Triforce! - Triforce Introduces - Chance & Counters: Lost pt II - With Lewis Brindley

Episode Date: July 23, 2022

Whilst we are on holiday we thought you might enjoy this episode of Chance & Counters featuring Lewis. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to give them a follow https://www.pickaxe.uk/chance-and-counters -------------------------------------------------------------- Lewis (https://www.twitch.tv/yogscast) and co are stranded on a desert island, Ben gets crabby, and only a board game stands between them and insanity. Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly. here though yeah we are here listening to you i'm not actually awake right now you're flaming us right now i heard that enjoy the podcast hello and welcome to chance encounters podcast uh we've been operating board game cafes around the uk for about six years now from hen do's to family do's from first dates to breakups we've seen it all and recommended a game for the occasion

but now we're looking for a fresh challenge. Each week we'll invite a guest on who will put our knowledge to the test. They'll come armed with an abstract and absurd scenario and it's up to us to figure out what that situation calls for and recommend a game that totally settles their Catan. We'll get there. We'll find one soon.

Keep trying. Whichever game recommendation the guest loves the most will score a point and at the end of the series, whoever has the most points will be crowned the Titan of Board Games. So I guess we'll start introducing. My name is Richard Skarsbruck. I'm a co-founder of Chance Encounters and I've been with them pretty much since the beginning. That's kind of what founder means so it's about six years. I play lots of board games, video games, all the things. Do you have a cool nickname? Oh there's a nickname I've heard been used. Oh Scarab. Okay so my name is Skarsbruck but there's a lot of richards in chance encounters so yes i have

been known as the scarab which i'm not just scarab i don't think it's an affection and i really like you sound like a 1930s like vigilante you know like with a with a hood and a cape no no he sounds like some a mummy that's been yeah he's been like haunting a tomb beware the scarab we also have a tie-in with disney Moon Knight as well, and that's where this is coming from. So, my name's Richard, my co-host here is Ben. Hello, I'm Ben, I work with the Yogscast, I do streams, I love board games, and I'm a massive nerd.

It's Bedgurs. Bedgurs is my Twitch handle, correct. Thank you. Yeah, so it's Ben Edgar, right? The most unoriginal. Ben Edgar. Never going to be a situation where it's like, oh, where did you come up with that situation?

A lot of people, actually, when I've said that, people have been like, oh! I guess it didn't make that connection, right? They thought you were so creative. You've come up with this strange new word. People misread it all the time. If I remember ever on public voice chat, people always call me Badger.

Because they just scan read it. You know how you look at the beginning and the end of a word and you just assume you know what it says? We're going to call you that now. Or Bedgers. Bedgers. Like talking about just seeing words and not knowing how to pronounce. Bedgers, right?

Yeah, there's nothing quite like getting phoned up by a call center, being called Dan Edger, and being told that my customer is very important to them i mean the one thing that we don't know i mean if everyone's happy with it was fairly easy to figure out what your handle and how that came about the shark situation yeah what what what led to the shark i'm i'm that's me i mean that that's who i am oh my god inside i mean i wear this you know flesh disguise yeah but i am mean, I wear this, you know, flesh disguise. Yeah.

But I am a shark. He secretly, you know, tries to kill beautiful, you know, divers. And eat their legs. Right. I've been reformed. I was caught by the HMS Yogs car. Flying up on the back of a motorboat, you know, flopping around. Getting harpooned.

On your passport passport it also literally just says shark as your uh gender is that how it works yeah and nationality and age shark i kind of you're there to fight the lizard people right that's your real purpose for being here the lizard people that's why i'm on i'm a surface dweller now. Wait, this means that all those situations where you're on the website and they go, are you human? And then you're like, no, I'm not.

I'm not a robot. Yeah, it's whether it says, are you a robot? In which case, oh yeah, that's correct. I am not a robot. I'm allowed on like half of those websites. Right. You need that third option. Other.

And the Games Guru from chance encounters this uh week is russ hello i'm russell i'm game guru slash head of games at chance encounters bristol and i am also a huge nerd who loves board games i've probably played board games far too much is why i'm here yeah russ is recommending me some cracking board game oh my god so i've got a head start i've got a head start hopefully none of these like you can't use any of the ones you've already recommended lewis uh okay challenge accepted the guru is that what your nickname is yeah talking of nicknames the only nickname i've ever been given and it doesn't even make any sense is rusty like i don't i'm not like i'm not like a handyman i've never i don't have red hair yeah yeah i don't know why i've ever was ever given that nickname but apart from russ which is kind

of dull just shortening my name say your xbox live or you know playstation my gamer tag yeah uh yeah is that gamer tag is that like yeah username whatever uh it's actually it's completely irrelevant it's just it's just a character that i in a book that i wrote when i was a teenager that is adorable yeah you don't have to share i feel like i feel like i feel like it won't make sense so i think i'll just leave it out but you can find it if you try hard enough there you go if you want rusty oc fan fiction i'm looking for it right now i'm sure that will lead me straight to it yeah and the guest that probably needs very little introduction lewis thank you yes uh they used to call me chuckles in high school high school in senior school that was my nickname back in the day

because i was just a very jolly fellow not because you're a clown i think i have got quite a distinctive laugh though and i i do laugh often and and inappropriately um as has happened you know just to diffuse the tension um there is definitely that situation where it gets uncomfortable and I'm like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. And then everyone's laughing and I'm like, that was really dark and why are you laughing? And I'm like, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Yes. It just kind of stacks though, doesn't it? Because the more you feel like you need to laugh and you know that you shouldn't, that makes you more nervous. Yeah. And then before you know it, you're just howling at a funeral. And then everyone's saying, did you know lewis was laughing and she was dead so disrespectful and yeah it compounds itself and then i'm like i wasn't laughing um yeah led me down some risky areas but i'm doing fine i love

board games thank you for having me on no worries uh when do i crack open the the task for you uh let's do it now what what have you come with abstract and absurd scenario for us so i've been thinking about the 2001 to film cast away oh okay yeah hanks with tom hanks now of course one of the main problems he had uh on the island was staying sane when he was cast away and so he ended up because he had all these fedex packages do you remember and he cracked them open and there was like an ice skate and a volleyball volleyball yeah well that he made friends with. But imagine he wasn't that lucky and there wasn't something with such a human-shaped head.

And also imagine he was trapped there with several of his friends who, you know, maybe they were friends, maybe they were strangers, but, you know, I'm sure after a while they're all going to be pretty sick of each other. In one of those Fedex packages was a board game you know maybe a board game that would have to you know see these guys through thick and thin yeah through years of of straining their social fabric what what do they have to like what they have to make themselves create a new civilization on the island

no no no but but more more just to hold them together like bind them rather than make them enemies okay i don't know if you've played board games before but making enemies seems to be the point in a really competitive board games in my opinion or maybe that's just me i don't know what would be worse though if you were constantly fighting each other in this board game and someone was always winning and you're all very competitive or the opposite you're playing like a cooperative game one person pulling their fucking weight and you keep failing the scenario like honestly i don't know which one drives people apart more to be honest i think it depends on the group i guess i'd hope that after a few plays that person that wasn't pulling their weight

would probably have at least learned the rules by that point, right? You've got nothing else. You've got no excuses. We're on this desert island together. You're reading the bloody rule book. I would still,

I would still almost guarantee in a situation like that, about three or four games in where you've got literally nothing else to do, I would still find out we're playing a rule wrong.

Yeah. Because there's like some kind of bit on the side of the rule back leg that says something. Oh, we've been playing a rule wrong yeah because there's like some kind of bit on the side of the rule back leg that says something oh we've been doing that wrong the whole time even my favorite games i've been doing that like i mean to be fair some of the rule books are also i think it's maybe something we've we've previously mentioned but it'd be a trial to get through there are some bad rule books out there and you wouldn't be able to watch the youtube instruction video and smith couldn't help you out in these situations.

He's like the big board game tutorial video guy. Yeah, imagine like you fished it out to sea as well and like half the rule book was missing. Oh no. That'd be the worst. You have to start inventing your own rules. Or every week you could take it in turns, you know? This week it's Lewis' turn to make the rules up. Every time I play with Ben though, he's like, I've enough board games i think i'm assuming this is how this happens and this

probably works like this and that's what we do yeah um we got a you got a lot of trust in him then uh based on that well the first time ben played wingspan i remember um he said he was like oh i got a score of like 250 i was like how did you do that what were you doing i think it turned out we weren't paying actions to play birds we were only doing the three main actions so obviously we were just putting down millions of birds and getting loads of points it was really easy like far too much many actions we did that the first time we played a war of whispers as well we're first time we played that we we because you we thought you had you could take every action in a row yeah not not just choose one of the options like twice or three times as many

and then we played yeah i played that game with us a few months later and he was like i know this game really well i'm going to tell you all how to play it and he started telling us how to play it the wrong way that we'd been playing it oh my god and had to be like i hate to interrupt game guru we just we did exactly the same thing wrong i say some one of my biggest shames is obviously getting rules wrong but also i feel like then if we both fell for that then it must be something to do with the rule book that did vindicate me i felt a lot less guilty about teaching it wrong there's someone else independently yeah the teacher bought games for a living and still got that that small wrong this is why you can't really make assumptions

this is why it's like actually sucks sometimes if you get a rule book that's so like badly done because then you just you might miss something that actually changes the whole game um but yeah that is still my biggest change so we have a few people on this island should we should we give them names should we give them some personalities yeah the scarab rusty yeah okay the guru and chuckles okay okay right so there's four four Make of them what you will Yeah It could be anyone Okay

So is there four then? There's four Okay Okay All men Okay Are they all gamers? Are they all hardcore gamers?

Look You One of them is a pilot Ooh Okay One of them is A holidaying Old man

Like a greying old man One of them is a young 18 year old um surfer oh cool professional surfer and one of them is a 38 year old youtube twitch streamer right so what we're saying is they have a lot of life skills to bring to this survival uh island is that what we're going with? Yeah. We need to keep them interested. Replayability. You know, and we don't want one person taking control and doing everyone else's actions. We want everyone to feel like they're part of the game.

I want a game I can play again and again and feel like everyone's able to you know compete okay but with variety okay hit me oh i mean i feel like there's some more digging to do first yeah uh like like like are you playing this game out in the open like is there a shelter somewhere nearby that we can like go yeah there's like some coconut fronds we've rigged up over the over this area we've got some you know a little wind break yeah we got like a little campfire nearby we've got some coconuts that have been carved they've collected some rainwater we've got some crabs on sticks you know that have been cooked on the fire yeah we're content otherwise you know there's no imminent danger of you know, of being cooked on the fire. Yeah, we're content otherwise. You know, there's no imminent danger of, you know, disease, death. No natural predators. Yeah, there's no smoke monster or like...

It sounds like a luxury island. Or some button that needs pressing. There's no button. No mystery hatches that leads to five more mysteries. Equally, there's no doorbells ringing. There's no animals that need walking. You know, no one sitting on their phone during your turn. We've got plenty of time.

This is like a dream scenario rather than like a nightmare scenario then. Yeah. You've just like literally got all this time to play games. It's just got to be a good game. All this time to play games. The one game you have. Yeah. Okay.

I like this as a... I'm kind of already immediately thinking, do I want a game that literally will take the whole day just to drop in there is that the only game you can think of that would take the whole day? Depends who you play with sometimes

sometimes you gotta, I've played Patchwork which is a very, it's like a 30 minute game with a friend of mine who took, it took us like two and a half hours to play because he analysed every move that might lead to island murder yeah I think who took it took us like two and a half hours to play because he analyzed every move oh i like that might lead to island murder yeah i think like oh my god so i just really want to like rocks have we got so yeah i mean that is one of the longest games that and game of thrones is the other kind

of classic game that takes forever yeah it's like a well but then again i feel like you know if you've got like the games in a spectrum of length and time commitment, Twilight Imperium is just over here on its own. It's the anomaly. There's nothing like in that space. Yeah, the eight to 12 hour range is quite rare. There is a known like really ridiculously long game

called The Campaign for North Africa. And that takes like days to play and also diplomacy which is a childhood game for some people that can take a long time as well i've seen risk take like three or four hours before because people just get lucky with the dice rolls and they just you can't they've got one country and they've been holding on to it for like the last 45 minutes but literally they just keep rolling enough to keep like surviving so you know there are games that can take forever but you want a game that's engaging throughout that time i've played a game of diplomacy online so you can do it in such that you have uh each each turn essentially takes 24 hours um so a lot of conversation like a play by

email kind of situation exactly we could do that on the island. You just have your own corner of the island, and you just send each other notes in a bottle. Then you all go off and whisper with each other about your... Because diplomacy is a game that will ruin friendship. I don't know if it's one I could possibly recommend. I think you'll end up... People will keep those betrayals in their heart.

If you haven't played diplomacy, surprisingly, it's all about those interrelationships that you have during the game uh by large your attack and defense no one can gain an advantage unless it's through someone else supporting you give or take the is almost imperative especially early on that you're talking with other people and get convincing that it's in their interest to let you attack other places or the opponents for example so that entire game gets very backstabby very quickly ironic really this name is supposed to be like was it a game about working together until someone makes that wild lunge for solo victory yeah and just betrays everyone yeah when you've been like

closest allies for three weeks as you've played this game i think for me when i was playing it it's another situation where if you try and use logic the whole thing which is it's kind of what i do i don't just use it and then someone does something that's just illogical to you you're like what what's why is this going on and i take it very personally that is not a game for me i played one of it and i was like i'm done here yeah i've never touched that game because one of the things i'm really bad at is being uh diplomatic in games because like i i get that um you know you're supposed to betray someone and you're supposed to do the thing that you know goes against someone else but i just want to be nice i don't want to be that loudmouth guy at the table though

like negotiating all these deals and like oh yeah like you want to do this thing with me and then we'll trade this thing and then we'll do that i'm like i want to do the three-way trade just you know give me let me trade with the bank yeah i don't want a minimal player on player de-wheeling and dealing in my game thanks this is when i played in that similar circumstance in twilightium, it was people were under the table texting and I was like why is everyone texting? I didn't really get it. So it makes sense

and if you're on a desert island then you've got these secluded areas you can go to and have those conversations but equally people are gonna die. I think it's good, yeah. There'll be three players, you know, Chuckles will be speared with all those crab sticks.

That does remind me of this time we played betrayal at house on the hill, which is a game where, you know, you're cooperatively exploring a mansion, like a creepy mansion and kind of things happen. You get items, omens, whatever,

until at some point one of you has to maybe turn against the rest or like you all end up fighting against each other but um we didn't understand so there's a point in the game where it's called the haunt where you kind of your ultimate goal is revealed whether it's you versus everyone else and um and so there's two rule books there's one for like the betrayer and then there's another rule book for like the survivors who are like the good guys, essentially. And we just did not understand the game so much that we weren't allowed to reveal anything about our goals, our separate goals, that we were literally creating a separate WhatsApp group. And we were like texting each other, like someone would say, what are we doing? And then we'd literally just create a message and send it to each other.

what are we doing and then we'd literally just create a message and send it to each other it was like so extreme the secrecy that we were just trying not to tell anyone the other player anything about what our goal was it was kind of to the to the most extreme point where we literally just almost became a silent game we were like not saying anything it was really weird interpersonal relationships are almost what what board games are built on but i feel like that it's really concentrated when you're on a desert island about any these could super affect what's going on like have you have you collected your crabs no well god damn like i'm gonna have to come after you this is the same thing that happened in that board game we're really gonna have to make sure this is the third time you've borrowed my crabs and when I like how crabs

are now like the currency of this island and you know in the game when you didn't repay that two wheat I lent you just this Thursday

all over again oh my god they're going to be rescued and they're going to be like old men brought together for like you know a TV show interview

40 years later and they'll be on the fence you know to talk where are my crabs what about that two weeks it's gonna be like i gave it to you you did not give it to me um this actually uh brings me but how long are you anticipating oh like i mean it's your scenario how long are we going to be stuck on this island for is it going to be like a couple of weeks are we talking well that feeds into the insanity right you know you there's no end in sight you don't know when rescue's coming it might never come you know maybe there's a boat you know sailing by full of tourists you know next week but as far as you're concerned you're stuck with these people here forever and you know I'm going more and more insane. That really doesn't help, like, pick the game

because if, I mean, it's irrelevant. If the insanity is always on the table or, like, complete, like, this is separation of everyone living on their own corners of the islands because they've just had enough of each other. Like, eventually, like, picking a game with high replayability doesn't necessarily help because, you know, it's inevitable. Right? Right? Well, let's just help because it's inevitable, right?

Well, let's just lay down and die then, right? Yeah, you could play the game at some point. We need to stave off the insanity as long as we can. But we've got to try. We don't want to have two days go by and we've all gone completely lunatic. Do you know what I mean?

That was the roughest 48 hours ever. It was just a company retreat. It was just a team building exercise, guys. You didn't need to eat the crab, man. Why does Chuckles only have one foot? I've also started referring to Ben as the crab man. It's like a new nickname that's been created on the island. Has been changed. It was scrubbed out

in whatever charcoal you could find. What's the board game skill experience? You've said the ages and stuff of these people, but have any of them got any board game experience? Not that it matters, because you have however long it is, you could learn at the time.

But is there anyone on the team who's like i just like like opposed to playing board games they they think board games just not for them um the scarab is badly burned that's true and uh and no there's no there's no uh i was just gonna go with the bandages i don't know i was the mummy i was leaning into the mummy the angle it didn't work um no i think everyone's got all of their fingers and can see and stuff they're all compass mentis for now okay okay at least compass mentors to learn the rules and then subsequently ignore them as the insanity does that i mean everyone's dealing with their own mental things yep you know you're just you're enjoying the surfing right okay yeah

but you know the nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you might never see your sweetheart again yeah um you know i love in the situation that i'm also seeing that i'd have really long hair and that that's a good thing with my slowly receding hairline I'm like yeah long luscious surfing locks that's great I think in this scenario you're the 18 year old like surfer

person right well I'm just sitting around in the cramp pool it's like you're surfing on like a plain door you've like cut off up coconut fronds to cover your shame. But you don't have much shame to display. I'm thinking at this point I'm also ripped in this scenario. You're gorgeous.

I am. But not distractingly so you know we'll keep our eyes on the game sorry could you just move your frond slightly to the left there it is so in terms of you know we talked about you have shelter and stuff

but is there a risk of storms like how how much information do you need about this of you know we talked about like you have shelter and stuff but uh is there a risk of storms like how how how much information you need about this fucking desert island i might as well write a novel okay so like what i want to know is if a piece goes missing like some games they've written out the word help in stones they've done it all they thought about building a raft but they realised it was like a lot of faff and they got splinters and I couldn't have an axe

only had an ice skate and it wasn't quite enough and there's no tropical stories it's a sunny sky it's all fine it's quite hot

but they're undercover there's like you know they found a sun tan cream no one's burned it's fine Russ

how much more do you need i need to know oh much much more okay all right at this point as well i'm pretty sure that affects the personality and there's a whole thing we we use it whenever we are first aid uh they've got like some antibiotics one of the packages contains a first aid kit thank Yeah, they're all right for a while. They're careful. Okay. How about your personal, let's say, Chuckles' tastes? What does Chuckles enjoy in a board game? What kind of genres or styles or themes or art styles or whatever? What draws Chuckles to a game?

I think that Chuckles, it doesn't matter actually what Chuckles likes. The key thing here. They're stuck playing it anyway. Is to bring together a group for a good time. And leave everyone happy. But also, you know, create some good memories. And forge an alliance that involves, you know, that will deter backstabbing for crabs. When the crab season starts dwindling and the crabs are running low, people might get desperate and they might think, oh, I won't kill Chuckles because, you know, we had that nice experience.

And I'm looking forward to next tuesday evening when we're gonna do the next bit or play again you know i don't know if it needs to be one of these legacy games where it's got you know a journey well because the problem with the legacy game is it will eventually end they're very hard to replay some of them claim to have playability when you're finished like Pandemic Legacy you know you're supposed to be able to play the game like more like Charterstone actually is another game but some of these games have

like a finished state which is like you've finished the game and you can still technically play onwards but it's not something you would ever do yeah I mean as much as I don't like the idea of a board game coming to end i think so many board games we never get that far we never play i never played pandemic enough fucking times we even worry about having to do a 12 game series i think that's very

optimistic have you heard of the 10 by 10 challenge so it it's in a given year, you're supposed to try and play 10 games 10 times. Wow. So it's 100 gameplays, basically. This would be the 1x1000 challenge. Yeah, exactly. But that one's quite interesting because it kind of does highlight that people who are super into board games

tend to be like, what's the new shiny thing? And then they go, I bought this one thing, we played it once. it once cool well i'm ready to play the next and you don't get to like how many board games have you ever played more than five times only a handful and probably those games i love because i've really got into them i've probably managed to get in so my most played board game is terraforming mars and i've probably played that into the the good double digits at this point maybe like 30 or 40 and i know it's not everyone's piece but no that's probably the game

i played most as well actually because we've played we played we played the board game version a lot you and you played it on steam and then we played the digital version and it became this kind of fallback game for us a lot of the time we'd end up having a spare hour at the end of the stream and we can get the digital version done pretty quick and i hate a lot of things about it but yeah if it's a it's a hole filler i'm gonna say right now not a huge fan of that game yeah it's too dry and actually the original game so the game is essentially you're terraforming the planet you play cards and you're like it's an engine building game which means that you play cards which help you like improve on your actions to do in future turns and um so i mean it's a very dry themed game you can place water tiles part of the game

doesn't make me more interested in the game unfortunately um but it's the the positive thing about it is it has so many cards and expansions that the game does have end like a lot of replayability or variability because you might never see the set the card for like the next 10 games i mean in that can we assume that whatever board game uh parcel this came with it came with any expansion that exists for this board game as well yeah it was like a big wooden crate yeah yeah the big box version of game that's actually gonna help if that is the case yeah it was a replayability for sure but um but yeah the the game oh my gosh the artwork on the game is so destroying some of its clip art

some of its like photos and it's just it just drives me nuts like it doesn't have a consistent art style as well in places that that game like there's certain cards that are just rubbish and awful like the worst thing about terraforming mars actually is the the interaction with other players because you have these cards which take resources away from other people but they cost you resources to do it so there's no incentive really for you to obviously there shouldn't really be an incentive for you to screw up other people but it's kind of like i'm going to destroy my game and your game yeah you know if there's three other players in the game who will get to race ahead while you two are crab bucketing each other if you use the reference

now i am the crab man i guess i for example, when the games get that complicated, you can imagine the spreadsheets. I know that people like Wizards of the Coast with D&D and stuff like that, they have proprietary sheets that have everything in them. They try and balance it out and they try and work out exactly so.

It's only so far the math will take you, though, because once you're actually playing a game, there's more to it than simple numbers. And I mean, in Terraforming Mars, I will say one of the good things about it is that it doesn't have obvious combos that once you played them, you don't want to play them again. Right. So a good example of that might be like Quacks, which Alex is a huge fan of. I know you're a big fan of.

I introduced Alex to that, by the way. She will admit. Whereas Quacks, I've been a huge fan of. I know you're a big fan of. I introduced Alex to that, by the way. She will admit. I'll be playing it a lot recently. I just sent a copy to Pflax yesterday for him to play with his kids because I recommend it. I really like it, actually. So it's a game, it's a push-your-luck game where you're a witch.

It shouldn't be called Quacks, because I think that's the German, right? Quacks of Quedlinburg is, it's the Quacksalber von Quedlinburg is the German name. So the English one is just as silly, Quacks of Quedlinburg. Because it's by Quack Doctors. They could have called it like the Witches, though, or something. It would make far more sense if it was called Witches Brew or something like that. There is actually a Spanish one called the Witches.

Oh, yeah. I guess Quacks is a fairly negative connotation in terms of like oh that guy's a quack he's a he's a fake it's like a quack doctor i don't know if there's a known anyway it's getting it's going off i just don't think it's very well-named game and it wasn't what i thought it was going to be i thought i was going to hate it but actually i really really enjoyed it it's a it's and it felt really social game to play with people and it was didn't really matter how good you were obviously it being skilled it was helpful but there was a big luck mechanic in the middle of

the game where you're you're throwing all these ingredients into your sort of bag and you're pulling them out hoping you're not going to get these um the cherry cherry bombs which are like kind of like salt in the cauldron or whatever they're like the negative thing and if you get too many of them you go bust and you get a penalty. But the penalty isn't too bad either. It's kind of, yeah, I do get a penalty, but it's not going to ruin my game if I get it. And so, yeah, it was just nice.

But I think that has fairly obvious combos in it that you want to pick certain things. And once you've done that, you're like, I'm not going to do that again this time. I'm going to try a different combo. And, you know, I think that other where where they aren't they weren't as obvious setups where the cards are much more random have to add 300 cars like in terraforming mars there's a huge amount of cards obviously not all of them are going to be great or duds but it's much harder

to pull the combos together and so therefore it's much harder to get bored or be like oh I don't want to do this again I don't want to do code stalls and new guys again. Every game does feel quite different

just because you never see the same card twice when there being 500 cards. I really like Quacks. How do you

shuffle that? There is quite a lot of replayability because you can have the tokens do different things and there's quite a few expansions. In Quacks. Yeah. the irony is there is a perfect name for it

but it's already taken by another game's potion explosion that's essentially would be perfect because it is about trying not to explode your potion yeah essentially but it's a really good game um there is a really cool um so the game comes with these cardboard chips which you like put into your bag and then draw them out but there's an upgrade for the game which are these like really cool plastic chips um and they cost as much as the game itself so like it's ridiculous you really want them because it would make the game better because um the the cardboard wears out after you've played it like 100 times probably have played it a lot of times i mean in terms of like board game manufacturing uh if you say those cost about the same price as the actual board game,

like, you can... Whenever you purchase one in a retail shop, the actual manufacturing cost is about a sixth of the actual... of what you're paying it for. And so you can start working back on how much that would be. But if you added that in,

would you pay £150 for a Quacks game? It's really good, though. It's really good. It's really good. But yeah yeah that game is really good uh the danger is of course you have to choose who you're playing with because certain people are very much would feel the chips and all this one has a raggedy edge that means it must be this one you know you don't want to get that kind of folks so to bring the island back into it but if you get a bit of sand in there as well, be wearing away the chips, that would ruin it, I have to say.

But if it was quacks. But then you just replace them with shiny pebbles and shells. Yeah. I assume like one of the boxes has some paint. You can paint the stones different colours. No, you'd use blood. Okay. Crap blood.

Everything is blood. There's plenty of that. Yeah um that's in the bucket uh okay how are we how are you feeling have we got any other particular questions do you have any like like turnoffs in the games like any any things you like definitely don't want that in my games um i don't really want social deception or like i don't want there to be i don't want the game to have a that'll happen on the island like it feels like this two-pronged game right where you play it play one game where you're turning over tiles exploring this manner and then suddenly it turns into i'm bad and you three are good and it's kind of it's a it's an odd dynamic that i've never

particularly enjoyed um and i think i think i've just ended up having a lot of shouting matches with people playing the resistance and coup and things like this where you're someone's betrayed you it's some way you're know what I mean or tricked you I'm not looking for that I think It's very hard to separate the personal from the game at that point and when your tensions are high especially

when you're on a desert island I just like to get immersed you know I need something to distract me from this beautiful island paradise that I'm trapped on with these idiots and all these crabs. I would pay to be here, providing I knew I could get off. Right. Okay.

Well, I have something that touches on... I've got something ready in terms of recommendations. I've got something in mind. I've got something in the pocket, yeah. Okay. Some things are meant to be shared, like sunsets over the Pacific,

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I'll go first. I don't have a backup, so I really hope you don't pick up my game. I don't have a backup so I really hope you don't pick up my game I don't think so I think this one covers some of the bits that you've talked about I think it's a game that you've probably heard before it's something we've talked about before but the reasoning

I'll give it is because it focuses on some sort of replayability and I think the insaner you get, the better this game will be. So the game I'm suggesting is Dixit. So super not strategic, but I think it has a load of replayability because the idea of this is you have like these oversized cards that have this beautiful artwork on. this is you have like these oversized cards that have this beautiful artwork on and you one of you is the storyteller and that kind of position rotates and you'll give a word phrase story uh

sound you can kind of go pretty wild with it um about the card that you hold in your hand and you'll place that in the in the center essentially and then everybody else has to um find a card that they have in their hand which is i think about five cards or so in your hand and what will happen is they'll they'll think what best represents that sound stick it in give it a shuffle and then we end up uh laying them out saying the sound word or phrase in the center of the table and then imagine we said crab yeah it could be anything we could be anything but that's what comes to my mind on this island yeah well it depends entirely on what the uh what the cart has so the reason i'm suggesting this is because let's face it at

any point you're gonna start the replayability is gonna gonna fade away now dixit has a lot of expansions associated with it they are also some incredibly beautiful stuff that are out there i've seen i've played i think there's probably eight or ten at the very least expansions out there um and i like the idea that you could take these cards and almost tell a bit of a story about it becomes this whole like way in which you guys could create a world and so i think the insanity then plays into it because you begin to see weirder and weirder shit in those cards and it really begins to like barrel out of it and it's not necessarily about playing the game at those point or you if you could inscribe in crab blood your new cards that you want to add on to it you've got loads of boxes let's create our own i think it really becomes like this new cards that you want to add on to it you've got loads of boxes let's create our

own i think it really becomes like this whole thing that you guys can get behind and make a very cooperative storytelling uh asset essentially so i know that's not necessarily it's like the campfire oral tradition yeah pictograms it's like envisioning like turning them into like some sort of tarot deck and like and like when things go bad on the island like people ascribe these kind of situations to certain cards and you're like like stuck onto the wall using crab blood and then just making like chanting around the fire like burning some burning some of these cards that's just in my head i was like i think you're right that this insanity one will come to play.

It's fine, like one guy's taken away all the cards with like pictures of women in their shelter. Oh no. Oh no. By the time that someone comes to rescue these people, it's going to get real wild.

These are my waifus. Wilson. So that's my recommendation. I think it touches on some of it. I think it's an interesting one. We'll let you decide on that one. So between the two of you? No, that might be the glue that brings, you know, these

four stranded castaways together. And through, I don't know, some sort of weird... It kind of feels like a tribal acid trip style like reaching back to the roots of humanity yeah like we all ate some of the weird those weird berries you know we were licking the crabs everywhere and don't lick the spotty crabs yeah all right ross what you got? All right. So like I said earlier on, like if we're including expansions in this, I think this would be a very good way to go because there are a lot of them like like Richards.

I went for something that would be very interesting to play a lot of times. And not only. So basically the game is called Unmatched. It's a series of games and it's called, the tagline, which I think is really cool is in battle, there are no equals. And it's essentially a skirmish game. So there's a board, it's got some like some spaces on it that are connected to each other. So you can move around the board and you're going to be taking on a character from either history or folklore or legend and you're going to be given a a miniature with of that of that character so as an example there are um there's sherlock holmes uh as one

of the characters there's and bloody mary there's like achilles there's um there's other ones Medusa sort of like Alice in Wonderland yeah exactly that is currently out of copyright yeah it's in this game but there are also some branded ones like they've thrown they've done some Jurassic Park ones they've just released some Marvel ones there's lots of characters and essentially each character comes with potentially some sidekick or some like minions which you can use but also a deck of cards 30 cards and each character plays uniquely um just using this very cool concept of moving around a board and playing cards so you basically you know you play these cards and um you know it's a battle game so you're going to be moving you're going to be playing cards to attack and then they may play cards to

defend but there's also cards that let you do other things but the brilliant thing about it is not only does each character play very much to the style of the character and they've had a lot of fun in coming up with the the way that these characters play as an example um achilles was uh released in uh one of the late later sets and his sidekick is um patroclus now in like there's this kind of um historical thing where apparently they were lovers these these two characters and when patroclus your sidekick gets killed uh achilles becomes stronger as he like gets enraged that his you know the love of his life has been killed and so it just makes the character stronger so he kind of goes all out in like this rage um and then bloody

mary because obviously because um they're famously to summon bloody mary you have to say bloody mary bloody mary bloody mary three times so they get benefit why would you say that you have to be in front of a mirror yeah there's no mirrors in here you are fine we're fine um and so if you start the round with three cards in your hand you get an extra action giving you three actions so they're very much um they've much very much um nailed in my opinion the like the thing that makes that character yeah the aesthetic of yeah the way it feels but as well as that there is a two-player mode so you don't have to involve everybody in fact i consider it mainly a two-player game because i've

never really wanted to play more than that but there are three player um modes and four player modes so everyone can get involved if a crab man has having a tough time maybe run out of crabs and you need to send them off to go and get crabs so you can do that and you can still play the game in the meantime that's cool but also what i thought was really fun is because there's like this unknown uh amount of time that you have you could do tournaments you could literally play as each character against each other character and just find out who is the ultimate character um the best one so i think you have that like longevity but also each even if you play with the same characters you still, it's still different because of what cards you get. I feel like you couldn't really have a Dixit tournament so much.

You know, you couldn't have the world, the Island Dixit champion. Whereas I feel like, yeah, that makes sense. You could, you know,

carve it onto a rock, you know, the trophy, the rock trophy, the crab trophy. You know, you could fight for the crab trophy. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure you could like take one of those. You could fight for the crab trophy, yeah. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you could take one of those shells, turn it into a crown. Oh, yeah. The crown of claws. And because you might be there for years, you could have a tournament every year. Yeah, it's likely a little bit.

And it changes hands, yeah. Keeps the nations of, you know. We split onto our four corners of this island. It's like, the beach dwellers are represented. Well, yeah, you know, split onto our four corners of the silence it's like the beach dwellers are represented well yeah you know before long you don't know how many other planes are good if one plane crashed here it's a good chance that the more are coming i was saying before long there is there is one other thing i wanted to mention about it and it's because it is a strong um aspect of the game and the artwork is so good so each

card has a really beautiful artwork on it as well so i'm kind of like stealing a bit of richard's uh thunder there and some of them are really trippy like if you look at the bloody mary card some of them are genuinely like terrifying the artwork on them it's really good so if you even if you just weren't playing the game fight a t-rex her fight a T-Rex. And you could make that happen. What other game can you set a T-Rex versus this kind of... Sherlock Holmes. Yeah, exactly. And Sherlock Holmes might win against the T-Rex.

That's brilliant. I deduce you have rather large teeth. I deduce that those arms must have once been vestigial wings. You should be feathered. And they shamed him. And then Ben, are you still free? I'm still free. I've got one lined up.

Ben knows me very well. It's a game you already know and have played, but I think it's a very good thing. So first of all, maybe the theme is too on the nose, but I'm going to go with the game Spirit Island. This is a cooperative game where one to four players have to stop the invaders of the island using their magical nature spirits to drive them away.

You've got to protect the indigenous people. And it's a really quite complex, interesting puzzle where wave after wave of these colonials turn up and you have to stop them from destroying the land too much and build up your magic to drive them. One of the reasons I recommend it is because A, it's cooperative, which helps keep the team together. You should win together. You lose together. You should win together.

You lose together. You're bombed. B, it's complex enough that you can't play other people's turns for them. Everyone is very much in charge of their own bit, and you won't have too much quarterbacking. And third, it has increasing difficulty that go up very high. You have like four different opponents to play against. Each opponent has eight difficulty levels to beat.

So it's going to be a long time before you've managed to beat it on the very highest difficulty. Every time you play, if you win, you crank it up by one. If you lose, you crank it down by one. And this could keep you going for years, essentially. And you could even, if you've mastered the very highest difficulty session sure between you guys you could find a way to make it even more i love that i also love the sort of vague metaphor the idea is that it's you better keep your island clean you know don't don't shit in the water yeah don't eat all the

crabs yes don't put a blight on this island. Respect the island or else, you know, it might raise up and the forces of thunder and lightning will be roused from their slumber to zap us. Well, exactly. And there's lots of different island spirits you can play as, especially once you include the expansions. But maybe everyone starts going a bit crazy and picks one spirit to be,

and that's who they role play as in between game sessions they're just like i am the fire god yeah there will be that guy who looks after the fire yeah maybe they've already been falling into those roles and this just reinforces them yeah oh ben again this is gonna be really weird when they get picked up and they're like, I'm actually a god. Back invaders! It's like whole rocks. The ship's coming up to rescue them. Throwing burning sticks at the ship.

This is very ineffectual. What's going on here? Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that. We're so into the game that we don't want to get rescued. This helicopter's coming and we're chucking crabs at them. We haven't finished the highest difficulty yet. Come back in two years.

I really love the concept of that game being a lot of Euro style games have this kind of colonialism kind of thing built into it. Even if it's not sort of like obvious and yet spirit island is complete opposite it's like we're protecting the island for these indigenous people against the like colonists and i think that's really cool and it's not been explored nearly enough as a concept no you're right there is a lot of exploitation and trading and oil barrowing and everything and building a massive conglomerate or corporation it's always about a lot of it is about taking wood or cut or harvesting even

k-tan uh has a little bit of that even if it's not obvious like there is that element there's a bit of a controversy at the moment in the board game industry i won't name the board game but um where they've basically had a leaflet that were like we do not uh glorify any of these things and then they sort of glorify it um and that whole part of board gaming it like it really affects the people that it you know has affected that have personal experiences so it's a really interesting and i think it's we'll see board games go more that way yeah well i mean this is this is this feeds back into the old idea of the the worst board game monopoly um which which was originally supposed to be this anti-capitalist anti-monopoly sort of thing wasn't it and and to teach people about the dangers of the corporate greed whereas actually actually it's sort of being subverted into,

enslaved into promoting instead. Become the very thing I set out to destroy. You are the chosen one. I find myself recently wanting to own four hotels. I hear I get a lot of money when I start renting those out. That is what kids used to want to do. And I can just go to jail and pay a fine and out I get a lot of money when I start renting those out. That is what kids used to want to do. And I can just go to jail and pay a fine and out I get. Oh my God, you don't even have to go to jail, do you?

Just pay the fine. Get out of jail free. The most unrealistic thing about that game is it's set in London and there's free parking. That's true. Completely out of date, yeah. I mean, and the fact that you can actually afford any of the property. Here's your $1, try luck good luck yeah you'll get one dollar every time you go around the board yeah oh but there's taxes so that's uh 50 of that's gone geez yeah we'll try not to talk too much about that but yeah no spirit island good no it's the i suppose

there must be other cooperative board games that that are similar there are a lot of cooperative board games out there but this is one of my favorites because of the massive amount of customizable difficulty that most of them don't a lot of them have a little bit of difficulty increasing but once you've solved the game you've kind of solved it you're right um and most of the other ones don't do much to stop the quarterbacking syndrome of the person who's played it the most telling everyone what to do um whereas i find this game is complicated enough with your secret card of hands that you can't have someone going oh you do this one then you go i think it when it was first released it was almost the anti-quarterback so quarterback being

that person that is constantly telling or managing everyone on the team this one literally came out as the the one that if you have that person you can now play a cooperative game with it instead of just forgetting to invite them to game yeah we're partly due to the nature of these cards um triggering either quickly or slowly and so you're kind of your your slow cards trigger basically at the start of your next turn. They go after the enemies have been. Yeah, but then that's when your next turn starts. So you have to think of it like I'm playing a turn ahead.

And because of that, you can't have one guy coordinating, unless he's some sort of Sherlock Holmes super mind genius. It's very hard to like, you have to kind of figure out where, they also, the invaders come in waves and multiply the invaders, the colonists. They swarm all over your place, shitting all over your lovely island, leaving all these like little poops

and you're like, it gets out of control really quick. Just thought of an interesting re-theme for that game. Oh yeah, okay. Like, oh no, just like for that game like oh no just like sewage island or just like i don't know cats or something oh cats invading your garden yeah that could be fun that could be good digging up stuff yeah just put those daffodils in leaving little presents oh no so uh overall it sounds like you have the acid trip you have the uh fictional characters fighting each other and you've got the ultimate battle of that and then

you've got the the spirits the the anti-colonial stuff have you is any of these hit the the head do you like any of the ideas um well i think this is like maybe look first of all i'm all for a burning man style situation where we're all just we all just go mad and embrace it you know and lean into the madness you know fuck it um i love that the the new olympics it leans a lot on the old it's like it's almost like cleverly saying let's fight in game instead of in person you know let's let's settle our disputes yeah but you know you're angry with someone take it out of me on this game you know um especially if you're doing a free-for-all i think you can always in a four-way you can always say this guy's not done the washing up.

I'm going to go for him. I don't care if I lose. I'm going to take this guy out. I think that would get, it's a little bit like having those arcades in the truckers, you know, so they can get their stress out on the fake truck, you know, and not do it on the real road.

So yeah, I can see that helping. And also I can see the idea of, you know just forming our own sentinel island where they are the natives and um becoming a god yeah and and forming our own society from the ground up founded on the sort of natural you know respecting the island living one with the island. You know, maybe the rest of civilization will have burned itself out. We'll still be one with nature, playing cooperatively together in harmony with the land and earth and sky and sea and crabs around us. So, yeah, I like them all. I'm ordering them right now nice alexa order games she already knows which one it was she's been listening she's been paying we do have to pick

someone needs to get their point yeah oh i have to pick you have to pick one yeah you can only take one with you um it's gotta be the drugs yes i think i think it is probably the best option actually yeah it's a good game you can just smash it out in like an airport or anywhere can't you and it's like yeah that doesn't matter in this scenario yeah i could just unless there's an airport on the island, in which case, why haven't you escaped already? At the start of the movie, I could just see some kids playing it, you know, in the airport. Oh, I see.

In my movie version of this podcast. You can check off Scunner. It's come full circle. They were already playing it, and then it lands up on the island. They've already taught all the rules at that point. You've gone like, oh, that was an interesting Easter egg. Oh, but it's actually the entire movie now. You have to put that stuff in.

So when people watch it again, they're like, oh, I didn't see that. Foreshadowing. Yeah. Okay. And then they think you're smart. I say you win an Oscar. Just tips throwing it out there. Nice. Welcome. Well, thank you. Thank you. think you're smart. I say you win an Oscar. Just tips, tips, throwing it out there. Nice.

Welcome. Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Obviously congratulate the winner of that. They've done a fantastic job. I thought they really,

yeah. But thank you so much for coming along. Lewis, where, where possibly could we find you? Just, just Google my name. Just Lewis.

Chuckles. Chuckles. Chuckles. Chuckles and the crab man. Well, thank you very much for coming on. Thank you for entertaining us this afternoon. And well done to everyone that partaked in this glorious exercise. That was a lot of fun. I could have gone for another two hours and then had a coconut and

doing it again tomorrow. Strangely enough, I think we're all going for crabs after this as well. I am hungry for crabs now. Well, thank you very much. That's all for today for the podcast. We'll be back next week. Thank you very much. Bye!