War With A Mate - Episode 17: Pasta Point Of No Return

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Episode 17: Pasta Point Of No Return Well it’s finally here, the wacky (and genuinely punishing) Italian Pasta Point rule. James struggles to come to terms with the fact he’s playing a difficult game, while Andy makes large strides to streamline the future of CfNA gameplay. The guys receive telegrams-a-plenty and another trip into the past sheds some light on the commonwealth leadership of the campaign. Special thanks this week to KamSandwich having us on for a cameo role in his Worst Board Game Of All Time series, check him out, he’s better than us! https://youtube.com/@kamsandwich?si=IV9d3k5Zb_gWxKp8

hello and welcome to war with a maid with me james me andy that's both of us we're all accounted for let's do a quick head count yep yep looking around i see you one two one two one two I've got my glasses on today as well, so I can definitely see you. Yeah, you're not squinting. Yeah, yeah. I just do that so I can see your face that little bit clearer, usually. Sat across this gulf of a table. I mean, you're normally not wearing them, so it seems you normally can't stomach it.

Yeah, that's it. Usually I just can't bear facing you. Can't bear facing what we're going through. But what we're going through, we're doing for all of you. All of you who want to be in our shoes. You all want to be playing this game, don't you? You all want this thing sprawled out in your living room, this behemoth of a game.

I think people think they do. People think they do. We thought we did. We don't have that same feeling anymore. Yeah, we just stupidly started recording a podcast where we committed to it before we knew how bad it was. And constantly ask people to listen to it and interact with it.

And then got what we wanted. Then we got what we wanted, and now you're listening. And now, oh, God, we have to play it. and in play it we have we did some of that today as promised we've been keeping up that promise from go and there's there's a lot of you listening into this from all over the world from what we've seen not sure if it's vpns not sure if it's genuine but wow some some far-reaching places you were rattling some of them off just before weren't you yeah glasgow glasgow chicago yeah all the exotic places yeah that's it we got a few um we had it looks like there's people in north

korea yeah it did if you zoom in it's just south of the border though just south of the border yeah it's in seoul so it's not quite yeah so we yeah so if you're listening that's um yeah that's not where we thought we'd reach so i hope you enjoy yeah thank you yeah thanks to all of our international listeners which is to be fair most of them i'll include glasgow in there you're international and you're welcome for the uninitiated we are playing the campaign for north africa all the way through at the moment we're going through a little practice run and it's important to do the practice run because today we found out more hiccups i mean yeah we've been doing the store expenditure so i think i got all my food done i think you've i'm halfway through getting rid of

all my food and definitely getting rid of all of it because my men are not in a good position a lot of them really hungry turns out that the the issue is all of these people that need food you can you can choose to half ration it if that's going to allow them all to eat but there is a trade-off with that if you choose to give people half rations so they can't eat they can no longer expend their usual capability point allowance they can't exceed it sorry they can't they can't exceed it that's right yes they can't exceed it they can't expend it but usually units can go above and beyond that with a cost on their cohesion level but when you give them half rations they can't exceed it so they're just stuck with bog standard and as well as that it also

means that they can't engage enemies willingly they can't enter an enemy zone of control so essentially it means that they're playing on the defensive however if you just let your men starve if you don't give them half rations you try and divide it equally and they just can't eat properly at all yes they lose their cohesion level a little bit so they become easier to defeat in combat but they can willingly enter combat so i had an interesting decision to make a bit of a sophie's choice of do i feed all of my men or do i want them to attack so i've been weighing that up and some of the units are getting all the food some of them aren't yeah uh was sophie's choice starve your child or send them to war it was it was similar and we're not we're not choosing to

starve people or send them to war they're already at war we're just deciding whether or not they're gonna fight in it or just on the ground something's gonna kill them yeah something's gonna kill them whether it's my bad decision making or whether it's your tactical genius it's hard to say at this point i think there's gonna be a lot of bad decision making on both sides that let's i mean thank god we're doing the offensive first to like figure stuff out because it means hopefully when we come to the actual game we won't brick it in six turns yeah i can see this falling apart at the seams by turn three our men are not doing well at all but it does turn out if they have at least a little bit of food if there's food in the hex that they start their turn on they don't

fall apart completely because they they actually start to starve and lose toe points if they don't have food in the area so turns out yeah i'm gonna stave that off for a little bit with my men you don't seem to be as panicked i don't think you've done it as badly no all my guys have had a there's a couple of people on half rations but everyone else is sort of eating and yeah i've also gone through the water and fuel evaporation and that feels all right so far i haven't actually given anything anyone to drink yet it's just evaporation i've not quite got to that point yet you evaporate more than me as well because you don't have jerry cans you lose nine percent yes and i lose six yeah oh that's fun fact by the way didn't tell you this the wikipedia page for the game is wrong

oh in that regard because it doesn't actually give the correct values for the evaporation i think it's a seven percent right uh it also says that you only get one die in the game which is wrong you we got three and this was the game coming as is it was the original edition yeah which is something that a few places I've seen say you just get the one die. So I don't know if maybe we've got the deluxe edition. Yeah, well, we had some addendums, so maybe they threw some extra dice in the box with it.

So we don't even have the original. We're going to have to scrap it all and start again. Back to eBay. Bin it, that's it. I'm putting it in the bin right now. They're selling still on eBay, actually, if anyone's interested in them. We see them pop up every now and then.

we always consider buying a second copy just as a spare but they cost a fucking fortune and you people just you beat us to it so if anyone else is starting up a competition one we'll amalgamate them we'll do a double one

you can bring your board, we'll put them together we'll all hang out and we'll play it together and we'll do a double one I want to get their version of the game I want to get their copy of it I want to check the dice might put some extras in

I want to check the dice for the verisimilitude I want to make sure that we've got the real one there it is there it is you didn't think I'd get it in but I did and if you are listening for the first time today we've got a treat for you because today we encountered what is the most I think

infamous rule something that's always brought up everywhere we look about the game it's the Italian pasta rule and that actually came into play today and it was a shame because this whole time for me it's just been this joke nebulous idea of oh my men have to use more water for the pasta but today i had to deal with that in the context of a spreadsheet in the context of dozens of spreadsheets and it's not fun what it does

mean is that some of my men will go thirsty because of this stupid rule and i'm not even sure it's that accurate that's so much water it's not i in the thing he says he it's not accurate because they just cooked it in the can with the sauce so yeah it's in there as a bit of a joke but right now it's impacting me and my life and and my my mental well-being so it's actually not that funny of a rule when you play the game so anyone who next wants to comment yo i've heard about the game i've heard about the italian pasta point rule it's not a joke it's not something to be made light of it's really upset me today so next time you do that take a moment hesitate pause think how would james feel about this negatively is the answer negatively but all in

all it's solid it's solid progress it's still marching our way through the first operation stage well technically technically speaking we aren't in the first operation stage we're in the prelude i just got there you just got there i'm nearly there i've got additional work though i've got i've got the italian pasta which means i do need to go back because we had to double check some of the ruling on it yeah turns out there was a bit of a nuanced decision to make a bit of a gray area as to whether or not the evaporation happens before or after we use the water for our food and we came to the solution of they get the they get the pasta point first because it's left ambiguous and that

logically makes the best sense. Yeah, and we are just going to have to do some rulings because there's no way to look it up. It says that in the game. Richard Berg, the game's lead designer, he does say several times in the rulebook that if it is the case that you're not sure

to just do that. So who are we to question, dismiss his wise words? He's the one who put it together. It was his idea. His fault. so you're i'm evaporating more water and fuel but you're using a lot more water with the pasta rules it'll be interesting at the end of the strange thing with my voice there i think i was getting

a bit angry i was about to shout it's an interest yeah so i think what will be interesting at the end of this six turn run will be to compare water usage and figure out if i was actually on the back foot more because of this or if it was you based on the evaporation was the pasta point that bad who knows at the moment i'm feeling yes because it's affecting me personally and i'm too short-sighted and narrow-minded for anything else from what the amounts you've been saying it's affecting you more for sure definitely to brook it's to brook that's that's what i'm that's what i'm most worried about thankfully they're in a place where water isn't much of an issue but the food oh god the food well you've got your uh your convoy coming in pretty soon because i didn't

manage to intercept any of them in the naval convoy stage that's true so tabrook will be being relieved with food fairly soon that's right so i don't need to worry about that too much i i will get all of the food to tabrook that i need to try and replenish it because those boys in tabrook they were hungry today tabrook starts with a cache of and i already told you this so it's not really giving away any tactical information tabrook starts with 500 store points 500 food points essentially and most of them were used at the end of the store expenditure i have 53 left starts with 553 left and that's just for the garrison in tabrook and i do need to double check but i'm 90 sure that there are more people in tabrook than the garrison which means they are

they are going hungry i mean yeah it's a you've got multiple things just looking at the map past your shoulder tobrook has its own post-it note oh actually yeah tobrook's over here let me have a quick look yes there's more in tobrook yeah oh yeah there's there's more on the post-it note oh i've not got to them yet i think those are the ones i think they might be sgsu's No, they're not. The SJSUs, by the way, are the... What does it stand for? It's the airfield units.

Yeah, they run squadrons and stuff. Squadron Ground Support Unit? Yes. Yes, that's it. So they're the ones that... These units go alongside any of your aircraft and they are the ones who ready them up, get them geared up for combat missions,

which, as you may well know, we can't do for this turn because it's raining so we can't do it we're not allowed to do it so that's plenty fun so those guys are just sat in their laurels which is good because it's less work for us to do it's also very easy work for me to do the stores expenditure at the moment because my men are starving so all i have to do is get rid of i just get rid of all of the food in the hex and then i reduce the cohesion level of the units jobs are good that's it all you need to do yeah i'm starting to see it like if this game is as accurate as they claim it is with all this stuff, I'm seeing

why that offensive ground out pretty quickly, because no one had anything to eat or drink. Yeah, that's how you seemed to look earlier. You wolfed down a pot noodle earlier during the play. Well, I needed some sustenance. I needed to carb load

for the pod. Yeah, you always do. You carb load. You do 50 push-ups. You do 50 pull-ups. And then I go, I'm sick for about five minutes yeah whatever whatever gets you prepared i just sit and meditate for a while that's why i'm always so calm during the recording oh you must be doing that in secret i think people would be really jarred at the difference in atmosphere between when we're

playing the game and the podcast i mean yeah i feel like there's nothing to distinguish us playing the game from like two accountants at work it's just like referring to documents and then spreadsheets and occasionally being like oh what's going on with you but the thing is as well it's two accountants on the worst day of their job because they don't seem to know what's going on they have to keep asking each other so what is our job again what are we actually meant to be doing is it is it normal for this many people to be dying because of our job i guess we're accountants learning the tax code in tax season while we're filling stuff in and the tax for some reason goes directly to food banks so if you aren't filling this out correctly then hungry

people die or get taken prisoner which is another nightmare we're gonna deal with what kind of fucked up food banks are we funding get taken prisoner if you're hungry oh they take so much food we've found out today you can't a lot of prisoners it was a concern in previous weeks that we'd accidentally be war criming uh you can't deliberately starve your prisoners you can't even accidentally they draw food from the closest point regardless of where that is they are they're like a food tractor beam because if you've got prisoners if you don't have enough food in the hex which is the thing is quite likely yeah because you have to give you have to give prisoners food before your own men and you have to give them at every off stage not every turn so three times

every turn you have to feed the prisoners whereas usually you have to just feed your men every turn If you take my men captive, your soldiers will be starving looking at my prisoners jealously. Yes, because if I don't have enough food in the hex, the way it works is it just draws food from the nearest supply point. And that can be anywhere on the map.

Well, it's the closest one on the map, but it could be all the way across the map and they draw food from there. They just summon it. Yeah. And it'll almost certainly mess up your intended supply lines if your supply dumps are just being emptied.

If I was my men, if I was the Italian forces in the desert campaign in North Africa, I would willingly surrender and become a prisoner so that I could gain the magical powers of summoning food from thousands of miles away. That's an incredible superpower to have, all at the low, low cost of your freedom and liberty.

That's nothing. That's nothing for some food. i guess they won't have the pasta point but well i do like that it implies that there is this whole level of logistical infrastructure underneath the one we control that they yeah they took your common ground idea from a few weeks ago where everything's underground god that would have been awful if this included an underground he would have just added underground maps for every layer oh i bet he would have if they gave him a little bit more time he would have done that you wanted to include all of the rules for how successful the bakeries were in italy at the time

yeah which would affect how much food you could i think he wanted to simulate the entire world for this entire time period and then his bosses were like pack it in it doesn't feel far off i don't feel like we got anything that's less complicated than that maybe i'm looking at it too closely but maybe you hear that oh maybe it's good news this is some someone's sending us a message a telegram of sorts you hear that coming in i do now you hear it you hear it now yeah yeah there it is that's it and now now i think it's over it depends on how long i stretch out the audio sound effect but it's probably over by now don't stretch it this long i can't stretch it this long it's it's a i'd have to i'd have to overlap it more than once we've had some

communications we've had we've had quite a few we've had a lot actually so thank you all for getting in touch as pledged previously we will be getting around to everything you've sent in everyone who sent something in it will be getting read out at some point we we just have to break it down but the influx of listeners meant a an influx of correspondence so i suppose we should dig in would you like to go first andy you got one there yeah sure this one's from tim all right what's tim got to say gents i found your podcast uh recently and i've been working my way through it i'm up to episode 13 so far and i'm glad to hear you started your first turn thank you tim so are we my friends and i enjoy heavier board games so i've always wanted to play the campaign

for north africa i thought perhaps it'd be something to play in my retirement uh listening to your experience i've decided that i most definitely will not cheers tim yep that's fair happy to have provided that service that you've not wasted uh some time there oh tim we'd be devastated if you uh if you hadn't listened to this you got to retirement age and thought i know what i'll do and then your poor heart would give in a few turns in when you realize what you're dealing with you look at the paperwork that's enough to kill a man kill a man with a bad heart anyway so through boredom or through boredom so yeah you you and all of your friends in the retirement home you can look back at this day and remember we saved you from one and a half

thousand hours we saved your life we saved your life and you're very welcome that's what it is to be two subtle humble and brave men it's sometimes the burden of being a hero but on this occasion we'll happily accept that and glad you're enjoying it glad you're enjoying listening to us and suffer so we'll do that on your behalf you sit back you wait for that retirement check to come in enjoy your pension and we'll we'll do the hard stuff well who else have we got here we've got um we've got a message here from hayden so hayden says dear andy and james just wanted to express my appreciation of the podcast thank you cheers i've been fascinated by the Campaign for North Africa game

and discovered your podcast off a Reddit comment. Yes, yes. We've had a lot of people listen on the back of that. It's been quite the drum-up of attention. It's been good. I'm listening to every episode from the start, and I heard you mention this email and the invitation to send anything. I think it's

more of a plea and a beg, but... Especially at the start. Especially at the start. Just wanted to say how enjoyable the podcast is to listen to. I'm attending college right now and often commute from my on-campus dorms to my family about two hours away and this podcast has given me something enjoyable to listen to other than just the radio that's nice in addition i also have a suggestion to make okay okay this

could be bad this could be good it's just stop playing find a new find a new hobby no it unaccepted yep fair enough um no when y'all oh we've got a few y'alls haven't we got a few people saying y'all when you all really get the hang of the game surely it'll only take a year or so you know what i do feel like we're getting the hang of the game so you might not be i don't know if that was sarcastic or not hayden but i do actually think that will be the case i feel like that was a pretty accurate yeah so you might have just called that directly so well done you should live stream or record video of a session or two if you're familiar enough hopefully there won't be as much radio silence and rereading all the rules which i know was a concern i did

hear y'all mention second y'all we should do a y'all counter i like y'alls that a turn can take upwards of five or six hours so maybe only a chunk can be recorded just a thought from a big fan thanks again from a perhaps too invested fan hayden well hayden you can't be too invested you can't be to be too invested would to be here in the room doing all of the accounting work for us however if you want to prove that you're that invested come and do it for us that's the only time I would believe it. Don't invite people to my house. I'm going to invite Hayden to your house. The address is...

F***. F***. I'll bleep it out. I'll bleep it out. I'll bleep it out. If you can find a Hayden, you're more than welcome to come around. There's another seat here. Don't go,

oh yeah, and then invite him again. No offence, Hayden. No, what have you got against Hayden? Guy sends a lovely email He's going on a commute to his family Listen to our voices And you won't even let him pop around for a pot noodle Bastard

I'm awful But yeah, we have talked about doing some video stuff Or some streaming it It's just It feels like it would be incredibly boring Because as we've mentioned We're just sitting here looking at spreadsheets But once we've done a few turns

I think we can maybe try and identify some bits That will be more Interesting to watch that's it if you were watching a live stream of today you'd be watching about five hours of us sat with our laptops in front of us at the opposite ends of a coffee table both just reading through rules updating spreadsheets and then occasionally having to sit for half an hour at a time with each other breaking down rules for cohesion to figure out whether or not my people get pasta before or after the water so it's and that sounds like it might be a bit of a whimsical fun thing because

we'll put our own little charm on it but it's really not because we're just in the game we don't smile at all while we're playing the game i don't think we we felt miserable playing the game it's not like this that's why we go on tangent so much now because it's like being let out for playtime in school this isn't the game this is after the game however yes when it comes to us having played a turn where we move the units around that might be something that's of more interest to people maybe air combat might be air combat some dog fights it's a great idea actually because air combat's one-on-one we'll be able to put out a sheet of the pilots beforehand and stuff yeah so people will be able to see the pilots give their thoughts on who who win you know that that could

be fun so there's a lot of stuff we can look at i suppose a lot of it is down to the demand of how much people would want that sort of thing so if it's of interest to you drop us a line let us know if a video of anything would be of any interest and we'll we'll try and work around it as as best we can so yeah thanks aiden that's uh that's good i hope hope the commute's that little bit shorter with our dulcet tones aiding your journey what else we got got a bit from dan he's got some comments to the question all right dan so i've been listening to your podcast over the past few days and in episode 11 you stated that no emails had come in while i am a few episodes behind i was going to send an email just to remedy your lack of emails cheers uh i've

started listening after saw one of your posts on reddit about magnet pieces oh yes yeah anyway do you think the cardboard pieces will be able to last a number of years you will be using them i know you some games where you have to handle the pieces often the printing and paint will start to fade or fall off good luck dan well one godsend we have is we won't be handling the pieces very often at all ideally that's part of it yeah that the magnets mean we're not taking them out the box and putting them on every week so yes handling will be minimized uh one of our friends did tell me that magnets have like a half-life for their magnetism yes we were talking about this during our dnd game the other day which i didn't know so apparently they might start to be unmagnetic

after about a year or so so we might have to replace it that's a big concern yeah that we're going to have to swap out the magnets because at that point we're going to have to take the blue tack off so the pieces might fall apart a bit then yeah when it comes to the actual pieces themselves we handle them very little we haven't touched them since we finished putting together the magnetized picture frames so that's that's a big positive we haven't had to touch them yet but beforehand we were having to handle them every single week which would have by the end of it destroy them i mean the resale value is destroyed oh yes they should be readable at the end hopefully so i i think they should hold up the magnets might be something we have to swap out

and we'll have to see what the blue tax done to these cardboard pieces by then because i imagine there's some sort of chemical reaction going on with 50 year old cardboard and adhesive yeah it's slowly releasing asbestos into my house oh that'd be cool is that how asbestos made you get the campaign for north africa some blue tack and magnets they put it in everything by that even the campaign for north africa yeah they were like oh we don't want it to catch fire chuck's the most best doesn't it hey and anything that worked to keep you warm back then yeah well thanks dan we'll um we'll we'll do our very best to uh follow your advice of uh of good luck but unfortunately that is not something we we decide on that's granted to us by the powers that be all right

let's see what else we've got we have we have technical issues because my my sheet's gone where's it gone there we go there's our emails we have a message from adam adam has messaged to say hey guys my name is adam i'm from the lovely state of georgia in the united states ah very nice very nice pretty far from here i came across this podcast by sheer luck uh everyone listening to This is lucky. You're not on your own there, Adam. I saw an Instagram reel a few weeks ago about a bracket of the worst games where this was the second seed of whatever tournament they were going through. Right, well, for a bit of background, Adam,

that would have been the worst board game tournament being ran by the YouTuber Cam Sandwich. And we know this because we've been in correspondence with Cam, a really nice guy, and he's actually mentioned us, and we've recorded a little clip for him. which is on his episode that came out, well, today is when it's been released. The Campaign for North Africa is in this knockout tournament, and he's done some content on it. We've recorded a little clip from describing our lovely experience with the game. And I definitely recommend checking it out,

because if you're into us talking about this game, you'll be amazed at how many other games there are out there that are as bad as this, not in the complexity, but in how unenjoyable they will be to play. Yeah, and Cam's channel's great for board game stuff. it is especially uh this kind of thing so definitely check it out if this is if you enjoy this you'll enjoy his channel a lot so yeah he's got a video on this game actually that came out in 2022 it's it's good it breaks it down in a very good way it's very digestible so it's one of the first things uh we actually watched you showed me it yeah um the day that we purchased

this i think yeah so yeah definitely check it out you'll enjoy it so yes that's that's where you'll have seen us uh i checked out the comments where someone mentioned two guys from britain playing through the game and it would take forever to finish which led me to you guys that that sounds about right i thoroughly enjoy the podcast and as alexander alluded to in episode 15 you would have lost me 10 episodes ago if i didn't enjoy your jokes banter sidebars and excruciating complaints about the poor structure of the game well adam you've got plenty more that to come Don't you worry, that's not going anywhere. I've got eight years of that coming up.

I'm interested in where the game will go, figuratively, because I know where it's going physically, and what gameplay will look like when you get into a rhythm. Eight years is a drastically long time. I'll be 31 if that timeline holds. Well, happy 30th in advance. We'll be nearly done by then. Maybe.

I guess I should ask a question. What are the chances this game puts an immovable rift in your relationship that will end in the death of one of you? it's pretty, pretty likely. If we don't keep up the common ground segment each episode, then it's definite. Thankfully, we still get on at this point. But I can't promise that we'll last forever.

It is at this point. It's very much a question mark. You can assume that's definitely the friendship's over. It's just when. Or maybe a question about how the game is in order. How does the game work? No, actually, how does it work? You don't seem to be so sure there, buddy.

Neither are we, though, so that's fine. Will each turn slash week start with moving supplies, blowing up half a set of supplies, moving trucks and troops, attacking, then saying, I'm done, your turn? I hope to hear from you guys. Thanks for the time, Adam. Well, you've heard from us, Adam,

and thank you for the time. It's not just ours, it's your precious time. Thanks for getting in touch. And that's not a bad description of it, by the way, for how the turn works. That sort of boils it down in a very simple form. But yes, the base structure, and we'll have to put something up on the website

of the turn breakdown but the base structure is it starts off with the movement of convoys then it goes down to planning some air missions after that it breaks down into consumption of food water that gets into the operation stages the operation stages repeat three times every turn that involves the reorganization of units moving them around eventually combat any air combat land combat yes construction training and you do all that three times per turn yes and that happens in a specific sequence combat being towards the end of each op stage which is yes repeated three times so it is the case that you've kind of summed it up pretty concisely there so yes blowing up supplies is actually a very fun part that i'm looking forward to you can blow up supply dumps

and ruin everyone's supplies having said that now that i know how hungry my men are i'm terrified of the concept of uh of you blowing up any supplies so i don't think i'll do that to you oh thanks so you shouldn't do it to me i'm definitely going to knowing how hungry you guys are i'm gonna stop them eating more uh just for the turn breakdown thing as well we've got a little excel document to track it with a line per uh per part of the turn you have to do yes we should distribute that actually yes we'll put that up but that is 158 lines long yes so on each of most of them we both have to do uh so yeah about 300 segments to attain yes and we do that um in we take turns with that so uh andy will complete one step i'll complete that step if he's going first

anyway if he's the player with initiative if he's the one who's phasing then he will go first then i'll do that stage then him then i when it comes to the admin stuff we're doing that in these play sessions sort of in tandem we'll just sit with our laptops and we'll go through those stages as you'll have heard earlier and he's a bit further ahead in terms of what he's doing with the water but i'm doing the pasta point stuff so there are bits where we'll be kind of out of sync but we won't go too far where the admin stuff ends yeah so we're always very close to where we are um we just have to try and stay as as in sync as we can with that but it's just if i'm doing admin and then you're doing admin immediately afterwards let's do it at the same time because otherwise

that's just doubling the time and it's taking hours exactly exactly well should we do a couple more uh yeah i've got one more ready to go yeah go for it uh hey gents currently on episode 10 and loving the friendly banter i'm rooting for you to power through the next eight years because you have a dedicated listener. That's the thing we feared the most. And the accountability Jules kicked in. It has, it has. Now that we know they're dedicated, you've actually ruined

any chance of dipping out here. Since you wanted questions about the game, here is a doozy. Since the game hasn't been finished and there are no guides to completion, are you excited or afraid of being experts

once it's completed? Patrick Patrick, thank you. well thank you patrick the patrick's so good they named twice so when it comes to that i see you've put experts in quotation marks that's a very good way to do it because we even though we know a lot of the rules now i would say experts is generous because we we don't play war games so when it comes to this sort of thing even though we know the game rules probably better than a lot of people i would say i don't think this is this is going to um too arrogant or cocky i think we do know the game rules better than a lot of people

who've probably encountered the game but we also don't play war games so we don't know if the strategizing is at all viable so when it comes to being experts we might be experts in terms of knowing what the rules are it's a very different question as to whether

or not we're good at the game but I would say excited, personally. Yeah, so am I I mean if we finish it, no one can really well they can't say we did it wrong and they absolutely but if they want to do that they'll have to finish it too exactly and finish it better and i fear they might however on the topic of being experts and finishing it yep you've been working on a bit of a an aid uh yeah i've been

doing some uh writing some software um yeah which is a a speciality of yours you're pretty pretty neat at it so you've been dishing that out so we are we're well on our way to having a program that can not only read all of the pdf version of the rules but also allows for a search function which means we won't have to just search through manually the actual physical rulebook or scroll through pages of a pdf we'll be able to search key terms which is going to be a godsend and it'll all be hyperlinked and highlight things you search so that should hopefully save a lot of time and that's not all you've also been working on something to aid with the store expenditure uh yeah i've made an excel template which should automate that a lot of that and also that'll go

into the program eventually so hopefully this hours of store expenditure down the line becomes of button press which if we get some of that stuff sorted out uh should help with the flow and yeah maybe doing some live stuff or video stuff if we can get rid of some of that bootkeeping because we we aren't against automation of certain aspects of it we're doing our very best to stick to the rules of the game but the rules of the game are just to carry out that expenditure doesn't say anything about not using computers because they didn't think we'd have them back then so ha what do you think now in 1978 uh as well as that patrick i see you've also sent it look yeah it is you yeah you also sent a web form through our website where you'd said love the podcast someone

commented on an instagram post about your channel so i followed and i'm listening now super excited to listen podcast sound is great and i'm rooting for you to finish so you dropped in two messages there we caught you both platforms so you definitely deserve the readout there so thank you very much for that probably the same instagram post mentioned earlier and we'll do the last one here um not the last one we have but we'll we have to stop at some point so we'll we'll read this one everyone else we will read them out at some point i assure you that this is from steven hello i'm just curious what some of both james and andy's favorite games are are you veteran war gamers or have you decided to jump into the deep end by

tackling this behemoth? I'm really curious. Thanks. Well, Stephen, as you may know by now if you've caught up, we are not wargamers. We do not play wargames. We do not know what we're doing. Never done it before. We're not really a veteran of anything. The closest I would say is Dungeons & Dragons,

which we've played religiously for eight years. Yeah. So, that's my favourite game. That's also my favourite, yeah. If we're doing board games, definitely my favourite game. um comfortably we've we've played it we played it through covid i mean yeah so during covid in in the uk i'm not sure if this was a thing in many other countries but we have a covid was

i know called yeah yeah so there was this disease where you got like a bit of a cough and uh people people got ill apparently yeah um no yeah so during covid you definitely have heard of that we in the uk had a it was called a support bubble network where individuals of a certain number of people were allowed to still stay in contact this was towards the sort of second half of the lockdown and you you lived on your own at the time so you were allowed to be in a support bubble with another household you could visit another household and you generously chose my household my dm yeah your dm which was it was me and uh it was my my girlfriend at the time that i live with so you would come around and we would play dnd and we did that since we had

nothing else to do on the weekends all weekends every weekend and beforehand i'd live with you at the very start of covid so we also played that every day because of timings of furlough and people not being in work so we played dnd constantly so we can comfortably say that's our favorite game and also i think the reason we felt comfortable given this ago because we played dnd back to back for weeks at a time every single day although having said that there was a short period of time where we had to go on hiatus because we had so much stuff going on in the dnd campaign, so much conflict with these enemies that were really

bogging you down, you felt like it was actually psychologically battering you. You need a break. You do, you do from time to time. So, yes, Dungeons & Dragons is our favourite game, and it's basically the opposite end of the spectrum from this. It's so

freeform, and this is all rules. We'll give a shout-out to Carcassonne as well. Carcassonne actually was a pretty... That's a great game. We, because we lived together a long time ago and we we it was actually a long time ago now in the way way old back yeah in the way old back times and we lived together we would play carcass on a lot in the evenings we would just leave it out on the table and then pick it up the following day yeah

yeah building mega that was a very spiteful game it was it was that actually set the groundwork as well if that's any indication for this then yes we will fall out so yeah carcass on is also up there with um with dnd so check them both out dungeons and dragons it's available um everywhere and carcasson also pretty much every game shop yeah well that was that was some great correspondence so thank you for sending that in everyone we've got plenty more to get through we will be going through it each week and we'll get to all of you at some point but for now let's take let's take a step back from present correspondence and let's correspond with the past because we've got a little bit more history to go through yeah you've got a little report on someone involved haven't

you i don't know much about this so i'm excited i have i've concocted a little bit and honestly you've you set the bar pretty high last time man not gonna lie so i'm a little bit nervous to try and step into your boots however i will try i've got a little bit of a dossier on one of your leaders this time and that is a mr bernard montgomery or monty as the nickname went now he was a commander in the north african campaign on the the commonwealth side who's british and i've got a little quote here to to start off with little little very brief anecdote which really sets him up to be the foil to rommel oh good so supposedly it was the case that on appointment to the North African campaign,

Montgomery had remarked, well, after having an easy war, things have now got much more difficult. And a colleague supposedly told him to cheer up, at which point Montgomery said, I'm not talking about me, I'm talking about Rommel. I like that. That is confidence, if ever I heard it.

Now, Bernard Montgomery, And I never know if it's Bernard or Bernard. It depends very much on the individual. But I'll go with Monty just to keep things simple. So Monty was born in Cannington, Surrey in 19... No, not 19. Definitely wasn't 19. It was 1887.

He was one of nine children. One of nine to a Church of Ireland minister. Okay. Big family. Big families. Big families. Church of Ireland. Church of Ireland, yeah.

So Church of Ireland, but in Surrey. Yes, yes. Church of Ireland minister in Surrey. And his grandfather was fairly well-renowned, Sir Robert Montgomery, a colonial administrator in British India. Okay. Which means if you take his family,

immediately what you've got is a family that has a notable history in Europe, Asia, and Africa. so a real a real dynasty going on here covering covering a lot of the uh the world so is he rich well well there's something of of that sort because because his maternal grandfather was a famous preacher by the name of frederick william cannon ferrar and in that individual frederick he was actually a pallbearer at the funeral of one charles darwin oh you put old charlie darwin in the ground he did he did okay so um yeah from there of course the family evolved and stretched out across the globe succeeding in all sorts of areas so they're fit they're like

firmly aristocrats they've got a big history of a big notoriety in politics yeah and religion as well it's a big crossover of that venn diagram that middle bit is very big between politics and uh and religion so after his his grandfather died robert um his dad henry i believe it was henry have i got that down right yeah it looks like henry henry inherited the ancestral estate and a whopping 13 000 pound debt left to repay including mortgage what's that in modern money In modern money, that is roughly £2 million. God. That's quite the thing to inherit.

Yeah. They sold all the farmland that they could from the estate, and it didn't really cover what they needed it to. Didn't put a dent in it. And because at this point they're all sort of vicars in the family, it really made it a bit of a struggle. So as well as that, what didn't help is his home life left something to be desired. He would suffer frequent beatings.

A lot of his siblings emigrated. One of them actually died. And his mother hired tutors to educate him and was disinterested in his education. And he became a self-described bully. Oh, okay. Suffice it to say, he didn't get on with his mother. And when she died, he didn't even attend her funeral.

He also forbade his child, when they were born, from having any interaction with their grandmother. So they didn't get on. They weren't close. But, later on, Monty went on to attend St. Paul's School, and then the Royal Military College in Sandhurst. The Royal Military College in Sandhurst boasts some alumni that people might have heard of. Ian Fleming is one of them. Spy guy.

Spy guy, author of James Bond, 007, Casino Royale. Spy himself, wasn't he? um in terms of i didn't do much digging into ian fleming's past there but the fact that he attended a military college probably gives a bit more uh verisimilitude towards his work and there was another alumni um a one winston churchill so a bit of crossover and that's not the only time they'll cross over the same time not quite no winston churchill uh quite a bit beforehand so he wasn't bullying him No, I don't think so. I don't think so.

However, it was the case that he was nearly kicked out on several occasions because of how much of a rascal he was. Very violent, very disruptive. Well, that's going to come in useful. It may well. It may well. So that means that when World War I did kick off, Monty was part of the 10th Infantry Brigade of the 4th Division of the British Expeditionary Force.

and while serving as temporary captain in october 1914 something happened which actually uh runs a bit parallel to your history segment a a brush with death because in october 1914 along the belgian border monty was shot by a sniper in the right lung in the lung in the lung okay after taking that shot he lay there pretending to be dead one of his men ran out to save him and was shot also and killed fell on top of him lay there on the body the sniper continued to take more shots

one of them hit Monty in the knee and he still lay there pretending to be dead the body of his fallen comrade absorbed a lot more of these bullets fired down intending to be for Monty so he's just lying there playing dead

while bullets slam into the guy on top of him yes yeah I'm not gonna lie I'm not getting out of that yeah that's pure panic that's a i mean a lung shot i suppose the i don't know that this is could be described as a saving grace but if you've been shot in the lung you're probably not going to be able to cry out in pain as easily or gasp so maybe you don't react as much is the only thing i can think of is something that might have helped so he's getting peppered with rounds

and in the end he just lays there all through the night and then late on into the night into the morning they arrive with stretchers to take away the dead bodies because they presume he's dead they find him in the state he's in barely alive and decide

based on his condition there's not really any hope so they start digging a grave oh wow this guy was even closer to death than so he's just lying there not being able to breathe while they're digging his grave they're digging his grave they've taken his dead fallen comrade away and he's got a punctured lung he's been shot

in the knee he's been there for hours however they decide at some point to change up the plan they stick him in an ambulance send him to hospital where he recovers that's mental he survives so Graziani may have had some close brushes with death, however this one feels a lot more visceral warzone, this is

I mean, that's a that's not one that I would survive, I'd be dead that first shot gets me, I'm out, I'm dead well it's also they lay there with him for a while digging his grave and then called the ambulance when he didn't die

yeah, so by the time the grave's done and they just decide, well, he's still alive. Maybe we should give him a shot. So, yeah, they could have just got the ambulance straight away. I suppose the thing is, it's not a case of back then, you know, you hit 999, ambulance shows up, it's a Ford. Yeah. Back then, very different kind of environment.

So I suppose maybe it was always on the way. Who knows? So he pulled through. The old boy pulled through. He saw a lot of action on the Western Front from there. Battle of the Somme. Battle of Arras Battle of Passchendaele

I think it is Passchendaele around this time was granted the rank of the temporary rank of Major and around this time, there's a picture in October 1918 it shows him, at the time a fairly

unknown individual, standing in front of Winston Churchill the current Minister of Munitions in that period of time no one knew who monday was but that picture has been used in a lot of biographies for for both of them yeah by the end of the first world war he was uh for lack of a better word disenchanted with uh with the leadership he only twice saw an army commander on the western front and criticized the levels of communication between command and frontline forces

It seemed to be the case that He didn't really think that there was much Communication between them Much visibility from the command And that people were left with Little trickle down information So he set out to remedy that Okay

His approach was An interesting one, one that I think Really changed the Atmosphere of the North African campaign Based on the stories that I've Read from there But that's a story for another time and we'll pick that up next time

in our next segment about good old Monty but suffice it to say he does have some interesting tales about him just a quick thing there, you said he got hit in the lung in 1914 yes

and then went and fought in three other battles he was at the Somme so the lung puncture didn't really put him out of commission for that long if he was back in time to be fighting. Well, you've got to bear in mind, he was in World War II.

So this lung shot, this doesn't take him out. This doesn't even hinder him. I don't know. I was expecting maybe a year or two bed rest, maybe, from a lung shot. I suppose I will have to double check when the SOM was,

but the SOM... I mean, it's World War I still. And now for something nicer. He really is. He really pulls through. So we'll have to see where his story continues from there. But I suppose for now, we've got our own story to tell. I'm recording.

Yeah, Common Ground. Common Ground. Yeah. So, for anyone who's a first-timer, or anyone who's just really sleep-deprived, and maybe had a bit of a drink today, you can't remember last week, or any of the previous ones, Common Ground is a segment where Andy and I

alternate a topic each week. One of us comes up with it. and it's to try and find a common agreement on a topic that we discuss, try and find something that brings us together at the end of a play session of a game that is poised to have us hating each other

and this week it's you Andy so would you like to tell what your common ground suggestion is? Yeah I've got a fashion one this week. Oh dear I'd like people to bring capes back and for people wearing them to not inherently be losers

so you've acknowledged something very early on which stops a lot of what i was going to say so that's good um can't help but notice by the way you you've got your dressing gown kind of draped around you at the moment as well um so you look quite comfy yeah but now i'm realizing you've got a sort of cape vibe going on yeah is this why partially i mean it's a very good piece of clover that we don't use enough what is the selling point of a cape if you could if you could i guess pitch that to me first of all well it's like a coat but you don't have to mess around with sleeves it's not like a coat though is it i mean it is it's just on your back and hood oh fine you get yeah you get a hood yeah so you cover your clothes on your head this is what a coat does

you're describing more of a cloak than a cape okay cloaks capes okay that genre because i hear cape, I think... Are you thinking like the one shoulder, like half length? I'm thinking the ones you get in RuneScape. Oh, they tell everyone how good you are at mining. Yeah, yeah, I'm thinking that. Or the team ones that you could get in the Wildi. Oh, yeah.

So the ones where, yeah, so it doesn't cover your arms at all. It's just down the back. Still fine. But it's not warm. You can't though, they're quite... It's to keep the rain off. They're quite narrow, those ones. Yeah, you flare them out. i don't see if it's like a cloak yeah and i've worn a cloak or two in my time um usually it's

sort of a halloween costume related i've got i've had a few cloaks yeah and i will admit they're fun what i did have actually we um this is this is cloak uh adjacent so we went to a festival a few years ago and i had a poncho as you may remember yes i bought a poncho at the festival i had a cowboy hat as well it was it was a lot of fun and it was really really warm and i remember the poncho being a a beautiful bit of relief yeah because it's a bit of personal shade you could stick a t-shirt on and then put the poncho on top it's it's warming when you need a bit of warmth and it's a lot of shade when you need that and that was a that was a beautiful piece of clothing to have i might actually still have that poncho somewhere so when i look back at that i do have

positive memories ponchos in the same ballpark ponchos like a double cape yeah you just you've got something you just chuck it off when you're inside keep the rain and stuff off don't have to have a coat right okay based based purely on my personal poncho experience pockets into the capes i don't i don't actually hate that idea yeah so when you say we've got another big thing to tackle because you said when it comes to it for people to not think you're a loser for wearing it now i wore this poncho at a festival yeah that's fine i saw people dressed up as all sorts at the festival i don't know that i would ever be comfortable wearing that on the the commute to work no on public transport but all the advantages it has are still there so if we can all get more

accepting of ponchos capes and capes capes and cloaks capes and capes capes and capes You just think of a poncho, but you've cut it in half. Yeah. Yeah, but you're relying on the goodwill of people to not make fun of you for having a poncho or a cape or a cloak. We just need a critical mass, and then everyone debuts their cloak on the same day. So, right, we need to pick out cloak day, sea day.

Sea day. We need to determine when sea day is. Well, it's the day before D-Day. So we missed it by quite a while. We've got a year to get ready. So this is why they've sort of petered out, because C-Day's already went and gone. Yeah.

So, all right, so if we can pick a date, let's say the 17th of, you picked a month? June. June, 17th of June, 2000 and... 27. 27, 27. give ourselves two and a bit years for Cape Day

alright so you heard it here first you can gather up your cloaks gather up your ponchos, your capes yeah just those three we don't want to go too broad so get them together amass in your local town centre

town halls if you can let's not do sort of let's not go quite January 6th let's not storm anything no storming, this isn't storming anything, it's a fashion statement the clothing helps with a storm not helps you do a storm

exactly, we're not storming anything, we are the storm no, I think that's what they were saying oh no, sorry, that does sound too revolutionary we're in comfortable clothes and we're going to look really nice they can't spin that one no, don't put viva, no, get rid of the viva

ok, le comfort Just Le Comfort. Le Comfort. Okay, that's fine. Le Comfort. So we've common grounded that. I think we have. I think we ticked off the common ground. So 17th of June, 2027, marquee calendars, Cape Day.

That's it. That's Cape Day. So if you have any thoughts on that, let us know. If you can't make it, just drop us a line and let us know you're busy. We will need a doctor's note. Yes, because we've given you plenty of notice. so if you want to opt out

then you're I'm going to be honest you're not subtle humble and brave are you but we are we're subtle humble and brave and this takes us pretty nicely to about an hour and that's about all we can do

we've got we've got lives to live we've got bedtimes to have it's pretty late here and you've had us up this late really maybe maybe next time

consider that maybe maybe next time keep us in mind alright turn this off turn this off we can't escape

until you turn it off we're stuck in your phones we're stuck in your radios we can't go until you go to bed or get to work or get to your family after a two hour commute

stay so humble and brave goodnight fare thee well We'll be right back.