War With A Mate - Episode 60: Deserts Of Our Minds

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

The guys fully embrace the future they have made for themselves as a victor is declared in the Practice Scenario.

hello and welcome to war with a mate with me james hey andy and this is this is it This is the end of the scenario. There's been a victor declared. There's been a victor for the scenario. It's not the end. We are keeping the scenario going, but we have a victor. Okay, we didn't... This is it.

Okay. It's all done. Never to be revisited. Thanks for joining us at War with a Mate. You'll never see from us again. It's not even what we would do if we weren't saying we'd finish the scenario. Yeah, that's it. We've finished the scenario.

We pack up our bags. we take our doubloons and we ride off into the sunset right we're singing off different hymn sheets but i've got the doubloons it's over yes you've won the scenario i i managed to at long last after a year of playing this godforsaken beautiful horrible game i've won the Graziani's offensive scenario. Didn't think I'd be doing that in January. No, well

until last time we played we didn't think about it at all and then it abruptly became very real. All of a sudden the victory conditions were a part of the game and today that came to a head and we finally ended

in terms of the win conditions we ended the scenario um as a caveat yes as annie mentioned we will be continuing to play the scenario out over the remaining three turns to see what happens to make sure we've got complete familiarity with the rules because a few things cropped up today that we haven't actually visited before so there's still plenty of areas that we can get some knowledge from oh yeah but we've we've actually ticked off what would end the scenario if we were just playing this to have a fun time and end it yeah which no one is because no one does this hasn't been done for fun i think at any point in history

i think anyone who plays it it's some sort of experiment it is actually fun it's it's yeah i mean i enjoy it moment to moment but now that i look back and it's been a year and this doesn't feel as grandiose as i thought it might i think it's because it kind of just ended because because i ticked boxes yeah and i like you did take the stuff but like i just vacated that because i didn't think it was important and then suddenly it's like oh now you've lost everything yeah it this was this was very surreal we've been playing this for a year i guess we'll we'll go over what happened today yeah then we can maybe look back at what happened in the broader sense yeah yeah it's very strange to have finally ticked off what makes up the Graziani's offensive

halfway through that scenario's run length as well yeah it's meant to run six turns we've finished it at the final upstage of turn three so the exact halfway point yeah and it did have a real flashy end it was a hell of a day of play today yeah there were more combats than i think we've done in any well definitely more than we've done in any other play session maybe combined over the majority of the game because we clashed like 10 battles or something yeah we clashed over and over and all over the map yeah at city barani we just kept on going at it your seventh armor division really lived up to the reputation they've been building in the history segment because they would not let up and it was only thanks to a rule that we

clarified today that i was able to hold my own against them yeah because it's the uh you can just not retreat if you lose and take an extra 10 which if you're holding an objective means you'd rather just do that yeah well in this situation it was either i take the extra 10 losses and hold city barani or i lose the chance to win yeah and the play state that it's been left in at the end of this technical victory that i found it's not boding well this is a flash in the pan and i think over the next three turns it's going to look very very different i will say uh there's a bit of saltiness on my part but uh to be expected yeah it has been a year it's more because it came down to a technicality and it came down to again us not really understanding not even just the rules

just the win conditions something that we didn't really revisit much at all i think it's they just felt really distant and then you looked at them and you're like oh fuck we like i could have won last turn if i'd looked at them before and then you won it really it was it didn't realize how like knife edge it was the game state that we had was so fragile and we didn't realize until we looked at those win conditions because either one of us could have lost in that very same upstage if one or two things I think one thing on either side had went differently mine was redistributing the trucks

and I've gone after your last truck convoy with the 11 for SARS yeah before I split off my trucks then that would have been it so we've come to an end of it and I think it's been a very it did exactly what we

set out for it to do it taught us the rules oh yeah and more than just like rules it's also like strategy like how you should handle your supply lines that sort of thing it went in a few stages the first was how do we learn the rules yeah well i think before that how do we actually get the game set up in a playable way because we couldn't take the game apart and put it back up every week we did the magnets then it was what are the rules and that's that's still something i guess you could

say is in progress and then beyond that it's how do you implement the rules into a strategy and actually play the game not just in the sense of i'm using the rules to progress turns but how do you use that to win and that's still something i wouldn't say i've completely done because my my win is technical my win is i've met the conditions for it yeah but we've just kind of stumbled into the situation i wasn't working towards this for five or six weeks i realized last week that i'm on the cusp of winning and just quickly pulled something out the bag to meet those conditions and i feel like that's also part of why we need to keep going because it feels very disingenuous to shut this off here and go well that's it done let's continue with the full game

because we've not really got to a point where i feel like i'm playing each week with an objective in mind apart from take this place take that place none of it ever connected into one full strategy winning this game so today we started off with your movement wrapping up yes and it was a big one because we left last week knowing that if i lose my position in city barani then this whole thing falls apart and i i can't win so you pushed hard you pushed gave a bloody good go the fourth and the seventh so they tackled four or five divisions at various points yeah so the seventh armored division the fourth indian division and who else was sitting with the seventh uh they had a tank uh second second or seventh for all tank regiment was just on them yes so

they made a push along the coastline yeah they pushed in against the um 63rd serene and they they fought back however it wasn't enough the mismatch was insane when you first rolled up and you told me those numbers i was terrified the differentials that you work out um we've talked about this before but to recap the differentials you go through are the size of the units that are clashing so um if it's division versus division it's fairly well it is equal there's no difference if it's division versus battalion that's it it's two it's a if it's battalion it's four i think isn't it oh yeah yeah so that differentiates the modifier by four and then there's a few in between of course so that came into play however that was that was

balanced i believe we 63rd being a yeah i don't i think we had it was a later fight where the division yeah later on it became a bit more of a factor but that was flat the next big thing that changes is morale morale factors into things massively and my morale for the most part in my units starts off bad ironically the only ones that i can recall off the top of my head who have positive morale are the saharan detachment yeah and yeah we'll get to them we certainly will so i was already on the back foot and then your cohesion level affects morale because you roll on a table at the start of combat based on your cohesion it could detriment your morale the law even surrender yes which happened to the saharans when they first showed up at alexandria they

showed up and um because their cohesion was i think minus 15 at that point it led to a surrender result and in this situation my cohesion was already a little bit lower than i would like it to be so my morale dropped further which led to a difference of about four i think it was in this fight uh yeah i've got the between mine i think panned out at minus three yeah the first one was a four different it was typically about a four difference so we're looking at a four difference before we factor in the units that are being used in terms of the the strength points the toe strength so when it came down to it you ended up dropping i believe it was 12 actuals 12 actual toe points yeah which the thing we mentioned it before but the way you work that out is each unit

has a close assault and a close defense rating but if you're attacking you times that by the toe and that gives you a score like i got 120 odd and then you divide that by 10 and round it to get the actual the actual which is what you use and i had i think it came out in that instance to maybe like 48 so rounded to 5 um because of the division by 10 so a big mismatch already so that was a difference of 11 i think it yeah it fell between 11 12 something around that region which is into the the worst column in the close assault table which is where there's a little divider between the other numbers and the overrun section which meant in that combat everything was fair game you could attack um my back face i didn't have any back guns to be fair i put everything

forward i went all in with this fight normally losses are from what you've assigned to the fight if you get an overrun losses are from everything in the hex yes which meant some heavy losses because i understandably was pushed back at the end of that fight i did i think zero damage to you i don't think you lost anyone in that first fight so i was pushed a hex back i was forced to retreat by a hex so you advanced and as you advanced the groups that you had split because the fourth indian division was now poised to take on a different group while the seventh pushed on to city barani to city barani they that's when we had the big mismatch because there was the thing with one you had a tank unit that split off because it was pinned yeah then my division

attacked so that was four and then i think four from the morale that's it because previously the trivially detachment uh trivially regiment sorry my tank regiment had a bit of a running on the road and one of the groups were pinned one of my army units so they broke off and stayed behind later on linking back up with the group so they were the they were the wall that the seventh armoured came up against yeah so the seventh armoured division versus i think it was eight tanks who all died i think um no those ones survived oh you took out all eight tanks that the 63rd had that was it all of those tanks were destroyed in that first fight and my rationale between um them being the ones that were killed is because every time you fought them you kept

on pinning those tanks so i thought well i'll get rid of them yeah they'll be the loss you captured half of them the other half were destroyed which meant the seventh progressed and then were facing up against the first libyan and city barani well they took on those eight tanks that remained absolutely blasted them they had to retreat um and then yes from there you was you were sat at the gates you were right in front of city barani and the fourth indian were slightly south yeah they were ready to come up as well they were up against the that was the first libyan first libyan were in city barani that's right yes it was the matri i don't know your guys i'm trying to think you you give me a moment it's on the map yep he's leaning off a chair with his head in between the

maps any luck i can't see from the map now because we then did movement afterwards i can't remember who it was this is bad but um i might be able to quickly consult my spreadsheets actually you basically they were against a not division right that's right yes they were against a a smaller group who was it i can't remember now it wasn't the milady division they showed up later cirrhosis or something no that was that was the serene that was the 63rd um i'll get it back up in a little bit um i'll i'll figure that out just for my own sanity you had another running yes is the the crux so the the fourth were held back a little bit and then you you pushed on to city with the seventh and that's when you encountered the first libyan and now the tanks that were also

being pushed back so that conflict was a bit of a an issue for me oh it was it was the 63rd serene yes sorry yes it was because they just got moved back a little bit yeah yeah and then they came in and attacked on yours but we'll get to it that's right that all makes sense now it's been a chaotic day guys it really has it's been so much combat so much combat and i needed to win i didn't really win any of it but all in all yeah so yes you continued your push Sidi Barani was now under assault but I was still hopeful that there was going to be some result on my end that didn't come instead the first Libyan just got pounded by the 7th Armoured Division and then they should have retreated but you found out that you could not retreat and spend 10% yeah so I was looking

at the table on the close assault and it said one of the results is retreat which we've seen before and it mandates retreat of anywhere from one to three hexes and it says you do that or you suffer additional losses and i thought well that's interesting because i'd quite like to suffer additional losses if it means not retreating lo and behold in the rules you can suffer an additional 10 loss if you cannot or choose not to carry out this retreat and i thought well 10 extra losses i'll happily take that if it means sticking it out so i did just that i stuck it out so they were battered following that battering you battered them again they still stuck it out took even more losses 40 the first time i think and then 35 or 35 and then 40 so you you took

off 40 and then another 40 of 60 it was bad i lost more than half of the first libyan division however they held themselves in place and that was when i was weighing up do i burn through because i'd have to kill them to the man to get the hex and it was sort of a i could maybe give this a go but because of the way that the losses are percentages i'd need to win like four or five fights i think yes it would be a lot of fights to win to gradually work it down you wouldn't be able to decimate them in the way you'd need within the time skill you had the time skill being that upstage which meant by the end of that you'd decided to relinquish your assault so so began my movement yes and with my movement i made a few moves that were fairly inane i shuffled around

some of the divisions so that they were closer to this front some of them i moved right into the front the maletti division the guys that were nearby uh the bardia garrison and the trivoli regiment they snaked around to come after the fourth so i had a division the trivoli regiment and the bardia garrison all ready and poised to take on the fourth indian division yep while the first libyans would try and take on with what they had left the seventh arm that was probably a fight you wouldn't have chosen but because they're in the hexes next to each other they have to but yeah and i also sent my remaining saharan guys the little break off from the detachment the ones left behind they went to alexandria and what did they do um they they got to the

gates and they surrendered instantly yeah as is the mo of the saharan detachment i've also realized that i need to get the because i've got the equipment i captured for like the guns and stuff but i'll also need the trucks yeah yeah you need my trucks that's a shame they don't really have anything in there so it's pointless and i just need trucks i can fill them up with stuff from cairo and alexandria i'd love more trucks well speaking of trucks yeah the last bit of movement i made that was well i guess not the last because it's a very important last bit of movement i made but i did move the to what was originally the tabroot garrison back into bardia where they were before to take on your guys the truck bandits the 11th hussars and the fusiliers

that have decided to perch themselves in bardia and i really battered them sent a division after i did and i took some of them prisoner no you killed the first nefemblin fusiliers because they had one toe point left and you they surrendered no sorry they yes you bombed you bombarded the Hazars so they were pinned, which meant the yeah, which meant the first Royal Northumberland Fusiliers just surrendered

and then you attacked again It was not the result I wanted because some of them are still in there. I still have Bardia, yeah I don't love that, but what I did love was my final bit of movement which was to move the Blackshirts the second and third

all the way along to Tobruk and then the third split off and went further down south and then broke off 20 of their trucks to become a truck convoy. Which met the conditions of a supply line. And that was it. That was all I needed. So we played out the combats. I was completely ineffective against the 4th Indian Division. They did 20% against me.

I lost 20% of those guys. You lost 0%. the saharans shown up at alexandria surrendered or immediately hearing that the rest of their group had surrendered previously they thought that's the going trend so let's do it and that was that that was it that was the the wrap-up of movement and therefore the wrap-up of the wind conditions yeah because the you just had to get a supply from to brook and then to brooks within 40, so light trucks of Sidi Birani

and then the rest of it you were much more comfortably supplying. Yes. So it means that's it. That wraps up that scenario. The win conditions were met. We'll be picking up at the truck day next time because we've still got trucks to do for this offstage, but I have

everything I need to have won. It felt like a very good offstage for me if it wasn't for the win condition. yeah it was a great upstage for me you made incredible pushes um with minimal losses absolutely hammered my forces my first libyan division is completely crippled i can't really use them effectively as a division anymore yeah so going further into the scenario i don't know

that i'm going to have any real might to hold city barani yeah i'm gonna probably have to pull out the first libyan which is funny that we're playing this out for the rest of these turns because it's it's just a mess now yeah so but i'm gonna try and uh i've realized i can't come up because i ignored sea work which means i basically couldn't win the first two if i take to brook i get the top level one so i'm gonna try and go for that i can see you holding to brooke by the end of this yeah i mean i was i went into it because i was like i need to dislodge them i'm gonna throw the divisions at them yeah they've performed so well incredibly insane the fact that i had a division up against the fourth and they were

bolstered by a tank regiment and some additional guys on top of that a whole garrison from bardia which was by the way incredible with their barrage yeah i barraged you with the maximum amount of barrage that i can hit i had nine guns in there some of them had nine barrage points and like six toe that's yeah so it was just a an absolute bloodbath with that barrage managed to pin down your tanks with complete ease nearly took off a toe point as well while i was there but all in all this is not going to look well for the the rest of the scenario i'm going to be absolutely battered however i will do so with that slight sugar rush that little buzz of a kinder bueno and i'm still not sure which one i'm going to pick andy you gotta let me know before next time i've got a i've

got a the option of a milk chocolate or white chocolate i think they do dark chocolate kinder buenos the shop i'll be getting from also has the dark ones are you gonna get from the shop near yours i mean yeah i'm not gonna they're not rare it's the shop next to yours is like 10 steps from your front door yes i never thought that that would be where we get it from i thought it would be years down the line we'd have moved you'd be in a different home you know somewhere nice quiet in the suburbs but no it's just the shop right next to yours the same one we go to every time you play to pick up provisions so okay i guess it's maybe this is interesting because it's i feel like it's one of those shops where they don't replace stock all too often for some

items i feel like the kinder bueno while it's delicious maybe not a particularly great selling snack there so do you think there's a possibility that we pick up a kinder bueno that's been there for most of our playtime i i'm partial to a kinder bueno so i've been rotating their stock on a kinder bueno you bastard you've taken my kinder bueno the one that belonged to me the one that was mined by rice and it was delicious well enjoy because it's the last kinder bueno you'll ever have that wasn't a i'm gonna keep having you're not allowed kinder buenos that wasn't a thing by the same merit when i win a meal at the end of the full game not allowed to eat you can't have meals anymore you can eat but you can only snack oh okay light snacks and i guess you can

have breakfast because i don't count that as a meal that's just incorrect we'll get to that out of Common Ground in the future. That's insane. They call it the most important meal of the day. No, it's not. Breakfast is a snack. There's certain conditions that a breakfast has to meet for it to be a meal, and I know for a fact that 99% of breakfasts

do not fit my criteria for a meal. What? Yeah. It's a specific... I'm not going to get into it. Do that next week in Common Ground. I really want to argue with you about that. So, Andy, at the end of the technical run of the Graziani's Offensive, a year in, how do you feel?

All right, I'm very happy about the game. The game's more fun than I thought it would be. Yes. Which has made me... A lot of the nervousness from when we were up to episode 20 of, like, this is going to be genuinely unpleasant for a decade. That's gone. Yes.

especially after today when i realized that when these heavy moments hit when all the ammo is flying through the air when the gloves have really been taken off this game gets heavy with the combat oh yeah and this was without the air force playing much of a role in it no we weirdly before this important land stage had a very non-confrontational air stage yeah i blew a part your road that was kind of it nothing massive happened in the air stage everything that happened important was on the ground and at the end of it i found myself a little bit exhilarated however when the wind hit it felt like the the calm after the storm like the storm had came and i won afterwards yeah and it was i won through situations feeling completely divorced from what

happened yes i needed to hold city barani but i'll be honest the moment i found out the retreat rule where you don't have to move you'd want it sort of felt like a foregone conclusion i kind of spoiled it for myself if i'd maybe played by the rules a bit and then brought it down to me having to drive you back out of city barani with my men it would have had a bit more zest to it but i wanted to win take the win yeah so we're now left with a scenario that i'm going to be ripped apart during i think i think so yeah i've got a lot of divisions that have just shown up to bolster my forces but my supply lines are a mess i've got one that technically runs from tabrook down to gearabub but that's not gonna do me any good you're not gonna actually run along that no that's a

garrison that i don't want to help they've been starving for turns oh so they'll be getting hit the start of turn four as well yeah they've had no stores the whole game i've not been i've been neglecting them massively i'm so you know what we're lucky they haven't just died lucky they haven't starved to death but they don't need to be alive i just need to be able to supply the place yeah now we're it's it's weird now knowing what the end feels like because now i i wonder what the end of the full game will look like that'll be because the win conditions on that are much more involved and i i don't think they're happening by accident not that happening by accident but the day that it ends oh that'll be nuts well the day that it ends it's just going to be counting up

points yeah it'll be 111 turns over and that is then it yeah this is so surreal i can't believe it's done i can't believe we've ticked off we've we've actually played one of the scenarios of the campaign for north africa we did what we set out to do at the start of this now we just need to do the rest of it yeah which is finish this we're only halfway through the practice run and then we have the full game to do but yeah we have been much faster i think we have which means this turn took about as long as turn two maybe but a lot more happened in it yes which is odd because you would have thought that's because we were looking at the end and we were trying to plan for it but it's not we just started to test out more things today i used anti-tank um as the combat

yeah segment for the first time that seemed pretty weak for my you need to have a lot of anti-tank yeah pick apart more than a few i at first went in looking at the raw tank points so before i divided it by 10 yeah and i thought i had a lot more i thought i had six i had one because it rounds up yeah so i had 0.6 which is pitiful i took out did i take off one tank no i didn't even take off one oh no that's right i got a 26 i needed a 31 yeah which weirdly because of the way the dice work 26 is one less than 31 in the game yeah i i don't like this dice system but stuff like that feels like a thing of the past complaining about the dice system yeah like i look back now it is weird and arcade but i've just got used to it yeah and i don't know that

the game now feels so familiar most of it anyway that when we go in and play this whole thing i feel like i'll be doing something that i'm at least familiar with i didn't think i'd feel so comfortable with the game yeah this early in i know it's been a year so it sounds silly but it's it still feels like there's so much of it unexplored yeah there's huge swathes of the rules that we'll scroll through to get the stuff that we need to look at each week and i'll come across stuff and i'll be like we don't look at that i've never looked at these sections of pages like for the production and some of that stuff yeah yeah like i've gently nudged into the idea of construction last turn which i've cancelled by moving my guys oh so the minefields minefields

not getting completed um that's that's over and done with the airstrip is still well the airfield is being repaired so that's still underway yeah that'll be done but the the ins and outs of the game the poisoning wells sweetening wells not really done that we haven't done that we've not really had much of a cause to water's never been an issue that is something that surprised me after a year is like water it's by far the easiest thing to manage water fuel a very very close second fuel is basically as easy to manage as water but you just get it from less places yes and you use it it feels like i never have worried about fuel the only guys that low on fuel with the saharan guys that just showed up in alexandria yeah but thankfully you're putting them on a boat back to

europe now so they don't need to worry about you go lads i don't know if there's any particular areas that i want to test out like this i don't think there's any rules where i'm like i need to get this in before the end of the scenario in a natural sense i'm interested in the reserve stuff the reserve stuff i understand in its essence i just have never felt like it would outweigh the benefit of using stuff yeah it's an interesting one at work because basically you hold your turn and use it at the end right you sort of pause a unit yeah you put them into a state of like non-play and then release them and then you you've released them there's like a stage one release or a stage two release but it means that they can't really be touched like if i reserve a truck convoy

you can't then capture them can you not no i'm pretty sure you can't touch them because that was what i could have done to prevent the truck bandits from getting them that's what we'd looked at oh right okay but i ended up never doing that which could have cost me the game yeah because if i'd done that with some of my convoys i would have been sitting relatively pretty yeah but instead i didn't and you ended up absolutely rinsing all of my supply lines so now i'm stuck with no supply lines i'm stuck with a a wall that's come up to city barani that i i don't really have the resources to take on long term and i've i've got all my units out in play that i realistically will have in the scenario and they're all clustered around that area

yeah there's nothing else coming yeah i don't have any relevant i think i get like some a few tanks but like i think i'm pretty tapped on the if i remember rightly i got no more aircraft yeah and i might get some like stuff coming in but it won't like get to the front in time flight comes in like 10 5 well my um my black shirt showed up today they did technically win me the game by having the trucks that i needed yeah but they were so like abstracted from my plans they were just like oh and then they'll show up eventually yeah little did i know they are actually my ace up the sleeve to win because of the trucks but not because of their combat prowess just because they happen to have trucks with them and thank god they were moving over

um road the whole way yeah otherwise i could have lost all the trucks i needed in order to win it's it's over it's surreal I really can't believe it's it's at this point yeah

the Bueno felt like a a pipe dream I think I'd if I told myself a year ago that I'd be winning a Kinder Bueno in January of 2026 I I wouldn't believe me

and rightly so should have been you Andy what yeah you should have won I'll say it right to you right now you should have won this I did definitely fuck up a lot thing is if you hadn't pulled back from Sidi Barani

you I think you'd have won yeah which is this feels like kicking you on your down a bit but no I do think it is a sort of took you it's a good lesson to learn in this one rather than the full game seven years in suddenly you win because I've

not thought about like i think now we'll always have those victory conditions in the back of our mind yeah we'll always be checking up on them because the last thing we want is this to be sprung on us like you say seven years down the line that's a much harder pill to swallow also for the final one yours are much more clear cut in terms of you have to hold everything in alexandria and cairo right yes which is sort of like that's much more that's really blue sky thinking for a strategy because that means i've conquered the map yeah that's so it's also easier to sort of keep in mind that yeah i guess it's not going to be hard to remember that keep your capital and you can't do that until

turn 35 you can't win until turn 35 yeah and then when i do i've mine's a bit more complicated i need to like sever supply lines and stuff you essentially need to do the same thing you need to push all the way to map a and then stop me having a supply line that runs to triboli which is an off-map location yeah so if i don't have that i mean first of all i'm absolutely boned at that point yeah because what the hell has happened to the game for either of us to get to any end of the map at that point one of us has fallen asleep at the wheel i think we might get to fighting on like borders of map a and e we could definitely get i could see it to the borders it's like fighting alamine is the border hex on map e yeah but i don't think we're gonna have

i don't think al alamein is probably going to not have the same weight in our game than it did in the well yeah well you've got to bear in mind and this is information i've taken from your history segments um that um graziani mussolini were idiots morons yeah so what they did we can't really take anything to base the game off we've got all of the rules that allow us to move in the same confines of reality that they did we've got the same units but we don't have the same stupidity i'd like to think we certainly don't have all of their flaws so i think all in all we don't need to think of it in the historical context i think we just need to look at it from we have the tools they had oh yeah but we just aren't the tools that they were well yeah that was like rommel who got

to italy didn't yeah didn't ever do that i'm interested to see what it's like when the german show up yeah that's going to be a different game i'm also interested for the thought because one at 20 is there's scenario like groups because they have the same starting thing we're doing the Graziani's Offensive because it's the shortest one and it's from turn 1

there's another one that's from the very start that's 20 and that's the Operation Compass one yeah that takes you up to turn 20 and then not long afterwards you can do the Desert Fox one

which is a few turns after that and then that goes up to turn 40-ish I want to say. Yeah. Well if it's, I've not checked the things but it's 14th of February. Yeah. Rommel arrives in Tripoli. Yes. Operation Cup is

ended on the 7th. So basically I'm imagining you probably turn it showing up like turn 22? Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah. Maybe what we should do is do a practice run of every scenario. And then we've also also played the full game. I don't actually know

if there's a scenario that takes you up to turn 111 I don't think there is I think it ends I think that's like overtime mode yeah

but now this is overtime mode that's what we're doing now yeah this is the end of the beginning and everything that comes after this

is it's bonus it's time for us to learn the rules and it's time for Andy to get us just desserts get some revenge

and really pick apart the italian force what it will do is give you a chance to see what it's like when you've got the sort of the the winning force that you need and you've got the leverage you've got the positioning and just like what the push looks like and how much resistance comes from a broken force yeah because you need to know that really to structure the rest of it because that ebb and flow i suspect will come in the main game yeah because those four divisions that are up there Well, not four divisions. All the guys up there have taken heavy losses now, haven't they?

On the north coast. I think everyone up there has been hit at least once. Yeah, so then it's the four full divisions down south. Yes. And then obviously the black shirt's coming in. Yeah. So you can essentially reload those five tiles with new divisions. Yeah, I can swap them out.

One of the black shirt divisions is not as good as I hoped. They're not. I've been doing a bit of research on them. they're not they're not elite troops the black shirts yes well we um we won't be having a history segment this week no um we've been very much fixed on the game so we're a little breather between the seventh arm of divisions history and um well you've uh you've said it there i believe it's the couple episodes on the black shirts yeah which i'm looking forward to especially since they will be at the forefront of the rest of the scenario yeah it's worked out quite nicely in that sense

then i think it's the third black shirts um they're not what i hoped yeah compared to the others it's fair do you have like m is one of yours like m battalion or like m regiment i think that's the third is that your good one no oh okay um not off the top of my head i remember looking at the sheet earlier and i was like hang on a minute this isn't what i hoped it would be so i'll have to yeah they sort of cut their teeth not through intensive training in the desert but beating up socialists in italy yeah and this is a different environment to that i can see why that doesn't translate very well so the kinder bueno yep when when you're gonna when you're gonna get me this bueno for the next recording i guess okay just so i can eat it on mic loudly okay

so definitely for the next recording because if i give it to you when we're not you just have to save it also don't loudly eat on mic you said this to me ages ago as well and it's always correct no that was circumstantial that was popcorn fucking wild the kinder brenner's like got a soft like it's got like a bit of a crisp wafer but it's not like a loud thing to eat it'll be more of like a than a like crunch what's the thing called is it synesthesia or whatever way it's called asmr andy you can't handle the sound of people eating i'm like most people have it no you're thinking of whistling most people don't like whistling that's not true yeah you like whistling yeah oh of course you would you can't whistle can you what song was that

what song was that i don't know you know what song it was no i don't that's why i'm confused it's the best one of the best songs ever about whistling oh right okay it was a whistle by florida by florida that took me way too long to work out as well well wait until i tell you about will i am what's what's that thing what's that thing yeah he's a guy he's a singer from the mr i am person named william surname i am yeah he's a dr seuss character he does like Green Eggs and Ham actually

cause if you think about it Black Eyed Peas Green Eggs and Ham it's all an homage it's a fromage homage

nice to Dr. Sarge author of Cat in the Hat good book better film incredible film awful film

if anyone hasn't seen the mike myers cat in the hat watch it pause this and only come back to it if it's a good film that's our entire audience gone our entire or i have faith that the kind of people that listen to this will love the cat in the hat it's incredible you like the cat in the hat no 50 of the people who host this show don't like it so why would 100 of the audience 100 of the host of the show don't like it. I'm a special guest. Oh, you don't like it either? No, I'm a special guest. Oh, we're doing

that, are we? Yeah, I decided I'm actually going to be credited as special guest. Okay. It also means that I get tax breaks. Yeah, but it also means I own 100% of the show and I'm paying you a bit. No, I still own it. No, you don't. I own it. That's not what a special guest... You can be

a special guest or you can cede ownership of this project to me. We're actually like a building society. We're a mutual. We're owned by the listeners. again no yeah we're going to hold an AGM we're going to hold our annual general meeting everyone gets to tell us what changes they want

and we're legally bound to make those changes whatever they are let's not do that no that's how it works Andy I know that's how a building society works that's showbiz that's showbiz

a building society give me my fucking kinder bueno Andy give me it now What? You offered to go and you didn't tell them what you wanted? I won! I won the game! I won the scenario! Kingdom Bueno's all round!

How many do I get? One. One? I've done this for a year and I get one fucking Kingdom Bueno. Yeah. Oh my god, what have I done? And there was no rule that it couldn't be squished beforehand. You monster! You monster!

If you do that, you're setting a very dangerous precedent for the meal. Because we didn't say shit about not poisoning it. I think we should put that in. We should probably set out some ground rules for our own wind conditions. In terms of, the meal can't be anywhere where we have to pay for accommodation or flights to get there. Well, we'll see. Right, no, I'm vetoing that.

Heavy veto, hard veto. We'll see. No, I'm going to... Well, there's a few places I'd fly to. I would take you to Johannesburg, safest city in the world, statistically That's not on There's a discussion we've had before where I've

explained Johannesburg as the safest city in the world and you just won't have that for some reason No, I guess not I don't know why. There's no statistics to prove otherwise that you have in your hand right now Don't use your laptop You can't just get the laptop out whenever

your inner corner why not because that's cheating if i get back to the fourth corner i go on my laptop it's a good reference good show the thing is it's a bit like when um teachers used to be like well you won't always have a calculator in your pocket so you can't use a calculator in this test look how wrong they were look at me now i was about to just dox my old math teacher She was a lovely woman. I'm not going to do that. She also retired, actually. She retired when I was there.

My last year in her maths class was her last year teaching overall. What a send-off. To have a star pupil like me. I got an A in my maths GCSE. That's good. You know what I got in my AS level maths GCSE? Nope.

I got a U. I got a U. Oh, you got a U in chemistry. You got a U in chemistry? Yeah. Well, don't know how that's the case, Andy, because you and I have great on my chemistry. All three of us.

Yeah. Oh, I did not like chemistry. No? No. Why not? Really confusing and hard. I agree. Also, I'm pretty sure our teacher accidentally chlorine gassed the room once.

That'll do it. It was like making it in a fume cupboard. Gail put her hand up and was like, it smells of chlorine, and she was the one sitting closest to it. It was like, right, everyone get out. At least he evacuated the room. I had a lot of teachers

who would be so stubborn that they just would not. Yeah, they'd be like, no it isn't. You playing with bottle caps next to your microphone? Well, that's going to be a nightmare for the edit. I'm sorry. And you tell me I can't eat down the mic. That's far worse. It just sounds like this tiny metal horse

is clip-clopping away in the background. Okay, I'll stop doing that if you don't eat. Get the bottle caps back out. God damn, that didn't work. I'm willing to compromise. I'm a reasonable man. We can both make noise down the microphone. It's what we've been doing for a year, Andy. Make a noise.

And I won! Ho-ho! Ah, to be a winner. Must be nice. Yeah. Well, I'm sure you'll find out. I think you're going to do some real horrible things to me over the next three turns. It's the plan.

and tell you what here's some stakes for you andy we've got to have stakes okay if you manage to get the other win condition the the higher ranking one where you take to brook yep i'll get you your own bueno and also reimburse the boy i need two buenos no get lost absolutely not i accept i'll get you i'll get you a bueno and for this insubordination i'll give you one of the fingers fine good yeah don't talk yourself down from another don't i'll take it i know what i'm yeah take yes for an answer so we've we've covered off the closing chapter of the the real scenario after this it's it's overtime mode it's just it's just a little little sandbox in the desert of our mind that's what it is at this point yeah that's where this game will always

live on andy these um 12 or so months these were the deserts of our minds okay this is where we were we were we were sat in them trapped here in this room unable to escape this plight and i've shown us the door and you know what we did at that door andy closed it again because we're only halfway we closed it we turned back around and we're back in there we'll always be in the deserts of our minds trapped that's what this is it's eternal torment we had a chance to get out we could have very reasonably just said today that's it we played part of the game wasn't that impressive thanks for coming everyone but no men of our word floored with honor that's what we are bound by it uh that and the promise of a hot meal who would i be to walk away from that

i guess another promise you're bound by i'll die in these deserts okay i guess another promise you're bound by is that we would read the emails just trying to give us a little segue there that's true we we did say we'll read them all and in order to do so we'll have to just read them there's only one way to eat the elephant andy one bite at a time let's get into it all right then let's let's have it some listener mail we gotta get through them all at some point and they keep one coming in which means reading them on a regular basis is probably the best way to do this it is indeed this one's from the web we do have a backlog of these so getting through them is uh it's vitally important we can't leave them there to uh fester so if you set a web for me

we'll be we're trying to chip away at those as well we've neglected them we're aware and we apologize we've been on the website we fiddled around a bit website looks a little different now checking out new banner new banner again courtesy of alex and thank you very much for it your artwork is absolutely fantastic stupendous and better than what we did previously which was erroneously stick a different game on our logo for those of you who are wondering at this point if we're qualified to do what we're doing no and we never claim to be so just bear that in mind so this is from pete pete uh long time listener first time form user i was just listening to episode 52 and the common ground that was proposed was about using more inflatables

and had me thinking about a conversation I had with my wife last week. Oh, please don't say she threatened to divorce you for talking about the podcast. No. I recently refinished my basement into a den slash gaming room. I'm in need of a new couch. And my wife suggested a boneless couch. I love that. A boneless couch, I said quizzically.

She said, yeah, like those beds that come in a box and then decompress when you open the bag. kind of like inflating don't you think in my head i questioned everything i thought i knew about couches was this a beanbag like a beanbag chair does it have structural integrity does it deform permanently when you put a butt groove in it anyway i just wanted to add to your conversation about things inflating it's not really inflating like with a pump but it's kind of similar to your questions i know you said you're getting more comfortable with the gameplay and it's going quicker what do you feel like uh will be your maximum speed per turn once you get into the games

is it days or weeks or hours if everything went flawlessly um that's a very good question because it i guess it's hard to predict at the moment because we're going still at kind of an exploratory pace but we have definitely picked up the pace yeah i reckon if we got a because i think if we sat down and had a good like eight to ten hours we could crack out definitely an upstage um with complete ease i think realistically we would get to the point where if we had a full day to do it if we got like a nice 12 14 hour stretch and once we're more familiar with it and maybe it's a fairly quiet turn we could do a turn in a long session i think yeah best case scenario i think maybe a turn in a day that all comes together yeah once the spreadsheets are fully refined

and it gets rid of all the paperwork so we don't have to go away and do some of that at home then i i think realistically a turn in a day and like a long day not a not our usual evening sessions yeah which is what we do like a weekend one yeah if we had more time to do it without our schedules of work the rest of our lives yeah we have we have full lives going on as well so it means we don't often get a full day to do it but down the line that could be something we could pull off a full day

doing a turn but that is very optimistic thinking but if we're talking theoreticals I think that's it if that's a flawless as well yeah I don't think we'd get any faster than that I don't think like two turns in a day would be I don't think we'd want to either yeah one I guess we'd mentally burn out

and two it would be like uh weekday episodes where we get through a turn in like 10 and then suddenly we'd be like hey guys we did two turns yeah you'd be looking at a bumper episode yeah if it came to that and we did a full turn expect a longy in terms of the episode and also expect kind of like today a bit of a jumbled mess of the recap because we're trying to keep track of all the stuff that happened which will be in much smoother note taking in the full game because we'll have the time to refine that between scenario and full game yeah so another reason it's good the scenario is still going because

we're not ready for the main game yet oh yeah well we'll have a nice hiatus between and then follow-up question would be if you're playing with a full squad and everyone was playing at maximum capabilities would it shorten the time or do you feel great debates would erupt between teams and strategizing would make it take longer than ideal i think in the spirit of the game as it's intended if everyone works seamlessly definitely faster um smoother as well realistically if we got more people the logistics of that would be first of all finding people i definitely don't know four people to have on my team who would do this i think if i did come across those people if they're people i know i think there'd just be so much debate in amongst it i think it would be very

fun it would be incredibly fun but it would not be streamlining the process at all but yeah i think the like discussions would be interesting yes it would become a very different kind of game yeah and i would really enjoy that side of it i just don't know that it makes it easier to play i think it becomes a different thing i enjoy doing for different reasons that's a good way of doing it yeah the show is great and i look forward to seeing how all this plays out stay subtle humble and brave in the deserts of your mind from Pete. Thank you very much, Pete. Some good questions there, and

looking at some of these boneless furniture. Yeah, spoiler alert, Pete, I win in turn 60. Hee hee hee hee. But we will forever be in the deserts of our minds. We've come to accept we'll never escape. We'll die playing this game, Pete.

But I really hope that you found some good boneless furniture. Yeah. Got a nice den set up. Yeah, let us know if you got that boneless furniture or if you went for something a bit more conventional some um some couch on the cob trademarked yeah you don't want anyone making that yeah i come up with all sorts of fun and good ideas i don't want anyone to snatch them up we're putting this information out there so it's in very poor taste if someone steals that if i see couch on the cob um the next

is an email traditional at our email address which is info what with a mate.co.uk for those who want to send emails this is from joe hello andy and james and also jurassic park friend yeah our jurassic park friend has had a mention we'll pass it on i am also a jurassic park friend i've watched the movies more times than i can count i know way more about the series than is healthy for one person oh this should have a trivia off i think i think our pal would uh we would do well with that so that would be interesting spin-off series battle our friends and various things we're going to nominate champions for each listener who comes forward with a category that they're good at spin-off podcast war with our mates i like that another

good one no one steal that did you know that in the script for the first movie the genaro character during the scene where hammond is giving them the tour and showing them the scientists is supposed to ask are these characters animatronics the actor instead says are these characters uh auto erotica not sure if the filmmakers didn't catch this or didn't bother to fix it my favorite movie of the series is the lost world and i will not apologize or back down for my opinion um even from because i've seen the films the first three anyway um please don't come after me um i've not seen the chris pratt ones i've heard they're good yeah but even i know that the lost world is a it's a rogue choice yeah i've only seen the first one i think it that that is as in most cases that is

the the best i do have a soft spot for three where the raptor says alan on the plane i've seen that clip that's a fun one that's what you want from jurassic park isn't it the fun clips fun clips i was randomly discussing monopoly with a co-worker one day and that got us started on what the longest board game in the world was which inevitably led to the campaign for north africa sometime later i thought it would be cool if someone actually did manage to beat it and made a show out of it like a live stream and lo and behold through my research i found you guys i ended up binging the series you guys were around 50 episodes in at the time and as i'm writing this i just finished the christmas episode kind of bummed i have to wait for more but i'm eager to

follow along for the journey well i uh i come across this sometimes as well whenever i'm doing a bit of look into it just see what kind of things are erupting in the campaign for north africa sphere and there are occasionally people who post on reddit stuff like oh it'd be cool if this is a good podcast idea and i'm like no it's us my idea don't steal that i keep on saying that listen to the podcast i don't know much about world war ii same but some of my special interests is bats so i do have a history story for you during world war ii about a month after pearl harbor a dentist by the name of little s adams wrote to fdr with his proposal that was quote designed to frighten, demoralize, and excite the prejudices of the people of Japanese Empire.

He called it, that he called Surprise Attack Remember Pearl Harbor. It's a bit of a clunky operation name. Yeah, I feel like that's quite emotionally charged. His idea was to take millions of bats, glue firebombs to them, and release them all over Japan, where they would then fly into buildings to roost before exploding and setting fire to everything. adam says quote the lowest form of animal life is the bat what what a quote associated in history with the underworld and regions of darkness and evil

until now reasons for its creation have remained unexplained it doesn't need a reason it's an animal as i envision it the millions of bats that have for ages inhabited our belfries tunnels and caverns were placed there by god to await this hour to play their part in the scheme of free human existence and to frustrate any attempt of those who dare desecrate our way of life he also mentions that just like the mormons of utah erected a gull statue he would also erect a statue in memory of the bats who died i'm sorry but this screams common ground this is i mean tomb of the unknown bat as well this is quite fittingly bat shit crazy because asking why bats were invented is not a sensical thing to say well no he's not he's not asking why bats

are invented they're invented for this moment yeah sorry he's giving us the answer to a question no one asked i don't know i the this feels like a guy who's got like the venn diagram that he's got is um i'm angry about pearl harbor and i don't like bats and he's put them together and in the middle he's created firebomb bat plan it's so fucking crazy uh let's let's continue it goes on sorry yeah folks this isn't the end of this roosevelt read the letter and passed it on to the director of the oss while also including a note saying that although it sounded wild it might be worth looking into i included a picture of the cover letter because the right so what what this says um it's a cover letter and it's got the letterheaded paper from the white house

it's dated february 9th 1942 memorandum for colonel donovan donovan and in bold letters this man is not a nut it sounds like a perfectly wild idea but is worth your looking into you might reply for me to mr adams letter so the fact that roosevelt's looked at that and the fact he's written this man is not a nut that that makes me start a question a little bit of what was going on on roosevelt's side and whether he might have been a bit of a nut because yeah so he continued on the email um work began shortly after sorry work began this went somewhere oh yeah work began shortly after approval with the final design being a tube with over a thousand mexican free-tailed bats chilled in ice cube trays with napalm glue to each one the tube would be

dropped from a plane parachutes would deploy and the sides would come off allowing the bats to leave and find their roosts tests got all the way to actually dropping the bomb on a mock japanese city results were promising and would have continued but the project got shut down after it was decided that the boys that they lost alamos laboratory were under something way more destructive while i love bats and the idea of millions of them dying makes me sad i can't help but wonder what an alternate future of a world where little boy and fat man were bat bombs instead of the horrific nukes they were would look like keep up the good work i'm looking forward to when you get the vox machina treatment and your animated show comes out stay subtle humble and brave

that is insane thank you very much joe i'm now picturing because it's mentioning it gets stopped because of last los alamos oh christopher nolan film in an alternate universe called adams where a man is gluing napalm to bats killian murphy would kill that role he would have oh i i wonder i wonder why there wasn't any like cameo appearance or like a post-credit stinger where the the bat plan having been shirked he then decides to seek vengeance on oppenheimer and starts sending bats at him or becomes dare i say batman or yeah or matt damon's character is like i've actually got something else in the works oppenheimer so uh we're gonna pause this i think that the poignant scene of the alternate film that you've um you presented as well that

final shot of oppenheimer but translated to this where it's adams going you know how you said that we might have created a plan where bats are covered in napalm and flying to japan yes i think we already have and then just shots of lots of media memorabilia of bats covered in napalm flying around the world in the future the when the weapon goes off for the trinity test it's just bats for going into buildings that like still shot where the the detonation goes off and it's just silence for a few moments it's just the parachute deploy the screech of bats um well you've um you've absolutely outdone yourself with that message joe also the results were promising this this come on this got intercepted by something else this isn't a

dead end in the history of military technology it is we're beyond it andy unfortunately it had at one moment it's had it's one bright shining chance to be history was overshadowed by nuclear warheads i'm sorry to say but it's it's been done it was tested it's over we'll never see it it had its moment dig that one out of the out of the files no i think that one needs to stay there in the x files that's that's an incredible email yeah thank you very much that's awesome uh yeah pete and joe you've you've sent us some absolute classics today they will go down in what will made history is this man is wild not a nut that man is a nut anyone saying anything other than that is also nuts that's the front i'm gonna try and dig up the rest of that report i smell a

history segment coming on i feel like that that was a history segment in and of itself so if anyone wanted a history segment for this week in the absence of the typical one there we go it's been delivered to us by joe and we love it very much yeah um anyone else who wants to send any emails um of of that regard or any other um related to the game unrelated to the game anything your little mind fancies um the email address is info at warwithamate.co.uk our website is warwithamate.co.uk just slickly upgraded may i add and the instagram is just war with a mate we accept messages on all forums we update the instagram weekly we update the website like annually sometimes it's on a strict schedule of sometimes and email inboxes thankfully

don't require maintenance so we can always see those yeah so fire them on over and we'll read everything at some point we promise that is a promise we're sticking to yes just like the promise that bats will become firebomb except there is no nuclear option that's going to overshadow this we'll see this is locked in so there is there is um the mailbag and what a mailbag it was and now we're in this unusual gulf where the history segment would usually be but we had an impromptu one so yeah it feels like a real common ground needed you think you've got a common ground a bridge today andy because i just beat you at the game i've got a common ground well you're on you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna quash all issues from the past kettle

gates over it is both did a bad one you did a bad one and i reacted with a very well structured retort but we decided to just shut it down so i would love to hear andy now that you've just lost the scenario what your common ground is and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro for common ground i'm recording maybe this one it's got to be phenomenally good i think you'll agree i don't know if it's particularly wild but i think you'll agree with it well when i say good i mean one that really needs to bring us together okay never have the stakes been higher okay they need to

bring back the long seasons for like genre tv okay so i will give you some like examples that make me think this you've got like stargate smallville farscape supernatural like lost or a type of show it feels like don't exist anymore where it's like it's genre and it's also they're doing like the 20 episodes everything's like 10 now it is and they're talking about what made me think of this is they're talking about bringing back stargate which you really enjoy one of my favorite shows ever was like watch every day when i got home from school but i think part of the charm of that is they had 20 odd episodes yes so i don't want them to do 20 odd episodes and also double the budget no that's not what the same

budget and have each episode cost less i think you get more creative interesting stuff and you also get the like filler episodes and that kind of show which you don't get which are often really good ones you've really sunk your hooks into me here andy because i i've seen this happen in in real time with um shows moving from stuff i've loved now into stuff where i can't really get on board with it for this kind of reason so i think i think there's an underlying thing behind this and i i could be wrong because i'm not in that industry and all of it's speculation from my end i really love um some of my favorite shows ever are i really love buffy the vampire slayer and that's been off angel probably another example they have fairly long seasons 22 episodes that's

what i'm talking about yeah so first season of buffy was like seven or eight episodes maybe nine everything else 22 episodes so like a sort of pilot season and then everything else really long yeah which makes great television for monster of the week stuff in between you get your sort of wacky bottle episodes things that are a bit out there sometimes that tie into the overarching plot of a season sometimes that aren't but then in amongst that you've got sort of a normal season's worth of television yeah of like the core plot but you get to know the characters better you get to understand you know the world the dynamics and it's just a fun time as well and the budget for shows were never crazy high never crazy the special effects are touch and go at times but

overall really good time brilliantly put together show um problematic people behind it now to an extent but the show itself really good work now you've got stuff like that you've got x files which i'd still need to watch in its entirety i've seen a lot of it but not the whole thing these kind of shows where you've got the perfect structure for a monster of the week thing and another one that had that was doctor who now doctor who i think fell for the trap and the trap is and again this is just from my perspective it could be completely wrong there's probably a million other things to factor into it but what it feels like from an innocent bystander is a lot of shows saw the prestige television of stuff like true detective been re-watching that recently

that's confined to eight episodes a season which makes sense for that show it does it works for that show and it's a very tight narrative and they've got a beginning and end because it's an anthology series it means you've got a start and end every single season which fits for the the show but then other shows i think maybe looked at that and went well these smaller episode counts are still prestige television they're still drawing in people they're still talking about it but it's all condensed it fits around the scheduling of actors better there can be multiple projects at the same time um the budget is also condensed into a shorter space so each episode gets more yeah and it has this like prestige psychological effect of

oh well there's only a few episodes of this this must be good yeah doctor who went from like 13 episodes a season and then dropped off into just a few episodes less but still shorter and then less frequent as well doctor who i know is it's absolutely peppered with behind the scenes issues like the disney situation actors leaving and joining the nature of that and the way the show reinvents itself all the time maybe it's an outlier but yeah it feels like what's happened with movies as well where it's either dirt cheap or it costs like a billion yeah you don't have middle and it's like that level of show as well and i think they benefit from oh we have less money per episode so we need to be creative yes i think it's bring that bring those type of tv

shows back because i'm missing them and they are they're great great shows and yes maybe they're not going to be like a 9.5 out of 10 on imdb no but whatever but the people who love them love them yeah they're cult classics that's what makes them so fun is that they may not be for everyone but the people who enjoy them wow they really get into it buffy the vampire slayer is coming back they're doing a not quite a reboot it's a continuation but it makes me wonder what will they do with that will that fall into the trap oh we're gonna make this prestige rather than yeah because i'm comfortable calling it a trap and there's one perfect example of said trap and we were talking about a similar thing earlier of television shows that dropped off which i suspect

maybe inspired this common ground yes um a big one the most famed example dare i say of a tv dropping off game of thrones that went from the 13 episode seasons and i think episode season seven had fewer episodes and season eight definitely had fewer because six i think it was six which is and again this is off the top of my head and i'm not fact checking it but i believe it was the case that the showrunners were offered more episodes to wrap up the show and they they declined that now a lot of the stuff i've seen online points to them wanting to rush it because they had a star wars project lined up that's what i've heard yeah but i think it still boils into that thing of oh well oh we're at the end this is prestige television this is the biggest

show going everyone loves it let's wrap it all up in these few episodes there'll be big showy offy episodes and then it just it's like a fart doesn't work it just it's bad it's a bad wrap up to the show i started watching that show when the last season was coming out so i caught up and i was like this is great and i watched that i was like this is what a terrible ending yeah stranger things just finished that had very long run times over a few episodes but it kind of felt like nothing really happened like the they had a few character moments they paid off some plot lines that were running for a long time but then they also gave a character who was like very much a side character for the whole show she had more screen time than anyone else right in that last

season yeah and it's i don't really understand the logic behind that i feel like these shows now when they have this smaller runtime they don't know how to distribute it sometimes whereas if you have these 22 episode seasons you can do that and it feels fine and also all those shows for the ones i'm thinking of all seem to be like we might not get another season so each but each season also isn't like oh we're wrapping up the story in the same way strange things was it's like this is this year at like skaldgate sg1 command as it were yes and then it's like it might end because it does end at the like climactically yeah in the final one but it's like you don't need to have everything building up to crazy payoffs in that way yeah and it feels like you're

getting into something when you get into the new season and and another thing when it when it releases annually also love that when you're not waiting five years between seasons because that and again i know it does kill them a bit i know there's like all the time you have to put into cgi now and sort of contracts out and writers rooms but and not to because we need to be careful a lot of be hypocrites here because we've talked about having like a follow yeah for video game series and stuff like that but when it's a serialized story and it's back to back and it's a season of television that you can end also if you're done with it wrap it up it's finished yeah also if it's one show you're not gonna get like buffy fatigue because you've watched 20 episodes

of buffy yeah you're watching you get fatigue because there's five shows yeah you know that one spin-off and i know you can juggle two shows but if they then span off every other character and then there were five films that released on netflix as well over the course of a few years it it feels like yeah the core of this i think the issue is how people now structure television yeah everything has to be it's either reality and procedural like a lot of cop shows still seem to have the 20 oh yeah they'll run crazy long i don't know how long they run um off the top of my head but stuff like law and order like they must run crazy lengths and it's with the same characters as well a lot of those shows they don't often kill people off with stuff like that unless it's

like an actor being written off because they want to leave but and it's like one show can be like a career yeah for an actor you yeah you become known for that that show yeah and maybe i don't know that that's down to the aspiration of the actors there's again a lot of stuff behind the scenes and we're just two subtle humble and brave guys we don't know everything but we do know what we enjoy what we enjoy is we don't want these tiny tiny television programs i mean so they're good fine but also let's do some longer stuff same budget it's going to take more time obviously from actors and stuff so you might need to increase it yeah but like one of the best episodes of stargate is a time loop one they get into like two of the characters get into like a groundhog day

thing that by the nature of a groundhog day doesn't really move story yeah but that individual episode is one of the best episodes and you can't have episodes like that when everything has to be tight yeah because then you're wasting one of eight episodes you're wasting 10 of your show and and you shows can't experiment if you don't give them the room to yeah what you need to do is just release something every week make it an hour and 18 minutes long it can be about the same thing over and over again and people will listen to it because it's good because people want that they want the familiarity they want to hear you talk about the campaign for north africa they are the masks lived that's that's what i like about this that's what i like about some

of the podcasts i've listened to some of the long form content that i enjoy i like the familiarity i like that it runs along i personally really like to binge something and feel like there's no end yeah i love restarting a show that goes on forever 24 great example you start watching that on a rewatch you know you're locked in for months of entertainment well i rewatched a big chunk of stargate recently it's just like yeah just chuck it on it's yeah and you don't need to worry about that running out and it's also tv shows like because i i used to watch it when i got back from school i think they had two episode blocks and depending on what time i got back i'd also miss an episode but you could still just enjoy the the overall whereas if you missed like episode

three of stranger things last season that's an important part of the show you've lost a chapter of the story it's gone yeah so just the like long-running are they b shows are the equivalent of b movies or in a way i guess yeah but yeah let's bring those shows back you know what well that's what we're doing andy at least we we not only agree on this common ground but we're we're practicing what we preach we're putting this out there and i can't think of a better way to wrap this up at the end of the the scenario win we've come together again we've shut the door on the deserts of our minds and we'll be staying in here we'll be staying in here forever and if you're listening to this you can always listen to this this will be every week this will

run forever or until one of us is dead this will keep on going even then we'll banks we'll put in some extra hours and we'll have some more at least posthumously but you don't need to worry about this ending you can always tune into this and it's if it's your comfort show if it's the thing you put on the background you can skip a few episodes we'll cycle back around to the same point that we're playing the game just tune back in yeah go back revisit them just start again in a year's time people do that it works so from me james and me andy stay subtle humble and brave and we will forever be in the deserts of our minds thanks for listening We'll be right back.