, and it could fail, and so
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they wanted to try to reach an agreement with King George so they didn't have
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to have a revolution. And so they sent something called the Olive Branch Agreement
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and offered to King George to try to stave off revolution. He apparently did
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not agree to the deal, and in seventeen seventy six we went to work.
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But I am intrigued by the idea of trying to keep the peace,
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and I'm reminded of the game that I've mentioned before. It's a kind of
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a weird co op called Don of the Peacemakers, and Don of the Peacemakers
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has a premise it's very strange. Feel free to look up the board game
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Espresso episode where I mentioned it. But in Dona the Peacemakers players represent the
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interests of the king, who is trying to maintain control of his kingdom despite
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the fact that factions in his kingdom are at war with one another. So
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the king is upset by the disruption to his kingdom caused by these warning factions
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and the potential ill will it brings his way for not keeping the peace.
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So in Dawn of the Peacemakers you play people envoys sent by the king supposedly
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to help in these different battles, but what you're actually supposed to try to
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do is keep the battles as even as possible so that neither side feels like
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it's making progress in the war effort. Because the idea is if either side
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and feels like it's making progress in the war effort, they will press harder
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to take advantage of that progress and perhaps kill a lot more people and win
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the war or whatever, continue pressing the war effort. Instead, you as
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the Peacemakers. Your goal is to keep the casualties even or drive the two
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sides to a stalemate in the battle, so that they will both retreat and
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feel demoralized about the war and hopefully stop warring. That's the promise of the
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game. We played one game of it. I thought it was pretty interesting.
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We succeeded in keeping the battle a stale mate, but it took a
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lot of thinking and careful manipulation of the different parts. So it's a really
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interesting idea for a game. I'm not sure it's great, but really interesting.
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And if you're interested in taking today to celebrate the seventeen seventy five Olive
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Branch petition, perhaps Donov the Peacemakers might be your choice. Finally, the
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last of the events from July fifth in history that I wanted to bring up,
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and these are all these all seem to have been American. Well,
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no, Dolly, the sheep was Scottish, the bikini was French, I
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believe, but this last one is early American. July fifth eighteen sixty five
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is the day that Andrew Johnson, the president who came into office after Abraham
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Lincoln was assassinated, signed the execution orders for the Lincoln assassin conspira assassination conspirators.
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Now, if you've read much about this, which I will admit I
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have not, but my understanding is that the Lincoln assassination conspirators, there are
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some who were very clearly necessarily involved and very clearly deserved governmental punishment. Whether
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that's a hanging or not, I don't know. Uh. I generally would
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not think the government should execute anybody, but people who try to assassinate state
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leaders, I don't know. Uh. There's some it's such a significant anti
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democratic move that I'm I'm uh ambivalent about it. But there are people who
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were part of who are tried as part of this asassination plot, who may
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or may not have reasonably been associated with it, some people who were unaware
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of what was happening, as my understanding, and some who assist it afterward.
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In particular, there's a lot of commentary I understand about Samuel Mudd,
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the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth's leg. Some people branded him a trader
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other people said, if you're a doctor, you have to treat the patient
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in front of you. You can't refuse to treat a patient just because you
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don't like them or they're a criminal. So that's an interesting question if you
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want to wrestle this out further. There's a game that I've heard is very
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good called Unforgiven the Trial of the Lincoln Assassins, And what it is is
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it is a back and forth card driven game in which you are trying to
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sway jury members to your side about regarding the Lincoln assassination understandings. It plays
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in a similar way to something like Watergate, but it's about the Lincoln assassination
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instead. It looks like a really interesting game when it came out. It's
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just not sort of game I'm going to play a lot, so I wasn't
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willing to invest in it. But it does look interesting, and if someone
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brought it to a game night, I would certainly be willing to try it.
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So that's that might be one way to celebrate or remember the eighteen sixty
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five condemnation of the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Well that's it for my reminiscing on
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July fifth, History today, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
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Are there other events that you you think should be worth discussing? What games
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would you play? In response to these events? Head over to board game
22:48
Get Guild three two six y nine and let me know your thoughts. Otherwise,
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until next time, thanks for joining me. I hope your next walk
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as as pleasant as mind was. By bye,