War With A Mate - Episode 22: All Men Are On Islands

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Anyone miss the good old days? The days before the game could be played? When it was just playing with magnets? The guys continue through the movement stage, with something of a two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach after the first recorded whoopsie! Professor Andy covers the conclusion of the Enigma history segment and James threatens to expedite global warming. Do NOT trust Thomas the Tank with your economic stability.

did it yeah check out these grippers this is where i get my feet out so hello and welcome to war with a mate with me james me andy getting right into it getting right into it going real deep climbing in there oh oh oh i'm trying to fit in oh oh it's so so so little space in here oh but i'm in how about you are you in i'm watching you struggle i'm gonna stay outside yeah probably for the best there's only room in here for one of us and that's the victor oh no we better swap oh no stop trying to climb in here with me there's no room there's only room for me we're not podcasting from burrows yeah i thought it was a bit of an interesting choice that you decided to relocate everything um every earthly

possession you have into this little burrow today well i've been in favor of getting below ground you know so lead by example that's true that's true you did mention not too long ago you want to be below the surface you want to be a subterranean boy that's a song isn't it I don't know. I feel like you're referencing something. I am. I'm doing that thing I do, but you don't know the song originally, so it doesn't really work. So, Andy, the game. How'd it go today? Pretty good. Start off with some deeply embarrassing news. Yeah, we had a real whoopsie, didn't we, on someone's side?

Or was it James's side? I mean, I think we're both responsible for keeping each other honest. yeah for keeping you honest yeah but for stopping you from making such a grand old mistake so we had to do a little bit of time travel today because as it would happen you all may remember last week that i was talking about a certain war crime that andy had committed where he walked onto my airfield and he executed a group of engineers well it turns out that was just flight of fancy because andy couldn't have even moved those men there they didn't belong anywhere near that part of the game. I thought they were on

hex C 4 1 1 3. They're on hex C 4 1 3 1. I've basically dyslexia'd the last two numbers, which means they went from firmly behind my lines to

firmly behind yours. So at the start of the session, we corrected that and the SGUs are live. You got the hex numbers wrong. They couldn't have been anywhere near there. I know he swapped those numbers jimmy he swapped them that is a bit of a chicanery reference for anyone who gets it one after magna carta anyway so yeah we we did a little bit of time travel to undo that embarrassing step back and then some genuine stuff yeah so after i put my men back i've got

my sgs use back and it didn't really impact anything because they didn't have any role they could have fulfilled in between nothing material changed and i think as long as nothing material is changed in future with any of those mishaps during this practice run we'll we'll um sort of do what we can to remedy that and undo it but when it comes to the actual game we'll have to just stick with our guns so yeah this is a perfect opportunity to to figure out stuff like that and stay extra vigilant but yeah after that you continued more movement because you've actually wrapped up part one of your movement yes yeah moved basically the front line forward and some guys got on the train from cairo to matissa maru so use the train as well yeah you got on the uh

got on the old choo-choo the old thomas and friends yep the old gordon fired our way across egypt james was the most vain train in that thomas the tank i have quite a funny thomas the tank engine story actually okay we'll get into that in a little bit okay that sounds very actually you know i need to know now okay uh i think it was when i was like four or five my mum came into me watching thomas the tank engine with my dad and there's an episode where they go on strike so thomas and his friends deliver all of the stuff and my mum walked into my dad going now what thomas is doing what we call someone like that as a scab and then she was just this is too early he was trying to teach you about the ethics of unions through the medium of thomas the tank

and how thomas the tank engine is a bad guy because he's the scar i mean yeah thomas the tank guy he would bend over backwards to please the topham hat so yeah he's the worst person to have at the picket line yeah wouldn't be picket line for train would it they'd need something else just pick at the station yeah i suppose so there's little white picket fences at the station i used to have one of those so some guys got on the train yeah sorry so they got on a train not thomas the tank it wasn't any other scab train either so they got on the train they traveled to mercy mature i believe it was yeah and then you had to figure out which guys had breakdown points to take over and every one

of your guys that moved had either trucks or tanks yes so none of the trucks broke down thankfully it seems like you really have to be hammering the trucks for them to break down movement wise did lose, the 7th Farmer Division lost two two tow point of Mark 4 light tanks I think it was, and a tow point of A10

tanks, so there's three tow points of tanks sort of just out there in the desert for someone to come and repair Ooh, I wonder who might do that Well actually right now, I don't know if you read the repair rules none of us can do that because it's in rain Well yeah

Can't do anything when it's raining that's the rules those are the stupid bloody rules can't expect people to be repairing things in a storm yeah yeah I mean tell that to the British Rail Services in Britain

I'm on the train tomorrow really hope that it doesn't get slightly wet otherwise my train will be cancelled yeah you managed to assess the breakdown and if a truck has 20 or fewer breakdown points accrued then they they don't break down yeah because there's a there's a table and trucks move two

to the left which is the good direction um for the person who's rolling so unless they've got more than 20 break points they shift left and there's a hundred percent chance of them having no breakdowns so the trucks are all fine for the most part yeah yeah so when it comes to the trucks they are pretty much completely fine unless you drive them through the worst terrains the worst range for breakdown is the desert if you're in the desert you accrue 24 breakdown points for every hex that you move through which just to give you a sense of it the table maxes out at 71 plus yes so if you move three squares uh three hexes sorry you're pretty much done yeah in terms of the capacity for damage you've done to a vehicle when it comes to other stuff a clear hex for example

your sort of bog standard hex is four breakdown points that are accrued that is reduced by half if you have a track going over it so yeah the types of terrain vary massively in the kind of breakdown points you accrue but you were lucky in that only a little bit of your tankage was broke down yeah but i will be getting those they will be mine i'll be taking those speaking of taking i took some prisoners you did you did uh beer schaffersen i believe it is which is described in the book at one point as an oasis but not it's not registered as an oasis in the technical sense for the game so the town in real life's probably an oasis but it's not an oasis enough to be an oasis tile or something it must be more of a village than it is an oasis yeah so it means

that there's not unlimited stores which is annoying because it means those men would have eaten because the chauffeurs and garrison that have just been captured have a very unfortunate position at the start of the game because they are just past the egypt libya border on the egypt side which means that i can't start by putting anything over there with them i can't give them any trucks with resources i can't even put any supply dumps down there so it means they start off with absolutely nothing that includes ammunition so when andy's men came and knocking and quite a few of them came and i didn't realize that there was like one guy with no ammo in his gun so i committed a tank division two infantry divisions and a horse artillery division the only way that i could have

got those guys to be safe would be if i went first in initiative and basically retreated and yeah move them away or move some forces in to reinforce them yeah so by me having you go first i've actually damned those men yes which means when it comes to the actual game i might have to try and find a way to go first i mean you don't have to find a way i think you just go first i don't know if i do in the full game you might not you might have wasted your one chance yeah in the small scenario it might just be down to the dice yeah so that means since those men had no ammunition as soon as the enemies engage them in close combat they surrender automatically which means all of their two points that are infantry are converted to prisoner points which was a brand new concept

we haven't looked at the prisoner rules before well we've read all of the rules but we haven't played them out yeah yeah we haven't even done like a test run of the prisoner rules until today when it happened for real and it was fairly straightforward i think yeah it wasn't bad at all i think bootkeeping wise it might get a bit annoying uh like everything in the game but what you're actually tracking is pretty simple yeah it's very straightforward compared to what i expected it's just one tool point of infantry converts to one prisoner point you can then have a guard point assigned you just take one tool point from yourself an infantry unit and then pop it there and you need to feed them every op stage you need to give them some food

if every five prisoners they get one store point but they do have a magical ability to conjure up food from the distance yes of the deserts of egypt because they don't need to be near it if there's no food nearby they just consume food from the nearest source you can't war crime accidentally or deliberately with them you can't no the game doesn't allow you to war crime so when it comes to the ways they can die if the prisoners at any point don't have a guard unit in the same hex as them they escape and when they escape they can go on the run if they get close to a friendly unit they are rescued and will come back in a month's time in game time and if they are out there on their lonesome every turn every op stage rather that they don't have

water they lose 10 percent of their strength and start to slowly die so the game does specify what you can't do is take a bunch of prisoners out into the desert and then abandon them with the guard so that they just die of thirst it doesn't let you do that no death marches no death marches so it's it's good that they thought of that that richard berg decided to get rid of that bit of abject cruelty from his game however there's still a lot of abject cruelty that we seem to be at the receiving end of yeah it's inflicted on the players not their characters i guess that's right but thankfully no war crimes have befallen us in real life that's pretty good i mean not yet but yeah there's always time don't threaten me with a good time so that was most of it and then

we resolved that and that was sort of it for today yeah we were about to start another big fight but we realized that because of the time chances are we would be eating into a lot of the evening probably if we then started to play the next fight because there's actual combat going to go on it's not just people surrendering it's not people getting on a train and it's not as turning back time to undo a war crime it's just the first real fight the first real one yeah that's going to be a big one so tune in next week that's that's going to be one to put in the calendar tell your friends about keep them informed keep them up to date you know that weird podcast i listen to about board game well they say it's about a board game but usually they go off on tangents about thomas the

tank being a scab um well they're gonna have their first big fight yeah no one will care yeah don't tell your friends that they're gonna they're gonna think you're a freak tell them about the pod uh yeah tell them about it and if they listen to it that's great and then they're also part of this sort of cluster of strange behavior and mannerisms but um yeah i wouldn't try and persuade anyone to listen that's that's far too far do you try and persuade anyone to listen andy do you go out there in the streets and um and try and corral anyone into being a listener no i leave that for you for me yeah yeah i go out with flyers put them on on lampposts and ask people to to listen it's got a picture of your face on it oh nice it's probably why no one's listening oh i don't mean that man

you got a lovely face it's got a lovely face if i put your face on the thing is we'd have too many listeners we simply we simply can't put up with the bandwidth we'd have far too many we have to start dropping some yeah gotta be sustainable yeah yeah it's a last in first out policy with listeners as well so when we get a capacity you know all of you ogs you'll you'll be sticking around don't you worry that's that's the rules for listener capacity i'm not really sure how that's measured oh dear should we get some mail done yeah let's get some mail done let's get some mail done so who are we hearing from today who we got first off we got connor this is the one that came in morse code at the end of last episode it is yes yes so the whole thing is morse code

including the subject there is nothing in it that is english language it's all just dots and dashes so we fired that off for the folks at bletchley park and they've decoded it for us we did yeah we fired it off and then everyone read the mail yeah over in uh america and uh rommel had a read everybody got to have a little read of this and we determined what it says yeah so hello andy and james i'm a university student from sunny san diego california and i'm an avid listener to your podcast i enjoy listening to your british humor and your ability to make one of the driest board games ever made and one of the highlights of my week i'm glad you two have decided to document this enormous project to the world my question is this in episode 20 you had joked that

you would sell hypothetical merch in particular a poncho with a life-size map of the game while this is hilarious it made me wonder would you ever consider selling normal merch i would immensely enjoy a coffee cup or a sweatshirt with the war of a mate logo on it thank you for your misery uh for my entertainment connor so yeah thanks for that connor um i'm not against merch we'd have we'd have to figure out how to do it but yeah um i've got no idea where we would start with that but like every other aspect of this we are starting from scratch so i would be more than happy to look into that as a an interesting endeavor i would right yeah i think we'd have to gauge if anyone would be interested in that i don't imagine it's the kind of thing we would do

en masse no but if people are interested in it i guess communicate that with us we have many channels we have email which some of you already know is info at war with a mate.co.uk or instagram which is just war with a mate um you can go on our website use a web form there if you want to go particularly flash but yeah if that is something anyone is interested in i guess let us know what those numbers are and we can see what that would look like um i think the poncho thing's a great idea i think that would that would sell like hot cakes just people in the street i mean i do want that punch should we just get one for ourselves but uh yeah mugs seem reasonable yeah so i guess if you're interested in something like that let us know and let us know what kind of item

and we'll see what comes from that that'll be interesting yeah but uh yeah thank you very much for the the male connor it seems to be the case that there's a lot of a lot of you folk over in the states that have taken a liking to this um yeah i'm not sure that for anyone in the uk our humor is anything exceptional it's probably subpar so it's uh it's nice that it's been appreciated it's a global platform yeah thank god other people other people listen who are a little bit unfamiliar with with our our tones but yeah that was a very uh very nice yeah i'm just thinking of the fucking poncho oh it would be amazing i think um yeah i would actually quite like that poncho but i want i want the matching cowboy hat well yeah you full costume oh the cowboy hat as

well you know the sort of um the tassels that fit that fasten around the neck oh yeah to keep it in place i want to i want to have it so you pull down on the tassel and it plays the opening jingle for the podcast you know the sort of western yeah jingle so you want the hat to be a speaker yes okay that's gonna that's gonna be difficult it's gonna skyrocket the price isn't it production costs are gonna be through the fucking roof i think it'll be fun though well while we uh think about that a little bit more i guess we'll move on to the next one the next one that we have is a it's a message on instagram it's from it's from dev it's from a friend dev dev is a friend of the podcast and she has decided to send in a message unprompted how good of her and i had to

look through and they're actual questions they aren't just funny ways to poke fun but uh but actual questions so dev you've sent over three the first one is if you could change only one aspect of the campaign for north africa to make it more user-friendly or modern what would it be it's a very good one what would you say andy oh um you see i'm trying to think of a change that won't completely destroy what it is yeah because you could make this quite a streamlined and fun game, but you'd be basically removing all the logistics and stuff.

Do you have one, I think? I think being able to reliably locate terms in the book would be ideal, like a search function. That would be perfect, because right now the amount of times that we think do we understand this rule

correctly, and then instead of being able to just sort of control F, it's a case of having to scroll through either 200 pages of pdf or six try and find it in the actual pages of real real book yeah so that i would say for me is the biggest one because not being able to quickly reference those points it is something you're working on yeah trying to make that a reality so i guess that could quickly become a real thing for me and i think that is actually my number one draw at the moment i think yes similar i also i'd love someone to have gone through with the addenda and everything

and removed any of the misleading yes basically the feature i want from this game is for it to be correct so someone to someone to have edited it properly like 50 years ago yeah that would have been great that would make the game a lot easier to play maybe one complete play test by the designers yes yeah i was going into it knowing if the game works or not would be very different maybe it would take some of the fun away who knows but i think yeah being able to i guess both of our points rely on the rules being correct and serviceable so yeah if the game had a way to communicate those rules very clearly and reliably that would be perfect because i don't think i think a lot of the like effort and the slowness comes from all the bookkeeping and stuff

the rules that are right are easy to follow yes yes it's the problem of like inconsistency or it seems like there's stuff that might have been one day intended to be like a whole thing and they like cut it for time but not all of it from the rules yeah yeah i think a lot of it because we i mean we had this issue last week when we were looking at the tactical shipping segment that doesn't exist yeah it looks like at some point there was a big overhaul of some of the logistic rules yeah so there's probably going to be more artifacts of that when we go through well i wonder if the camel stuff is one of that because the only mention of camels is that one little rule sub bit but the thing is that feels tongue-in-cheek the camel thing feels like a joke

it feels like a point of remark it feels like a joke but i feel like it feels like a joke because the rest of it's amazing oh god i do wonder if there was a different logistical system well we are still finding these little nuggets of things that seem to exist but don't so maybe there is actually a camel thing and we haven't missed something yeah the fact that we can't control f camel you know it means that we might still you know it might still be out there who knows but i suppose maybe you'll have that fixed sometime soon that would be god that would be good you also ask dev what's your ideal setup for a game session of the campaign for north africa is there a particular snack drink not you well that's not a drink anyway that is a meal

it's a nutritionally complete meal or environment that helps set the right mood or just help you get through the admin well that's an interesting one i suppose first and foremost the ideal setup is andy's living room that is i don't think this is an ideal set well at the moment it is because where the game is to be fair we don't really do a whole lot of snacking or reading ironically or i guess quite unironically um just earnestly i do tend to have a heel quite often when we play this because i'll usually be coming from work or elsewhere and i'll be fairly hungry it's a very convenient food to have so I will actually bring a heel

down that and then I'm good to go for a few hours. Other than that, we tend to just I don't know, we don't really graze. No. We'll crack some beers sometimes for the recording. Yeah, towards the end of the play we'll have a

brewski or two but during play, well one, we need a very clear sober mind to play this game so usually it's just soft drinks or Heineken Zero we often go for a nice hiney zero i've uh i've been on the sparkling water today which i know will malign maybe a good portion of our audience because whenever i talk about sparkling water people just go apeshit they absolutely hate people do find it personally offensive they really do and

i don't know why it's just a nice even more refreshing alternative to normal base person water bass person yeah you know all those normies all those boring people fancy bubble hammers yeah so that's uh yeah i i would say there's no specific one or or mood sometimes what we do do though is we pop on some music in the background and it does tend to default to quite uh upbeat rock or a little bit of girly pop i think it just it's usually my upbeat mix on spotify maybe I should publish that as the official soundtrack to the campaign for North Africa my daily upbeat mix

I would like just a dining room table that's big enough to have the full map on that would be ideal it's also not against one wall so you can walk around you want a really big table really big room

basically yes I want a much bigger home which has a nice side effect of making the game easier yeah i think that's kind of cheating the game i think that's um that's not really the the nature of the wish but yeah i guess that's the answer to that one it varies but andy wants a bigger house and finally if the campaign for north africa had a video game version what features do you think would be necessary to capture the essence of the tabletop or picture frame top experience well we actually touched on this a little bit last week with um oh god what

was like that game um yes yes that that looked pretty pretty similar in its complexity i think you would need to have something that requires a lot of manual input you essentially would need a video game that removes a lot of the automation which is difficult for a video game yeah but you would need to yeah you'd need to start having ways that you have to service the game manually rather than calculating stuff automatically because i think if you streamlined everything it would actually be a very there wouldn't be that much to it if it was calculating everything automatically i think it would actually be a very a very bland and boring game yeah because while it does have a lot of complexity it's complexity for a board game it's the kind of

thing that a video game runs in the background for hundreds if not thousands of other games that are similar but it just boils it down to the surface value you get the values and the results and that's what you play with so it ends up feeling a lot more of a shallow experience i would say and weird that i'm talking about this as if the campaign for north africa is the better experience but it you what you see with a video game is very front end this is all of the processing behind it yeah so i don't know that a video game could ever do it without it just becoming a video game that when you open it up it's just spreadsheets yeah i mean or it's simplified to the point it's not an interesting strategy game yes if it's simplified and calculates everything for

you it's not this game so i really don't think it would translate to that medium of gameplay yeah i don't actually think it could be done where it doesn't take off what it is or you you'd keep the complexity by ramping everything up if it was going to auto-calculate that's true, maybe you added a ton more features instead of supplies you are tracking food uniforms

yeah, you could get a lot more granular rivets and stuff I feel like if you are going to automate it to capture the same feeling you need you'd have an even higher level of breaking things down like granularity yeah no maybe you're right i think that could be the way to go yeah yeah i

think that's probably the way that you capture that difficulty and that complexity by just making it it feels like drowning in just detail and i think you'd have to do that again you'd have to give them that even with the automation so yeah i guess that's that's probably how we would do it then you just ramp it up and make it just as difficult to play that way as well so yeah thanks for the thanks for the messages dev and uh we have one more believe we've got one more at the moment that we'll go through yeah uh from oki uh howdy i don't know if this is the right email if it is sweet you have nailed it uh i'm only on episode 15 so sorry if it doesn't help out have you all considered putting the map on the wall or like a whiteboard with wheels

so you don't have to sit on the floor and you all are a blast to listen to at work and can we get a segment with a bit more mind games like discussing important objectives but we can lie so first off great minds think alike when it comes to organising the game we have ended up putting it on

well yeah in the picture frames as for the segment with a bit more mind games i think that's probably something we should do it's just finding a way to do it where we're not giving each other too much information and we're not lying so much that it's just not pointless information yeah what we were talking earlier about maybe trying to um work in a different segment and also to break down a bit more of the game in more detail through maybe some visual aids some other bits and pieces ultimately what will be happening once we've finished this play scenario the test run is we'll have an idea as to what the game looks like each

week and how it is that we can communicate that which also means the the planning the strategy all of that we'll have an idea as to how it's it's going to look you're essentially listening to one very very long pilot episode of the podcast which is going to run yeah for the whole of this italian offensive so once that's done we'll have an idea as to what actual segments would look like but i wager the first i mean god 60 70 episodes of this could well just be us figuring out how the rest of the podcast looks yeah so we we definitely agree that some of the objective based stuff would be a fun topic to cover and getting to lie to andy on the pod would be fantastic i love lying to you man it's great i could i see your eyes light up yeah so much there

gives it away every time that's a good point actually yeah i do i do get giddy with hope so yes we agree it is an a fun aspect we will be working in more lies as we go but um yeah aside from that when it comes to putting the map on the wall or a whiteboard with wheels whiteboard with wheels it definitely adds more fun to the game but it would definitely be knocked over at some point yeah and when it comes to going on the wall i don't really think there's anything wrong inherently with it but it becomes too much of a sort of standing desk situation we wouldn't be able to ever sit down and operate any of the board also to attach them to the wall like firmly enough that i want to uh probably can't do that in a rental that's true yeah you don't

want to don't want to because you could just bang some nails in but i wouldn't want you to wake up in the middle of the night i wouldn't yeah i want to hear that crash because i i feel like i would hear that crash i don't live anywhere near you but i feel like it would wake me from some horror yeah it would have some um some sort of psychic bond well you've been having nightmares about the game haven't you i did have a nightmare about the game the other week yeah i had a i had this weird fever dream that um it was when i was not feeling very well i had this horrible fever dream that i was in somewhere in public i can't remember where but um yeah the game got wet and it was horrible

I'm not going to really try to describe my dream most because one of the things I hate more than anything else is people talking about their dreams I think it's the most boring stupid thing

you can talk about but it is a good indicator of how deeply it's wormed its way into your psyche yeah yeah it's just

yeah talking about your dreams is pointless anything can happen it doesn't mean anything well that was some great mail and we do still have

quite a bit more in there we are chipping through it bit by bit I promise if you've sent something we will get to it we've just got to just got to get there and if you've got any questions suggestions comments please fire them over yes once again info at war with a mate.co.uk and war with a mate is the instagram handle as well so that breaks down our correspondence and we've covered some of the

gameplay that we've had today in its i suppose surface level glory but you have something else to break down in a little bit more detail some more enigma i believe yeah this is the last bit so uh yeah we've looked at the enigma machines and how they were cracked and a bit of north africa and we found out about a kid or a fella and his widely read secret reports yes his open letter to the world yeah that everyone in the world seemed to be reading which we've now broadcast on this podcast years and years later yeah so um now you know how i said the um they had to change the codes last time yes there was this back and forth about it yes gonna focus on that because this is a kind of crazy what if piece of coincidence okay i'd like to so rommel um arrives

in egypt and he's uh sorry libya and he's helped greatly by his um the good source as they call it yes um he's pushing his original orders are stop on the egyptian border okay and then we'll consolidate well not we'll then the axes we're planning to consolidate take malta wrap up the mediterranean and then start going east again all right okay okay but um rommel's got all this information about how badly uh the like morale and training and disposition of all the british and commonwealth troops are which plays into the game actually yes uh so he's arrives on the border uh just to put it in perspective he has 44 tanks left okay uh it's 11 to 8 toe points if we're converting his men like infantry are all

exhausted and he's already like close to the like end of his supply lines right okay but he believes based on accurate intelligence from what he has so far they can push in and take egypt so because in this situation he's officially under italian command so because he's officially under italian command he asks mussolini if he can evade Egypt and because Italy's unofficially under German command Mussolini asks Hitler if Rommel can

invade Egypt and Hitler says yeah and he has this moment where he's like you do that sweep through we're going to sweep through on the eastern front and we'll sort of like meet up in the middle east these two armies that's ambitious

I'm delusional so he does eventually get permission and on the 23rd of June 1942 he crosses the border of Egypt and starts heading towards Cairo and Alexandria

yeah, yeah, I can see that on our board so next, we're going to go back a week to the 17th of June and this is in Bletchley Park after, you remember the kick off about the codes

yes yes okay so on the 17th of june the order's finally given for fellas codes to be changed about time however uh because the code he was using was cracked they were going to send it through a commercial uh company called the radio corporation of america okay not really an exact reason it just seems like a paperwork fuck up the message doesn't go out until a week later Right So Rommel goes into Egypt On the 23rd of June The message for the code

To be changed Is sent on the 25th of June And that's when the last Readable code for them is sent Just as Rommel's Driving into Egypt Okay, that's weird timing They, the

Commonwealth could not have planned this better If they tried So like this is an example of what's happening on the 23rd the Italians intercept a message saying a squadron of tanks from America is going to be deployed

they don't read the cancellation message on the 25th so they think there's like tanks coming they don't see the order to like cancel it secondly and significantly more importantly on the 25th

Auchinleck who's in charge of the british forces at the time uh flies to mercer matroof and takes direct command of the eighth army and he takes most of his army a hundred miles uh back east um to el alamein leaving a small like rear guard at matroof um this is all unknown to rommel who's expecting resistance at Mersa Mertruf and then basically that's it so he runs into a surprise defence that he

doesn't know about because of the timing so the Germans come in, they take Mersa Mertruf fairly easily and at this point the Allies are intercepting German messages for instance, the chief medical officer is sending messages to the

troops to not drink unboiled water when they get to alexandria and cairo and to avoid buying ice cream from street vendors they're like what a fucking stupid message to get but they're like so certain we've got egypt they're now doing the like when we're there this is the like process yeah it's like it's tourist information it's it's travel advice so they know there's some forces at ll amain but expect to just be mopping them up oh dear uh so more rommel pushing his army to its absolute limit his plan basically is my supply lines are fucked but if i take alexandria and cairo i can resupply there yeah yeah that'll be my plan in a few months time

so uh but he's lost his uh insight meanwhile orcan like has all of rommel's battle plans and stuff yeah so he mounts a surprise offense which turns rommel's certain conquest of egypt into the first battle of el alamein right arguably the turning point where what comes after it is defined here and a win in north africa for the commonwealth yeah yeah it's from this moment uh so it's one of those like cool hinge moments in history where if the message had gone when it should have a week earlier, Rommel would have known about the defence that was waiting there. Well, he would have known the code

was changes, he would have lost his source and might not have gone in if it had been a week later he would have known all of the defences because it would have still been on the old code so it's like this basically the world's drastically

different to the point like the Nazis might have won in North Africa and God knows how that ripples out through the rest of the... Yeah, that theater would have changed completely if that push all across had won and then they linked up

and the Eastern Front then changes drastically all because of the timing of that code. That is pretty... That's very Butterfly effect-y. So yeah, maybe some time traveler went back and managed to alter that one to get it right in the perfect spot because that does seem very convenient.

Moved a bit of paperwork to the bottom of the thing. um so i'm not going to go too much into that but i just thought that was a really cool example of like the power and effect of that information like i'm one side having it and one not yeah yeah i i would i would say that's a i mean the enigma from the start to finish has been a very fascinating topic to see how all of these small cogs in a machine which is essentially just correspondence played such a massive role in information exchanging and the tactical planning and the fact that it has such an impact goes to show how important it will be for us to actually have the right information to hand yeah and we aren't even i was going to say we aren't even

having it hidden from us we kind of are because i feel like the rules sometimes are cracking fucking enigma like some of the stuff in there it has i think fewer combinations of wrong information uh so a couple of last bits uh when the allies conquered rome uh mi6 agents arrived soon afterwards and uh started questioning members of the italian uh counterintelligence unit which was known as the removal section which i just think is a cool name for a spy agency i like that a lot um and in the process of them like interrogating all these people that's when they find out about the robbery into the embassy with the key ah right so that's when it came out yeah so that's when they found out about it a little bit more about that as well uh one of the troops

entered um with a key he also had a key to the safe he took all the documents and went to a nearby photography shop to have them all pictured and then put them back exactly where they were i mean it's smart and uh just a bit for enigma after the war uh because it wasn't revealed until sort of the 70s the effect enigma had on the war and bletchley park and all this uh sort of started to come out to light um there's a couple of theories for why the machines uh for why it was kept secret for so long and one of them i just thought was uh very evil kind of so after the war britain was selling enigma machines to third world countries to use for their cryptography and telling them it was unbreakable oh god that's not okay so that's part of the reason they didn't

release it till the 70s is because they were actively selling them so that they could then crack them and intercept information what a bunch of bastards this is why we have such a bad rap in history because that's not okay buy this perfect cryptography

machine it's going to save you all sorts of hassle when it comes to espionage we do have the keys however so that's just a nice little bad bit by the commonwealth as well um and that's sort of it for enigma there's a lot more to it but we might come back to it later but yeah that's sort of it for now well i'm very happy that you you chose enigma

for your topic because that was uh it was very insightful got to find out a lot i didn't know about it um i guess i could have probably just watched the imitation game again yeah i probably would have just given me all the information maybe we'll watch that review it at some point no you gave a lot more than the imitation game that's that's just got benedict cumberbatch and And, well, yeah, I feel like maybe we should have got him in for that bit as well. You could have got him to do some of the bits with you. That would have been good. That would have been pretty good.

Just hand him the script and he can read it for me. Well, Idris Elba didn't show up, so, you know, I don't think we've got much chance of Benedict Cumberbatch either. Never try to meet your heroes. Are they your heroes? No. Neither of them? No.

Who would you say is more of your hero? I don't know. Maybe Idris Elba. you think he does other stuff other stuff other than like acting does he oh yeah that's of course yeah he markets huel he markets huel he markets gold does he think he kickboxes he's big in huel is he yeah sorry i'm i meant i meant to say gold i just said huel automatic because to me huel is solid gold. Or it's liquid gold. Yeah, I think he did a weird documentary about

gold for a gold company. There's gold companies? Yeah. I thought it was just gold. I thought gold was just the brand. The brand and the product. That's yellow metal. You're not allowed to

call it gold. It's not from the gold region of metal. So, you got some common ground for us? And now for something nicer, a little oasis in the war. It's time for some Common Ground. I'm trying the intro for Common Ground.

I'm recording. Maybe. Yeah. I do, I do have some. So for those who aren't familiar, and you should be by now, come on, guys, we're like 22 episodes in. This is crazy. when it comes to uh this podcast since we're at each other's uh you know throats throughout this

going against each other killing each other's men sometimes capturing their men sometimes killing them and then having to turn back time because we didn't actually kill them yeah that's right you look down at the flow in shame so we we figured since we are doing that we need to still stay friends we need to each week try and find a common ground and we do so by suggesting a topic we alternate each week and we have to find a common ground something to agree on with that topic and it's my turn this week

I think we need more islands Okay Britain does? Everywhere, globally We need to slice up all of the countries into small islands Okay

Why? pros more beaches more boating we get to build bridges now that one is not just literal but also metaphorical for building relationships with other areas i feel like it becomes harder to have all of these borders that divide us when everyone's on a fucking island like small islands as well okay i'm talking like uh or like a few square miles so micro nations yes you want to cut the countries up into micro-nations. Yes, yes. Okay. They can still keep whatever collective identity they want.

It could be an archipelago. They're just spread across... Lots of islands. Lots of beaches. Everyone is now within walking distance of a beach. How cool is that? I mean... It's not that cool. Well, I was thinking about it, because I'm going away tomorrow. I'm going away

for a trip along the coast. I'm going to be away for a few days. I'm going to spend a lot of time along the coast, a lot of walking up and down by the coast and i think that's a really nice thing but so you want to get rid of it but i know i think i've taken that for granted because i was thinking not everyone lives near the coast we are quite coastal okay so let's let's give that to the people i think everyone would have a very different perspective if everybody lived by the coast i mean do you not not really Do you not think the coast has shaped your view of the world?

Not really. Right then. You seem to have a lot invested in the coast. Yeah, I think it's really cool. But you're getting rid of everything else for this. You're getting rid of mountains, forests. No, I'm not getting rid of mountains. I never said that.

You said you're cutting all the land into beaches. Into the little islands, I said. Into the little islands, sorry. Yes, yes. So some of the little islands are going to be mountains. We can keep some of the big stuff. Oh, so, oh, we're just adding some islands. No, no, no.

We are cutting most of the world up into islands. Okay, so we're getting rid of countries. Yes. We're doing a reverse Pangea. Yes, yes, that's it, yes. Think about what Pangea did back in the day. We're going to take that inspiration and we're going to do that harder and faster.

And man-made. And man-made. Okay. It's like fracking, but it's nice. We're going to split up the world into all these tiny little islands. We'll keep the big stuff like mountains. We'll keep them on a big piece of land

so you can go and visit the mountains. Okay. You can go to Mini Pangea to visit the mountains. You can go see the mountains. You can go see the Himalayas. They're all there. You can go see the Rockies. They're still around.

Everest has its own little bit. But everywhere else, everywhere that doesn't have a massive landmark. Grand Canyon. you can keep that keep the grand canyon okay we'll even keep a we'll keep a bit of the sahara desert and we'll keep a bit of the amazon that's good of you so we'll keep those we'll keep a little bit of the lungs of the world yes well they'll still exist on the island we'll just be cutting up the rainforest okay into thousands of small islands okay but then we'll keep like one big

portion of it so that if someone wants to go to the big rainforest, they can go off and do that. Okay, so there'll be like, rainforest, desert, mountain, and then everything else is like, specifically, our rainforest, our desert, our mountain. Yeah, we'll keep one of each. Okay, and then the rest is islands.

Everything else is islands. Okay. Because you like walking along the coast. No, when I was thinking about the fact I'll be walking along the coast, I thought, that's nice. So you want to destroy that? No, so I thought, well, now everyone can do it. In small circles. Yeah. Yeah, or they can pop over to the next island over.

Are these like islands about the size of like Sealand? No, no, they'd be bigger than Sealand. And Sealand is completely manufactured because it's an old AA battery, I believe. Yeah. No, this is like, you know, actual beaches. That will be the part we have to figure out, though. We'll have to get sand.

That's easy. Yeah. I know a guy. Oh, brilliant. There we go. I've got a sand guy. Actually, come to think of it, since I'm going to fuck up the desert so much,

we'll be able to get all the sand from there. There you go. There we go. we'll get all of the desert sand is that all right to interact with the beach it's the same thing can you i had to know if it'll like interfere with it you don't think beach sand and desert sand mix no i think they're definitely like immiscible it's like oil and water oh okay you put them on top of each other they just won't they won't mix the grains won't like get caught up within each other well you learn something new every day i can't prove this for

certain i've never been able to get the two of them to get like close we'll check when we go to libya and egypt eventually well i i guess before then you you gotta you gotta tell me where you sit with this i seem skeptical man you seem real skeptical untold ecological destruction i mean not really you want to destroy the amazon we're already destroying the amazon i'm talking about making if anything this makes it a lot harder to destroy because they can't get the logging machines to the islands exactly the bridges that have to build constantly are these islands anchored anchored to the sea floor like a normal naturally occurring island yeah we'd have we'd have to make sure they are okay so we

don't just get like an island and you can sort of sail it to where you want uh no however that does sound quite cool i am open to that okay because that might get me on board yeah no i am open to that so you want to have like a like a sort of i don't want to use the word pirates but you could be you could be an island pirate yeah sailing around on your own island with a with a jolly roger yeah now that does sound quite cool that sounds fun i am on board for that we just invented the film water world right if you build it they will come different film i think i think so yes yeah if you build this um people inherently won't come because it's they'll all have their

own they'll all have their own place to be okay so yeah okay i'm up for a bit of um island sailing as well so yeah yeah so we'll put that on the list i can get on board with you there we go see that's not it's not all that bad no and then that way we'll have also if they're not sort of ocean to the seafloor or anything climate change comes your house just gets a little bit closer to the sky oh and that's great the sky is what you want yeah the sky is exciting yeah the sky is the limit cool so you solved climate change oh wow that's a that's a nice side effect of what i've just talked about what kind of island are you having me personally yeah do you want like a tropical one do you want one of those ones with like lighthouses and like the

scottish off the uh well since i invented the idea i think i i should probably get the best island which is for you it's going to be a bit of everything okay an island with a bunch of different biomes on it probably has to be quite big to contain them i want um no i want um i think it'll be made of uh one square feet of every other island so you're doing like a island land tax but it's like a literal yeah i take a square foot of every other island and i put it on my island okay that's what my island's made of you can do your island stuff yeah i'm gonna retreat underground stuff right okay you know what these things can work at the same time yeah You can go Poseidon mode.

I'll go Hades mode. Okay, yes. So what we're doing is we're creating our own pantheon of gods. Yes, but neither of us are Zeus. We are both well aware we're backup gods. We really could have done with a Zeus to keep us in line, actually, because clearly when we left our own devices, we're destroying rainforests and burrowing underground.

Oh, dear. so not a full I'm going to let you do it I might visit your islands but I'll be busy elsewhere yeah underground doing underground stuff yes oh well I guess we'll watch the space

I do like that we're starting to build up the common ground verse where all of the common grounds exist in the same universe and it's just one hellscape that's been destroyed by earth People aren't allowed to have cats on their island.

No, of course not. They're not allowed to. It's simply not allowed. And this all happened because AI ran the world for a month. That does feel like a suggestion from AI. Well, I think that covers off pretty much everything we could humanly discuss when it comes to every topic ever, which I think means that we've wrapped up the podcast forever.

That might be it. Surprise last episode, everyone. You try, but you can't escape. Oh, damn it. Oh, well, I thought it was worth a bash. Well, I've got to head off. I've got to wear in these new shoes. These are the most comfy shoes I've ever bought.

I'm going to wear them in because I've got a big, big old walk tomorrow. Enjoy. I will. It's going to be great. I'm going to come back. Refreshed. I'm going to refresh myself, and then I'm going to release this episode. and when you listen to this

I'll be very very tired but at least I wasn't tired today I won't be tired next week either that's a promise you can take to the bank well I think that's all I have to say but if there's anything you guys

have to say you know where to find us we've already said the email and given the Instagram I'm not going to give it again if you want to hear it go back and listen Infowarvmate.co.uk Infowarvmate on Instagram Stop spoon feeding them They're better than this, you're better than this

I just like the correspondence I know you do, I know you do But you've got to make them work for it a little bit Have them scroll back, scrub along Back towards the midpoint of the episode Where we talked about it Okay, then bleep this Andy, you can't just

You can't say that, oh my god You can't say that in the pod oh wow that's going to sound real bad we should wrap this up before you forget to unbleep this very good point well thank you all for listening and we'll talk to you next time

stay subtle, humble and brave or don't, you know, we're not your dad night Thank you for watching.