War With A Mate - Episode 4 - Pyramid Scheme

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Whoever thought that the set-up for a board game would take so long? Clearly not these two short-sighted fellows. A 12 hour stint of preparation has really taken a toll on James, with Andrew standing tall as the energised front-runner. Hopefully this one stays on topic and isn't wildly unrelated to the game.

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Because we have your number. Alright, that's three, two, one. You gotta say something, man. I thought you were starting it. Why? I don't know, it's because you did the last ones. Yeah, that's true. But I had a nice non-sequitur lined up for those ones.

for this one it's all it's all business it's all sequoia it's all business today because we started we have started we've got the fucking game out okay so we have also started the podcast yeah yeah that's why we're recording yeah that's what the mic's for yeah yeah we started the game we started spis the campaign for north africa started in a loose sense we've we've taken the game out of the box we've started punching out the game pieces yeah we've destroyed its resale value so now we're committed to this yeah yeah we can't trade that one back in no refunds yeah don't even get refunds for it anyway it's very old it's very bespoke yeah we've we've now punched the pieces out the game is afoot we've taken out all my pieces that i'll need for the start of the

game anyway yeah you made the decision not to punch the nazis which yeah well i've we don't need to punch the nazis yet that'll be in about a year or two that will punch the nazis all right and then punch with a vengeance yeah yeah i want to punch the nazis don't get me wrong uh we've also just kind of delved straight into it and we've probably got loads of people who've just jumped in now and they're like what is going on here and what is going on here so we are uh doing a podcast as you can probably tell by the the sound of our voices beamed into your ears the idea of the podcast is me james and you andy is it yeah you andy yeah we're gonna be playing a board game for the next eight years probably longer based on today's index and we're not

gonna be getting the recommended times i don't think no we're really not the the board game is the uh the very long and uh infamously unfinished board game spis the campaign for north africa it's a big old war game it's really complicated and we're going to finish it and we've started playing it today we started playing in the sense of we've tried little practice runs of parts of the rules that we thought we understood we did understand some of it we got some of it right yeah there were a bit of clarity on certain things but the overall stuff we uh seemed to picked up all right so we ran through a movement through terrain specifically so working out how much it costs to move things around breakdowns fuel requirements yeah all the fun nitty-gritty

parts of desert warfare got all the pieces out punching out the game pieces because there's 1600 of the little bastards that took us what two hours just to get them out the box get them all out then we had to organize them all into little trays so that was still not still need more organization i think but that's going to be an ongoing battle throughout the whole game yeah and it must really cut you up that mine were better organized than yours i mean it doesn't thrill me but you never know next time you come around perfectly organized i'm going to be able to track mine down straight away i'm going to be like the rain man of this game i'll be able to just look at the tray and go there's the camel unit yes we did get a bit of no we didn't we got

more information about the camels we didn't get much more clarity did we mention the camels last time we mentioned it with the echo of war guys yes when we asked them about i mean why there were rules for camels and they seemed to be as confused as uh we were yeah so there's that there's a rule about camels it says you can ship dead camels and planes but not living camels and i agree with that fundamentally but i don't understand the role that camels play in the game i know it's in the desert but i just didn't understand when the camels show up or what they do i know what camels do and actually i don't really know what camels do in real life i know you can get on them and they've got humps yeah they're just horses for the desert desert horses

okay well in the game turns out i actually have a camel unit and i'm really excited to play them a single unit of camels and i guess if i kill them i can then ship the dead camels anywhere i want on a plane or just to taunt me you sick fuck i there's nothing to use them for when they arrive so i guess yes i'm just transporting dead camels just a trophy for you to to brandish when you fly back to cairo yeah my men it's not really intimidating having a camel's head on a spike i mean it's it's confusing i don't know why you do it but it's not going to terrify anyone people are scared of the unknown andy that will terrify a lot of people mostly the citizens of cairo i would imagine when you come back start putting camel heads on the

The gates of Cairo? I'm now picturing Cairo apparently as some... Walled city. Walled city, yeah. It's one very, very medieval. Yeah, so we've figured out parts of the game just through play. It's long.

It's going to take so long. We did a practice, like you say, with the movement rules and the... What else did we do? We've done... Fuel consumption. So, so little, and I've forgotten the little that we've done. We've been doing this for, like, ten hours,

and we've got so little to show for it. We do have a bunch of Excel stuff set up. We did a lot of, like, bookkeeping. That's the whole game. The whole game is bookkeeping. So in that sense, we did about six hours of bookkeeping and a few hours of playing, which seems to be the ratio. We didn't even play, though. We just sort of went, well, this is what the rules should be.

and then we just referred back to the rules over and over and it really didn't feel like progress but I do still feel like I've learned something I know a little bit about how the game works a little bit more compared to previous

we put the game map out it's the first time I've seen the full thing not like in pictures yeah it went all over the floor it's long, really long I did spend a good chunk of yesterday moving furniture around because it's too big

I did come in here this morning and it was barren and it turns out we actually made more space, well sorry you made more space I didn't help with the furniture at all it turns out we didn't even need as much space as you cleared

no, it's not as tall as we thought tall in the sense of wide we never thought it was going to be tall because it's paper sure for god's sake you said it why would it be tall

do you know how board games work it's called a board for a reason I guess deep then oh sorry do you think this is a tall game we're going to be playing apparently so I guess I did wow I'm playing against a moron ok so it's not as deep as I thought it would be

what do you mean it's really deep it really cuts into the heart of the conflict the complexity that these people went through to try and navigate the desert environment in wartime, it's really deep okay

so it's, it's not tall it's not tall, it's definitely not tall it's very deep but not in the directional sense in the profound sense it's got a lot of weight to it no, it's made of paper if you're going to do that to me, I'm doing it to you oh, oh, welcome to Andy's

funny pony, oh oh no, edit edit edit oh i can cut that out i edit this i'm allowed to cut it out so yeah now we need a good part where it just sounds normal again so uh tall it can't be tall andy it's a board game but it is deep as hell oh fuck oh no i'm gonna i'm gonna keep in the mistake i'm not having to take that golden joke so now i suppose what's next we're gonna we're gonna have to keep on Doing these little trial runs Yeah we're going to do a

Combat trial run next And an air combat trial run More like a trial by combat I'm going to show up to your house with a rapier I'm going to duel you Interesting weapon choice Yeah I'd be a master swordsman with a rapier

You wouldn't I think you'd be bad with a rapier Cutlass? How about that? Like a pirate I think you're just a guy who Tops out with a spear whoa don't knock the spear i'm not it's incredibly easy to use for peasants and the like peasants no no no i'm thinking more sort of like roman uh you know shield fighters where you got the like the shield turtle is that right the shield don't look at me like that don't ever

look at me like that again you know where they've got the they've got the shields yes all around them turtle like and then you poke your spears through yeah so you're going to be one of them you're going to come round to my house with a Roman shield and a spear yeah I'm going to be a centurion

so not really sure what what retort you've got to that because just looking round I don't really think you've got anything in here to defend against that tactic no it would be surprisingly hard to fight a guy with a big shield and a narrow corridor yeah I'm going to corner you in your

corridor with a spear apparently. I'm delirious after spending 10 hours. Two of which, at the very start, is just punching out pieces of cardboard. Really, really small pieces of cardboard as well. And then trying to find a way to

organise something that I don't understand. But it worked. It did work. It worked. I've got a great organisational system. I've created the Dewey Decimal system of this game. i assume because you've used that as the touch point you're an expert in library sciences

and you know what the jury decimal system is yeah yeah yeah i do so the the idea for the campaign um for the the campaign for north africa next is we're going to try and play the small mini scenario because the game is meant to take 111 turns and there's a little small scenario in it sort of like a mini game and it only takes six turns each turn is meant to take 10 hours i reckon it's going to take us about 20 hours per per turn for the setup yeah yeah for this practice one yeah so we're going to do the practice one the six turns and then when we've done that and we've got an idea as to how the game is meant to work properly we're going to go back to the start we're going to do all 111 turns in a row we're going to finish it we're going to finish

it and see the problem is we came across a liar earlier today didn't we did we we did we did that man who says he finished it and he didn't finish it he played five turns of it okay so we're just calling people out some rapscallion we'll not name him we'll not name him we'll not mostly because i can't remember his name otherwise i'll call him out right now send the mob after him but no somebody my heart sank honestly when I thought that someone had finished it and we were just going to be second best

still a podium finish, second place but turns out this individual hasn't actually finished the whole game they've just played a few turns of it and they've taken the credit from some people who've commented on their post going, oh well done, well done

really pleased that you finished the game congrats, you didn't didn't finish the game you played the game you're focused on the wrong things i want to be first don't want to be second i get that but also the really disheartening part was the fact that i found that out as i was punching out those pieces of cardboard we were like an hour in to doing that and then i came across what i thought was somebody completely nullifying the whole fucking project this is all pointless yeah basically and at that point we'd already vandalized the game in the sense of we

can't just sell it off to some collector who wants it so thankfully no we we haven't been beaten to the punch no that would have i would have taken out on you probably so i yeah i do have some complaints with spi and their associated folk well spi the people who made the game they dissolved i think like 20 years ago so these complaints you're gonna have to just read them out and hope that some former employee of SPI's is listening and they can take it to heart yeah this is a sort of rude eulogy

for a company let's hear it let's hear the epitaph of SPI well we were making the log sheets which were very confusing but it does handily have a list of the different sections in it and explains what they did

and they're ordered A E F D G C B alphabetical ordering of their description of the log sheets. Well that's that pop song that's the one where they're like oh

fuck your dog as in like you know oh no is it fuck you and your friends maybe it's accept your dog no it's accept your dog yeah so there's a song

so the joke I was going you're so confused I can see that the joke is that there is a song and it's just the first few letters of the alphabet is the title and yeah sorry but my complaint is that they're not in order yeah I know it was a it was a bad joke and I'm really sorry

I've thrown you off by mentioning a pop culture element you've clearly got no experience with you don't know that song I don't really know it either because I've misquoted it but please continue okay I mean that was the

main uh but actually shockingly intuitive when you're going through stuff if there's not addendums or direct contradictions that are fixed in attached printer paper oh yeah that's the annoying thing is that when we when we bought the game we opened up the box and found not just the actual original game in pretty much mint condition but as well as that somebody the previous owner of the game had printed off uh what is it like nine sheets of paper from some website in 2007 because it's dated at the bottom and it's it's a list of nine pages worth of amendments to the rules that either don't make sense or are just completely incorrect and i found out today as well when we

going through the rules there's also an addenda section in the actual rules themselves yeah that again frustrated me because if it's in the same rule book don't make an addendum fix the body of the text but the thing took two years to make so the poor guy by the end he's probably just as lost as we were reading it so he's like i'll just stick this in at the end i know it's wrong he's probably made some sticky notes as he was going through and you know back then you know we're talking late 70s they couldn't just amend it the same way we've been amending our digital notes it was set in stone literally stone tablets that's how the rules were carved out initially and then they i suppose photocopied it and sent it to a printer yeah who then put it down why are they not

because whoever made that game um well we've got the designers names um that wasn't a threat by the that sounded real eerie for a minute we've um yeah we know who the names have plastered all over it they take quite a bit of pride in the i think cruelty that exists within the game

rules they taunt you through the whole thing when you're reading it there are sections where they just openly apologize for the game being so difficult yeah or they just go why are you doing this i like really do wonder that to be fair i do feel we've fallen for a practical joke.

We have, but we're both the people who set the joke up. No, that was SPI. Well, we've been baited by this, what, 50-year-old whoopee cushion of a board game. Just sent a prank into the future. No expectation I'll ever see it.

Just laughing at themselves sending these stone tablets to the printers. Someone was going to do it eventually. It just, thankfully it's too dedicated, charismatic, oh some other people doing the podcast i was waiting for that you had that yeah i set it up i'm glad i'm glad you hit it out the park so we've we've started playing we've punched the pieces out

not the nazis we're gonna punch them later and we've figured out the board isn't i mean it is really long it's like 10 feet long but we we can play it we know for a fact we've got the space for it we've got the mental fortitude to try to play it and we've got the promise of the loser buying the winner a meal at the end of all this to look forward to yeah so there's there's a lot on the table and now it's it's real i guess yeah it is start getting into some impressions based on what we did about playing it seems roads and tracks are going to be incredibly important because you either slug through the desert and your car breaks down and you barely move or you just whiz around on roads it seems you sound like a man who's just uncovered public transport for the first time

i didn't think it was going to be that this is again me being deeply not aware of history i didn't think i thought they're in the desert you just go where you want to go i didn't think you'd need like tracks you can't just drive through the dunes i mean you can but apparently you get lost yeah well we found out the rules are if you drive through the desert and there's no roads your your vehicles just break down that's part of the game and then they're just left out in the desert because there's abandoned vehicle tokens which i feel are going to be we're going to be using more than the designers of the game intended. Well then

the designers, those cheeky monkeys, they've got a little section in there where it says try not to scatter these abandoned vehicle markers all across the board. And it's like well first of all, we're playing the game so we can scatter these

as far and wide as we wish but two, it's like you've built a rule set in. How dare you give us advice? It's not really practical advice is it? It's just like oh don't don't be messy when you're playing the game let's say i'll be messy if i want to when i'm playing the game it's my desert game so we're essentially gonna turn the north african desert into a junkyard yeah yeah we're gonna really try and skip forward from 1940 which is when it's set

and we're gonna try and sort of speed run just polluting the desert and natural environments because back then wasn't half as bad as it is now so we're gonna have to really catch up So that we feel at home. Yeah. I mean, because we're at home in junk and trash. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, I think that says more about us than anything about the desert. Yeah.

Big, broad desert. Stretches out really far. Really big. Really sandy. Pyramids. Well, the pyramids are there, actually. Are there any rules about visiting the pyramids? yeah you get a morale boost

oh yeah that's fair pyramids are cool I've never been personally but I've heard lots of stories you don't want to, you don't want to go to the pyramids I've seen mountains, I don't care if a guy made one it wasn't a guy it was a lot of guys

and they don't know how they made them slavery yeah sorry there is a definitive answer to that hard work hard labour, long hours yeah no there is an answer and you've got it there yeah so it's more depressing than aliens it adds less whimsy to the world it's not i don't like it when people say it was aliens this is no no rationale behind

that it's not aliens it's slaves well well no you look at it you go that looks difficult i probably can do it so it's alien yeah because you haven't been forced to i think also it'd be fair if someone was forcing me to build a pyramid, they'd get a really shitty pyramid. A really low, badly built pyramid. Just really spite them. If you're going to make me do this, I'm going to do such a crappy job.

No, I think I'd be earnestly trying. Oh, right. I thought you meant out of spite. You're just not very good at building. Well, I mean, yeah, they did a swell job with the pyramids. They really did. They didn't have to.

I mean I wouldn't have blamed them for not because I probably didn't want to it wouldn't have been great although there's not much going on back then I mean just globally globally?

nothing going on back then Egypt was the happening place there wasn't much media coverage at the time so you probably missed out on all the big stories oh you think yeah people were doing a lot of stuff they just weren't recording it yeah and that's why we're recording this we're doing the big stuff

we don't want to be missed out because someone else is building their pyramid and everyone's like look at that we need to get this out into the ether we don't want people to be listening to this podcast in a thousand years and be going this is so good humans couldn't have done this exactly we don't want people to think that this was either slaves

or aliens this is us this is all earnest we want to do this and we're from here the game as we went through the rules turns out it's a lot more about lying to each other than we first thought yeah i was kind of thinking we sort of mentioned it a bit last uh episode the but it's way more than we thought even then yeah we thought it was going to be pretty much everything on the board turns out very little is on the board almost everything's on your sheets

which you keep a secret yeah there's 1600 little game pieces and at any given time you're not going have many because you get these like headquarter units and they represent usually anywhere between sort of 10 and 15 other units that are included in there. So you just put down this one headquarter unit. So I put down

mine. You'll look at it Andy and you'll go well he's got someone over there in this part of the desert. But you don't know how many there are in there. You don't know if I've got tanks, soldiers, artillery. So if you march over to it you might find yourself in a fight you just can't

possibly win yeah i mean i think a lot of it is going to be tricking each other well you can build fake minefields and you can have fake tanks yes so there's a lot of there's a lot of fake outs which i'm a big fan of it'll be fun to have you wander on over saunter in with all your troops ready to take on my it turns out wooden tanks oh what a muppet probably win that one yeah yeah Maybe. It's really bad if you don't. There's also the fact that we need to use natural resources

like, I was going to say natural resources, like wells. Again, not really natural. Don't naturally occur. But stuff like wells, they can be depleted of their water. But if I deplete them of their water, I don't need to tell you that. No, I might just get there and be like, damn, I'm thirsty. And you've ruined

the well. Because there's two ways to ruin it. You can drink all the water out of it. mmm yum greedy little boy or you can throw salt down there i love that that's a rule yeah because it's it's referred to as poisoning a well but then it does later on in the rule say you're not actually putting you know arsenic into here yeah it would be ridiculous but 50 pounds of arsenic in there so they just fill it with salt and it's like it's also confusing you know i would probably be more annoyed if i'd been traversing through the desert during a war and then i got to a well

and if i took a big swig of it and it turns out i'm poisoned i'm like well i'm at war death was already on the cards it's horrible but here it is but if i took a big gulp and it's just sea water i'm just like oh god no what a what a kick in the teeth like have you ever the night after a party or something took a glass that you thought was water and it's like vodka or something i've done that with i suppose the equivalent that springs to mind for me because i don't i don't tend to just fall asleep with a glass of vodka by the bedside unlike some people apparently in your living room also i've passed out in the living room in this situation that's worse no you wake up you walk through you're like oh a glass of water i'll have a drink after a party you just

pick up random glasses of liquid and just swig oh right right okay that's well okay um let's put a pin in that what my equivalent would be is you know when you've made a cup of tea or a cup of coffee yes and you leave it for a little while you don't realize how much time's passed and then you take a swig and that's not the temperature i thought that would be and it's just horrible and now see you don't seem to be bothered by this at all and i know for a fact because years ago i know for a fact that you would make a cup of coffee in the morning you'd go to work you'd come back and that cup of coffee would be sat on the bench and i'd watch you drink it and i've never had less respect for another human than when you used to do that if you still do that now

don't tell me i don't want to know so moving on oh god i don't mind a cold hot drink no it's not that you don't mind it it's like you've actively you've you've nurtured a situation where you know there's going to be a cold hot drink well i drank some of it before work but then it hadn't cooled down properly so i had to leave you didn't have to leave you could have either you could have got up earlier you could have made it you could have mixed in a bit of cold water there's a thousand different ways like you didn't have to wait eight hours to then drink freezing cold coffee and again it's coffee you've got home from work you shouldn't be having caffeine that late i used to think i was an insomniac so i'd be like oh i'm not gonna sleep

anyway turns out it was the coffee of course it's the coffee you're drinking it was a huge mug as well it was like a novelty size mug that you used to be drinking from yeah it was a good mug do you still have that mug somewhere oh yeah i've not seen it a little while i remember being horribly stained like the inside was just it was just black it was a white mug so it shouldn't have been it wasn't that bad you still have the mug i got you i do have that mug i can't you i can't use it and i almost gave it to my mom that would have been very good for context the mug i got i got andy and morgan it's color changing so you pour your hot water in and once you've poured in the hot water the uh solid black mug

slowly starts to shift and reveals a picture of a it's a naked man um with with everything hanging out so the idea of your mom being given that um it feels like you're just making some sort of horrible pointed attack on her if you're handing her that mug any guest that you give that mug to you, you clearly don't like them very much. You're making them the butt of a joke. The thing is, you've given me a mug I, one, don't want to drink out of, but two, no one else can. Yeah, no one should be

drinking from that. You should probably get rid of it, to be honest. I'll keep it and eventually give it to someone. Oh, as a gift? Yeah, maybe you'll get it for Christmas in a few years. That would be a great Secret Santa present. If you want to get fired.

Well, the thing is, yeah, you've you've got to hope that they don't use it there and then certainly that they maybe take it home and then they can enjoy the joke in private in their own home you can't really do that in the office can you no it's not gonna fly but this is this is our this is our office this is our workspace this is where we're going to be grinding away working hard hours but today was one of the longest we're going to have because it was a good 10 hours straight of this and we're probably only going to be doing this for sort of 4 hours at a time

this was a real bumper session where we managed to bash out all of those little rule concerns we had start trying them out and we're going to do another one next week as well where we go over it we go over the combat side of stuff

have a little fight in the desert and then we're planning a kick off next Friday the game begins yeah the actual game itself we're going to Well, the trial run, the six-turn trial run

is what we're going to try next week. Yeah. And that's so we can work out the rules and with all the deception and stuff, that'll be more open, figure everything out. Yeah. And then go into a proper game.

We need to figure out how to lie to each other. Yes. Because at the moment, the relationship we have is so transparent, it's hard to fathom. We're going to have to learn to lie to each other. yes learn

how do you how do you feel about that good good right that's excited well you're you're already doing it

you're already lying because I can see the pain in your eyes you don't mean that I do right you've misread this situation oh right

out of my eyes you've got glasses on I can't really see them properly a layer of deception no it's a layer of glass because your vision's really bad yeah it's not great

That's not going to come in handy because the fact that we both have bad eyesight and these pieces of cardboard are absolutely tiny And the colour of the terrain You put an Italian infantry unit down and it just disappeared Because they've made all of the Italian units this sort of like eggshell white beige colour

and the map is meant to simulate the colours of a desert so it blends in really easy And these pieces must measure, like, a centimetre, maybe centimetre and a half either side. Yeah. So these things are really small. So ten foot board, one centimetre tiles. And we both have bad eyesight. Some of your tiles are even worse because it's a black background with yellow font.

Oh, yes, there's some horrible combos. Oh, you're flicking through your notes here. Yes, I did write down the combos to keep track of. Oh, no. There's red and white. It feels fairly easy. Okay. Red and black.

Dark red and black. To differentiate, of course. Orange and black. Oh, the program, yeah. And white and red. So three of them are just... I say dark red. They're all the same shade of red, basically.

And then two of them are flipped. oh and we also found out through the uh the addenda that some of them as well are meant to be different types of units because all of these little pieces have different codes on that represent what sort of characteristics they're meant to have sort of if they're artillery units or if they're headquarter units and there's i think 20 different pieces that are meant to be headquarter units and they've got this big stripe through them to show that and 20 of them don't have the stripe so we're gonna have to go back through my my carefully organized and your hastily bundled groups of units and find the ones that are meant to be different headquarter ones

and then then what because we can't even do anything we can't we could stick a bit of something on them like a like a tape or something something on the corner it's just favor trashing i mean at this point we've got the game we're playing it we might as well just highlight them does it really matter oh god just with board game collectors screaming oh fair enough punching out the game pieces they can probably live with that when we start taking out the sharpies and just vandalizing i'm gonna draw little mustaches and glasses on give them disguises we're going to improve this 50 year old game yeah to be fair i mean they've tried several times over based on all these addendas.

I wasn't even trying to amend it or fix it. They were just trying to make it playable. Yeah. Which they seem to have managed. I mean, we've got no way of knowing that because all we've done is a practice run with two units.

And all we did was move them around today and go, oh yeah, so they've used fuel by doing this. Oh, they've eaten their food. It's like, well, that doesn't really prove that the game works yeah well it's never been fully play tested by the people who made it either so for all we know there's like an issue that just cumulatively builds up to like turn 105 and then the game becomes unplayable yeah it's the animosity between you and i it's gonna build to a to a boiling point

i mean it's gonna get bad we're gonna be sending proxies in to move our pieces yeah we're going to have to send in a third party to start playing the game for us we've been we've been lucky so far in that we've not I've completely forgot what I was saying

completely forgot I've been doing this for like 10 hours straight we've been lucky what about this has been lucky I don't know it's been a lot of very concerning information

a lot of we don't know what we've got ourselves in I don't know why you feel lucky no I've got no idea what part of this made me feel lucky maybe that's why I stopped because I was about to say something I just didn't believe my brain just no shut it down shut it down

I mean I think if we'd taken the time to understand the game properly before buying the game and this podcasting equipment we wouldn't have done it I think the sophisticated wargamer and the student of history

knows enough not to do this I suppose what we are lucky with, and this isn't what I was going to say because that's completely gone is that no one has finished it before that's the only real selling point we've got that's what's driving me to be first

I mean, yeah, so if someone finishes it before, are we just abandoning. Could that happen? I mean, maybe. Someone could finish it. Yeah. I mean, it has to be possible or we can't. But like, they could finish it soon. I mean, yeah.

Fuck. Yeah. Yeah, you've really committed to something and you're not even going to get what you want out of it. No! Oh, no. I don't want to do it anymore. Because also you're like, oh, are they going to finish it soon?

Is any time in the next nine years soon? Yes. I would say that's soon, relative to the board game, because that's how long it's going to take us, if not longer. Okay, then, yeah. Yeah, cool. You've ruined my night.

Oh, good. Absolutely. It's so late as well. It's close to midnight. We've been playing this game for far too long. Not even playing it, just trying to understand this game. We've been making Excel spreadsheets and reading rules punching out little pieces of cardboard yeah we've destroyed

a piece of gaming history and gone on google sheets for hours my favorite part was um when you were working away on the excel spreadsheets to keep track of the game that we're going to be playing for a decade more or less and i was just punching out the little game pieces and I got them all out and I was so proud after finishing that and getting all of the pieces punched out and you were just sat there stressing over the log sheets trying to figure out

how we're meant to document all of the stuff that these things need and then I was just sort of sat around like a spare part for 15 minutes until it was perfected one of us got the more fun job today it was a bit like in geography did you always get to

colour in yeah that is a thing isn't it geography's the coloring in yeah because after a while i thought it's sort of like you know oh well you know you've got your mountains you've got your desert hey topical you've got um you've got rivers and then they're like oh well that's sort of it um earthquakes volcanoes and talk about the exciting bits you know the sort of you know things that explode into clouds of flame and rock and then it's like well we'll get you some pictures

of them and you can colour them in and that's geography because it's just it doesn't really change you don't get new mountains not often because I know you get the whole thing of like oh you can get creative and destructive tectonic plates

and it's like yeah but you're not going to get a new island anytime soon you're not going to get new geography it's it's worse than history for that i mean you get new history every day you get new history every day and you've also got people who discover new things about history all the time we're making history you know this is going to be one of those things no one's coloring us in but then when it comes to geography nothing's changing of course they're going to color in now i know what everyone's

thinking right now. That's the same with maths, because that's already been figured out. It's all rules. They're all set out. But you can play around with it so much. What if I did this with this number? Oh, this is a particularly

big triangle. What's the area of this one? What are these angles at? Where is geography? It's, you know... Name all of the mountains. Oh, done. Oh, you've got an A. Yeah, it is kind of a bullshit subject. they should scrap that

and they should make another subject take its place, another sort of humanities what's a good one to replace geography I reckon something to do with space space geography because then you can go to different planets and you keep getting more

you gotta go like a school trip yeah, in the future in a thousand years when they're listening to this when i was listening to this on mars yeah and i whoa that's what earth was like just no wonder we left just full of cool guys just full of full of bloody good blokes have you ever listened to a file and not respected the planet

uh yeah yeah um that's that's actually why uh pluto was decategorized as a planet Oh, its podcast wasn't very good. Yeah, yeah. Very, yeah, very, very hate-filled. Full of vitriol, the Plutonians. Bad people. Yeah, they're, I don't mean to sort of tarnish a whole species. No, I do.

But, oh, fair enough. Bad, bad people. So you're a listener as well, an avid Plutonian podcast listener. I mean, yeah. And that's also, that applies forward. So at any point in time in the future, if anyone settles on Pluto, even just briefly they're a bad person so the planet has like a corrupting presence that makes someone bad just by being there yeah let's say so yeah you're not even sure that you

well i just think if you've gone why are you trying to get so far away from earth oh it's been running from something it's less that pluto makes you bad and there's no reason for a good person to go there it's only only bad men go to pluto why else would you leave well i'm in men in the sense of mankind but it's very inclusive of you to to understand that women only in space that's a yeah interesting um interesting proposition you've got there for for space geopolitical relations maybe they'll teach that maybe you'll be one of the founding fathers of this topic. Who knows? Who knows?

Yeah, Aristotle of space races. No, not quite Aristotle. I was thinking Pluto. The dog. Yeah, yeah. I can see that. You could be the Pluto the dog of talking about

Pluto. That's about it though. Yeah, I mean that is something to aspire to, isn't it? Not really, not really. I think we've pretty much covered all that we can realistically cover alright we're signing off because there's one last thing

to do before we sign off is there? yes this podcast is called war with a me oh yeah we didn't mention that it's alright it'll be in the previous episodes and also they'll see the title if they click on it unless they've just overheard this

from Tannoy in a shopping centre if anyone listening won thanks I guess bizarre play it over the Tannoy owner

shopping centre and send us proof and we'll I don't know do something did you know Tannoy is actually a brand name it's like

it's like a it's like referring to a a vacuum cleaner as a a Hoover or a Dyson so are they just

speakers I suppose so yeah yeah so you can play it over any speaker play this over any speaker doesn't have to be a Tannoy doesn't have to be a Dyson

don't even think Dyson makes speakers probably do, or a vacuum that plays music oh, that'd be cool I would like to see pictures of people listening to this via vacuum cleaner we don't have any people smart enough to make those kind of things though because everyone's learning about geography

well yes, this is a podcast where we will play the entirety of the campaign for north africa and abolish geography as a subject that's right we've got two agendas now we're gonna be the first to do both of those things so we'll leave you with that don't study geography and don't try playing this game either uh please don't please don't try and finish the game i'm not going to be very happy at all about anyone finishing the game so on that note we'll head on off if you do have anything to contribute

in terms of questions or remarks or insults or encouragement or determined you can send that off to what's the email we definitely have an email

but I'm not sure on the end of it info at warovermade.co.uk .co.uk there we go we didn't go for the .com no it cost yeah stay away from Geography

and Pluto and bye bye