Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 208: Catan, Codenames & More! (Board Games Part 1)

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

In this episode, Conor and Ben chat about their favorite board games.Link to Episode 208 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBen DeaneShow NotesDate Recorded: 2024-11-12Date Released: 2024-11-15Meeting C++ Conferencecode::dive ConferenceCore C++ ConferencePyData NYCRustacean Station PodcastWord on the StreetScrabbleDixitWatergateAFI 100 Listactualol YouTube Channel"Point-Free or Die: Tacit Programming in Haskell and Beyond" by Amar ShahComposition Intuition - Conor Hoekstra - CppNorth 2023CodenamesCATANCATAN: SeafarersCatan TikTok VideoRicochet RobotsIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

And... okay, here we go... Oh my god, another seven, are you serious? Not my lucky day. This guy... There. Something troubling you? Surely there's been a mistake here. What mistakes do your eyes see, please tell us.

Well, the burglar appears to be placed on my highest yielding wheat field. Welcome to ADSP the podcast episode 208 recorded on November 12, 2024. My name is Connor and today with my co host Ben, we talk about our favorite board games. All right, how's it going? It's been a minute since we chatted. Yeah, it's been a little while. It seems like, I was thinking the other day, is Bryce now doing the On Location podcasts and I'm doing the Homebody podcasts? I haven't decided yet. I mean, I feel like this is a multi-co-host podcast now.

That's what season two is. I don't think we're either of us. Actually, that's a lie. Bryce is, I think, at the moment, what is it, November 12th? Actually, I don't know if he's left yet, but I know that there is a cascade, is that the right word, of conferences and events in the C++ world about to happen. There's CodeDive. There's Meeting C++ world about to happen. There's CodeDive. There's Meeting C++.

I think sandwiched inside of that is the Berlin. I think it's Berlin. I could be wrong. Maybe it's Poland. It's in one of the two Meeting C++ or CodeDive locations, which is Berlin and Wroclaw, Poland. And then I think it's still happening. The Core CPP event in Israel is

happening after that. And I think Bryce is attending all of that. I think, I think. I chatted with him a few days ago and he said he had to do like, you know, three weeks work of worth. Three weeks worth of work? Wow, that's a tongue twister um in like a couple days because he was heading for travel and i think actually he was just in a conference in new york like pi data nyc where there was some nvidia folks anyways there's always something happening there's always it's always busy on the on the conference circuit c++ alone and then you take in you know all the array language conferences that you do and it's all it's all you guys are always traveling i think honestly that's this like in the midst of whether c++ is crumbling as a an empire or not you know it's

hard to tell in the midst when rome was at the peak of its height. Sure. Whether or not that's happening, I think the single best thing about C++ is the cornucopia of not just conferences, but also podcasts, content, say what you will about competing efforts, but Rust is probably the biggest of those. And I think there's only really one active Rust podcast called Rustation Station. And there's a couple other small ones that come and go that like I think the next currently active one is like at 10 or 15 episodes.

And there's definitely a few Rust conferences, but definitely nowhere near the number of C++ ones. Anyways, and it's nice to, I don't know, as someone who consumes content, it's nice for there to be more content because I would love to listen to more Rust podcasts that are like more language focused. Anyways. So is this your new recording space? Connor's where I normally talk to Connor from, he has changed. Now I see behind him a good number of books, which I'll ask about in a sec, and a bunch of board games, and a bunch of medals and running numbers and a Sansevieria.

Mother-in-law's tongue or snake plant, for those who aren't familiar. Yeah, this is actually Professor Snake. It's from a friend of mine, Justin. Justin Kwong, shout out. He got married in September. I was actually emceeing his wedding. Congratulations to him and Jenny. He used to live in Toronto and left to Vancouver.

And when he left, I acquired all of his plants, one of which is Professor Snake, who has never been on camera before. Maxwell, my fern plant, is too big to fit back here. So what has happened is I moved at the end of October. My fiance and I used to live at one place. Now we live what was her old place and is now our new place. And I'm not going to stretch this over like 10 episodes where I tell you a story each time about my coach and then my fridge. We moved. It was painful.

Oh, I have a couch guy down at Ikea, you know. We had one couch at my old place, which was a hand-me-down from my sister when she also used to live in Toronto. And then she went to Calgary. Almost all my furniture is like acquired from people that left the city while I was moving. And they were like, hey, do you want half my stuff? And I was like, sure, why not? But my fiance had a couch at her place. So we don't need two coaches.

So we sold our coach for $30 to... It's basically like the fee for someone just to come and get it from us. We don't... Yeah. I'm actually trying to make money from it. Right. Exactly. It's like, take it away.

The point being is we're now in a smaller space. So all of my stuff is crammed into this little den. It used to be spread out across the apartment that we used to live in and uh that's why you see yes all the board games and stuff i'm not sure yeah so we were chatting because someone once requested we should do a board game episode i know you are also a board game fan i am so yeah i don't know if you want to talk what's behind me and then you can mention your favorites and we can... Sure, sure. So, we know that Connor likes Scrabble and there are some word board games represented behind you there.

So, you've got one called Letter Tycoon. I'm not familiar with that. But you've got Dixit and Scrabble indeed and Word on the Street. Is that what that says? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Word on the Street. I went through a yeah oh yeah word on the street i went through a phase that that was it's a still a very fun game it's a game where uh yeah of the word

games well i mean scrabble is here you can't see it yes yeah it is there um this is this is the $20 version of scrabble if anyone knows you used to be able to order custom Scrabble boards that, you know, you could choose the foldability, you know, if it's a tournament Scrabble board, turnstile, et cetera, you can't get them anymore. A lot of the companies folded during the pandemic or they shut down just because they didn't have the bandwidth. It's like one person shops. If anybody knows a place that I can get a, and not for like 500 USD dollars, because

that is crazy. That's the only ones that I can find I'd be interested Scrabble is definitely my favorite word game word on the street is a game where you take not the full 26 letters but I think it's like 22 of them and you place them on a table in a line on a board and then you'll get given a category like animal. And then you've got 30 seconds to think of the name of an animal and then spell it out. And every time you say a letter, you move that letter one lane towards you. And once you get it three lanes in your direction, you collect that letter and it's the first person to get eight letters. Obviously, though, you go back and forth with the either opponent or the turn so like if you say

alligator that would be a pretty good one because it's a l l i g a t o r so you get two doubles a's and l's so the longer the word it also it gets really fun because towards the end of the game once certain letters are collected all the a's r's l's s's t's you can't use them once your opponent gets them is is that okay? Or you can use them. But there's no benefit, I see. So it's a tug of war. Exactly.

A 22-way tug of war with all these letters. Yeah. So do you go for, what's a good strategy in that game? I mean, one is trying to get double, trying to get long words in general. Do you try and snipe some of the lesser huge letters perhaps that's a strategy the best strategy is to or and i mean i'm sure everyone has different strategies although it's not a huge it's not like a deep strategy game uh in general the longest word as possible that you can correctly spell because if you misspell it you have to put back all the

letters right okay and then you want there to be a breadth of letters but also if you can get like a double or a triple like sometimes saying the word i don't know daddy or something like that or mommy uh those are bad examples because i don't actually think that would be the answer to any clue but um if you can come up with a word that has a triple you can automatically lock that letter up and especially if you see because it's only three stops until you yeah capture the letter yeah and then usually you want to try and target letters that are either at the edge of your highway like side of the board that you're one away from collecting and you want to defensively try and take back if if your opponent

has like a t and an r coming up something with like a website like twitter then you can get it you know back into the middle very fun game not many people know about it sounds fun yeah there are a few of those kind of tug of war the tug of war style it reminds me of is um a game called that i haven't played but it's called watergate and it's for two players and it's so it's the strange it's supposed to be a really good two-player game strangest idea or it's that kind of theme for a game it's about the watergate scandal and one one side is playing you know nixon's administration and the other side is playing basically the press one side trying to you know get to informants first before they get sort of taken out of the game and you're playing tug of war with a you

know if you get it all the way to your side then then nixon gets impeached and removed and if nixon gets it all the way to his side it's he he wins it's that it's a kind of tug of war game interesting i've never heard of that and i'd be interested in playing because i did recently watch what's the watergate movie called it's not called watergate it's all the president's men all the president's men yes robert redford yeah robert redford and dustin hoffman i believe and there was obviously a couple other people in it where my fiancee and i are watching we're trying to get our way slowly through the afi america's institute 100 and it's always it's a it's a toss-up sometimes the movies really really age well and sometimes they're painful to watch yeah but this one i thought was really really good um and also

what's sad and that's you know everyone loves their partners but um she my partner is so much better at understanding like the context of a movie the movie not to ruin anything uh but it stops before all the stuff that was in the headlines at the time right place it's just a lead up yeah it goes through that like in rapid fire at the end and i was like what that's the most exciting part but because i didn't live through it like i'm not really familiar with what happened but at the time everybody would have known like they were telling the story that people hadn't heard, not the story that was in the news. She immediately picked up on that. And I was like, what?

How could they do that? And she's like, well, you have to understand, like, we're watching this, you know, decades later. 40 years after the fact. Yeah. I was like, well, now they got to make a follow up so that the young kids that didn't live through it, because it's pretty insane what happened there. Anyways, back to board games. Watergate. I'll put it on my list. it's supposed to be really good um i haven't played it but uh i i do watch a youtube

channel called actual lol actual lol like lol like actual ol actual lol okay yeah hard to say but um yeah it's a british guy he reviews board games. And Watergate's one of the ones he recommends. Yeah, so I see several others there. Mastermind. Mastermind, of course, is a programmer type game, right? Mastermind is the game that I borrowed the exact matches problem from in Amar Shah's talk, Point Free or Die. And then I talked about it. I think it was in the composition intuition talk that i gave at cpp north a year ago i vaguely remember something yeah and it's actually hard to

find that game that version of mastermind is a multi-person mastermind that has like a spinning ball where like up to four people can play and guess i only never played that version, but it's hard to actually find the old school, just rectangular with rounded edges, gray version of the game. Right. Let's see. I see Hive, Wingspan, Patchwork 2, Codenames. Codenames is a good game, but really difficult, I found. You have to have the right, you have to have people that are on the right wavelength. It can be.

Yeah, I think so it can be a lot of fun but there can be some frustration like where someone goes for or should we explain the game should you explain the game for those that might not have heard of codenames yeah so in code it's a two-player game at least i've played two players um you're sitting across the table from each other and between you is a matrix of what five by five matrix of yep cards with words on them uh with words on them and you each have a key to this matrix which denotes some of the cards as secret agents or bombs or basically you you they are to be avoided yeah like so you get a five by five grid where you have two codes sayers and then two people that are trying to guess and the people that are saying the clues have a little five by five card that denotes i think it's going to be like seven red ones eight blue ones and then one black one

and your goal is you want your red teammate somehow to guess the red ones the blue for blue but never guess black because that's the equivalent of sinking the ape in a game of billiards. On each turn, you are trying to give, I think, a single word clue. One word, yes. That somehow leads your opponents to guess one or more of the

hopefully related words in the matrix. Obviously, the ones you want them to guess, the red ones, and not the ones you want them to avoid. Oh, no is my son just sent me a dad joke where the bad rainbows go uh i have no idea prism oh that's a dad joke we'll keep that in we'll keep that in yes so code names is uh and what makes it difficult is you don't have an We'll keep that in. We'll keep that in. Yeah, so Codenames is... And what makes it difficult is you don't have an unlimited number of turns, right?

The timer counts down every turn. You only have a limited number of turns to uncover all the... Or identify all the good words. I've never played that way. Yes. Wait, maybe I've been playing wrong for the entirety of my Cenames. Well, there is a mechanic like that. I don't know if it's a pure time limit or if it's just that when the quote unquote wrong words are guessed, they count against you and they decrease the time limit. There is some mechanic like that, the way I've played it.

I think we might be conflating. I could be wrong because I've actually never played this version but there is the solo code names where you play with just a partner and it's you against like a number of turns and then there's code names versus a team so the the one you're explaining i'm guessing you've got n number of turns and every you know wrong guess decreases something and if uh yes and it's a cooperative game for two players. Like I'm cooperating with the person across the table. Okay. Yeah.

I've never played this version. And so the version I'm used to playing is you play against a team and you're trying to get your teammate to guess your color, which is either red or blue. And you're trying to definitely avoid the black, but also trying to avoid the blue cards. Because if you accidentally guess your opponent's card, they still get that as one of their guesses. So now they have one less thing to guess.

And the tricky thing is when you say a clue, you give it a number. Like a classic one is there'll be like some geography or cities like Canada, Paris. But then it'll also have something like pyramid. And so you'll want to say something like geography for two. but you want to make sure that they don't guess pyramid because it could be the opponent's right guess or it could just be a neutral one so you want to say okay if it's what did i say paris and canada you want to say something that is leans more towards like jurisdictional borders, like jurisdictions maybe,

versus geography that could get conflated. Landmarks, yeah. Yeah. That's right. I'd forgotten you say the number of words that you're cluing. Yeah. In each round. And your opponents can guess up to that number. Or they can guess as many as they like.

They don't have to guess the number you said. They could sort of leave it in reserve for the next guess and then so they can get some more information by combining successive clues potentially this is where because i whenever i played board games in the past like pre-pandemic especially when i was younger i used to play with actuaries and even people in tech we all take board games very seriously so there's a set of rules where yeah you you can say n uh as the maker of the clue and then like you said you can you can guess zero if you want and just say pass right and then in the future if you ever go perfect if you go one for one or two for two you get a bonus guess right and so you can you can make your way through and there's another way where the if it's close to the end and it's like a last shot Harold

Mary, you can say, I can't remember what the word is, infinity or like negative one. And then they can have as many guesses as they want. Or you could just say like seven so that like they get as many guesses. Yeah. So they get as many as they left. And it can become very strategic where you'll guess like two out of the three because you're definitely sure. And it's narrowed down to two.

But like you don't want to guess the opponent so you'll save it for a bonus but i've played with people where they don't understand all those rules and they're like what are you doing you're cheating here getting a bonus guess or um and it's like no no that's the rule anyway see sometimes that's a simplify but i've played where someone will say like something for two and it's very obvious what those two are in hindsight. But then like the person was, oh, I actually didn't read all the cards. I only read the first two columns. And then it's like, well, you wouldn't have made that quick if you had read the remaining, you know, 10 cards. Anyways, very fun game, if not leads to some contentious moments with family members and friends.

Yeah. So, yeah, I am an avid board game player. Yeah, what are your favorites? I don't see any behind you, but I'm sure there's in a different room. They are all in the cupboard on my right, which is full of them. I would have to say my favorite game, and this is just one that I was playing. So, when I was working in the uk for electronic arts in chertsey back in the day we would play settlers of katan it's just called katan in america these

days but i know it as settlers because it was called dc love on katan in germany we would play it every lunchtime every day you know we would take the lunchtime just to play. And it takes about an hour. Because Settlers or Catan, Catan has an expansion called Seafarers. The original game, I understand, as it was designed, was Seafarers. Catan, or Settlers of Catan, without the boats part, is the original game that's cut down to make it the marketable. This is a four-player game that lasts about an hour, right? So anyway, that game is just great in terms of how it mixes strategy and luck. It's a really, really, I don't know really of many other games

that do such a good job of mixing luck and strategy. And there are multiple paths to take, you know, depending on where you get your settlements and how often they produce. And, you know, you can go for things like largest army, longest road. You can go development cards. You can go settlements. You can go road building. And then the game pivots as you play because you have to start out building

settlements and roads but then in order to make it to 10 victory points you more or less have to start upgrading to cities at some point and that takes a different distribution of cards, a different strategy because cities require

I think it's stone and wheat uh to build whereas whereas roads are brick and wood so completely disjoint materials that you need to somehow get and there's just such a lot for such a smallish game i mean it's it's a sort of a perp for me it's a perfect size um there's so much in it there's so much combinatorially in it you know it's just you're putting down settlements you're putting down roads you've got a card a hand of cards and you're spending cards and you're getting cards from what produces every time the dice are rolled it's a great game i used to play every day i always have a soft spot for it i've only played katan i think

three or four times i've loved it every time i played it. I'm not actually sure why I never got into it. I think it's probably because I found Carcassonne first and both of those games. I'd say actually Carcassonne has- Carcassonne's a worker placement game. Is that right? Yeah. That's the one with the meeples?

Yes, exactly. It's my second favorite game by far because it's a game that takes like one minute or two minutes to explain, two minutes of playing it to get the gist of it. But it's actually got, it's like a light strategy game that actually has a lot of depth to it. And it's in the similar box of Catan. So I think I discovered Carcassonne first, fell in love with that.

If not, I would have fallen in love with Catan. But Catan, I came across this Instagram reel. And I will try and find it and get the audio and cut it in. Okay, here we go. Oh, my God, another seven. Are you serious? Not my lucky day. This guy. Something troubling you?

Surely there's been a mistake here. What mistakes do your eyes see, please tell us. Well, the burglar appears to be placed on my highest yielding wheat field. Surely there's been a mistake here. What mistakes do your eyes see, please tell us? Well, the burglar appears to be placed on my highest yielding wheat field. I'm afraid no mistake has been made. But are your people not enjoying bread made from my wheat? And are your people not living in stone halls from the resources that I've given you? You illustrate my point perfectly. We were engaged in trade. My people no longer have use for your bread.

We take lamb from the north. But what about us? We're friends now, we're allies. What about that? People of the Orange Kingdom do not make alliance. We had an alliance! We had an alliance. If you thought that was an alliance,

then you truly are a fool. I'd rather live a thousand lives as a fool and breathe a single breath as a tyrant i just i just won what yeah it's got longest road oh yeah true okay i wanted to see where this was going that's anticlimactic winning that didn't even feel good i think i'm having panic attack. I don't want to clean this up. It was so fun. It's these two guys, or it's actually one guy playing three characters, and they're playing Board Game of Catan, and they're saying, at some point he's like,

I'm no longer going to trade my wheat with you. And then he goes into these UK accents of like, I can't believe we had an agreement. And he was like, blah, blah, blah. And they go back and forth for like 40 seconds if this is like, you know, a Shakespearean medieval whatever. And then the third guy who's just like watching it happen is like, actually, I won't say it. I won't say it because I don't want to ruin it.

But anyways, he just like interrupts and then the game's over. And it's, you have to have probably played Catan at least once to understand the hilarity of it. Yeah. One of the things that makes it good is on any turn you have a number of choices of what to do you know you have plans to advance your own standing and you can try and screw up other players you can be racing to build roads to cut people off you can be but you always have you have a hand of cards right and you might you you could buy a development card or build a road or exchange you know exchange cards maybe at a port if you have a port or you know so there's

a choice there's always a choice over what to do and that's what makes it and it's a kind of a fast paced in terms of like the turns don't drag it's also a game of um which is why i like carcassonne as well it's a hidden game of statistics if i recall correctly yes like well in settlers exactly in settlers the statistics are not hidden they're actually exposed on the board so you lay out the hex tiles for the island right the island is made of hex tiles and every hex tile is uh one of five landscape types which produce um the various resources so you've got um pasture producing sheep wheat fields producing wheat mountains producing stone uh my i think mines producing brick and uh what's the other one forest producing wood right and then one tile is desert just the

way that the tiles are mean that the island has one tile which is desert and that's where the robber lives to begin with and and and then across those tiles you you lay counters which indicate that each count has a number on it right corresponding to a roll of two dice right so the idea is that when when that number comes up the tile with that number will produce its resource right but also there's dots on the on the numbers on the number on the little number tiles um and the number of dots indicates the probability so eight and six obviously are the highest probability so if you roll a seven which of course is the ultimately highest probability with two dice that doesn't produce anything that's when the robber moves and the person who rolled the

seven moves the robber to whichever tile they want and then steals a card from someone with a settlement on that tile that's the whole thing about rolling a seven right rolling a seven is the most common role but it doesn't a you if a seven is rolled everyone has to discard their hand cards down to a maximum of seven right so there's that element you could be building up a stockpile of cards but if you don't spend them quickly enough you run the risk that a seven is rolled and then you have to discard i think you have to discard half of them actually it might not be down to seven it might be half i forget the rule this is very honestly uh i'm not super familiar with the game but craps-esque where yes yes well and then all the way down to like so obviously

you lay out the island you let you lay out the numbers on the tiles and then the first thing you do is everyone places two starting settlements on the on the vertices between tiles so each each settlement right yeah borders effectively has three tiles around it so three chances to produce resources but of course you want to put your settlements on the vertices that border high probability tiles. Yes. So the first person, the first player to go gets an advantage because they get first pick. And it's snakes, right?

If I recall, like the picking of, or like the way that people place things, it's snakes. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. And the nice thing about Catan too is is the replayability of it that's like you're explaining of the the way that you set the board up every single time you get a brand new yeah where there is some games like robot ricochet i love that game have you ever heard of it no i know i've got robo rally no robo rallyally I've heard of as well. But Robot Ricochet is a very quick game.

When I was down in Silicon Valley, there was some guys at Amazon that had a board game group that would meet at least once every two weeks, sometimes once a week. And we would play two or three games in the evening, and we would always finish with Robot Ricochet. And the replayability of that game isn't great if you really study the boards, because it has four quadrants, and each quadrant can be flipped. So you get a certain number of new things, but every quadrant is always going to be the same,

so you can kind of get a sense. And the way it works is you basically have a grid with kind of angles that these little four robots visually can bounce off of kind of um okay not like hence the ricochet yeah so it's just like you know if it hits an angle you know it goes or if it hits a wall it'll bounce back is it like one of those laser mazes exactly yeah the the play field okay yeah it's just so you can it like, yeah, with lasers and windows is a great way to explain it. And you'll have this board with a ton of these mirrors, effectively, that these robots can bounce off of. And you'll flip a card that'll show like a red circle, which means you need to get the red robot to the red circle or something like that.

And so then you just stare. You stare like the six of you or the eight of you at this thing, like just trying to do it visually with trying to figure out where the ricochets land. And then at some point, someone will say seven or 14. And that's the number of reflections that it takes that robot to get there. And then the timer gets flipped. And if anyone after that can come up with a lower number in the 30 seconds then they'll say like 10 and uh and the person with the lowest number then gets

to show it if it's correct they get that card and that's it and then the the robot's in a new place the next thing gets flipped very simple game incredibly fun because some people will be like 24 and you're like how did you you can't do 24. And then they will have done 24. Anyway, very fun game. Haven't played it in years since I was down at Silicon Valley. But the point being, Catan, replayability off the charts. Yeah. Like I said, I used to play it every day for like over a year.

Over a working year, we played every last time. So replayability very high. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSP the podcast dot com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments and questions. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. I am the anti brace.