War With A Mate - Episode 21: First Blood

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

The first shot has been fired! In what is undeniably the greatest stride yet, the guys have made a tremendous charge through multiple game stages (albiet some did not apply to Operation Stage One). The point of no return is well and truly in the rear-view mirror as the first casualties are recorded, and pieces on the board begin to move. More enigmatic enigma facts from Andy's History Corner and the mail call segment may finally shed some light on the meaning of "TOE" Points, while James basks in the kindness of strangers. Only the exposure of Andy's hubris in Common Ground could taint these waters.

good evening and welcome to war with a mate i'm james i'm andy and who are you andy not you the listener oh okay you want them to say their name out loud yeah go for it let's go No, no, I didn't hear that. Well, we'll just make up a name for you. How about any names spring to mind? No. No, nothing? What's going on?

It's called audience participation. You know, sometimes you've got to bounce off the energy that they're giving you and, you know, a bit of back and forth. Oh, okay. But, yeah, clearly that's not working here for whatever reason. Sorry I didn't pick up on that. Yeah, yeah. Well, neither did the audience, apparently.

well audience we are james and andy of war with a mate and we are playing the campaign for north africa a really really long board game however not feeling so long now is it no today's been a very very productive session hell yes it has we have made some startling progress against this behemoth of a game we've really taken it by the horns today wrestled it around flown through we have we have we've went through multiple stages of the game we've had a bit of a longer one today and we've made it through multiple phases of the game we've went from the how did we start again today we started on we just finished the water distribution distribution was yes yeah last week was attrition which we don't have we don't have because it takes time for that to kick

in yeah it's coming for your guys from what i've been hearing but yeah yeah my thirsty and hungry men will suffer the consequences of my um i suppose logistical failings that will come about next operation stage but for now they're just a little bit thirsty a little bit hungry nothing bad's happening to them for the most part because we moved past that we then moved on to some of the shipping bits and pieces and that was an interesting that was a revelation that was i think can only be best described as a fuck on yeah an absolute farce as far as we could tell there's well not as far as we can tell there is a tactical shipping segment in the rule like the turn breakdown there's no rules for tactical shipping for reaper of us there's that's a raise but it's

not that phase yes it's contradictory we found bits and pieces that refer to this tactical shipping segment but then there's other parts of the rules that completely contradict it because it turns out it's been completely replaced by a different system basically all of that is now part of the truck system they're just water trucks yeah they've just amalgamated all of the coastal shipping stuff into what you do during the truck convoy stage which is way later so now we'd spend a good what two hours trying to figure out how that tactical shipping thing works and it turns out it's not real it's part of the game that doesn't exist anymore but it's still there in the rules it's still there in the turn breakdown so we spent two two fucking hours trying to figure

out how this thing works and it's not even real i was not pleased and i'm still not very happy about that waste of time however however that being said we did then move on past that we found out that you don't use boats apart from your naval fleet to actually bombard and mine don't ship the coastal bits and pieces until much later on in the truck convoy but my actual naval convoy arrived today yeah you're one that made it unharmed for the mediterranean because i never knew they were there yeah you didn't find any of them so they dropped off all of their stuff today dropped it off at all the ports which i'm not going to tell you handy because you didn't find them you didn't find them with your spy planes so you don't get to find out where all my supplies

went yeah which after the enigma fig last week where it was like they knew where every single one was at all times i think i should get some buffs to that this is clearly pre-enigma crack this uh this clearly is a either an alternate universe where enigma isn't cracked because we're the masterminds behind each side or maybe it's coming down the pipeline maybe next turn you'll be lucky yeah but this turn we move past that so my shipping stuff arrived then we would have had all of the aircraft bits and pieces however it's raining it's raining really badly in the desert so we didn't have that we simply can't have that which means we didn't end up doing any of the plane stuff because we we simply couldn't we had to skip construction

we had to skip the planes i did do some training you did do some training you started training your australian yeah they're in cairo and they are they have extremely bad morale at the minute minus three so i think they're going to be training for the entire scenario and we we also found out a fun fact about cairo and alexandria the the cities on the um the eastern side of the map is that they have unlimited resources for you which is it was actually part of the revelation that the shipping stuff doesn't work the way we thought it did turns out that part of that is because cairo and alexandria have unlimited resources for andy to tap into and move around as he pleases but not with boats no not with boats which makes sense because the rule the thing said your supplies

just move so i'd just be teleporting supplies from port to port with an unlimited stockpile so good that that's not the rule yeah i would not have been pleased if you could just teleport resources um unlimited in scale but we moved past that we instead continued powering through the turn and we eventually got all the way to movement yeah it's an actual game now it's not just bootkeeping with no input we actually moved some pieces i say we did it's andy going first andy moved some pieces you moved the second scottish guards i believe it was yeah the first group i moved second scottish guards and the 31st field artillery regiment and where did you move them i moved them from a horrific pass where they would have all have died to one of your airports where

they eliminated an sgu yes that's right you moved your men away from the uh the ridge that they were caught in between next to some of my units you snaked them around the ridge yep and then took them to my airfield and they stormed the undefended airfield that's right because it was just sgsus which are essentially engineers no planes no planes were there this this was one of my few spare airfields where I've just got the engineers. So your men rocked up, saw there were some engineers, saw that there were no

planes, and you immediately gunned them all down. You executed these men in cold blood. The first act that you've committed in this game so far is not finding my convoy. It's not flying your planes. It's coming into

one of my airfields with a battalion of armed soldiers and gunning down a group of unarmed engineers yep how do you feel about that i we don't know they were gunned down all we know is they're eliminated and they're never coming back they're not in the game anymore they're gone yep that's that's that's first blood you've drawn first blood of course and it was unarmed engineers in an airfield i'm sure they resisted a bit i'm sure they did because you've shown up and wanted to kill them all yeah to be fair that they had no supplies there so they probably would have

starved to death function so that was a mercy no it wasn't a mercy i don't think storming an airfield and executing people is ever really seen as a mercy unless you're the psychotic man sat across from me today so that was your your first act and then you moved other bits and pieces around yeah i've moved the some the fumbling fusiliers and another regiment of horse artillery to one of your garrisons and we had quite a funny thing where we worked out they have to have a certain level of strength to exert a zone of control your guys don't have that level of strength so when that fight comes to resolve i think it's going to be pretty bad for you yeah because usually if a unit has a certain level of defense it's quite a baseline level it's very low it's a

a point value of 10 and that comes from multiplying two other values so really it should get a 10 pretty easy however if a unit doesn't have that then it doesn't exert what's considered a zone of control which means any hex around it is an area of influence that if an enemy enters it then combat is essentially started automatically and my unit there is a little bit too weak to have a zone of control which means it doesn't mean andy can't attack them it just means it's not automatically triggered because my men aren't intimidating enough to resolve anything with anything but violence so it means they are probably going to be massacred well they're now in four zones of control because all my guys can't do that yes you've shown up with some actual equipped

i've shown up with two infantry battalions at full strength a tank battalion and an artillery so that's going to go pretty badly i think for your guys yes the guys at the chauffeurs and garrison are yeah they're in for a really bad time so that'll be an interesting one to to play out but what happens is first we we carry out all of the movement or andy does rather carries out all of his movement then we do the breakdown points to figure out if any vehicles or motorized elements of the uh the game have broken down in the desert and then it goes into combat so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out because the combat is i mean it's going to take up a lot of time next few weeks it's going to be movement combat but it's going to be fun yeah we're making

decisions it's a game it is this actually feels like a game yeah i'm really looking forward to playing out these parts and seeing what the battlefield looks like at the end of this this is the part i've been wanting to get to this is an actual game and even though we wasted two hours looking for rules that don't exist it was still i would say a relatively fun time i think It was a fun one, yeah. Yeah, I actually enjoyed myself for part of it, which you don't often get with this game because it's a nightmare encased in paper and pages.

I think having the map out makes a big difference because otherwise it's just us two on laptops not talking to each other, doing spreadsheets. That's true. This is the first time we've had the game map out in weeks because we don't need it when we're just doing the store and fuel expenditure sort of stuff because the map is just there.

But we've actually moved pieces around today, so we needed it and it was great i love moving things well i didn't move anything i love watching you move things even though it was i think technically a war crime what you did i'm not really sure the logistics of you know whether or not you're allowed to do that i didn't have any other options well i know it's the rules of the game but you chose to go there i thought there might be planes if there were planes i guess that the same thing would happen there were no there would have soldiers there yeah but we would have got planes i guess it doesn't address your war crime accusation no it just means you wanted to do the war crime and get a plane yeah yeah

so you're bad objectively so we've had a couple of those units move to airfield and set up a maneuver on some guys who are not equipped to deal with it and the other big move is the seventh armored division is now thundering through the desert towards your front line i did notice that i did notice the direction that they're going at full speed along a road yeah yes i did i did see that so i'm interested to see where they're headed because you're very tentative you don't know which of my units are stacked to the nines with all sorts of equipment and artillery and which ones are just a handful of guys with pea shooters in the middle of the desert i know they don't have enough supplies

regardless of how many there is of course not no one does but is it a few hungry guys or hundreds because that will matter. So I'm trying to get a feel for where your strength actually lies in that battle line. Oh, you'll find out, my friend. One of these days, you're going to cross the wrong group.

But I feel like before then, you're just going to get... I'm going to mop up a lot of garrisons. Yeah, you're going to get frustratingly lucky and kill a lot of garrisons. Oh, dear. Those poor guys. Oh, what a day, though.

What a play session. Yeah. Really tanking through this phase, phase, this stage this op stage before we know it, we'll be flying through, finishing this op stage finishing the turn

and we'll be looking back in a few short months and we'll have finished the whole game, how crazy is that? I mean insanely crazy almost unbelievably crazy this is episode 21 and we've moved someone for the first

time yeah what on earth was that I think someone was accidentally connected to my bluetooth speaker that was we're going to get a copyright strike oh that's no good

someone's playing copyrighted music through your speaker that was genuinely scary that's also I can't deal with that because I'm just going to wake up to someone else's music now should I turn down your speaker yeah at least for the part there we go

I'm just going to make sure that wasn't my phone connecting to it for whatever reason because it really shouldn't I shouldn't be playing anything at the moment that freaked me right out your speaker is right next to me and I don't like that it was just some soft woman's voice

started singing along there well, wasn't that spooky ghost of the SGSUs that you murdered earlier today you had to serenade me well how old were you, 39 I have 38 now One down, 38 to go

You monster You can have way more planes than me But if no one can refit them or let them fly So I'm going to be hunting SJSUs As well as trucks No, leave them be I don't think I'll be doing that Yeah, well, I'll get you for this

I'll get you I just don't think you will Easter weekend as well You chose Easter weekend to do this Easter weekend, Wrestlemania weekend It's a big one It's a big weekend. It's a big weekend. Movement weekend. We're moving around. Yeah, there's free events that are equally important.

You know, I forgot it was a bank holiday today because I was on the way here. Well, on the way. I got on the train and I usually get a weekly train pass. And in my head, it's Sunday because Monday I wouldn't have this kind of free time. So I'm usually working. so got on the train got off at the station put my ticket in the uh the barrier of course invalid because they uh they usually expire end of the week i usually buy one every monday when i go to work start of the week and in my head it was sunday so got to the barrier the station i realized it was invalid had to go over um you know hat in hand to the the man at the barrier you know the man

the barrier man the barrier man yeah and i said sorry i've um i've got a sorry i'm an idiot because is there anything you can do about that is there any courses you'd recommend any pills what day is it basically yeah and i go over to him and go sorry i've forgotten what day it is and you know what this guy what a what a guy what a what a sweetheart because he then got out his magic card and tapped it against the barrier and it opened up the barrier and he said, just buy one on the way back That was nice of him

It was, it was very nice of him I guess you can't chastise someone too heavily if they don't even know the day Yeah, that's it, I started to get into the spiel of, you know, it's a bank holiday usually I would get it on the Monday and he just tapped the card, he didn't want to hear it he's heard from a thousand idiots

today alone and I was just another one of the crowd but he chose to exert some mercy on me so i'm going to extend that mercy i'm going to pay it forward to you today because of what you did with the sgs use i'm going to show you some mercy and i'm going to give you an opportunity next week to not do that next week i'm going to give you the opportunity to surrender uh no uh take some time think it through uh okay a couple of things are gonna happen over the next few weeks right okay i'm both not going to surrender spoilers and if everything goes to plan i'm gonna gut about a quarter of your sgs use right and that's that's

what you definitely want to do is it uh yep and steal the planes right you're not stealing my planes you can and i will i'm not going to let you steal my plane as soon as the rain stops those planes are coming back to me so it's the weather the weather is the one thing stopping you from stealing the planes yeah because otherwise i need to hold and defend the planes you're not taking my goddamn planes oh i am leave them leave them alone no i've just because i've got better planes than you and more of them yeah you have air superiority so while it's raining i'm gonna try and stop that happening i'm gonna fly them far away far away from you if they're not in use that's fine no i'm gonna fly them all the way to tripoli and

So they're not in use. Well, they'll be in use. I'm going to use them to bomb Malta. How about that? Don't. You'd hate that, wouldn't you? I would. You absolutely love your little Malta.

Well, it's been a bit of a letdown in the one chance I've had to use it so far. That's true. You have kind of squandered Malta. Yeah. Don't know why everyone talks about it being so important. They couldn't find anything. Well, that's just down to...

That's user error, I would say. i haven't been given the tools i need well we've we've got a bit of a crossroads here andy what are we going to do first we're going to read out a bit of a bit of correspondence or are we going to dive into some history um do we do some correspondence first let's do it let's let's uh hear out for uh hear out let's listen out let's uh just play the sound effects future james there we go yep it's it's happening right now you think you probably spoke over it probably yeah one of us did either way it's happened now so that's it it's uh it's it's come through so let's have a little look see uh what's in the correspondence pipeline we got matthew

matthew's in what's matthew saying hey andy and james that's us hope you guys are well found the podcast for a reddit comment and i've just caught up as a history grad i'm loving the new historical background segments but a bit annoyed that i can no longer binge the podcast while i do my housekeeping job either way looking forward to following till the end although the lack of emails from previous episodes seems to have been sorted i thought i'd send a couple of questions i'd thought of regardless one can a member of a battalion desert if not treated well or does lack of supply slash food just reduce determination points i know it had italy had real problems with desertion later in the war but wondering if the game creators had made this a

factor to consider and yes uh i don't they don't directly desert but they gradually lose toe strength which is the equivalent to men so i guess you could even view that as those men dying from a lack of um food and water or going i don't have food and water i'm leaving well it's noted as attrition in the rules which suggests not just death but also yeah maybe people abandoning post going AWOL so yeah in a sense they do leave it's not an optional thing though it's not a sort of thing where you can have your units break apart and split off because of a lack of food but yeah that they do have essentially that rule yeah if you treat them badly whether that's through choice or lack of stores and supplies then they will by the nature of it start to dwindle in numbers yeah

i suppose it's it's up to the imagination how it is that happens some will die some will run away i guess who can blame them when they're being led by me as for the italians having problems i believe they have lower morale inherently as part of their unit um to reflect this kind of thing which then has an influence on combat yes because the uh the warfare that they were getting into in the desert is not something that they were used to so it's a yeah it really took a toll on their morale so the the impact of that is reflected in the the actual morale which can be trained up for some units but i think my italians will unfortunately be having a bad time although weirdly i think at the minute at the start your guys have better morale

because they're they've been operating in the region for a longer period longer and are more used to like desert warfare whereas a lot of my guys come in with low morale training yeah to become functional um so that's all like yeah incorporated and as for not being able to binge it anymore what you can do matthew is listen to the podcast backwards if you listen to the episodes in reverse so from from now go back down through 20 1918 etc there's actually a secret message in there so if you listen to all of them backwards and then all of them the right way again um and then just keep on doing that and let us know what you what you think if you've figured out the message and uh second question second question uh have you researched any units specifically

that either of you are particularly looking forward to being introduced into the game not sure how specific the game gets with it all but i'm currently in new zealand and know that the 28th maori battalion played a role in north africa although as this was against rommel's forces i imagine it'll be uh i'll be listening for a good few years before they're introduced and if the game isn't that specific when it comes to commonwealth forces would you perhaps have segments highlighting the stories of certain battalions that you might play with many thanks matt so yeah it does go to that level of detail with the units so i haven't seen the 28th maori but for instance the sixth australian the third coldstream guards there's the second

new zealand division which is currently in the zone i'm about to move them so a lot of them are in there yeah i imagine they will be in there somewhere because it does break down pretty much every unit that was active so the what was it the 28th the 28th maori uh battalion so i'm just having a quick look around here just seeing if anything stands out can't see them yet but i'd we can have a little look through it may well be that they're in there i would be shocked if they're not included because pretty much every active unit was accounted for they've been accounted for some that didn't actually show up didn't actually make it to the the theater so we'll we'll have a look through that because that's an interesting one to double check yeah and as for

if we're planning to do some breakdowns on specific units i think absolutely i think maybe as they start to be in use and maybe a unit has a particular good day on the board or something like that we might uh then go and dive into them in a bit more detail yeah there's some there's some individual i mean individual characters uh marce a pilot in the um the german uh air forces that is a character who is a very capable pilot and it has an actual material impact on the rating that he gets as a pilot in the game and he was also just a very wacky character so we'll probably end up doing a history bit on him at some point and probably individual units like i'm sure digging into them there's some interesting stuff about oh yeah there'll be plenty of individuals individual

units maybe individuals that were in units that we'll we'll start to figure out as time goes on i mean the fact that your units today have killed some of my men i'm probably going to look into maybe some of the history of your guys and get an idea as to what it is what kind of marauders the second scots yeah who it is that's actually just came into this airfield and caused this havoc so it's something that we will definitely follow up in because we have enjoyed getting to grips with a bit of history as we've

went along through this as well. And if anyone has a bit more knowledge than us or knows of any units in particular that might be interesting for us to look into yeah please get in touch I would love the suggestions Yeah let us know we'll let you know how

they're doing if they've had any sort of exciting endeavours so far, or whether they're years off, because some of them may well be. A lot of them will be. But yeah, thanks very much for that, Matt.

And you've got one from Instagram, I think? Yes, we have a message from the old IG, the Insta. Let's have a little look, see what we've got here. It is from Andrew. Not you, Andy. It's a different Andrew.

so this Andrew says hey guys I've been listening to the podcast for a couple of weeks now I heard about the podcast through my brother whose letter you read in episode 16 oh family affair my name is Andrew and I am from Georgia US just wanted to say that as a history teacher and World War II enthusiast I enjoy what you guys are doing especially as you delve into the histories of some of the key players during the campaign i also enjoy hearing y'all uh we love you all go from an all over the place conversation to having sound effects segments and responding to your 10 faithful listeners we haven't gotten lost in the deserts of our minds as far as my question how does all of the battle transport and movement happen

is it through dice roll or some other series of rules pages while most of us are happy to never to play the game we are your mates and we will remain subtle humble and brave right along with you guys well andrew it's a very lovely message so thank you for that and when it comes to your question we can actually break that down now with a little bit of understanding because now we've actually played a bit of movement we've went through that we know what it works like and um when it comes to moving around you have a set of capability points which are assigned to each unit so different types of units get a different quantity of these capability points and you have to expend them when you do anything whether that's attacking moving even unloading or loading

a truck all of these things use these capability points and depending on the type of terrain that you're on it will expend more or less so for example if you've got a vehicle and you're moving along a road it will take half a capability point for every hex that you move if you're on just a clear piece of land it will take up two capability points for every hex that you move and then there's others like if you move up or down a slope then it can add an additional four capability points for each hex that you cross which has a slope so it varies quite a bit but it's determined by but you elect where they go and then it's sort of limited by these points you can't exceed the points that your unit has but if you start to go over then you earn

disorganization points which really from what we can tell anyway seem to have a very big impact on combat so you're not going to be wanting to push your troops that much they also have to spend an entire op stage doing nothing to get one disorganization point off yes the amount of time you're going to be doing nothing if you expend your cpa by quite a bit there is that balance there um so yes there's a few different ways you can go about maneuvering and and using that differently and then when you do move if it's a vehicle it consumes water and fuel yes and then you also have to work down the breakdown because every piece of terrain you move over has a cpa cost and also a breakdown value um so if you're going up and down hills and stuff that increases

and then when all the movement's done you roll on the breakdown table for all your units to see if any of them broke down on the way there. They will always get to where you want and then break down so you won't have like I want to go there

and they break down on the way. Yeah so you don't break down to the part way through the journey you finish the journey then you see if they've broke down. Yeah. Which is I suppose good in a way the breakdown so yeah when you look at it you've got all these different things to factor in for movement so when you were moving your units today some of them were motorized yeah so that meant you had to figure out the capability points

that you spent moving you had to factor in the rain which slows you down on roads to yeah so then after that you figure out the the breakdown points that you've accrued you have to work out the fuel consumption you have to use up the water that's being consumed in the journey all of that for every single motorized unit in the game whenever you move them all of these different things have to be factored in and you also ask then about the the the combat so when it comes to combat it is the case that there are there's a few different aspects to the combat well we'll get into a bit more when we actually break into what will probably be weeks of combat back to back but in essence it's all determined by the the strength of the units so the the composition

of them which is factored in stuff like whether they're infantry whether there's tanks whether there's guns in there and then it also factors in the morale the cohesion and all of that then plays into a table essentially there's a table in the rules you then adjust the position on that table with all of those factors roll two dice and then that will tell you what your total result is and then depending on the difference between mine and andy's result it results in a certain amount of casualties and prisoners or yeah as well as there's other states in between like pinned and engaged and stuff uh yes where you can like use artillery to stop units moving combat will yeah i think we'll break it down when we get into it but it's definitely uh very involved so yeah thank

you thank you for the question there andrew it um it touches on something that we've had a grand time and uh i i would say also a lot of frustration getting through but it's it's been hey it's been a lot more positive than usual so also interested since you're a history teacher just how much of this we're getting absolutely wrong for our history bits like that puts a lot of pressure on knowing that we're trying to do these history bits and andrew here is going to be listening in going, nope, these guys have absolutely destroyed that bit of information. They've ruined it

and they're giving misinformation. So if that is the case, just let us know. Yeah, please, we will do corrections if we're getting faced up wildly wrong. Yeah, well Andy will, I'm not going to get anything wrong, so Andy might have to do some corrections. So many. Yeah, probably, probably. But I've got everything right so far and

I'm sure you'll clarify that for me, Andrew, so thank you. And likewise, you also stay subtle, humble, and brave. And good mention of deserts of my mind. I'd like to hear it. Absolutely. You've really got me there. Really got me there.

So we've got, should we do one more? Yeah, we've got one from Henry. Henry. Let's hear it, Henry. Good morning. I guess good afternoon for you guys. Good call. You've nailed that.

I've been listening since like two days ago and churned through your episodes like a fat kid at Hershey Park. I like war games, but I've never played one on a board game. i've spent many hours on gary grisby's war in the east too or as i call it gritism i've been looking forward to hearing you guys start the actual campaign and slog through this debacle of a rule set i mean hearing you guys reference the unit's toe i don't know i don't speak british

and i think i remember you saying you didn't know what it stood for uh if i'm hearing this correctly it stands for table of equipment think of this as the unit's overall kit does the game actually give a breakdown of equipment for each unit i remember you saying the manual is stupid long and that feels like more like you're reading a series of books that should never have been written the logistical part of the game honestly seems to be the most important part and this is both historically accurate and accurate in modern day terms look i'm a moron but i went to school for military history concentration in world war ii being in the army here for a little over a day and just generally love anything military related in gaming i hope you guys keep these episodes

coming and post more pictures of the board especially when you spot the main game the only acceptable time to wear a poncho is at a sporting event when they give you clear ones for the savages that are due alive sporting events in the rain henry so thank you very much henry We'll definitely have to bleep parts of his name there Because you've just read out his full name Oh sorry Oh dear Henry What's he like

Doxing you on the pod Sorry for the doxing That's wild Well we've also got his phone number Here on the email Should we read that out as well Andy So I mean you make some very good points there in terms of tow it does say somewhere in the rules what it stands for it definitely does because i've

seen it before maybe it is table of equipment that might be right so we will have to go back if it's just a military term not a gaming term that seems right yeah i i don't i don't see any reason why that wouldn't be correct so we will have to go back through and find that out mostly for my own peace of mind but if if you're right henry then uh top points yeah so thanks for that um some great analogies in there as well um the churn through your episodes like a fat kid at hershey park that's uh it's very very creative um writing there you've really painted a picture we also did a quick google of that game he mentioned and it looks insane yeah gary grisby's war in the east 2 yeah it it essentially looks like a computerized version of this yeah so uh

credit to you if you're tackling anything along these lines but i would say if it is on a computer it's cheating a little bit but we're also using spreadsheets come to think of it so i eat my own words so i would say yeah you probably got that nailed but yeah the logistics part of the game definitely important we've found that out well i've found that out the hard way because my men are going to start to die of thirst and starve from next turn so i'm really going to feel that pressure because i don't think i've managed that very well so i'm finding a war on two fronts one of them is um starvation and the other one is um andy committing war crimes so yeah it's a real it's a little rock and a hard place isn't it just isn't it just

but yeah the rules also do stress heavily that um the logistics is where the game is won or lost and in my case it's going to be where it's lost unfortunately but thank you very much for that henry i'll not um i'll not read out your full name again like andy did but um we we do thank you very much for that it's all right no one will hear it i'll let it i'll edit this part out no one will even know that you did it in the first place oh good it's gonna be short so now that we've got that out of the way and by the way we do still have a lot to get through so if you have sent something in and you're still waiting for us to address your um some pretty wonderful questions then don't you worry we will get around to it but as we've got a bit of gameplay

nowadays it might take us a little while to get through it but by all means keep sending them through and we will definitely get them at some point to hear from you guys we do great questions keeps us on track and just to i guess keep us on track in the historical sense is uh good old professor andy over here yeah now remember we do have an actual history teacher listening in so no pressure i am feeling it um good good this is what you get for killing my man oh so that's more and more pressure yeah body's pilot i'm gonna yeah i'm gonna get more and more petulant as we we go on right because not much has happened and you're pretty passionate yeah damn right i am i mean i came into the whole project pretty petulant so that's true this is

just gonna really this might be the first week we've both been in a positive mood yeah come to think of it it actually might be usually i'm either tired or ill or just really angry at the game and you're either pretty frustrated with me despondent or feeling a lot more optimistic than i am so yeah we've really hit our stride here today yeah tis a play in the actual game maybe that's all we needed maybe the real game are the friends that we made enemies along the way yeah but into the history but following up on the enigma one yes we did some enigma last time and here's uh there we go oh a flashback sound as always there it is so we're going to focus it a little bit on the specifically north africa with the signal intelligence stuff love to hear it yeah um so

got a little quote to kick us off because i didn't do one last week let's go because he had in the invaluable advantage of being able to read Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Enigma communications, General Bernard Montgomery knew how short the Germans were of men, ammunition, food, and above all, fuel. When he put

Rommel's picture up in his caravan, he wanted to be seen to be reading his opponent's mind. In fact, he was reading his mail. Oh, so Monty was tapping into a little bit of Rommel's little diary, was he? yeah and uh this um i found a quote by one uh member of bletchley park who described

the north camera north africa campaign a perfect if rather miniature example of a cryptographer's war so this is cryptography plays a huge part in this conflict oh wow which doesn't really seem to be reflected in a rule in the game but i suppose maybe it is abstracted to be put together by some of the other bits and pieces and as we'll go into uh both sides were reading each other's mail so uh oh brilliant it may come out in the wash a bit which is handy because um when i'm here and whenever you sort of go to the bathroom or anything um i read your mail oh i just have a little look around see if i can find any uh any envelopes sealed or not and i just have a little look through just see what's going on bills yeah turns out you got a lot of bills yeah so um yeah

nothing i can really do with that i was hoping for something exploitative but no yeah so before italy entered the war bletchley park was already reading a lot of their stuff including their high grade military ciphers for all three branches of the military uh as well as their diplomatic service so basically all um decrypts gave them a month's warning for italy entering the war okay on the 11th of june 1940 the italians changed their cipher on the 10th of june the day before the invasion which might have been a good security uh protocol except they arranged everything on the old one which had been broken that's a fantastic security flaw so in july uh bletchley park was already making progress in decrypting and reading these new ciphers and by august they

were just back basically decrypting almost all of it um and then because we used to have a sort of scattered bunch of like intelligence services and stuff throughout north africa uh but in november the commonwealth uh and the allies created the combined bureau middle east east and just put all of them together so they could coordinate better okay that seems like a good way to organize things so a big part of this is at this time um it becomes clear as bletchley park are reading more and more of the germans mail that they are receiving high value insider information from british headquarters in cairo someone there is giving extremely detailed reports to the germans okay that's not great so these messages are marked as having a good source is

what's mentioned all the time okay and in that a month earlier um this source whoever it was um who'd been giving all this information away um visited british units and described them as training inferior according to american ideas um which meant they were like this is an american who's leaking this okay because you wouldn't make that comparison if you yeah yeah yeah so one of two things is true here um there's an american traitor in cairo or someone's broken the americans codes okay bletchley park are getting increasingly angry at this because america are being very slow to acknowledge and deal with the issue until it comes to a head when the director of bletchley park overall gets involved and he's incredibly unhappy after it

turns out an message intercepted by the germans gave the details of nine simultaneous attacks on airfields by the sas they read that and knew the germans knew but couldn't get a message to the sas guys before they launched the raids and like a bunch of them are killed and captured oh right so at this point people are furious at the americans uh at bletchley park and the americans are like well no it's a spy it's not us there's like blame game going back and forward until eventually churchill directly gets in contact with roosevelt like it gets to the level where the two leaders have to have to have a chin wag about this yeah so what actually caused all this is a guy called well i'll roll it back a little bit to rome uh a few years earlier oh god

i thought we're going ancient rome for a moment there right back at the beginning but this is kind of crazy so what ends up happening is it turns out that the italians have broke the code except they didn't do it with like maths or anything from what i could tell they just made a spare key for the u.s embassy in rome and just went in at night cracked the safe and just took pictures of all the code sheets and stuff that's a very lo-fi solution and over the next week they were just going in every night photographing stuff, putting it back where it was locked up, left

and the Americans just had no clue Oh my god, that's so bad Surely someone should be guarding the embassy at night in a country you're going to be at war with soon Yeah, why did nobody look into that? That's so bad They only found out after the war

when Italian stuff was being decoded and declassified But I would be that would be one of the first things i would think of is where are the codes yes can anyone get to the codes oh that's that's pretty bad that's pretty embarrassing that's not a good look at all yeah so it turns out this highly rated source for the germans is a fellow called colonel bonner fellas uh who's cool name yeah the military attache in cairo for the us and he's been sending messages back using the military intelligence code which has been broken

so his office by he's growing his office here in cairo with like different intelligence people so he's hoovering up all this information and reporting it back to washington for them to like use he's like a like a hoover damn yes absolutely golden comedy sorry continue so he's getting all this information he's also i found a quote describing him as something like a fervent anglophobe he hated british people and thought they were worse and he's he's sending all these messages and the including like information on where tanks are what the battle plans are all of this stuff and it leads up to this point where the british are giving explicit orders to their men don't talk to this one guy

but it turns out he's just incredibly charismatic or something because people just keep telling him things which leads to this like incredibly long message that he sends about all the british failures related to the eighth army um their plans to retreat how they're going to mount their defense that his analysis is not optimistic and he goes if rommel intends to take the nile delta now is the opportune time taking the delta means capturing cairo alexandria and therefore all of egypt roosevelt read this message rommel read it likely before roosevelt did people at bletchley park read a decoded message from the good source the italian foreign minister mussolini's son also reads it and writes in his diary

cables from the american observer at cairo fellas we learn that the english have been beaten and if rommel keeps going they'll reach the suez canal oh my god everyone's reading this guy's which leads to them they eventually they go we need to switch the code up and then if the leaks continue it's deliberate not a broken code yeah they do this the week before at like a really crucial time in it because rommel's about to push into egypt waverly flies in takes command of the eighth army just after the codes switch and completely changes the strategy not because of that just because he thought the previous strategy was bad that's a very happy coincidence so ron was about to launch this attack on the presumption he's got all this

incredibly accurate information just by happenstance it's perfectly time to switch the codes like if they'd done it a week earlier he would have known so we just accidentally like depriving them of information at the perfect time that is pretty golden yeah and uh i guess next week i'll go into how that played out the intelligence aspects changing that push into egypt and why it played a huge role in it failing yeah well that'll be interesting to hear because that will be very directly tied to what we're actually going to be getting into in the game itself yeah so yeah i mean damn that's the idea of everybody just reading this one message all sides are completely aware of the contents of this but no one can really act on it accurately

because of that yeah it just it sort of dilutes the power of the message when every book is reading it also i just like the figure rommel likely read it before roosevelt like that's so bad oh god that's just yeah it's a pretty tragic tale of disenchantment a very very bad security etiquette and just an incredibly low low-tech solution to break this well the fact that they just had a spare key it's a spare key or they like fought like made a fake one but basically they just unlocked the door and walked in it's so bad that nobody was like are they maybe just coming in here yeah because we don't have guards apparently yeah i don't know what was going on there i guess i don't even know if you can call it espionage because i feel like espionage there

needs to be a little bit as an implication overcoming barriers yeah you're getting past something you're sneaking through yeah some sort of uh protection oh goodness me i mean yeah i mean you're not going to be able to read any of my supplies uh my supplies my strategies yeah about my supplies oh my god it's catching up with me god this this day is getting to me we've made a lot of progress but at what grisly cost i guess my equivalent of the enigma intercepts is you going oh shit when you go looking at the document and me going well things aren't going well i guess he doesn't have enough supplies that's it i am an enigma so that's that's what you have I've cracked your enigma code of loudly vocalizing things.

Yeah, it's difficult, and you may need a bit of social insight to be able to pull it off. But yeah, it will eventually yield results, I would imagine. But I think now, more than ever, what would be important to find is some common ground. And now for something nicer, a little oasis in the war. It's time for some common ground. now that we're at each other's throats now that you're killing my men actively now that you're

going to be capturing a lot of my men next week and i'll be retaliating with incredible force I think it's important to carry out what we decided to be a weekly ritual to make sure we don't hate each other all that much. And that is Common Ground. And it's your Common Ground this week. Yeah. What do you have in store for us? Well, I've been looking at some chess stuff this week.

Chess? Okay. I think it needs an update. You want to update chess? Yeah, they last patched it, like, 500 years ago. I don't think they patched anything. They gave it a new rule. They added some pieces. What new rule did they add?

I think they added, like, the bishop or something. There wasn't a bishop beforehand. I don't think so. No diagonal stuff beforehand. I think they've been adding pieces up until 500 years ago. Oh, wow. And changing things. Okay, so we're down a...

Yeah, okay, so we're down for an update. And, like, computers can now beat any human at chess. It's all got a bit boring. So let's update some chests. Let's add some new pieces, maybe some new squares to the board. Okay, okay. I guess you'd have to if you want to add a new piece. Yeah, maybe add a row.

Yeah, yeah, add another column, a row, so that, yeah, maybe just have an extra square, so it's an extra square by each dimension. Do you have a peace in mind by any chance? Not particularly. No. I just think it needs... Maybe something that can hop.

It could only go two or four, so it can't go right next to itself. Okay, like a sort of frog. Yeah. Yeah, not an actual frog, though. It would have to still tie into the theme of the current chess pieces. Yeah.

So you've got the... Yeah, the sort of... You've got castles. You've got castles, you've got knights. Bishop. You've got king, queen, pawns. So what's the new equivalent to a knight or a bishop in the modern world?

I would probably say... Oh, God. An equivalent to a knight. A hedge fund match. No, they're more like the... They're more like the rook. Okay. The strong tower that can move straight ahead

and smash through the competition. no we we need something that's a bit more noble a bit more humble and understated what could that be i think maybe a oh djs djs yeah there we go they just area of effect make pieces leave yeah so yeah there we go so we've got um hedge fund managers and djs another one one of your pawns is the union leader and when he moves all the pawns move with him that one is partly political interesting so we've got um we've got the union leader who now runs the pawns the head pawn we've got the uh like yeah there's now a pawn who's in charge we've got the the dj we've got the hedge fund manager yeah i think it's important as well for us to have um some sort of

uh tiktok star i think they can be actually no they can't play how about that okay how about that i'm i'm not going to allow them to play yeah i think i think tiktok is bad for the attention span i think it damages people's ability to concentrate and i say this as somebody who um ends up spending about an hour watching it before bed i know what it's done to me yep absolutely destroyed my attention span not tiktok because i never downloaded it but youtube shorts have done the same damage to me yeah all these sort of short form pieces of content i just oh it's it's like it's like crack yeah i'm just sat there in bed as i imagine people who enjoy a bit of crack do just sit quietly just sit quietly in bed enjoying crack for an hour

and then the next day I'm more tired. But now you can play chess 2.0. That's true. That's what I'll do. I'll download the new chess app I'll move my DJ two spaces. When the DJ captures a piece, the last person to capture a piece with the DJ

gets to pick the music that you're listening to. Oh, I like that so there has to be music playing from now on when you play chess. Yeah. Again, making it more vibrant. Oh, how about for the night we can have some sort

of telesales agent. Move the same way? Yeah. They're always making moves, these telesales agents. Always moving in strange ways that you can't quite determine. Can't see them coming. So that is sort of how the night

moves. Or the telesales agent, if you can't see them coming, there's a piece you don't put on the board until it captures something. DJs, they're the ones who move diagonal now. They replaced the bishop because, you know, they move diagonal. They moved it off. And the discotheque is the new cathedral.

That's true. I've been saying that since the 70s, and I wasn't even alive back then. And so we've got our hedge fund manager is the rook. We've got DJs as... They're just bishops, but also you get to control the music. That's true. That's true. Telesales agents are the knights.

Yep. We've got the Pawns. They are union or union leaders. They're unionized. The Pawns are unionized, which does leave us with the King and Queen. Now. Okay, I'm going to hear you out.

Chess, 500 years ago, wasn't the same equality. Now the King and Queen, they both move like Queens used to, but you need to checkmate both of them. Oh, I like that. I like that. So, yeah, both of them share equal responsibility.

and both of them have an equal level of power so it doesn't really work like an actual monarchy because you don't have a king and queen that are equal in their power well yeah but you know even so I would say we still need to

put names to them because it's a king and a queen these individuals aren't you can't just say DJ you can't just say hedge fund manager we need actual individuals oh like an actual person Like, yeah, actual people.

Well, who are like a power couple? Ooh, power couple. That's an interesting dynamic we're going to have to put together here. I'm going to say, ooh, no. I don't think I have it yet. Any thoughts? Jay-Z and Beyonce? No.

Okay. No. I'm trying to think of two famous people who are married. No, they've already had that time in the limelight. We need somebody a bit more understated, a bit more subtle, humble, and brave. And I don't think Jay-Z and Beyoncé are subtle. No, or humble.

I can't speak to them being humble, but it really doesn't seem like they're humble. No. I don't know that what they're doing is brave either. Being incredibly rich. Doesn't seem very brave. If I'm being really poor, I'd be brave. Maybe that's what we do then.

We pick some poor people. John Doe and Jane Doe Yeah That's who's king and queen Mr and Mrs Nobody How about that? The little people Yeah There we go

The little people are going to be king and queen I've also just realised if they both move like queens and you have to check both of them it's basically impossible Yeah, you've broken chess You know what, it turns out chess was fine the whole time No, I'm actually going to try and play this version we've made

all right so i guess that's what we'll be doing um after we wrap up this whole game this project we'll be playing chess 2.0 chess 2.0 and we'll also be playing that shortened version of the campaign for north africa oh what a what a bunch of crap we've rambled today andy yeah history was good though i like the history yeah i like hearing about enigma I think that's some good stuff, we talked about the actual progress we made in the game that's a big one, that was good too

I think all in all, we've done a hell of a job, and I think we've earned some rest, with some shut-eye it is bank holiday after all can we do a conclusion though, I think it's time we got some shut-eye I need to go see if John Cena won

oh of course, Wrestlemania maybe I'm going to look it up now actually I'm not going to spoil it for you but I am going to quickly check everybody if you're listening now don't email spoilers for Wrestlemania no spoilers

oh that's interesting we've just had an email come through it's written entirely in Morse code well that's something for everyone to look forward to next week we'll read that one out next week this could be really bad oh I just

I see yeah we're going to need to decode well looks like we've got our own enigma to decode well ladies and gentlemen and whoever just sent us the morse code message I hope you get some good rest and oh look it's the result of

Wrestlemania it looks like John Cena was involved in it no and on that big old cliffhanger I guess we'll call it good night bid you adieu and stay subtle humble and brave yeah nighty night thanks for listening bye