War With A Mate - Episode 44: Icarus

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

The guys mount up for the Close Assault portion of Turn 2.2, with all signs pointing towards an imminent conclusion to the conflict between the 7th and 4th at long last. An episode that sees the guys touch on hubris across the board, whether that’s on the part of Sony, fledgling Admirals, or simply Andy at a bus stop.

good day good evening and good night farewell that was quick yeah i just i'm trying to rattle these off as quick as we can i just thought if we get through as many of them as we can in one night then we don't have to do this for the rest of our lives it's only a decade or two man i think it's going to be longer i think at the minute we're on course what 40 years i just want to get that done in like maybe two weeks it's a grim way of view it i'm thinking 15 seconds per episode micro apps yeah micro apps yeah a little web series welcome to war with a mate a very very long form podcast with me james me andy it's the only podcast i believe in existence documenting an entire playthrough of spi's the campaign for north africa i mean who else is going to be doing

i don't think there's anyone else out there who is as uh as damaged as we must be in order to try and do this just bored for those here for the first time first of all what a weird place to start but welcome you're welcome but i think maybe start early on go back and then come back here in few weeks maybe episode 13 or 15 yeah maybe not from the very start but for though you're uninitiated whoever you are and however you got here we're playing a very long board game it's called the campaign for north africa and it's meant to last a very long time 1500 hours is the prediction that's wrong it's wrong it's objectively incorrect it's a lie printed on the side of a box that's wrong we're slow but it's because it's meant for 10 people and there's just

two of us and it's been going well i would say this is another week we're playing the game for a few hours and then recording an episode of war with the may right afterwards it's it's a classic it's uh it's a staple of my week andy i don't know about you every week yeah i do it every week i presume you do it every week uh most weeks sometimes i get my twin to come and do it i was wondering about that yeah yeah because he's got a sort of like very raw sexual chemistry with me oh no that's me right my twin's pretty flat oh okay you didn't really have that vibe going today maybe i'm the twin oh then i'm confused about you've seen the prestige i have and that's not about having raw sexual chemistry with your podcast friend it's about being two guys yeah sort of

but neither of us are hugh jackman i wish one of us was hugh jackman i'm not going to give away which one you would i suppose yeah uh one of us would have to be christian bale who do you think is more christian bale you or me me i reckon i could do the um sort of like extreme weight gain or loss to to fit the role thankfully with this being audio only we don't need to do any extreme measures like that i could put on a different voice like a funny voice yeah i'm christian bale from the movie vice i'm christian bale from the the big shot where he's really good with the numbers so what did we do today we played the campaign for north africa we did more of upstage two of turn two we resolved the air bit we did we finally tucked off uh tucked off tucked up

ticked off however you want to put it doesn't really matter it's over we did the air stuff for upstage two of turn two yes you were bombing a road i scrambled some planes to try and stop you just like that we've got paid for audio effects as you can tell that was a professional voice actor matt mercer's in the house ladies and gentlemen he does silly plane noises we did we we finished that that was good i i managed to bomb your road yes i'm not before shoot down three fires you shot down three bombers again when you have a lot of bombers it increases your tack air score which is sort of the bread and butter of air-to-air combat. So because I had 29 bombers, that shot up by two.

However, my TAC-air score maxed out for some of the planes at six. Most of them were four. And the other thing that factors into air combat is maneuverability. And my maneuverability for some of my planes was dog shit. Yeah, I didn't send the best planes after you. My Gladiators are TAC-air two. And you also didn't shoot down any of my worst planes. You shot down my sort of mediocre planes.

I'm fine with it. four tac air and 20 maneuverability is what i was playing with for those mid-ground ones and they were only carrying two bombs each the 307 i believe the abbreviation is bis 307 you shot down three of those it did take it down a tier for the bombs that's six bombs gone it took it from 203 to 197 the amount of bombs i was dropping that's my payload however all that did was move the table over i needed to score a 26 to a 66 in order to bomb that road successfully and boy did i do it and i took one of your planes down with me as well uh some fives no you took down to one of them one of them limped back but i took out one of the planes actually killed it

downed it you took out three of mine successfully but i took off a chunk of road which is conveniently a bit of road that is situated next to a downward slope so it means if you want to drive over that patch now you don't have that convenient road you're more likely to break down there yeah a very sound tactical move on my part and i give myself a pat on the back for that well done buddy there we go nice pat on the back i don't know about you but every time i like sort of reach back like itch my back sometimes i sort of like like my spine locks or like my shoulder joint locks i don't know if that's common or if it might be like some sort of like joint thing i've got going on seems like a joint thing like if i lean back like this this is great storytelling for an

audio only podcast by the way but if i like lean back like this sometimes he has his hands behind his head and his elbows up yeah i'm sort of like um it's like he the pose you'd have when you were like lounging on a sunbed yeah not that yeah let's not describe what that was but yeah uh that's i guess it's neither here nor there but uh yeah i i took down one of your planes and you took down three of mine and that was the end of the air stuff and then we moved on to my land movement in combat and i panicked for about 45 minutes you freaked out and this is all a sort of a bed of your own making because this is a pair of units that you send off for those who have been keeping up with andy's affairs andy decided it would be a fun idea to nab some of my trucks one of them was

a fake out you took some of my fake out trucks which isn't a buffoon yes it is a thing because it happened i had a fake out truck convoy at work debated you it's actually paying dividends now because these two groups that you send over the who are they again remind me of their identity um king's royal rifle company yeah and the royal northumberland fusiliers that's them the royal northumberland fusiliers they've been quite a thorn in my side from the start of the game so i'm glad that i'm getting that comeuppance out on my front to the west they've not got that comeuppance yet but they are in yes they are in a bad way based on what you were doing today yes they have because you spent ages leaning over the board i popped to the toilet for a quick toilet

break and then i came back through and you'd said you've definitively decided what you're doing with them and that it's a risky play and then you went to go move them and i described the fact that this is surely just a suicide mission and then you realize that i don't have two artillery units in the hex where you're going to put them i have about five or six artillery units yeah so you you doubled back on that one and you decided to move them a little bit further to the east but this is all because you sent them behind my lines you nabbed my truck so now they're just stuck yeah it turns out the long range desert group series has really messed with me thinking get some guys in some cars and they'll do some damage well you say that as if it's because of the the historical

basis that you've got for this however even if you look at the mechanics of the game today you moved the long range desert group and what did they accomplish andy they've not done anything ever oh sorry i guess they did do one thing today for you they identified if a supply dump was real or fake yes they failed to blow up a supply dump which fortunately was fake they found that supply dump 18 which is about midway up map c is in fact a fake it's a dummy it's a pretendy it's good to know it's all fantasy it's all make-believe it's theater of the mind it's not a real supply dump it's got nothing in it apart from hopes and dreams and i guess briefly the long range desert group and now they're back into the desert to do a fuck all i guess i might just leave them bouncing

around having fun just send them off map at this point send them to tripoli to cause some i guess major disruption there because they're not doing anything on the main game map yeah i think i need the sas to team up with them if i had a pound for every time i heard someone say i think i need the SAS to try and bolster some sort of force that's not really effective. In this game alone, I would have about seven pounds, because you say that a lot. They're good at what they do.

They are, and the Long Range Desert Group have proven to be completely ineffective. So again, I don't know why you thought this strategy of sending people behind my lines would work. And yes, some of you may be thinking, but James, you sent the 4th Blackshirt Division completely east, behind enemy lines. They're within an upstage of support,

though. They're within an upstage of support, and they're also pinning down the 7th armored division and friends because right now you've got them locked in until we didn't resolve the combat we got to the end and we're going to do the combat next time because we didn't have time yeah we're going to do your combat with them see how that goes i think i might smash them i think you might smash them however you can't then run away yeah i can you won't have the cpa to do that yeah well no you won't five to attack you yeah they have 20 all of them have 20 the top level guy does the top level guy might but not the rest of them yeah but it doesn't matter if the lower

ones are in cohesion unless a partner split them yeah but you know that cohesion is going to come in you know pretty detrimental when i follow them and absolutely destroy them as long as the top level because you only use that one so everyone under the hq can be like mutinous well as long as the hq is fine you say that but i again when i when i obliterate them um i feel like there's going to be some some throwing and swaying and ups and downs um i'm essentially trying to put the fear of god into you because i don't want you to do this to the fourth black shirts i don't know if that shows it does i don't know if that's picking up on the mic here hello that's gonna do fucking nightmares for the audio i don't know i shouldn't tap the mic it's like a fish in a tank

yeah but the fourth are pretty heavily pinned down by plane stuff yeah yeah uh the fourth are pinned by planes um they are in a bad position resource wise they're in a bad position position wise but all is not lost no because even if you obliterate them and then you start to fuck off back east it's not going to be the end of this conflict because you're still so close to all of my divisions yeah i mean i'm i'm clinging on to this hopefully upcoming victory because i've messed it up on the large scale i think well we waxed about this a little bit yeah i think it's becoming more and more apparent that i have i don't know that you've completely ruined your play here because it's not like hopeless but i think i've put myself in a disadvantage disadvantageous

position what you have done too aggressive early what you have done is you've hamstrung the fourth whatever happens with the next combat with the fourth black shirts I imagine either way you're going to be retreating afterwards that's my presumption however maybe I'll just charge in however badly you get them

I feel like you're probably going to then dart off but you have done some real damage to them and they are a very good division so you've taken a weapon out of my arsenal I do however still have a lot of men around and another black shirt division?

Two more. One of them's quite a way off. One of them's nearby. Two of them are on the way. Oh, right, okay. There's two coming from Tripoli. I think they actually arrive this offstage. Oh, good.

I think they arrive in Nafilia this offstage, and they're going to then just dart their way along that northern road and then come say hi. Checks out. So that's another two divisions to add to my group of, I think, sort of eight division equivalent in size groups that are going to be hanging around Map C. But it's fine.

I have three in total. is that overall yeah like the whole thing the seventh the fourth indian and the second new zealand right who are pretty badly understrength at the minute because most of their guys are off doing other stuff other stuff the only thing they should be doing is trying to win this conflict oh no that i think at this point in crete maybe that's that's a bit of a ways away yeah it's gonna be a while do they show up during the scenario uh i don't actually think so okay so i don't need to worry about them no because when they do arrive they come with the 28th maori

you know what i would be terrified however it it has shown so far in this podcast that there is no carryover of the historical president of scary men to the mechanics of the board game because the long range desert group are essentially something that you occasionally go they're here by the way and i guess notify you whether a supply dump is real or fake and then they disappear again yeah i mean they don't have special stats but uh no um a bunch of my guys from the second new zealand arrive on upstage three of turn six so they'll arrive but they won't be able to do literally anything that reminds me a little bit of i don't know if you've played battlefield much the which one i guess any of them really i've played a lot bad company too if you ever

played it online when you've got the sort of like ticket system to deplete down the enemy team tickets and just that moment when you you join a game halfway through or i guess more than halfway through and you finally manage to get in you pick your load out you get dropped into the game and then it just shows defeat on the screen because you've joined a game right at the end yeah that's essentially what they've got going on yeah so some of them arrive literally the last off stage of this game and then a bunch of them arrive the first off stage of turn 35 right okay so that's that's in a few years yeah and that's when the 28th maru show up is turn 35 oh cool so i'm going to be completely gray by the time they show up uh yeah just it's interesting to know that there's

going to be material physical changes to my body by the time they show up in this game i mean yeah i might have lost limbs by then it's hard to say i mean that's i mean i hope not i guess that could happen next week realistically all sorts of accidents limb loss tends to be pretty abrupt yeah it's not really a sort of slow arduous process it's sort of you've got the limb or you don't yeah sometimes doctors pick to do it yeah it's for good reasons it's not arbitrary we just love de-limbing people yeah some of them probably do ah those doctors what are they like bad bad guys um but we still enjoy the game the game is is still as as entertaining as it has been for the last i think sort of three four months yeah it hit a good point where we're

familiar with the game it now is a game it's not just this silly task we're doing there's stuff in that feels like we're playing a game it's got to the point where we've got familiar enough with all the core rules there's some sort of edge cases where we're not super familiar with things we have to spend like an hour or so making sure that the rules that we think exist gel with everything else that we already know exists but i don't have any real umbrage with the game these days i think those days may be long gone i've had a few blips coming up but yes that yeah that's a good point i genuinely don't know if we're gonna have any more real explosive moments over the rules until the full playthrough i don't think we'll have any like explosive or big frustrating moments

in the in the scenario because it's still fresh yeah i'm thinking like well let's use turn 35 as an example i'll be excited when the 28th mario show but it will i think that there's going to be a slog period in the middle of the full game i think also it could be kind of bad if one of us has got the advantage for an extended period of time yeah i feel this and feels a bit yeah i feel like it might hit that that sort of um purgatory period where we might be stuck in in a sort of limbo not really having any massive changes because i feel like we're going to be very cautious because we'll have all the stuff at our disposal that we have now but i can see there being full

turns where we hold back like three quarters of what we can actually use whereas i feel like at the moment if we've got it we're using it yeah if i've got planes that are fueled and refitted and full of ammo i'm sending them out bar like a few exceptions but for the most part if i've got it i'm setting it out there and i'm using it whereas come the full game there might be full turns maybe multiple turns where i'm gonna hold stuff back until i've got everything in the right position rather than just oh well it's the air stage i'm gonna drop some bombs here well you were saying you're you're kind of running you've got enough ammo for fighters to have them because they only use one yeah but a lot more it depends on the plane doesn't it um yes i've got a bunch of

fighters at the moment that have ammunition and as we found out towards the end of today i've got a lot more that can strafe than i realized yes because we realized the labeling system is would you believe it flawed yeah but uh if you can do close air combat patrol which is basically all fighters you can also strive yeah we need to double check that because i don't know if that means you can um have a cap a close air patrol or combat air patrol against strafing or if it means you can strafe that's the only thing i can think of because it's d which i feel like would mean defense maybe maybe yeah we do need to confirm that because also strafing is very strong it's probably if you want to kill if you want to kill units it's the best use of your

ammo and planes yeah um the sort of cost per toe point removal is the most efficient of any kind of combat in the game yeah but with the like going all out thing as well we don't have the thing of like i've used all my stuff i can't do anything for 100 it's six turns so i don't think any supply issues are going to compound themselves too heavily yeah because it's months of our time but i'm less worried about the time aspect and more about the resource yeah ultimately this yes will take months of our time and if i you know blow all of my resources next week it's not a great it's not a great idea and yes for months i will continue to play without having those resources but i know that it's going to reset it's not a decade yeah i know at the end of this it changes

we can start again i'll learn something from it but when it comes to the full game i don't i don't know that i could live with myself knowing that i've ruined the next 10 years where i'm just going to be watching you win slowly but surely uh yeah it's such a yeah it's such an abstract thing to try and visualize it's sort of like seeing your own death it's such a a weird thing for a human to experience knowing that there's this thing that's coming and inevitable but you can't do anything about it i don't want to have that i do not want to live with that that's not something i can just go through each week knowing that's coming so yeah the the game is fun but i guess existentially uh poignant yeah i don't think that was maybe the original design i think it was just

meant to be a really complicated board game for the fun of it yeah and just all poke fun at other complicated board games and here we are no experience as well no what arrogant people we I wouldn't say arrogant, I'd say deeply naive. That's probably, I think, yeah, it's the other end of the spectrum, isn't it? Yeah, it's not. It's confidence or arrogance because you don't know anything, not I know a lot, so I'm confident. Yeah, we've went in the wrong angle of this.

Maybe if we were more arrogant, we wouldn't have done this. Yeah. But hey, it's for experienced wargamers and students of history, and by the time we finish it we'll be qualified to actually play it. We'll be the sages.

We'll be the people that people come to. Yeah. Our retirement home. Can't wait to tell the grandkids about this one. It's alright. They'll see me playing it.

They won't need to ask about it. I wasted most of my 30s. Most of. It's going to be all of my 30s and likely the majority of my 40s. Only a day a week.

Like I'm seen at my 20s playing this game. i mean yeah that's that's ridiculous it's like two months for me i should be going out partying or living it up that's how you see it your 20s isn't it life starts at 30 andy i hope so oh my god we can't play turning the light off has turned the podcast dark it has we we turned the big light off because your

Living Room Lightbulb has been out for about what, two, three weeks? Yeah. It was out for ages, and then you replaced it not too long ago. I went again immediately. Then you flicked it. Was it during the bad movie day? Yeah. We've decided recently, a bit of an insight into

what we do outside of the campaign for North Africa. Other stuff we don't enjoy, which we could be doing better stuff. We decided, me, you and a friend of ours, the one who actually introduced us to this game, so if anything, he's kind of the source of all these problems. Yeah. we decided to watch the the sony spider-verse movies the um the trilogy yeah we watched madame

webb dickheads ago and then we watched uh and then we watched craven the hunter a few weeks ago i think that's when the light went out yeah and then we watched morbius last week boy that's a bad film god they're really bad they're all really bad i think madame webb's the worst yeah followed by mobius and then craven's a sort of soulless four out of ten action film craven has a like some some great action sequences it's the poor man action film you know it's it's it's got some good action sequence it's fun uh russell crowe's just there he's there a lot he's there he's there a lot of the film but he really shouldn't be man and web is incoherent and just a mess and mobius took itself far too

seriously and also was a joke at the same time. Oh yeah. It's a... The ending just happens. It just eventually ceases to be. Which I feel like, to be fair, this podcast will also have as well. I feel like there's not going to be any grand spectacle. We'll just count up points

at the end and realise what's happened. Then go have a meal. Then we'll go have a meal. There has to be a winner. There has to be a meal. And in order for any of that to happen, there has to be accountability hence the podcast hence the people listening and hence all of the emails that you send to us what a perfect segue amazing that is just genuinely artistic so so before we jump into it you can get in touch at info at war with a mate.co.uk contact form on the website or the

instagram is at war with a mate it is and the website is war with a mate.co.uk we kept it all very simple and uniform for convenience and for your pleasure our website is ribbed for your pleasure it's not it's linked in the episode description but it's not ribbed uh so everyone who uh heard last week uh will know that uh well one we had technical hiccups and two that we were reading a very long email which we're going to continue the email came in from josh a lot of good questions we got through about half we'll do the other half now we will let's punch through so we we left the last one um with the the practice scenario question i guess um i guess we'll pick up with the next one um which makes sense which was uh is it subtle or solid never mind i just

saw your merch apologies your accents sometimes trick my ears um that is probably a reference to the catchphrase subtle humble and brave which was called i didn't realize sounded like solid subtle subtle subtle i don't really know where the solids come from on that probably me misspeaking subtle no i don't get it i'm i'm sorry buddy i i don't know josh i don't know where you got that from um i'm pretty sure i'm pretty sure josh is from yeah california he's mentioned um i don't know so subtle i don't know even that's probably not a very accurate representation of the accent as well um but yes that was the next point um so andy over to you will alternate i guess uh yeah follow-up merch question uh the wall with a hat uh not a hat

oh spinoff podcast announced oh my god spoiler the hat we were more with the wall of a mate logo has tremendous raw shack potential myself i see a pug with chunky headphones on i'm gonna have to go back and have a look at it me too actually well to realize josh some of these aren't questions these are just questions and comments these are comments on our accents and our hats uh if the game seems to be out of reach can you just surrender is it explicitly enumerated mechanic or merely a golden eject button on your minds um so i guess in theory we could surrender um but we're gonna play it through as far as possible before the game break unless the game breaks down totally so even if one of us wins via victory conditions if we're still in the game we're

thinking we're gonna play it out we'll probably see it out and see how much we can continue to play the game past the victory conditions just to see if the game can take that or if it breaks under the strain of sort of like monopoly where it's tipped one way or the other by halfway through and then you know who the winner is see if that does anything weird to the game well we'll play around with it but we we simply can't surrender no we've we've had this asked before whether or not we would ever sort of surrender and i just i don't think we can i feel like it's a disingenuous thing to do saying that we're gonna play the whole game and then if one of us starts to lose they just quit it's a funny thing to do i mean i'd be a very big bombshell to drop part way

through the podcast but i feel like it sort of ruins the whole the whole project so we're gonna play all 111 turns as long as the game allows us to and then we're gonna flip it and play the other sides against each other uh we're not um i don't know why you said that i've been saying it I'll talk you around. You find someone else to do this with the second time around, man. Fuck that. Absolutely not. I'm not doing this again. That's mad.

Are you worried about Stockholm Syndrome setting in? A sort of Jumanji-esque siren song luring you back in, or even making you like this game? So the luring you back in thing, I guess we've just touched on. Me, no. Andy, yes. Andy's already fallen for the siren song

of the campaign for North Africa. I think we're a little Stockholm Syndrome already i don't know if it's that i guess that's the issue with stockholm syndrome yeah or it's not that bad it's really long and complicated but you know we're talking like we're like 10 months in since we got the game now so since we started playing the game so i don't know maybe because i do like parts of this game i'll say that fairly unashamedly oh yeah some of the mechanics are fun the the tactical decisions that could be made i think the fact that we've gotten to the groove this now. It is actually just

enjoyable. Yeah. I don't hate the game. Hate the player, not the game. You don't have to hate the player either. I hate you. Oh, good. Not the game. I actually like the game more than you. That's crazy, isn't it? That really hurts, man. That probably will hurt. That was smart a little bit. Yeah, I'm gonna be

thinking about that later. Me and the game are going out for drinks next week. You're not invited actually. I would never take this game outside of your house. I mean, it would be insane. I'm terrified of this game getting anywhere near danger. Same for you, though. I would never let you get in danger, Andy.

Oh, thanks, buddy. As long as I can. Although there was a funny moment of danger a few weeks ago when we were here at yours and some guy just walked into your home. That was fun. Oh, yeah. Because that's an increasing thing. It's not going to make it into a common ground

because there's no common ground there. Why do people not understand how door numbers work? because we were just sat here hanging around at yours and then we just hear the door go and there's just someone in your fucking home he just walked in yeah and then i like when it was like what and he was like i'm looking for another he's like set a door number that's like a few doors down and it's like then go to that house don't just get that don't round up when it comes to door numbers don't just think well i've seen that i'm on like well this is the odd numbered side of the street and i guess this is close i've seen a few numbers down that are similar

i'll just guess it's easy buddy they go up in twos yeah so you just keep on going that way and you'll find it uh yeah scary stuff yeah next question yeah part of the illust part of the illustrating absurdity of this game is fuel can thickness is this an actual game mechanic or has the internet lied to me my memory is that the british had a metal shortage thus their fuel cans uh for cars evaporated quicker due to relative thinness i guess i know half the answer to this it is you've yeah basically it's not until i think about halfway through the game i evaporate three percent more fuel and water than you do you lose nine i lose six yeah i believe that's it and then i eventually i come down to six i think because i basically nick your jerry cans you

use jerry cans but i i didn't know it was due to the thinness or thickness of the can but that makes sense i didn't know if it was like the closure mechanism of the container or or something like that but i guess yeah the thickness would play a big part in that like the insulation of it maybe i genuinely don't know enough about fuel evaporation and how that occurs in real life to know how that occurred but you are absolutely right in that it does play into the game i just don't know what the real world translation is so the internet hasn't lied to you that's good sometimes the internet tells the truth once in a while once in a blue moon but for the most part doubt everything you read online are there any mechanics you think are missing no camels right

okay but that's but that's that's self-perpetuating that's the mechanic that the game created yeah the camels are mentioned the idea that we can move dead camels and in cargo holds and in planes but that's something the game decided to mention anyway richard berg put that in there as an easter egg to really torment us and we still have no clarity on that. There is I don't know how it would be included but I'd like to see

the intelligence layer so if you had like Enigma or something because we've talked about how everyone's reading each other's mail so I've like a sort of mechanic where you can request

specific maybe like once a turn yes like how many people are in this in this division or something like a scouting mission because we you did the enigma segment quite a while ago now we had a great email on the back of that where someone asked if there was any sort of rules around the enigma project in the in the game itself and you talked about that afterwards i think while we were playing the game about how this would be a cool idea and i really liked it yeah the idea of like you say sort of like a scout mission or like the same mechanics that the scout missions perform in the game which we've not actually done yet yeah but through a sort of abstracted enigma mechanism where maybe you yeah you intercept maybe you roll a die and it's every few turns or something and

you're all say a six and then you can pick a supply dump or a unit yeah or a truck convoy and you get some information about them and it's only for the commonwealth i think that would be quite cool yeah although the i think the the axis would get it as well just not you know how i we've talked about how they're bad but i can have two long-range desert group units the axis can have one of their i think desert commandos which are basically the same thing yeah yeah similar in the game i think they're functionally the same yeah yeah so like maybe uh both sides get it but one side gets more maybe yeah or a signal intelligence unit that works a bit like a sgsu and it's non-combat but it's got like a radius where you get more information or

something that would be really cool i think i think missing probably not the word i'd use but there's some cool stuff you could add you know what i feel like i've got richard berg syndrome yeah well the thing is richard berg would have done that well he was trying to implement stuff about the baking bread in italian bakeries affecting yeah like the guy was going to simulate not just the north african campaign but global economy during world war ii to then influence sections of the game but did this come out in 71 79 79 because enigma was declassified started to be declassified in 70s

Oh of course because it was still implemented in I think it was actually Africa still Oh yeah they sold a bunch of Enigma machines to third world countries saying they were unbreakable and not wanting to give the Bletchley Park stuff away so

and I also don't know how much of a splash it declassified with or if it was just sort of like documents appeared in a library and people started finding them but i reckon he would have included it if it had been more available to him because i guess it's not like nowadays where you hear something every other day about something being declassified not everything but something being declassified and when it is it's usually the case that there's

like a big sort of news hoo-ha about it and it's like this has been declassified this is where you can find it but back then you don't really have that in the 70s 80s 90s 2000s even you know you don't have that big thing of well you know this is where you can find this information here's a pdf that you can download it is a case of go to the library and search for this so but yeah i guess a lot of that stuff that you talked about that gets declassified with a big splash is like the jfk assassination or mlk assassination or like known events people have questions about yeah whereas no one was no one knew about no one was wanting answers about enigma because they didn't know it existed yeah and they didn't know that this stuff to declassify yeah so

i guess there's probably a bunch of you know intelligence agencies maybe in third world countries that were using it that have got a horrible news bullet in that day whereas they've declassified something about the intelligence network that we have really what is it it's that it was not an intelligence network broken 40 years ago and then they fucking sold them to us it's uh you know those um like uh invisible ink pens you used to get like as a kid and then you shine the uv light on it and it's like turns out the british have had the uv light this whole time when we've been writing an invisible link they can see this yeah well they invented the uv light and then because they had it they sold the invisible ink but yeah fun entrepreneurial

story about me in primary school i had a little invisible ink pen and it had like a dinosaur head at the top and you would like pull back the head and the uv light would shine out its mouth oh yeah and i used to offer uh tattoos to people in school where i would like they'd ask for a design and i i can't you know illustrate for shit but they would give me like 50 pens i would write on their arm in this invisible ink pen and then you would shine it on and it wouldn't really show i guess whatever way the ink works it doesn't really work on human skin that well but i would do that and that is i guess just a sign of how um free thinking i am any who's that one got away from us um so yeah next one uh more of an end game question but there are any mechanics worth changing and

fixing uh eg bullshit base 66 dice either to improve gameplay or a surge sanity a suit yeah um that's when i think almost come back to because i guess we don't know yet i would at this point say a percentile uh d100 yes would make more sense to me but i mean i think we play the game and then see what's broken uh at this point but things work fairly well i guess as well as that it's such a small thing it's so it's i say small it's so granular to be able to determine the difference between a percentile like d100 roll and a a sort of 66 system um because i don't i don't know how we'd measure the difference in that there will be a mathematical difference in it in terms of probability depending on how you scale things

i just don't know if we were to play this game back to back and somehow have complete lucid memory of the entire experience from start to finish through both playthroughs i don't even know even then that we would see the difference particularly no i think it would just be easier it's all just luck based so i i suppose yeah it would be more convenient the tables would make a lot more sense they'd look a lot prettier but uh some of them would actually break because some of them you have to add the die rolls together from the six and the six yeah so i suppose yeah in terms of stuff to fix the only thing i have seen and i can't remember if it was an email to us or if it was a post on reddit or something but somebody had mentioned the strafing mechanic

being overpowered yes and i think as we've realized how available it is it might get a censor that over the next few turns because yeah the fact you're strafing uh it was yeah it was from an email from uh matthew who's sent in a few rules things for us um yeah he points out like a plane shouldn't kill a hundred guys or 300 guys on one like strafing run yeah it is yeah i guess if you translate it to the real life losses it's incredibly overpowered yeah um however in the mechanics of the game it doesn't seem to be super game breaking however this is still formative stages and we've only started strafing really the last three op stages yeah so that might come to light however at the moment nothing i think we need to fix or even have the audacity to think

we can fix but that that might become apparent in time we'll be keeping an eye on that because that could be interesting to see uh come the end we've got um the next which is what is the most tactically brilliant move so far and why is it having andy keep the board in his home eliminating travel time for the next decade um that is probably it because i'm going to be worn down because i have to come from if it's a weekday usually work i have to come from to get here to yours or i mean god if it's a weekend then i need to you know make a real commute i need to hop on a train to get here yeah so i don't know man i think that's a very good point if it's if it's real tactician moves then it's that it's wearing me down outside of the game so that's a clever

move however i would say in terms of the game itself so far that's a really tough one yeah i think because we haven't seen them play out if you like because things are taking time to resolve like you sending the fourth black shits forwards to pin the seventh might end up being a great move doesn't feel it at the moment or they might get all me being aggressive with the seventh might end up being like i should have pulled them back or is this working because it's like disrupting formations and stuff so i think i think we need to see i think one of them how stuff plays out maybe one of them that comes to mind is the seventh taking out the fort madalena sgs use yeah i think that was a very good move

um disrupting my supply line i know with the trucks you got a dummy convoy when you what you you know you nabbed them but i think that was still a very good move disrupting my supply line like that so i think those two really stand out for me when you've done that if i had to blow my own trumpet a little bit i think the best decision i've made so far if it was a long i don't know that it'll be as effective in this scenario but if it was something that i would try and replicate in some way shape or form in the full game it would be bombing the road yes i think that might pay dividends that was definitely in the camp of stuff to see if it pays off but i think it will because it's just adding potential breakdowns which like if i send a convoy along from alexandria

to the front and because of those roads i lose four or five tanks yes that's more than you can do with air superiority attacking a unit directly because i don't i think there's only like one plane oh sorry one type of tank that can be hit with bombing runs and it's a late game uh when they've got much heavier armaments on planes so it's not anytime soon yeah so i don't even know that i could do that so maybe that will pay dividends i think part of the issue is we don't really know the game well we know the rules but we don't know the strategy all that well yeah so i think it might be hard for us to determine it but in terms of the stuff that impacted me personally the most where i was like oh god that has fucked me it is probably the taking out the

sgs use in fort madeleina when you got them and then also all the operations around the seventh armored division i think you keeping me on my toes there has been a very good move and i'm quite pleased with the bombing runs on the road but i don't know that it will have a big payoff yet i think it will especially because it's bombing one bit of road not that important bombing three bits of road like because of the way breakdowns work each road destroyed is like exponentially more effective yes because the breakdown value really stacks downs accumulate and the percentages work um and i think a lot it's more strategic than tactical but i think a lot of what's going to win one or the other of us the game is like how do i structure my convoys in terms of like

percentages of fuel verse water this stores this ammo yes a lot of the like game winning brilliant moves i think are going to happen on spreadsheets i think so yeah so it'll be interesting to see how it manifests but at the moment i think we might be able to green to know for sure but a very good question very thought-provoking question yeah we've got two more questions yeah uh would the existence of a completed playthrough of the game affect your journey i don't think so at this point i think when we started it might have but i think we're sort of we're in it now we're doing even if someone else does it uh godspeed but it'll be their vision and will be doing ours so i don't think it would affect it um i guess uh on the

other hand if i found out that someone else has finished it i'm not playing this ever again oh so it affects it completely yeah if i find out anyone else has finished this i'm binning the game okay so anyone who's been inspired to listen uh to play by listening don't um if you tell me i'm gonna i'm gonna ruin the game i'm gonna i'm gonna flip the board and i'm not gonna play anymore um i guess is the answer yeah so um no if it came to that if anything i'd be quite excited if someone else has finished this i'd be really excited to hear how that went um ideally someone who's not done a solo play i know that there's a few people out there that are doing a solo play i'd love to see how it goes with a full five aside team yes that would be really intriguing to hear about but but

yeah when we started this it was the novel idea of we'll be the first ones to finish this but now we're in so deep that I think the only way it would affect us is we'd probably want to find out about their story

and how it went for them yeah but maybe I don't know that anyone has if anyone has god please send them our way

we would love to hear about that I'd love to see your bootkeeping oh please show us your we need to know how you've kept

track of all of this shit oh god I hate doing the spreadsheets so if there is anyone who's finished it please reach out and save us from that

and the final question there was a legendary board game geeks thread about a guy and his friend playing the campaign for north africa it was a story commiserate with the length of the game for both and lengthy the story takes place across months then years i seem to remember a weekend they spent at a cabin in the woods trying to get a marathon session in bad weather and a creepy neighbor figured prominently alas i've been unable to find it again if there is a chance it could be found this is the audience for us uh i've actually read what he's talking about oh i looked for it i couldn't find it i don't think it's campaign for north africa i think it's maybe a world at war but it's another like

mega complex okay um and i think for whatever reason the thread on board game geeks is um i think the initial like post has been removed so there's a big comment fred but the actual write-up he did i think he's been isn't there or i i've read it once and i've not been able to find it since so okay sort of a similar boat to him all right well i'm gonna have to have a look at that because i want to i want to read that so if you can send me a link there andy at some point i couldn't find it i'll have another look um but yeah it was a good read um in terms of stuff like that we've um we've had a look through board game geeks actually we've been trying to sort of trawl through see if anyone else has got experiences playing it found some

people that have mentioned sort of experiences with it um we've got some fun um anecdotes actually which we might be able to get into at some point that people have shared which is is awesome um but uh you do sign it off josh with enjoying the podcast rooting hard for you two to complete the journey endeavor to cherish each other unequivocally joshua in california and thank you josh because you've given us two full mailbag sessions worth of material there really great questions as well yeah um if anyone else has any other questions um i mean joshua's went above and beyond with that there um some awesome stuff but you can you can realistically send anything it doesn't even need to be very well thought out we'll probably read the damn thing

i mean we spent like a month talking about heathcliff so yeah so whatever it is that you send over we'll enjoy it but any questions about the game anything around the game any curiosities you have around how we navigate this or just anything at all fire it on over um our email our instagram our website best way to get through to us in fact the only way to get through to us so that's how you do it but it's great it's great hearing from people and it's great taking a look

at other perspectives of the game, the history the history the history, shall we do some history hoping I kind of hypnotise you into doing a history segment oh horrible sound effect so

some history eh eh, ABC ABC Mr Cunningham Admiral Cunningham Not quite yet He's on the road Starting quote

The captain glared at me and said Your conduct boy has been most Reprehensible In what manner was never disclosed Meatface hasn't been Reprehensible He's been a stand up guy up until now at least Well we'll see he's been a bad boy

In this week's episode Oh he's been a bit of a rebel some ways yeah so he's headed back after his time in uh his time in africa fighting the boat as a 17 year old yeah most 17 year olds don't do that no i guess back then maybe more so yeah so he's back and he's assigned to hms hannibal which is a destroyer in the channel squadron it's also a very cool name for a ship yeah and one of history's greatest generals but he's a site he's again he's assigned with his buddy henry colt ah yes i know colt they're still together and uh lieutenant dicks the navigator slash instructor who gave them their

money back he's there oh yeah the whole gang's back together oh yeah so he boards on his 18th birthday 17th of january 1901 god that's a while ago yeah uh shortly after he joins uh queen victoria dies and his ships are part of the procession when a body's moved around and the sort of funeral stuff okay and then he spends the next seven months on the animal before moving on he's sent to a training ship at portsmouth where they train with brigs and sloops which are both sailing ships however he says sailing is dying hard at the time which is accurate and a fun way of saying it i think yeah sailing as as we know from your previous ones uh it's on the way out so he's working towards his seamanship exam which will

take place on his 19th birthday here he also outlines an issue he found with the training process which wouldn't be an issue today mid shipment have to serve three and a half years for being promoted to sub-lieutenant but they also must have reached the age of 19 which meant he had to wait six months before between having enough experience and being old enough to be promoted but he does get promoted he passes his seamanship exam with a first class certificate which gets him into the royal naval college at greenwich where performance here determines your place on a list of sub lieutenants which then determines promotions and assignments the higher you are the better your career potential right yeah yeah checks out when he gets there he realizes

he's behind he didn't have a proper naval instructor dicks was a navigator who was also teaching them but not a dedicated instructor and also he spent seven months not on his ships fighting the boa war so that's putting behind like people who have just spent three and a half years like learning hardcore oh right yeah despite this he's just near london and he describes himself as not working hard um distracted by uh the joys of london for a 19 year old that yeah fair enough but he does manage to get a star which basically means he stays in the course he doesn't get kicked out i was hardly surprised when i finished the navigation course although it included also such other subjects as mathematics, statistics, hydrostatics, physics, magnetism and electricity,

marine surveying, the steam engine and French. He gets a second class certificate in this and then he's also bitterly disappointed when he gets a second class for pilotage which is a subject he has a lot of interest in and he thought Dix had given him a really good basis in uh and he had as his career will go on to prove but uh gets a second class here not a first i love the idea of studying magnetism yeah i've been shocked by the curriculum it's it's wild it's like everything you've described it's so vast like the breadth of knowledge yeah they're getting into and bearing in mind that the guy is he's a sailor yeah and he's magnetism is on the curriculum yeah like i get you know that ties into parts of navigation

and engineering but back then 1901 like that that seems like a very niche subject a very niche area of study i think then i think there was a switch that happened at some point i'm not sure when but when education was it was only for the upper classes but it was about like enrichment not getting a job and then over time it's become about preparing you for work rather than personal development as much yeah well and it feels like the the education level almost dropped off as it became more widely available the stuff i always hear is that it was around the industrial revolution is where it really geared towards getting a job so i guess we're still kind of around that cusp we're still along that bell curve at the moment in this part

of history yeah and here's another issue he has at the time all survivors of the midshipmen of the doris who had been to the front in south africa were noted for early promotion his name was the only name omitted from the list although he'd served longer ashore than any of them thinking it had been a mistake his father wrote to the admiralty only to receive a chilly reply to the effect that captain bearcroft hadn't recommended him facing the lordships with bearcroft's certificate of glowing recommendation made no difference it's always been a mystery to him but he does suspect his relationship with lord roberts sort of soured it for him yeah so he comes away with a second class in gunnery and a certificate awarded stating he'd conducted

himself with sobriety but general conduct was not satisfactory there was an incident where they had to drop off supplies at this like hut on the training island and it was uh the the hut was locked the guy who was meant to be there wasn't there so they tried to get in through the window and he describes one of them of being overfed and having broke the window everyone involved got like a bad demerit there everyone else other than him protested it and got it removed he just didn't think to do it that sounds like good conduct he's taking the the sort of the stick yeah but he comes away with two ones and three twos doesn't entitle him to early promotion although they enable him to keep his position roughly where he is and he gets his

commission signed by the two chief admirals and king edward the seventh and after that he becomes a sub-lieutenant on the battleship implicable in the mediterranean captained by none other than a man proffero the bad oh the bad that was his yeah captain proffero but he was known as proffero the bad oh the detective no yeah he what this time has lost his big bushy black beard and is now played by gal gadot but apparently that somehow made him more intimidating because he has these huge jowls he's also getting old and kind of ill so he's angry and short-fused and worse than ever that's what you want in any sort of leader yeah an example of this is at the first sunday rounds i attended prof rose horny i fell upon the chest of drawers in the flat where the midshipman lived

he blazed with anger when i was midshipman i lived in my chest and sometimes bathed in it too throw those damn things overboard so he just makes a throw all the furniture out what a bitter man oh yeah and because of this abc doesn't like serving on this ship so he takes a position on a destroyer called the locust and at this point he's responsible for discipline efficiency and cleanliness on board the ship and he's also been training midshipmen and cadets for a while at this point and his students tend to do well they like place well in regattas or sports games when they're allowed to participate the locust is eventually decommissioned and he moves to another ship and here's a little bit of him being bad the locust had a crack pulling uh

whaler which is like a smaller ship that's attached to it which had always done in well in regattas we asked to take her with us to the orwell his new ship which was refused by the dockyard admiral so while the two ships lay alongside each other the gunner and i changed the boats shortly after a letter arrived through the usual official channels asking why the locust had returned a brand new whaler to the boat slip this causes caption captain some uh perturbation so he volunteers to deal with the matter i put the letter on the wardroom fire and we heard no more about it he has become a little tyke now yeah there's also a bit where they're using some newly created um like instrument to test firing ranges on guns and stuff and his description of

this i think applies a lot to a lot of modern technology as well but it's the extreme ingenuity of this instrument rather blinds one to its absolute uselessness that's a great phrase i might have to use that yeah in modern conversation that was contemporary fit yeah so after this on the 13th of may 1908 he gets command of his own ship for the first time the torpedo boat 14 and during gunnery exercises on this ship i'll say it here i fired about a dozen 12 pound practice projectiles into bembridge which is a small town on the south coast that's not where you can fire ammunition buddy and was rather intimidated by the subsequent court of inquiry however i came out of it unscathed as it appeared the target ship had towed the target too close to the shore

so he does get out of it but he doesn't shell a town and also it doesn't really sound like there's much contrition there he doesn't really take much responsibility about i don't think anyone was hurt or anything in the end but no he doesn't seem to be it's just oh it was an admin error they moved the target one more notable event in 1908 uh his father dies uh unknown illness but he spent several weeks attending to his affairs here this is where he also runs back into his brother who's now part of the royal horse artillery alan cunningham okay don't know if you recognize the name i don't think so he's a very important general in the campaign for north africa oh really yeah so he's commanding the mediterranean fleet while his brother is a land general at the same

time oh okay very impressive family wow so they are yeah they've got a bit of a monopoly amongst the seas and the land so speed it up and set up for the next time he bounces through several more ships at this point some good some bad before he ends up on the scorpion which he'll command until 1918 we'll get into what he does aboard it next time but he has a very very interesting world war one oh i'm very interested to see what abc gets up to in world war one there's some there's some really remarkable stuff he's involved in but yeah um we'll get to we'll get to that down the line next we'll definitely do one more abc we'll get him up to world war ii but i think from there we'll move on uh because many of the events he's involved in during world war ii like probably

deserve their own two-part episodes like as just the event yeah i i think it does seem to be the case that there's there's probably yeah because this isn't the first time actually that we've had a history segment that's led up to world war ii or the campaign for north africa itself yeah where we've we've decided you know well you've decided that there's there's more history around that time that's worth picking up at a later date so i'm i'm more than happy to break this up however needs be for these these chronicles of abc and whoever so yeah whatever you feel works best but you're the one doing the research you are the man in the chair i think we'll set him up as a character so when we get to these things later we can pull from his book and we know the guy

involved but yeah one or two more abc episodes and then we'll you know i've got this thing now where for each of these history segments i get so attached to these characters it's like a little bedtime story like i'll just be sat here part way through the episode and like all right we've got the mail segment done it's time to listen to time listen to abc or let's hear what happened with enigma or what did the 20th married get up to who did they bayonet this time and then it comes to the last segment and i'm like oh i like these guys though like this is my weekly routine i'm gonna have to say goodbye to them again i'm learning a lot and it's it's all interesting stuff and it's all very very well delivered you should be very proud of this history segment and it because

it's uh it's it's good research and it's very well put together so i i have said uh previously that um there's a a friend of mine a friend of the podcast who uh has explained that you sound like a a very charismatic history teacher i'll take it it's a good very happy with that that's a compliment that's a compliment i had one of my history teachers at school was probably my favorite teacher um my history teachers weren't really my favorites yeah looking back it was actually a business studies teacher who was one of my favorites yeah uh to reminisce to reminisce of the days of yesteryear uh this is just a distraction though andy i know what you're doing You're trying to lure me into a false sense of security.

You want me to be your friend. You want me to think that what you're doing is just objectively good. That you're a kind man. That you're a good man. I've seen you behind my lines. You took my trucks. Then you try to move further in. The only reason that you didn't is because I've got artillery there.

And it's motorized. You're going to be blowing up the fourth black shirts next week. Indeed. So how are we going to fix this? This animosity that's being built? Well, I've invented a new type of democracy. And now for something nicer. a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro

i'm recording is that democracy common ground it is so for those uninitiated that we've mentioned at the start of this episode you'll also be shocked to hear that we have a mechanic within the podcast want to make sure that we diffuse the tensions between one another every single week through a section called common ground and this allows us to come together and agree on a topic of one's choosing we alternate the topic each week i pick then you pick and vice versa and this week andy it's you it is indeed and how are you going to bring us together what is the topic you'd like us to try and agree on

this week new type of democracy right i was worried that that actually was going to be the type it is okay right let's let's hear this it's based on the concept the best leaders don't want to lead so what we're doing it's like jury duty for elected officials anyone who's eligible to vote declares like for a party or they're an independent the percentage of votes that party get is a then a random lottery of people who are signed up for that party if you don't vote or you spoil your ballot you voted independent which anyone independent who hasn't signed up for party goes into a raffle and you just pick the mps at random along the same like percentages that have been voted for so you get rid of any career politicians you get you know nice normal

working random selection of people make up the government are you on board with this no why not have you seen harry potter and the philosopher's stone or read the book both okay in that you may remember that dumbledore hides the philosopher's stone in the mirror of erised yep and the reason being is because only people who don't want it can have it like being an mp that's right system and do you remember what the stone can do make you immortal that's right now that's kind of what you're doing here except i'm giving you a shitty job for four years but the thing is when you get the stone you may not want it mostly because you're disinterested you don't really get it but then i guarantee if any random git got the philosopher's stone and realized they could live

forever with it i bet then they'd want the stone then they're interested in the stone and that's what i'm concerned about here then we're taking the stone off them in four years right okay but however long the government lasts and this isn't necessarily for britain i'd recommend any country trying this okay so that's worse because i guarantee in to an extent some countries have done this i don't think they have i just don't think it's through any sort of democratic process or to be fair what you're describing by the way isn't really democracy it is because your votes determine the blocks of how much each party's represented well i guess first of all my point is that uh voting will voting patterns will change dramatically based

on this yes um probably not in a good way in a very unpredictable way um i i think this is a a bin fire i think we throw a wrench in the works things have been working predictably and badly and if what you're trying to do is throw a wrench in the works you've you've succeeded in your mission are you aware of the peter principle i don't know what that is it's where you rise to your level of incompetence oh yes sorry i do know what and they think the way around it is actually if you promoted people at random you might end up with better results because people don't settle at that level of incompetence you might yeah i'm doing that to the government no and i know that the government is flawed in most countries if not all i know that there are huge political

failings across the board globally i know that there are better ways to do things i don't know that this is it we won't know until we try this is possibly your most ambitious common ground yet because you're talking about the complete reshaping of global politics we'll just give it a go right that's what i'm concerned about you because you give this a go and yeah you're looking at like four or five years of of you know one person in who's some random guy just some complete stranger to the political environment. Well, that's good. That's bad.

But do you want to hear some pros? I'm going to need to hear some pros, or this is not going to be a successful common ground. If you want educated, good leaders, you just have to educate everyone to a high level. It'll help education. Okay, that is ideologically completely fine. I agree with that on a conceptual level completely.

another pro people better be on their best behavior because anytime they could become elected officials who face a lot of scrutiny i i again in the principle i agree with that i don't know that that will carry over because i think the system will adapt around that and create some sort of immunity for these people who will become and i'm going to bring this up now political puppets Because that is what will happen Well I do have some cons I'm willing to admit Sorry you've given me two pros I've shot one of them down

And I also only agree with the other one In concept Let's hear the cons The system of choosing people Is incredibly open to corruption And the other con Is that it's basically chaos It's meant to be democracy

and you open up with it's incredibly corrupt and that it's chaos right okay so how do we get some common ground well Andy here's you have a different you have a new type of democracy

I've got a new solution for common ground because you know what we haven't done before we haven't come together on the side of not agreeing with the common ground maybe sometimes it's fine to just accept that an idea was bad maybe we can both agree to scrap the common ground idea this one in particular can i admit something

yes i wrote this on sunday when i was pretty drunk and it's making a lot less sense to me now so you you came up with a common ground idea when you were drunk yep not the first time you've sorry i just need to add i need to find a bit more context to this sorry so when you're writing these drunk common ground ideas um oh i'm so pumped so do you just sit down and you're like right it's time to brainstorm some common ground is that just when you've had a drink or or do you sit down i was coming back from the pub writing this at a bus stop

with people around me being very happy with myself and how do you feel now Andy? I think the common ground can be that this is a bad and shameful idea

this is not this is not a sound thought from a sound man here's a common ground we can agree on i should proofread these when i'm sober you can't change your common ground suggestion just because your common ground suggestion was bad i think maybe the the the global political situation can't be decided by random chance especially when that random chance is proposed by a drunk man at a bus stop

I think really that's what we've learned here maybe we should have some smaller scale common ground you went too big you went too big a vicarist myself

oh there he is with his wings of wax waiting for a bus stinking of ale oh you you beautiful monster

you need to you need to proofread these I do you know what's crazy as well the fact that we were playing the game and I said you got your common ground for this week Andy and you went yeah yeah I've got it in fact I've got a few

now I'm worried how many did you write at this bus stop Right, so it's not one Because if it was one, you would say it's just this one, James There's one of a There's two There's two more From that bus stop journey

Which one was written first? This So the delirium of being drunk and tired Will have set in even more so On the others? Yes Yeah, we'll get to them in two and four weeks Proofread these

I will i'll i'll polish him up what i will say is that's a it's an entertaining idea andy but it's not one i can in good conscience agree with and i can agree with that if that ain't common ground i don't know what is sometimes the best change is no change at all what one inspiring message to end on i think we've learned a lot today andy we have i think we've learned that sending your men that far west was a bad idea yep i think we've learned that when it comes to playing the game um it's not really affected by anyone else finishing it if anything that's an inspiring thing and there are positives to be learned from that

indeed and when it comes to common ground i maybe find a different environment to think these up in because i don't know what inspired that to happen but now i'm worried that all of them that you've written for the next two weeks are some sort of political opportunistic vendetta against peace they're not uh they're not political this one was yeah this one was well i think we've we've done ourselves justice here i think we i don't know about that we agreed to put that one to bed i think that's fine i think we can say our farewells it's been another good week we're happy to have you listening and we'd be even more happy to have you fire something over to us that we can have a little read of discuss it perhaps maybe panic over it depends how confusing

it is but you can get in touch with us at info what with a mate.co.uk our instagram what with mate our website what were the mate.co.uk and from me james oh and me andy stay humble and brave oh my god he was waiting for some random assignment of what to say i thought you were gonna do your own thing i guess my own thing is uh vote normally and don't don't assign power to people at random that's insane

yeah yes it just is I agree well let's just get you on out of there into the deserts of your mind

you guys have a good night's sleep and we'll hear you next time thanks for listening farewell We'll be right back.