War With A Mate - Episode 50: Anniversary

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Join Andy and James, a year after obtaining SPI’s The Campaign For North Africa and beginning this ridiculous debacle, as they discuss what the plan was and what the plan became.War With A Mate is supporting Movember this year, with James sporting a truly embarrassing excuse of a moustache. For those that can give to a valuable charity, it would mean the world (plus if we hit £1,000 James will get a silly tattoo!)https://movember.com/m/15500393?mc=1Movember - Home

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because we have your number. Hello. It's almost time for What With A Mate, but it's currently November, which is a good chance to do something good through the means of Movember, which, for me, currently consists of sporting a pretty embarrassing moustache.

Got rid of the facial hair I did have. Now I have a little bit of facial hair, and I do not suit a moustache. It's coming in all right. We'll see how it is. Been a few days. I only shaved a few days ago. I didn't shave on the 1st of November, so I can feel the kind of stubble. It's odd having to shave all the time, but it is for a good cause. Movember is in support of the prevention of the death of young men,

whether that's through the mental health crisis of suicide, whether that's through prostate cancer or testicular cancer. It's raising awareness and money for people who really are in need of that. so i'm raising money for that what we'll be doing is popping a link in the description of this episode i'm aiming for a raising of a hundred pounds and if i hit that goal i'll show you all this ridiculous excuse for a mustache come the end of november and also committed to should we hit a thousand pounds okay you're doing this i'll even get a what were they made tattoo something some description something silly probably but i'll do that and i'm terrified of

tattoos but it's an important cause it's one that i value it's close to my heart and if you have a friend or anyone you know who you haven't talked to in a while or someone you feel needs a talking too have that conversation look after your own health look after your friend's health reach out talk to people doesn't matter how it is whatever you say whatever you do even if it's playing a very long board game for a very long time it doesn't matter how you hang out or how you look out for another person it's just important that you do but that's enough of the important stuff let's get on to the less important nonsensical stuff let's do some war with a mate thank you Thank you.

one today oh no no non-sequitur it's not a non-sequitur it's a callback it's also accurate there's a reason that i need to wear a hoodie and a coat at the moment it's chilly out there it's november it is notoriously a cold part of the year how are you getting on temperature wise andy i'm completely fine i'm sitting here in a t-shirt sure you don't have cold feet nope no nice warm toesies that's good because this is the anniversary special of war with a mate yeah specifically the anniversary uh since the game arrived that's right one year ago today we received a package and that package was none other than spi's the campaign for north africa which contained the next year of our lives uh well it's contained the last year of our lives

it's contained a lot longer and we're here to look back on what that year has entailed to go over the experience from that box arriving in our hands all the way to this very moment here so i guess should we do what we didn't do in the first episode and introduce what this is in a succinct way yes so this is war with a mate the podcast in which me james me andy will be playing all of spi's the campaign for north africa a very long board game that's never been finished by anyone and it will not take us the eight years we first said it would we're looking at at the moment around 48 years yeah we were really focused on that eight years but uh we were we we decided in order to get an idea is uh how things have changed and what we were thinking back then

we've sat down this evening and we've listened back to all of episode one hello welcome to war with a mate oh wow recording recording a podcast and introducing it first episode wow cliche and yeah you know what i think it holds up i think i think it's it's just solid good family fun i mean yes there's some references of course to the nazis and to uh i suppose the adult themes of nutrition but for the most part the thing holds up and it gives a real insight as to what we were thinking back then compared to where we are now there's some carryover there's more carryover than i thought but uh there's also quite a few differences yes expectations have changed the the experience overall has changed but one thing that hasn't changed is is what we're doing and that is

that's the through line that's got us here it stayed consistent and listening back it was interesting to hear us talking about our experience with long form board games yeah and i guess talking about risk we'll transition that into our experience with war gaming and massive board games so by the sounds of it you've you've dealt with risk you just know how to play that now well we've played risk we sorry we started playing risk once and then we stopped playing halfway through because we got we got bored because we talked about dungeons and dragons as our only experience but now that experience has changed it's dungeons and dragons on the campaign for north africa that's right we are not experienced war gamers the game says it's for experienced war gamers and

histories of histories of students my god students of history some things just do not change no students of history we're you know what we are sort of more so than we were yeah i think that has changed by the in eight years um we'll be uh we'll be able to fit that category we will yeah i wasn't we haven't had any more experience with massive board games it has made me want to play some not to this scale definitely not to this scale i'm not doing this again but it has like we've had like listeners send in some that look interesting and also the fact we can't handle this is like oh i would be interested in playing some of them it's just between this and dnd that's a lot of game time to add a third yeah like game night two or something yeah we've got lives yeah

i mean our lives are consumed mostly by board games by the sounds of it one of them dnd we love this one we we've been playing it for a long time i wouldn't say love i'd say but i'm growing fond of it it's it's got a charm to it yes which i didn't expect our experience with war games i think we we didn't really understand how much of a factor that was going to be in this i think because it was such a joke to us it seemed so far-fetched to have any war game experience it seems so much of a novelty that even if we had played war games before this was such a leap beyond that anyway that there's no real marginal difference between having experience and having no experience so we thought it was fine to come in with no experience yeah it's like i've not run

100 meters so i'm gonna do a marathon yeah it's at this point it didn't really matter so we went into it without that and it's i don't know how much of this will translate to another board game ever i don't know how much of it is but the thing that i think weirdly some of it will and also some of it is transferring outside of board games altogether into what i'm much better at google sheets now that's fair enough i've developed bookkeeping skills i didn't have you ever thought about a career in accountancy i have now it it only relates to i guess fictional airplanes though yeah well real airplanes not even fictional ones just very very old planes well i'm sure the air force manage all of their airplanes in a google sheet so you think that you now have the

qualifications to be a military accountant i certainly more so than i did a year ago i'll give you that i mean i can't really argue with that it's a fact it's just a it's not really a salient one for an interview i wouldn't bring that up i wouldn't go for the job to be honest man i hate to cut your legs out from under you like this but this is not the experience you think it is i don't know i'm telling you i don't know i'm telling you i'm not gonna you know run things but i could help out you want to be an assistant yeah that's your aspiration i'm gonna intern at the army no one aspires to be an assistant surely everyone who is an assistant they want to get to the point where they're they're filling the role that

they're an assistant too take dwight shrewd for example from the u.s office counterpoint the woman from devil wears prada i don't think she always wanted to be an assistant but then she did and she didn't want to take over yeah but that yeah but that's still not her wanting to be an assistant i don't think she was like i'll just say perpetually an assistant i am of course saying this from the position of a man who's never seen devil wears prada that's a good flick i hear the book and the film are vastly different wouldn't know i think it's the case the book's really bad and the film's quite good the film is good okay so you an avid an avid watcher yeah not often that you've seen something i haven't devil wears prada 2 is coming out soon there's a sequel yeah they

should have called it devil wears more prada go like the diehard root of sequel name prada harder oh that's what we should do we should do a sequel to this podcast called more with a mate i don't know that sounds like it's got adult connotations that i won't get into well we've got a decade to work that out wait right okay so that's that's something that for some reason listening back to episode one we kept on saying it'll be eight years we've really locked in eight years but uh do you feel like we're an eighth of the way through this andy we haven't started oh dear which is another funny um a funny part actually we did say in the first episode in a couple of episodes time we'll have started the game well that was our catchphrase our catchphrase

was we started the game we kept on saying we started it and we hadn't done that absolutely not we are still you know i feel like we're in the midst of we're perpetually in that we've not started the game still we're in the practice scenario we can't even say it now and it'd be honest that's that's insane the the fun thing we did talk about amongst all of that though was having read the rules the sense of regret we had about the project so with your first look over the rules how are you uh how are you feeling in a word regret does that is that a feeling regrets a feeling regrets definitely a feeling i'm feeling regret i think you more so than me but it was yeah it was definitely daunting because we spent time reading those rules and it was

it was an experience i think in hindsight we did that bit kind of wrong i think we could have done that very differently because i put the fear of god and myself reading those rules for the first like 10 11 episodes and it would have been so much easier i think if we just started playing the game it was a lot of mind over matter and a lot of the rules don't come up all the time in fact to the point where there's rules that we've read and we've come back to them we've completely missed them and then had to re-read them

so that first run over was not pointless I wouldn't go that far but really what did it give us materially well I think most board games you just get a grip off by playing them in context and I think because we haven't played games like this before

we thought oh it's so big you need to have it all in your head before you start but because it's so big you can't really especially when you're not linking things to pieces or things actually happening it's all like white boxed in your head yeah we had the audacity i think we could like memorize part of the rules after the first run through i remembered parts i remember that parts existed but if anything that caused more confusion down the line because one there are so many rules that i'll have an idea of you know oh well there's

something to do with land movement and it's like yeah but there's so many different faucets of land movement that could be anything that could be related to trucks or the water they consume and i just get muddled up because it references so many different rules relevant to yeah take trucks for example not just in the truck segment but everywhere else and also then there's the like major rule mess ups we had I think because we read it and then had like gaps is like got it in our head that

guns didn't like load there wasn't like a concept of guns loading or of things having fuel tanks oh god that was such a bad one and I think regardless of how long we read rules for the first turn was always going to be a

oh we messed this up and this up and this up yeah we never could have got anything else from that because we we read through that we missed it the first time around we would have missed it every other read through until we started to hang on a minute this game has a notion of common sense to it and then turns out yes it does because there's that and there's all the addenda as well you not only have to memorize the rules if you're going that route but also all of the addenda yeah so some of the rules are just flat opposite to what they should be or incomplete well one of the corrections just says this rule is the opposite

of what it says it is in the addenda which actually comes around to a fun point we right before listening to episode one we watched the video that we took of us unboxing the game a year ago yeah that was a flash uh flash from a blast from the past flash from the past uh yeah i think is it too long for instagram we'll probably we are going to put it up we'll put on the website for sure and maybe we'll upload our first non-podcast youtube video yeah we'll definitely put it on youtube we'll definitely put it on the website if we can find a way to there's got to be a way to it'll be easier put on the website i don't know what the video cap is on instagram i don't know if 11 minutes is too long but if it's not if it's not too long it's probably too

long for the platform if you know what i mean yeah well i guess like instagram's quick stuff but yeah we can put it up wherever it can go up well let's face it i have faith that anyone who's found our podcast page for instagram is used to sticking with something for a long time i mean yes if you're scrolling through instagram reels and you come across it i reckon it'll get a skip but if someone is out there looking for it i think they'll enjoy that yeah so we'll put that up probably alongside this episode it's us unboxing the game for the first time our initial reactions knowing literally nothing yeah our raw reaction to everything all we know is that the gamers along at this point and the rough

gist of it so that was a fun watch. It's also got a cameo from our friend who introduced us to this game Jurassic Park friend. Yes he's in there, the guy who scuttled away under a rock instead of playing this with us. What a bastard shackled this rock

to us and then threw us overboard And we've also got a video of us punching the first pieces we punched so we'll get those two up for the year celebration they must have like a six week time gap between the two because it was a long period of time where yeah we didn't punch it until we were gonna actually start with stuff that was like mid mid-december maybe yeah that sounds right so that's yeah keep an eye out for that that was

that was fun to watch back and the the sense of regret that i had back then that sort of carried over for 10 episodes or so the first three months i was reflecting on this you had a sense of regret i think in hindsight i had a sense of denial where i was like we're gonna bottle this like i think in hindsight i was like you thought it was just gonna be wrapped up i wasn't like regretful or daunted or anything because i was like we won't stick to this but we we dropped a chunk of cash on the game that meant we couldn't and then we set the podcast up to really lock us in yeah i think when we punch the pieces out the game it drops the value of that game significantly yes so at that point we couldn't we couldn't even resell the game

and i think i think i always had it in my head that i was gonna stick with it i don't think the i think that's probably why i had that frustration and that that anger and fear because i knew i was going to stick with this and seeing how complicated it was i just really felt like i've misunderstood what i was getting into really underestimated it and i i genuinely did oh yeah i i underestimated this massively but it's now a year in feels comfortable yeah you mentioned in the first episode that you thought regret might set in yes two or three i don't see the regret setting in i think there might be other feelings that kick in maybe more frustration akin to the days of old yeah i think now it's not going to regret doing it it'll be frustration with the game or stuff

but it won't be like i wish we hadn't done this and i think that frustration for me it probably won't come from the rules being complicated like it did in the early days i think it might come from the situation i'm in in the game like the state of play yes it's an actual like the emotional reaction brought up by like the game rather than stuff around it yeah by losing parts of the game or my men being killed or trapped or any number of situations that are brought on by your actions essentially what i'm saying is i'm going to be angry at you yes and not the game well we know that yeah well i'm i'm often angry at you in and out of game just this seething set you just got one of those faces maybe that must be it just one of those very punchable face made for radio

uh-huh that's that's how i should uh that's how i should describe us on the the description of the podcast punchable faces made for radio but voices of an angel oh yeah yeah dulcet tones angelic um hypnotizing we're sort of the deron brown of the podcasting world until he starts a podcast he better not he better bloody not and if he does uh darren would you like to come on um yeah we'll talk i wouldn't listen to his podcast though because i'd end up sending him all my money or something weird yeah i wouldn't want to like have his output because i'd be scared well i keep on when i'm scrolling through tiktok i get these videos where it opens up and it's a guy and he's like in this video i'm gonna hypnotize you in 10

seconds and i'm like scroll past i don't want to get trapped in that do you not want to get hypnotized through a tiktok video you don't want to get locked into your chair and then you have to scroll until you get the unlock 10 seconds short you know what i think that's how tiktok works anyway oh right i think that locks you to the yeah the first one you get it locks you into the algorithm and then after that you're just locked in until i guess you're done wiping um it's a toilet reference i know skibbity toilet you heard of that nope it's big with the kids it's a michael bay is doing a film franchise on the the back of it oh about a toilet yeah i don't really understand it but it's it's like a big meme thing at the moment with with the youth

oh um what was i think the big meme now is six seven what eight nine but yeah it's just the numbers six seven are funny apparently i i genuinely think that is the the bit back in my day used to be six and nine oh oh well when we were going back through the episode um i did look at my phone battery and so it was 69 but we were making notes and stuff so i thought i'll not bring it up yeah just so you know so that's uh it's not the only thing we realized when we were listening back to the episode uh speaking of regret oh boy oh do we have do we have a fun little easter egg for you guys this is on me this is it's fun that you know this is the anniversary this is one year since we got the game and we're talking about the things we've learned um we've learned something

new today and it really speaks to the um inadequacies of our setup brains our brains just this thing as everyone knows it's just me and andy there's no one else doing this we've got no production team we've got no no managers no agents and for this particular fuck up importantly no graphic designers we we have no one to check these things and when it comes to our logo i'm sure you probably see it you probably can see it right now if you take a glance at your phone whatever device you're listening to this on you'll see our logo it's stood the test of time a whole year and i was very proud of it when i made it before we started playing i was too you know it's a it's a nice charming it reflects our capabilities lo-fi yes lo-fi is a good way to

put it it's the the two silhouettes over a sand dune with a a picture of the the game in the background uh it sort of encapsulates various parts of of what we're doing but we were sat there and i i edit the episodes but i don't look at the logo screen a whole lot and it was there sat watching that logo screen i i had the revelation that the map in the background is not the map of this game that's not from this board game Andy no it's from North Africa 41

it's a different fucking board game our logo does not have the campaign for North Africa logo the board game in the background it's a map from a different fucking game we've had this for a year

and we've only just realised now that the fucking logo is not a logo with this game in it this feels bad man it is bad it's just not on i don't i don't understand how it's taken this long i'm i'm genuinely quite shocked no one's pointed it out to us as well because no one else is playing the game that's a good point they're gonna look at that and go well that's the game matt these are the people we can rely on to talk about this game truly the logo is a picture of the game i'm sorry to say it guys nope we've we've let you down we

are as incompetent as we've always promised to be i i just have an urge to defend myself but there's not really much i can say the thing is it's not it's not a vital part of the the logo i think the logo is just a a holistic overview of what we're doing north africa board game two people the people aren't us either come to think of it the silhouettes aren't actually us yeah like i'm doing movember but i don't have a luxurious mustache like that and the the sand dunes that isn't a real sand dune from north africa that i know of yeah it is no no i i know i know all of the dunes in north africa save for three of them and unless that's one of those three which the odds of that are astronomically low so so yeah that's a fun that's a fun discovery

we'll be probably getting a new logos i think we're probably gonna have to you kind of have to hey it's a nice it's a nice demarcation of it being a year yeah so anyone listening now you were you're here for the old logo yeah you're the ogs in fact there are some people out there who've actually bought merchandise with our logo on and if that is the case you have something that is very rare and unique it's like a misprinted penny it is it is because that that's going to be gone from the world soon that logo is going to be scrubbed so that we can put something out there that is an accurate representation of the thing we're playing instead of a completely separate fucking board game this is oh a year on andy and are we really better

did we really get better at any of this some of it but not that well one thing one thing we did get better at we say in the first episode that along the way we are going to try and learn about the north african campaign but we are we're going to try and learn as we go we're going to try and pick up some some facts some information we'll try and learn a little bit about the campaign for north africa as we play the game about the campaign for north africa yes i'm going to try and do a bit of research bit of learning and that i will give us credit with we have done more and more importantly you have because you've brought uh save for one that i did you've brought a history segment to us every single week since we started the history segment

which was what like maybe 20 episodes in 15 i think maybe so we started it a while ago and we've kept true to that and it's been fantastic i've genuinely learned a lot about this portion of history and it's been through the lens of you i think if this was just me reading it i don't think i would have got around to this i don't think i would have had much of a focus on it i bought that book about the desert rats when we started playing the game and i've just said the catch raise started playing the game we haven't started playing the game um i bought that back then and i didn't really get into it i read about a third of it maybe and then i've now given it to you i didn't digest the information very much i feel like it's really difficult for me to capture that

kind of information like historical information in that format yeah when you've been reading it out the history segments have been so cool yeah i've really enjoyed it because i i wouldn't have looked into this like when when we were listening to the first episode we were like do you want to give some context on this it was like uh world war ii in north africa yeah that was that was it but yeah i've uh i've really enjoyed doing the history segments and learning it uh about this it's a very interesting conflict as well once you get into it it's got a lot of like unique stuff to it um the characters in this are crazy oh yeah i mean history segments that stand at 28th maori awesome they were they were fantastic yeah graziani is a madman uh like nine lives and an

absolute monster and also like i didn't know that was a libyan genocide yeah that's it this is the part of history something you we should know yeah like huge squares of history the devastation and cruelty that happens sort of in the the um you know tertiary elements of a war where you get all these like horrible things that happen and what is focused on is i mean world war ii of course the holocaust yeah is what springs to mind when people think of the immediate massive devastation of lives but there's so many other facets of pain and suffering that come from it you know just to keep things light yeah um and that's yeah that's that's one i don't know when i would have come across it beforehand and just some of the casual cruelty i mean the whole beating people to death

with uh dried fish yes the uh balbo yeah rising fascist stuff that's another one balbo you know time person of the year yeah like i missed that reprehensible but very interesting character and all the aircraft stuff was like an interesting period of history yeah like i know for a fact at some point i've went back and i've looked at all of the time like the time persons of the year and i would have seen the name balbo i don't think he was person of the year i think he got the like a month cover oh right okay yeah he wasn't oh i thought it was of the year no i think he got like when he would i'll have to double check but i think it's when the fair was on he was the cover for that like month or week or whatever but even so if you want to go back through time's front

covers it's uh they don't have a great hit hit rate for being on the right side of history because i don't with that because i don't know much about time other than it's person of the year i don't imagine the is the person of the year meant to be the the sort of the the person to be or is it just this is one of the most influential figures of this year i think it's more that than i would imagine yeah i hope so i think it's sort of who's been it's person of the year and like who's shaped the year potentially more than like this is our guy of the year yeah i'd hope so because a certain austrian failed painter made it as uh person of the year at one point i believe so yes that's that's hopefully not an aspirational and also like too late if it is

it was like late 30s when it was like everything was fully underway yeah at that point you've really missed the mark if you're aspiring to be this person yeah but times times change and we've i think become pretty steadfast students of history yeah we're getting there every week i'm learning you know a good sort of 20 minute lecture on a figure from history and i think having the context of the board game makes it more easy to digest not just the fact you're delivering it but i have something tangible to like tie around it too yeah and people that listen seem to really enjoy the history segment because a lot of the emails we get tie into a history segment you've done or recommendation for one in the future yeah and i really appreciate that like corrections that

have been sent in or ideas like the 28th maori someone sent them in to do a couple of others have been and i've got a huge list now of stuff people have sent in or found and then be like oh we should do an episode in this so yeah it's been really cool having that back and forth with the fans about the history segment as well i mean you've brought a lot to it because let's face it we i think just listening back to that first episode and how i know the 10 that followed went the tangents were i mean hey we had a hell of a time doing it but it's not really relevant stuff i mean huell mentioned in that first episode yes huell gets a mention ep one and that's just a recurring thing but we've we've dropped it a bit i think i had some stopping power for the first

dozen episodes oh it's stun lockdowns but now with the history segment with all of the other segments we've got some real structure to it it makes it easier to navigate and uh you know when it comes to editing it becomes a much easier thing to do and uh now it's my time to give you your flowers you've taken up all the editing and you've been adding sound effects and stings and voiceover things on the quotes and stuff so yeah i think the production value between this episode and what we're doing now is much better starting with the audio quality and stuff so the temptation by the way when i'm going to be listening back to this and not add a fart noise when you said sound effects is going to be so so difficult so if that is in there this is me explaining why

um well i did actually mention in that first episode that in the future i'll become hopefully an expert on editing which is quite a bold thing to say given some of the audio mishaps we've had in the past i thought this was the podcast where i run out of disc space halfway through a recording and then we restart again is that not what this is don't let the listeners peek behind the curtain the curtain is humanizers one that stands out is we had a comment on reddit fairly early doors i think it was after the first 10 or so that we released and someone was talking about the constant clattering of a wire in the background that was connected to the mic yeah it was before we had the mic stands and i've listened back to some of them over time and i remember listening

back to that one when i saw that comment and it's bad it is just every now and then just the sort of like clattering noises against microphones it must be pretty distracting to try and listen to that but we've we have changed things up i sort of enjoy the editing process it's like a weekly ritual now where i get into it and it's it's not really i think much of a transferable skill because it's i've learned the cadence of our you've learned what the sound waves of our like ums and ahs look like i actually have that and i know when we're laughing so i know to keep those bits in i can see the sort of spikes of laughing i know what your laugh looks like mine's slightly different so i don't know how well that will translate i feel like i'm locked in and too

specific but it's been fun getting to do that sort of thing i don't really expect to do the editing like when we started this i was just like the editing will just be done somehow we'll go to the free podcast editing service well thankfully what i do use is is audacity which is free and it's pretty easy to use i don't know if that's a good one or a bad one i had a conversation not too long ago with somebody who made a passing remark about how audacity isn't that great of a tool and i was like well i don't care it works it works it's what matters to me yeah i think that was a we could have spent ages doing mic like research on mics and sound boards and the perfect software and stuff but i think it's better to just hey if you're thinking of doing

it just start doing it and learn on the job same with like when we were trying to learn the rules all at the start it's just better to jump in and figure it out yeah we've got better as it went and we've all been working towards a towards a goal because we mentioned in that first episode the stakes yes they were there from the start yeah from day one there's always been a goal behind this and it's not just to finish the game for our own pride it's also to be fed to reflect the thousands of hours we will each put into this the stakes are one dinner to win a meal to win a meal episode one making a meal out of it that was it it was it was the foundation of this we were hungry so we thought let's buy the campaign for north africa and play it in its entirety so one

of us finally has to pay out for a meal and i don't know if you've given it much thought um but for context i guess if anyone is coming in fairly late on we are playing the whole game so that the winner gets a full sit-down meal paid for by the loser yeah those are still the stakes for this practice scenario we're doing of the first six turns it's just a kinder bueno on the line but that's still something i love a kinder bueno same and they just released a dark chocolate one so now you've got the white chocolate normal and this new dark chocolate one so we've got options for whoever wins well the milk chocolate would have been my go-to but now i think dark chocolate could actually be the front runner so i don't know if you want to put that budget aside

now andy i've been saving up for the for the bueno yeah good i know that uh that'll that'll really bankrupt you i'll put you on your on your knees where you belong really how rude how uncouth oh sorry is it this this is where i went too far this is the line because i've said some pretty nasty things to you on this podcast and it's all in jest usually and we are still playing for that have you given much thought as to what your meal would be yes no not really yeah the the tentative yes mean because i'm not asking for the answer but the fact you had to think about whether you've thought about it sort of indicates you haven't There's a restaurant I want to go to in Malta.

Is this the one that serves camel? No, I haven't actually found a camel restaurant. That's just an option. That's just a beautyful... No, this is just a restaurant my parents recommended in Malta that sounded really nice. It's also tangentially related to the game. Well, it's in Malta, so it's not tangentially.

It is related to the game. If it's on the map, then perfect. Oh, actually, I don't know if I showed you this, but there's a friend of mine who recently went to... I said recently. A little while ago went to Japan, and

on the flight there, they went over Egypt and Libya. And on the in-flight maps, where you can see where you are, like the location. We were doing it on the way to Budapest. And we were trying to spot rivers. Well, they showed me

a picture of the map, and it had Mersa Matruh, and it had Tobruk. And they listened to the podcast, and they were saying that it feels like seeing celebrities. If it's on the game map and I hear anything about it now, I'm like, oh, I know that from the game. And that's such a niche reference to have to pinpoint stuff from.

To mis-imitry. Yeah. Someone mentions Tobruk, and I'm like, oh, you mean from SPI's The Campaign for North Africa, not actual real-life Africa. The stakes are important because it keeps us measured. It keeps us subtle, humble, and brave Which doesn't get a mention for a few episodes

I think that might be the fifth episode Where we coined that Episode one does have deserts of our minds Yeah, that's been there from The failed recording Of the pilot You know what, that one was great And I'm so sad we've lost that

Loved that episode The recording is Only part of it, of course The gameplay, that's where it's at That's the core of it oh yeah and the gameplay we didn't really make things easy for ourselves and kind of intentionally the game is designed for 10 players one of the first things in the rule books is that each team should have five players on it yes to organize the various parts of the the strategy involved

yeah uh because there's that much to keep track on and we saw that and what we thought was we both don't have full friends each will join us and be part of this war and also no one else is going to commit to something this long and stupid I think honestly we wouldn't have been able, we mentioned in the first episode

we couldn't wrangle ten people to well eight other people to play with and that is still true but one, ten mics on a podcast would be genuinely unlistenable well no it would just be the chiefs just be the commanders

Oh, okay. So it'd still be two mics. Everyone else, they don't get any credits whatsoever. Oh, cool. In fact, I mean, let's be candid. That's what we do now. We have four players on each team. They don't know about the podcast.

Don't tell them. They don't know about the podcast. They're never going to find it. And that's that celebrity over there, the one on the sofa, starts blagging on his new... Is it a talk show or a movie? I think it's a docu-series, actually. It wasn't clear.

He was pretty hyped about it. Yeah. Well, he's a bit of a dirtbag, to be honest. I've noticed the sort of mess that's being left around here at the moment. Yeah, it's disgusting. It's your place, so I didn't want to talk to him about it. That feels like a you problem. I tried. He just won't listen.

They're too flippant these days. Yeah, he's too rich and powerful. Yeah, well, downward spiral in the rich department. I mean, he is living on my couch, so... Yeah, snoring as well. I hope that mic doesn't pick it up. But I think two players is definitely the way we... was the right way to go. We were going to have three.

we were jurassic park friend was going to be like kind of a ref yeah he was going to come in the funny thing is he offered to do the bootkeeping for the game which is the game which yeah looking back would be a very funny dynamic it would be fantastic if we could have taken him up on that the thing is he's such a um a good guy with spreadsheets and numbers and and just data i feel like he could have done that where instead of us having to use spreadsheets we could have been playing the game just tell him and then we could have just said sort of you know how many fuel points does this truck have and you would just rattle it off immediately so we would just have a person to talk to instead of spreadsheets to consult but it feels like a an active modern

day slavery jesus christ i mean it's it's just not an okay thing to do to a person no much like us not knowing what we were getting into he really wouldn't that would have been so much worse i would have felt so bad we would have had to cut the project early i do think cos it's posts because when it was made it was pencil and paper entirely i do think like google sheets and stuff have made it much more manageable to the point where i don't if for whatever if someone is listening and thinking about playing i don't think you need the 10 i mean you'd actually have a lot of people with not much on i think um i think two to three on a team would be the sweet spot yeah because i think at that point you have people to confer with and it would make it more of a social game

sort of like a long-running hobby and i think as a scenario that would be really fun i think if you did like graziani's offensive and you had teams of two or three and you do that over the series of like maybe a year or two and it's a fun chance to like bounce off each other and take on those rules maybe one guy does supplies one guy does combat one guy does air or maybe like sort of overseas and i think that would be a really fun way to do it but the reality was when we sat down to do this we knew it was going to be the full game because of the novelty of finishing it for the first time and we also knew we do not have eight people to bring on board with this certainly not eight people who are going to be willing to sacrifice so much time every week for most of

their life to do that because that's what this is going to be it's going to be most of our life it will be the thing we've done the longest when we finish it that's crazy that's just genuinely insane so the that aspect of it i think it was always going to be that there was no way around that and i think it's like you say it's very doable with two people yeah i think with it being pen and paper initially or pencil and paper because you don't want to write anything down permanent for this game no that's it's not like doing a crossword with a pen that's a flex yeah we we've we've streamlined a lot of stuff we've streamlined the the yeah the the rules the the the bookkeeping all of that's been condensed into digital form with because we do refer back

to the uh the tables usually when we're doing like combat or bombardments or anything like that we tend to refer to the paper booklet i find it a lot easier to find the tables in the paper one because it's like 15 pages well the thing is the pdf we have is all of it in one thing yes which means it's it's good but it's not great for just like flicking around finding what you need whereas the books are yeah much easier yeah because you've reformatted the pdf so we can now search it yes which is good for like specifics but it's not great for tables yeah because the tables are just tables that mention stuff that's been mentioned a thousand times in the rules yeah and then it's also it's got that thing where some of the tables are horizontal instead of vertical so it means you

have to then get down then you have to rotate the pdf and i can never remember the shortcut on the keyboard to turn stuff around so just turn the laptop yeah so i'm just stuck in a mode where i can't i can't figure it out technology is too much for me i should be doing this 40 years ago with pen and paper and eight more people. But I don't have a time machine, Andy. Not yet. You don't know.

If I had a time machine, I would use it to come back to this moment right now. Oh my god, he's here! Hello! Is that future you? Yeah, he's got a bit of a sing-song voice going on. It's from the future

where everything's a stage play. yeah i know i know the reference you're gonna make there yeah where science has made stage magic obsolete that's wild that's a it's a flash villain that is a flash villain with the dumbest motivation in fiction what does he want to come back for again because he just stopped that future happening or he wants to come back to somewhere where people are impressed by stage magic but isn't he one of the like one of the speedsters so he's really fast no his power's something else dumb like he's just good he's good at stage magic and he also has future tech is this darren brown again yeah you just described darren brown new running theme for the next year of the pod

darren brown is mysterio from spider-man he's not he's not he was clearly based on him though I think there's definitely lines to be drawn, but I think Mysterio is older. Because Mysterio's been around in fiction for like 312 years. And Darren Brown's... Hide the run. And Darren Brown's like 20.

Yeah. Well, that's something that's existed from the first ep to now is our desire to go on tangents. Our inability to control ourselves. I think we control ourselves pretty well. Somewhat better. Although, listening back to the first episode, we did do an accidental common ground.

Yes, we did. The first accidental common ground is the Uber Eats free refills. If a restaurant offers free refills, they will ride back and forth between your home and the restaurant all day making those refills. Yeah, it was listening back to it, I realised that it's the exact same cadence of a common ground proposition. And it sort of resolves the same way as Common Ground. Yeah. So I think we clearly just had a thing in us where we wanted to let a tangent have its moment to breathe.

So we boxed it off into Common Ground. But that's been a really fun part of the podcast. Yeah, I don't know if anyone else enjoys it, but we have a lot of fun. Well, it also does trigger a lot of genuinely interesting emails and people, like, thoughtfully responding to the very dumb stuff we say. We just had one last week about the blimps.

Yeah. The airships, I think, is the catch-all term. and that that's a massive email of like very detailed interesting stuff based on like a very fro almost it's just stupid idea the fact that we we've drawn people in on these common ground segments feels um feels mean-spirited on our part that we've we've come here with the promise of a podcast about the north african campaign board game and we instead every week do that for a bit and then that's the thing that catch because we do it at the end as well yeah so it's the thing people are stuck with it's a capstone and then they send off a very detailed and thoughtful

email about stuff that has no place in this podcast but we do it anyway it's good though because if we didn't have that if we hadn't structured it in such a way those tangents would have become unmanageable because i know what we're like it's good i mean we're bad at we're doing them now but like it's related at least yes the fuel thing was not related it's good to funnel some of that into the back of the and it helps quarantine that it helps keep it you know uh light yeah because we do need to be pals by the end of this i guess if we're not doing a common ground in the traditional sense this week but the common ground in theory for this week would be was it a good idea to do this yes i i would i would have to agree with a yes i'd have

to go with a yes on this it was the easiest one we've done we we talked about in episode one how it would be a very long drawn out and arduous process it's going to be poorly thought out poorly thought out it's going to be brilliantly entertaining it's going to be captivating it's going to be motivating for some of you it's going to be touching it's going to be beautiful it's going to be long-winded and it's going to go on for years it's going to go on for nigh on a decade I also think I refer to it as inspiring and touching so some of that's an abject lie

but it is long and it is drawn out so what do you feel about the game now Andy this long drawn out process I feel really good about the game at the minute, it happened a few weeks ago

which sort of shocked me to it but we spent, we banked an episode in case we couldn't do it for a week and uh a few weeks ago we spent that banked episode and i was missing it like i genuinely wasn't expecting to be like oh i wish wish we played this week like it it felt it felt for me yeah the same way where anytime we have a lot because sometimes we record on different days which means we can have anywhere from like a 10-day gap sometimes in between sessions of play and i do find myself thinking i haven't played this game

in a long time and it's not the sense of you know oh i feel like i'm it's it's like you know when you're not at work for a while and it feels like you're gonna forget something yeah i think at first i had that fear but now it's the thought of well i i kind of want to play it again i want to get my turn done i want to do this next portion i've got some ideas i want to and i've never had that when it's a truck day that's coming up but i do have it when it's usually land movement is a big one yeah when i know that there's going to be stuff moved around on the ground and i'm going to get to play around with where my guys go i really enjoy that now and i did not think that would be the case especially those first 10 apps i thought that this was going to be something i suffer

through the whole time and that was going to be the joke that the fun part of it was going to be i hate doing this but that's going to be some level of enjoyment yeah it's not it's actually a game i'm enjoying playing which is a very very great thing to have run into where it's like we were thinking this is like oh it's going to be us getting through something horrible as the entertaining thing uh and it's not horrible really like it's a lot of fun yeah i think we struggled with the idea because we we heard about it we thought we'd do it as a joke and we've stuck with it at first kind of as a joke but it's become more than a joke it's actually a game that we're getting into learning the rules was definitely the hardest part but that's we did

that to ourselves because of the way we structured that if we just got on with it first time around there were some things we needed to change though um the the white not the whiteboard the um the picture frame idea yeah well i think honestly there's two i think big like barriers to entry that probably are why it's not being completed which is one as you mentioned like sorting the board out just the physical space it's going to take up in your house and because of the amount of stuff you need to be able to have it set up like at all times basically yeah like if you're trying to come in and like the setup was an hour yeah the setup was an hour and that was early days and we've got more stuff on the map now yeah that was when it

was just stuff that was already there and now we have to keep track of where things are moving to we'd have to refer to a spreadsheet every single time and it would change every single week yeah it would be a nightmare uh well actually it wouldn't change every week because we normally have four or five hours i guess yeah not every week so if anything in that instance it would change every few months it would have slowed it even more yeah i think the other barrier entry is there's so much work to do to start turn one yeah like so many spreadsheets to set up and things like that i think those two barriers are pretty huge to like getting in and actually playing it yeah the bookkeeping is a huge thing because if you're going to start this game and i

think if anyone is out there who's considering playing this game or is just sort of curious about that set of process one i guess you've come to the right place it's kind of the idea here but the second is it is doable i think when we heard about this we thought it was completely unplayable in a fundamental sense yeah we weren't and it still might be where we get deep into it and things start to system start to unravel but for now at least it doesn't seem to that's going to be the case and like it it works yeah because a board game of this length and the fact it hasn't been play tested means that there might be an aspect of entropy where the game rules that are working for the first 10 20 turns stop working because of the rate of breakdown the resource

availability the way that the turns are structured for movement it might just become a case that the gulf between those things goes you know grows further and further apart and then you don't have the means to play the game with those rule sets that worked early we're not running into that anytime soon i think i reckon we've got through at least half of the game before we come across anything like that if it does exist but the the initial setup if anyone does want to play this it can be done getting the game itself might be a bit difficult finding the space to play it is very much dependent on what your living situation is or if you've got a like a game shop nearby like a board game store i know a lot of those have like play spaces but you'd need to have it out

or find a way to pack it up if you are going to i recommend our plan genuinely works get some picture frames again it kind of may make the resale value of the game and its storage a bit worse but it's a consistent and reliable means to then pick the game up you can pack it up you can do it it's the bootkeeping and the admin thing that's the most daunting thing when you're setting it up we've also we have made the bootkeeping more difficult for ourselves than we had to yes because we want to keep a log so we can sort of trace things through rather than just like replacing things on one sheet yeah we're not like scratching out and replacing yeah because the idea for when we've got the the full game going which we promised in episode one to get

going from day dot which never manifested because we're still it's such a like an alpha version of had bookkeeping that if we try to share this at the moment it changes so much throughout it's sort of a jumbled mess we've also got some paper copies of notes and amendments to various sheets well i think that's part of why the scenario has been so important is like what i thought my bookkeeping would be needed to be again like hits the rubber meets the road we actually play and it's like no i missed a lot of stuff or this stuff wasn't as important so yeah at the minute i'm spread between paper and uh documents but i've been shaping the documents getting them ready like templates and stuff for when we actually do play i'll be able to go fully digital and then that's

when we'll like share them i think both will share regular updates of where we're at like maybe every at the end of each turn we'll put the things out for that turn yes um i think it would also be good for us to put up the starting docks so that if anyone does want to play they don't have to do all that themselves yes I think that's only fair

we shouldn't gatekeep this horrible experience that we've streamlined no we'll try and make it easier for other people it would be really cool if others started to play as well to hear that experience because that's something we still haven't really heard a whole lot of yes we do have one thing potentially coming up

yes we do have an anecdote of another person who played the game, or at least had the game, which they're kind enough to share. That's something we'll look to put out there. We've had a lot of waxings ourselves as to sharing the gameplay in different ways.

A live stream is something we're pretty certain we will actually be doing. Yes, at the start we thought it would be complete. Just unwatchably unentertaining. Yeah. We're not going to be recording during the gameplay because that's just going to be us trying to read rulebooks

get confused and frustrated a lot of a lot of radio silence dead air and i don't think that'll be fun um but i think as we get smoother and smoother uh that is something that will happen a movement stage a land movement stage where we have maybe already decided what the movement will be and then it's actually moving the pieces yeah i think you work out like breakdown and cpa and fuel expenditure and stuff beforehand yeah so we can come in and do like a real yeah rapid fire like this is this is what it looks like in like a flow exactly it'll be less of a i imagine typical live stream of constant fun action and more case of giving a chance for people to see how those sessions play out we are looking at that that will that will happen that is now on the

cards we're just sorting out the logistics we will be doing that might be quite a while but hopefully not like years no i would imagine possibly in this scenario we might get a land movement bit done in this scenario but we're going to do that and if anyone does have any other ideas of how this can be shared we know about sharing the bookkeeping sharing more pictures reliably come the full game we will be doing that it's the thing is with this podcast we did this as a means to keep ourselves accountable it was to try and keep track of the game itself but also to share it with other people so if there's another way that people want to digest this another way it can be more accessible let us know we're interested in that people have already shared

stuff in the past and it's been great getting the feedback that not only people are listening to it but that people have particular ways that they want to see and hear from things i think that's that's a real a real boon the accountability tool aspect of things has changed quite a bit if we know there's a risk of people listening to this and then halfway through we stop it's it's going online where people can just hurl abuse at the nature of the podcast yeah this is this is the shackle around our angle to make sure we can't get away i mean even if no one ever listens and then like two years down the line someone comes across this and there's seven episodes that's just gonna be embarrassing i would say this is still an

accountability tool but it feels like it's developed as a project let's turn from a like joking like shame tool to like a oh we've got a bunch of people listening who seem to really enjoy it and keep sending us really cool shit and yeah it's become a really fun back and forth yeah the element that i just completely didn't expect it's become probably one of the best parts of it i'd say so the best comfortably it's it went from a shame tool to a pride tool for me like i when i get to talk about it now because i still have the thing now which i had early days which at the time sort of was such a frustration where people would be inviting me to social events and be like well i do have this thing to do tonight and they'll be like well what are you

doing and i explain i'm playing a board game or sometimes learning the rules for a board game recording a podcast episode about it and then on a separate day editing said podcast and they were like oh you've got a podcast what's that about and i try and explain what i'm doing and i like this it's like a board game podcast but yes yes that's the genre that's that's what the genre is but as it went on and we had the history segment and we've had so many emails since we started reading out emails we've not had a single week where we didn't have emails to read even now we've got quite a few in the tank backed up and ready to go we've had people coming on there's guests we've had we've had guests on three occasions we've had

um on episode three we had the guys from echoes of war uh i'm craig from the pacific war channel but uh for the podcast we wanted to stop limiting ourself to the pacific war so now we're echoes of war big shout out to them because we hadn't released an episode yet no no we didn't set up zoom or whatever so uh we only had an hour you messed that up and had to rush them off but they were very generous with their time and if you do enjoy the history segment you should definitely check out their podcast uh they've got a 10 part series on uh the campaign for north africa uh it's really good a great overview but also a lot of detail so uh yeah definitely check those guys out i came across them when i started trying to learn more about the north african campaign

so when we'd ordered the game i listened to a few of their episodes for that that series and then i thought well see if these guys want to come on and they very generously gave their time to come on yeah like you said we haven't released anything they really took a shot in the dark with we said this is the general idea of what we're doing they shared some time they shared some cool information stuff that still calls back with relevance now like the cappuccino machines the really poor italian tanks that those guys have mentioned it then gurav um from echoes of war which they were used to be called the pacific war channel so if you're looking for them pacific war channel echoes of war um really cool history stuff on their side listen to that if you're into

history segments they are it's like a dedicated history segment podcast you can skip all the silly common ground and game recap stuff it's just pure unadulterated history and fun debate episodes where they'll do like the what ifs or like best generals or best admirals and stuff like that so it's all sorts of history they cover really cool thing i i'd recommend checking them out um and episode 25 we had cam sandwich cam how the devil are you doing well how's it going dudes yes that was a very cool one because i watched his channel that felt a bit almost surreal yeah that was like have meat yeah meat over the internet but it's like someone you've actually watched their stuff a real full circle moment as well because when we

found the game we watched that video that gave the holistic breakdown of what the game was and that's around that i don't know if we watched that before or after we bought the game i think we watched it when our friend told us about it we were like looking it up and that was like the top youtube video and then we all watched it together yeah that sounds about right yeah so we watched that and then on the back of that we we managed to get cam on as a guest really fun episode really cool guy great stuff if anything board game related that you're interested in he covers the weird and wonderful when it comes to board games yes his uh worst he had us on a little snippet for his uh worst game of all time tournament yes i think we were we were more down

on the game at that time than we are now which is probably fun to look back at the difference there but uh yeah really cool meet and calm yeah we had um we had something to say about the game for his segment his um yeah his tournament and it was it was a an earnest opinion of it but i think it was much more of a a nihilistic view on the game around that time we we'd started playing hey there it is again we'd started playing but we did have a very like you say a very different outlook i think we were coming off the frustration of learning the rules and we i think turn two we got into a flow yeah turn two we definitely got into a better course right in the middle of that sort of turning point yeah so yeah um i think yeah our opinions have changed since then i think it's

comfortable to say but he was a great guest and our final guest up to this date was episode 38 we had breakup gaming society we had nate please welcome to the stage it's nate of breakup gaming society hello everybody and uh surreptitious war game viewers throughout the world another great guy with a very unique spin on an idea which is covering hip-hop booze and board games all in one podcast and very eloquently he like yes lays it out it's very entertaining speaker so it's very cool to uh get to talk to him as well um i think of the guests we've had on his maybe is the closest in general structure to what we do in that he's covering a board game different one each week but he also covers other aspects of his own enjoyments which is um you'll have a look into

different pretty obscure alcohols and then also has a hip-hop track of the week it does feel like the sort of mismatch hodgepodge segment idea which we've kind of got going on but his is far more broad in what he covers and the guy uh speaks like a thespian like honestly the way that his podcast is produced is so great of a listen it's the kind of thing you can stick on in the background and enjoy it with very little attention or you can hone in and listen to every word and you'll get enjoyment both ways yeah so give him a listen as well so those those are the guests we've had but the real core of what's changed the experience for us from this being uh an accountability shame tool to being something we're excited to put out every week is just the wild

level of engagement and support from everyone who's listened because we i make a joke in the first episode about people disengaging about five minutes in so we're down to two listeners early days we had like a handful of listeners like an actual literal handful of listeners and now we knew them all personally yeah it was people that i'd harangued into listening to the podcast it was people that i'd bullied or coerced that i knew in real life into spending an hour of their week listening to this and all supportive i will admit but now we've got people from all across the world mostly chicago it would seem chicago australia we've got people who've bought merch from us yeah we've got people who send in emails some people have sent more than one email

and pretty detailed ones at that and the fact that we've had people say that this is something they look forward to every week and this is something that you know makes their their friday that much more enjoyable when they're at work when they're on their commute we've had people plan day trips out to go see various landmarks on the back of listening to this we've got to see a picture of someone flipping off balboa's monument which is a fantastic picture it's so good that's that's on the instagram um it's it's so bizarre because when we started this off it was as a joke to ourselves because we had some spare time and we thought it'll be fun to finish a board game no else has finished we sincerely did not think we would have more than a few people we know

listening to this and now the fact that we have so many people listening to this from all over the world and people who enjoy this and want to send stuff to us and want to engage in the way that they have it it's it's pretty humbling oh yeah subtle humble and brave um it's it's just crazy and we we really do appreciate it sincerely thank you for listening to this because it's two guys playing a really long board game we did not think people would be as engaged as they are we really appreciate it means the world to us yeah incredibly grateful and just the quality of emails we've all got like consistently has been just awesome we've had people doing extra research we've had people send us like arrow we mentioned last week but we also we've mentioned things and

people have sent in the stuff they know or extra stuff as well it's just i'm always excited when i see a little notification on my phone that we've got an email through because it's always a good read we've we um i remember we were in budapest airport on the way back from our holiday um in the summer and we had an email pop up there and i was sat in the terminal reading that and the fact that i was like you know yeah fair enough it was the back end of the holiday but i'm like i'm spending part of my holiday reading this email and it's an exciting part of the holiday yeah it's getting to read this that was the one about the um baseball not it was baseball basketball yes that's been very cool as well hearing about what other people's projects and

stuff they've got going on is uh yeah other people's sort of wacky side projects um and apart from that you know people who have bought them we've got a guy um rick rick if you're listening to this which i know you probably are um shout out to you because he has um not only bought some of our merch but he's been repping it um sort of across the world sort of thing um been firing over pictures of him wearing it listening to episodes in various places he's went to which is crazy so that has it's really transformed what this was and now it's feels like we're getting a fun back and forth and it's not just us playing the game it feels like we do actually have other people here watching and as a crowd we're not just shouting into the void

yeah we've got people who are backing us and you've all said that in your emails it it's it's a big thing and it's going to be a long thing and it really takes the pressure of it being so long when everyone's cheering us on but anyway enough about you this this is about this is about us all right we're the ones playing the board game let's not let's not forget that we're the ones who are taking on this gargantuan task this this monumentous ordeal and i think we're we're heroes for that wouldn't you say that andy it's a callback to episode one where he kept trying to call himself hero i think i've earned that now you're closer to it i've earned it okay if mjolnir was here right now i could lift that bad boy up in a heartbeat well i admire

your self-belief so you don't think you could lift me only wow that's i don't want it you're pathetic i'm rejecting molnia it's not rejecting me no that's not how that works that no no that that's like going to like a strongman tournament well you know when they lift the huge boulders and going over and going i am the strongest man ever but i'm refusing to lift that don't nod what the fuck is a nod in this situation that i'm agreeing with your allegory so you bring that yes i'm agreeing it's ridiculous okay so you agree that you're wrong yeah okay and the hero thing where we where do we stand with well loop background well i'm looping background 50 episodes no no there's not an every 50 episode thing we need a definitive answer now okay you're

a hero oh my god he said it you spineless coward i just wanted to move on oh my god you hear that everyone only has no integrity you'll just give it up on the spot i think that's in character with the rejecting it's all sort of the same well of insecurity well not lifting me all near isn't an insecurity it's a it's it's a it's a being unworthy it's not about being insecure it's about being no but saying i'm rejecting the hammer that's because you already can't lift it it's sort of a schrodinger's thing if i don't try to lift it i could uh you i don't know i i reckon we should get mjolnir on as our next guest oh that'd be good i just what do you think mjolnir thank you for that my issue is i don't want the conversation with mjolnir to get too

heavy but I have no doubt that sparks would fly to thunderous applause god damn it it's a year on it's all the same and it's going to keep on being the same

we've just got more of this, we've got another 58 years of this so buckle in we'll keep refining things as we go but the nonsense will continue we'll try and get a new logo, one with the actual board game on it oh god oh we we need a we need to book our ideas up andy yeah what is this

well start as you mean to go on well that's sort of what happens if you figure out as you go well we're doing just that we're figuring out as we go and next week we'll be back we'll be playing the game we're playing the campaign for north africa and we'll be doing that every week for the foreseeable future that's just how this goes so I guess from me James me Andy stay soul humble and brave

in the deserts of your minds goodnight We'll see you next time. Thank you.