War With A Mate - Episode 63: Humbled

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

The most important meal of the day? Over at WwaM headquarters, it’s Humble Pie! The guys continue their intense clash along the North Coast, with Andy making headway on terrifying James. The first WwaM public appearance is determined, all while concluding that some things are just simply bigger than them - The game, its creators, the listeners; and Father Time.

hello and welcome to war with a mate it's a podcast with me james me andy and we're playing the campaign for north africa it's a board game you already knew that it's not a video game not a television show it's not furniture i mean to be fair may as well be furniture it's huge it's bigger than any table i own what it does do is get rid of furniture yeah deletes it it removes it and we should have removed something andy we should have removed something when we started playing this game what was that hubris victory has defeated you i've not felt much victory that was that was bane i was aware it was spot on oh thank you um yeah i'm even wearing the bane mask right now bought it from tom hardy himself oh what do you mean oh well we all sweat you from

filming yeah well to be fair it's been a while since that came out it'll get musty yeah it does still smell like him it smells like tom hardy vanilla i imagine he smells like vanilla and cedarwood the guy is a cheap own brand aftershave from super drug we've had we've had a day we've had a day of it we've played some campaign for north africa would you believe it guys and we've we've come to some realizations we've come to some some humble truths which needed to be came to are we doing that first i suppose we'll sprinkle it in as we go along today was the conclusion of your land movement andy yes uh which is two big fights two big fights indeed all along the the big wall the first one was the seventh armored division against the first

libyan division the first libyan division not not doing well when they went into that one no they got uh slammed again they did but they are refusing a leave they are squatting in city so i'm gonna have to kill every single one that is the way it's it's looking and the second fight that we had was the maletti division the trivoli regiment and the bardia garrison on my side up against your fourth indian division and 16th infantry 16th infantry and it was well i've had better fights i've had worse yeah i think i got no losses on it you got no losses on that one yeah you lost five percent of the seventh damn right you did so those guys are digging in and that's what we covered today so we opened up we reassessed the board we loomed over it like the specters of

war that we are and we clashed i had no barrage going um for the big fight but when it came to the seventh i let off a little barrage i thought i could i could blow a bit of ammo because i was in your airfield city barani's airfield the one that used to belong to you so i use some of the ammo from there for a barrage you can only use ammo from an airfield for close assault if it's considered an emergency and the game leaves the interpretation of emergency to the creative mind of the players and i'm a creative man i decided this was an emergency the first libyan division are about half the size they were when this whole thing started i think if you're actively in combat it's always an emergency no no no no i wouldn't say that oh i was backing you up there but if you

want to say it's not an emergency give give me that ammo back handy i'm nothing if hang on first of all you don't get the ammo back that's not how it works it's not in an emergency you use it or you hand it over to the enemy forces i need to put that really clear now misread you yeah you can't have misread it it's nothing even close to that i was just trying to cheat oh god i gotta respect the honesty it's so brazen it's so cowardly it's not cowardly it is it's cowardly brave but it's brave cowardice it's just bravery it's a bad thing but i'm brave to do it it's sort of like being in an emergency situation and yelling i'm gonna run away i'm scared it's cowardice but it's brave to announce it that way brave to announce it that way would you not would

you not be afraid to do that i would i guess if you're not gonna help just declare that you're getting out of the way and leave is probably the best you can do i would try to slink away i would try to make an irish exit from an emergency james we need your help oh he's gone just hands on hips looking around a multi-car pilot where's james gone i've not seen him for ages he's hightailed it across the cornfields he's out of here i'd love to walk through a cornfield by the way it's really sharp you think yeah corn isn't sharp corn's round the leaves are the leaf yeah but they're not you don't get those with they're the stuff that's sort of ankle to neck height yeah but we've got to the point now where there's so many pesticides and stuff in plants that they

don't grow properly they don't dull the leaves yeah they do they'll be all soft now right everything's all nami pami these days and farming all right you see the farming industry these days it's not what it used to be it's not sharp edges anymore farmers are pussies now they've just the child-proofed farming yeah it used to be a real man's job and and now they've now they've made it all soft edges uh what are they like this this pesticide big pesticide i mean yeah yeah it's a serious issue it is i don't think i've ever been personally affected by pesticides you almost certainly have no i think i'm one of the few you definitely have pesticides in here i think i live rural enough that it doesn't impact me they're in rural areas they only make it in the

cities in the food supply that's a good point well in that case i'm going to pull together thing i actually live in a city where you eat food barely i don't think my diet can be considered food look you're full of microplastics and pesticides and you just have to live with that and the amount of processed food i eat i'm full of microplastics i may as well be eating fucking lego at this point i think it's healthier than some of the stuff i eat but my sodium sorry i just hit the microphone my sodium-based diet aside the game the war the the big war yes world war ii the war to end all wars the one with a mate oh yeah that's us the one with a mate and we still haven't who is the mate we're each other's mates i don't know we've done

this i know but i'm trying to rehash old material okay i feel like if we're going to be doing this for 40 years we need to occasionally dip back into the reserves and pull out some old stuff i think if we're going to do this for 40 years we should maybe leave the foundations alone as we stack more and more of our life on top of it there are no foundations andy it's like a game of jenga we've taken the bottom off we've built it back on on the top again and made it precarious i would say let's leave right no i see the analogy i've made is actually your analogy yes thank you i forgot how jenga worked for a moment there i thought it occupied non-euclidean space but it's actually just blocks on a table or in the case that we used to play it was on a lazy

susan that did an extra element it did it was very fun playing uh jenga on a lazy i forgot to steal that lazy susan when we moved out it's probably good that you didn't our landlords weren't fond of us anyway yeah i mean they never gave us our security deposit back so i wish i'd have taken a lazy suit that's true and we to be fair we kept the places in fairly good condition yeah we weren't belligerent no we played board games all the time we're just sort of inane forces that exist kind of like what the first libyan division were today yeah so they've been having a real rough go of it they've been getting absolutely bad they must be down to i know it's percentage of a percentage each time but i feel like i battered them for like over half last turn

you've you've done some damage to them they like i say i don't even think they're half of what they were there when i looked at the spreadsheet today when i got them up ready for the combat just the amount of red from last turn because i always every upstage i'll i'll create a new tab for the the units and i'll mark them in red if they've been killed in action in that upstage and then in the next stop stage delete those rows for the new tab yeah and it just shrunk massively it was like just partially red screen and then a tiny fraction of what it was just so ridiculous how many i've lost good to hear but they dug in they fired off a barrage and they actually did pin one of your armor yes the seventh armor divisions on one of one of four armored units that you have

there so that was handy to an extent it didn't really do much because then you went ham you attacked them i actually didn't use armor for the attack really yeah oh and the difference worked out at 10 it was it was a 10 that was with a difference of five in the um morale and then a difference of five in the close assault rating i had two you had seven yes i had 1.6 which rounded to two right yeah so it was barely there but i i pushed on anyway didn't pan out very well i lost what was it this time 15 and then you didn't move so you lost 25 no so no that that was the last one i lost 30 and then went to 40 yes because i've stayed put so i lost 40 percent of the forces involved which were all of the remaining forces and you lost five percent yes

which was worked out at three and a half assault points i'll take that i'll happily take that i'm getting absolutely battered and i took off five percent of your guys that's a win yeah the first libyan division i've written off in my mind mentally they're non-existent which is really not great to hear because they're very much in my way they are they're just going to stay there and therein comes one of the revelations we had today which was cohesion and how it's impacted by combat so it turns out one of the things we have been acutely aware of is if you win a combat a close assault and you manage to push the enemy force out of that hex through any means during that combat the attacker yourself in this situation you get plus three to your cohesion

yep that's great your cohesion goes up really helps when it comes to um cpa over expenditure it helps with combat morale adjustments it's great to have and morale is big morale is like you can get a six swing and morale which is 60 actual points which is a lot of yeah that's like when a lot of infantry tow has one and one yeah it's like 60 tow with infantry it's 12 fully stocked battalions for the most part yeah that's a crazy difference to have and and cohesion affects that so my understanding going into today was that cohesion is only impacted on the losing side with the same rules if i get moved out of the hex i lose cohesion turns out it's not just that it's also if you lose 30 or more of your forces in an assault so i've made the adjustments to reflect

that which has put the first libyan in a precarious position because now they are in the situation where when we roll the morale adjustment pre-combat there's now a risk they surrender good it's dangerous they're on minus nine now so if they were to go into the next combat for example say i don't move them and you engage them they get into a fight there is now a very material risk that they just surrender you might get a saharan division because your turn's next and they're in contact so they'll have to fight or break so they might yeah either break off or surrender well i mean they've been pretty plucky they might just stay in city barania and keep doing what they're doing well like i say i've written them off so if they get absolutely decimated and

surrender that's no skin off my back however i would like to have more divisions so while i've written them off that could change immediately when we go into next turn uh my next play and i decide to not do that because um i'm a brave coward too i'm admitting right now that i will change my tactic and my stance in a in a moment the blink of an eye if it means that i win so i will do that that's not even cut you've just oh i'm such a coward i normal military tactics to adapt to the situation yeah adapting is cowardly okay brave people don't adapt they just accept the situation as it is they don't budge they stay stuck in their ways and they say oh this didn't used to be like this oh it was much better in my day yeah i do think of those people as brave

yeah that was what i did there is high art it's actually satire i don't believe that but i made it sound as though i did it's performative it's art next thing you know we'll be on a have i got news for you no i don't think i could do that i wouldn't want to lie on television you could just say no i don't have news that's a good point i've never actually watched many episodes of that so i can't really speak to the veracity of how well i do you can't really talk about satire while watching that that's the only satire yeah that's the that's the the center column that's the supporting wall of satire yes well who needs that when i have the maletti and the trivoli regiment so that combat was a little different in that i had a

lot more to commit to it you did i came out with nine actual assault points not two nine and that was after you pinned a lot of them i did you pinned two infantry and one armor with the air stage you pinned an additional infantry armor armor yes you pinned another armor it was my trivially regiment that you pinned so you pinned quite a few but i went in with with nine actual which i thought was pretty good going but you did combined arms um i did yes i had enough did you basically just send infantry and all i had a lot of infantry involved in the the garrison from bardia oh yes because they're not in the tank unit but they're in the same hex yes so they supported them through that means they weren't pinned i had all of them available thankfully

so that was handy however didn't really pan out the way i hoped it would because despite having those nine actual points the difference still worked out at a plus eight for you that was because of yet another five differential for morale morale's been fucking huge morale is huge and is continuing to be huge and on top of that you committed 12 actual points yes which i was devastated to hear because i was looking through my guys and going this is there's going to be a heavy hitter and lo and behold you come in with 12 yeah i mean that one was worse because i had a much better chance of taking up to 15% of your guys which would have been a big loss for the for for the fourth sorry yeah that would have been huge however instead you lost zero diddly squat

and i lost a nice round 15 but they weren't pushed they didn't have to retreat nothing as dire as that they are still in the same spot they've just lost 15% of of their committed strength which thankfully didn't include all the pin guys because they weren't overrun so i don't need to lose anything additional no 15 of of that 90 actual not 90 raw points because of 90 on the dot so nine right in there it wasn't great however my position stays steadfast i've still got the first libyan and city barani i've still got that little pocket wall presented so you can't just waltz through there no i am having to fight them they are well supplied again after the end of offstage three your guys are yeah oh yeah i was gonna say if you're talking about my guys you're

lying no yeah so the the crux of today that we we got to a point of was the the cohesion issue was a bit of a revelation it's not the only thing that we've come to realize recently yes uh we've got another correction in the email box very much thank you for that we're going to address it now and then I guess we'll read the email yes so we had a broad of our attention we've made another

error would you believe now bear in mind this is the practice run there's going to be errors, errors are plenty and we also encourage anyone who identifies an error if any of you out there aside from our usual suspects who've read the rules cover to cover some have even experienced playing the game

which kudos anyone who comes across any sort of errors that we've made we we do encourage you to send them in we don't take offense we we take on strictive criticism very well it's actually very good because it means we can correct them earlier we need it yes we very much need it to give us it so what we found is that there was an issue with roads so um bombing roads is not the great tactic i once thought it was bombing roads doesn't reduce them to nothing it reduces them to tracks and then on top of that roads themselves have a breakdown value something that they half the hex they're going through rather than we were no breakdown on roads at half a breakdown point for a road doesn't half it it's just half a half a breakdown um again this is another example of

of the rules being very not open to interpretation but being so plentiful the the rules themselves aren't unclear some of them are objectively wrong and we found those and identified them early on and complained about them but then we've had the audacity to look at the other rules that are very plainly written and get them wrong yeah i think we'd go into a role thinking we'd got it as we've talked about we were like oh we're in a role now and we've let some assumptions ride and that that is the crux of it that's what we've come to terms with today we are we're on turn four we'll pass the halfway point of this practice scenario in its gameplay we've hit a win condition in the technical sense of hitting what would be a win condition

however we got a little cocky because we've been playing this week in week out we've got very familiar with the structure of the turns in the sense of we know how the turn looks in the way that this happens then this happens next a b c d but there's other areas construction some of the things that we often look at out of order and we also have got into the very destructive habit in this particular game of not consulting with the rules as often and thoroughly as we probably should be yeah that's really the issue is thinking we might be able to yeah just the idea we've got the like 100 page rules in our head and it's 100 pages of four columns of well three columns of small print it's we thought we had it all andy two guys thought that they mastered the campaign

for north africa and its fundamentals after playing it for just over a year boy were they wrong we've been wrong we've been wrong we got wrong a lot the benefit of this is the practice scenario thank god we did this because this means at the end of it all what we're planning to do is have a bit of a hiatus we'll still release episodes of course but what we will be doing is reassessing the rules reading back through them finding a way to present the rules in a very clear fashion we want to make something of a guide and that's something we'll be working on during that time as well we want to make it very clear as to what the rules are and that will help reinforce them for us because there's been so many occasions where we've got something slightly wrong and we've

had a lot of occasions where we've got something completely just very wrong yeah we need to be able to eradicate those from gameplay if they continue in the main scenario in the full game it's going to crash this whole endeavor we can't let that happen so we're going to take a bit more of a careful approach going forward we're going to consult the rules that that bit more precisely it might lead to us taking a little bit more time going through the practice scenario probably even the full game but it means we're doing it right and we always said we do it right yes we want to get it do a proper run rather than something that's not even close enough to call a run through we want to play the campaign for north africa we don't want to play the campaign for

north africa andy and james as we remember it exactly it's a memory is is just a memory of a memory and it dilutes further it's not going to be a reliable source to keep track of the rules in our heads so even if it is something inane if it's movement we'll start going back we'll start reconsulting the rules we'll double check them we'll make sure we get stuff right and again if anyone finds a discrepancy with what we're doing and what you find in the rules tell us because the likelihood is we aren't doing it right behind the scenes if we've talked about it on the podcast and it sounds wrong it's probably wrong we're just two guys we're just we're human however we're we're doing this and we committed to doing this and you're the accountability tool listeners

you're the ones that keep us accountable not just so we keep on playing it but so we keep on playing it right there'll be certain um indulgences that will allow when it comes to the practice scenario we'll be a bit more generous with how we're looking at mistakes in that we won't go back and redo things because we don't need to the mistakes we've made in the past we can't realistically go back and add the breakdown for every truck that's moved over roads now it's not viable no but we can't go into the full game allowing that to continue that kind of problem is like a restart problem because it so fundamentally affects trucking yeah and trucking is the game the game you gotta fuck the trucks andy and we've been we've been mitigating that completely should

have been more fucked which is a scary thought by the way not only is the fact that we've done the game wrong for a lot of the time but the the game is notorious for being difficult it's long it's complicated and we in our arrogance thought that we bested it and we haven't it's still got a stranglehold on us it's still winning the game is still in charge we haven't won we haven't beat the game i don't think we ever will we can but it's not going to be a sprint this is a tortoise in the hair situation andy and we've both been that we've both been that quippy little hair we should have been two tortoise tortoises tortoises tortoise yeah sure it should have been a pair of tortoise and instead we've been a pair of hair it's pretty

grim when we need to stop being the hare and be the tortoise, which makes the stationary game the hare. And it also means that this very long race. It means it's going to be longer. It is. But we're doing this as long as it takes.

Yes. It just means more episodes. Yeah. We complain about it taking ages, but it's the same amount of game we're playing. We're just slow. Yeah, it's the same amount of game. we're slow we get to release more episodes all it means is more common ground and more history and it also means you guys have to send more emails otherwise it won't work

the fear that ran through me that time that we had a dip in the email backlog and i had to try and think of what we're going to do if we don't have that we've become dependent on our accountability yeah for the first 12 or so episodes it was just us pleading to have an email so we'd use people were listening and this accountability tool was what we set it out to be and now it's a case of we lose a segment every episode if you don't email and thankfully we've got a we've got a big fat backlog we've got loads we've got emails we've got web forms we've even got some instagram messages so we've got plenty but we will get to every one of them so if you are planning on sending something in please do because we will get to it you might have to tune in 50 episodes

time to get there that won't be the case at the moment but we will get there we promise to people have figured it out it's not leaving us i'm on 30 i'll get to this when you're on whatever 70 yes people have been breadcrumbing which is quite fun we've been getting a lot of messages of people telling us where they're up to and what is very fun is when we see people let us know where they're up to and then we got another email a week later and tracking how long it's taken for them to get through 20 episodes and some of you folk are absolutely blitzing through these episodes i love binging a podcast and i i would love to step into the shoes of someone listening to this because i'd love to know what this sounds like condensed because all i know is how this feels

playing it over a year. I'd love to know how the attitude shifts because I don't know how it shifts over the course of a month or compared to a year or just week to week. Yeah, it would be interesting. I can't listen to my own voice

so that'll never happen for me but it would be interesting. Yeah, I've got to listen to us every single week. But you like that though. I don't like it. You love listening to yourself talk. I do, but I already know what I'm going to say in the episode.

what i like now is the freeform nature of i could say anything anything any like spark of genius could come out of my mouth right now and i don't know until it happens i've got no metacognition well it'll happen one day it will it's gonna happen today however i'm waiting however before we get to that we've talked about the gameplay today that was the gameplay yeah it was a fairly short gameplay session it was we just ticked off the combat the end of your movement came to some revelations about rule checking and then we're going to go into my movement next time which means it's not time for my genius andy it's time for the genius of those who get touched with us oh actual genius actual genius actual mail from the mailbag our first mail of the day comes from

old reliable this is perrin who has gotten touched before hi all there it is i hope the holiday period has treated you well and congratulations on the over a year of the pod thank you perrin it's been long it's felt like a year from just two people with fun banda as an excuse to hang out and for accountability to a full-on podcast with segments and still with the fun banda it's amazing to see how this has evolved it's very wholesome given that the first yeah the first 12 15 episodes were just a sort of mess. I can't remember before we had segments, Andy. It was just stream of consciousness nonsense.

It was. The segments have helped. They keep us in line. I know the idea of a live show stream has been floated, but one idea that may work within the scope of the game is essentially a stall at an expo, e.g. the UK Games Expo. That way, if you decide to keep playing,

you can do admin. If people walk up, great way to chat about the game in the pod and also would be an excuse to have a break from the spreadsheet. god yes it would and you can always vlog if a live stream is wanted to show off how it looks i've gone to the uk games expo for so many years and it is a really fun time to just hang out around board game and rpgs even though it can get very busy last email i sent i was contemplating

playing europa universalis the board game which seemed incomprehensible now after your sheer determination and verisimilitude the box has been opened and i've managed to find one brackets one friend who was willing to learn it including the ai rules i think it's ai rules oh i think it it's not ai as in it's a system for doing the non-player oh yes i see yeah since we are very unlikely to find a third player and although there are many rule books and flowcharts we are slowly breaking it down into its simple parts i shall send an update with the pieces on the board when we get there your festive humble and full of roast accountant turned forest warden perrin well perrin your gaming exploits intrigue us because we love to hear when people are getting

into wacky scenarios based on well anything really the fact it's inspired by our endeavors is that much more heartwarming love hearing about a niche project absolutely so i wish you the best of luck with that um i still sometimes wonder how that guy who's doing every baseball game from the season's getting on oh god that was june yeah that was a while ago but so that could be that could be any stage by now but perrin's just beginning his journey and i'm interested to get an update on that may well be that perrin sent another email we haven't checked some of the ones very smart approach uh breaking it down into simple parts maybe something we should have done well we tried we did do that at first and then we decided to just pedal to the metal and

just gonna thinking that we know what we're doing hell for leather and it didn't work now you float an idea here perrin about the uk games expo and it's something that we've looked at something that we've considered and what we will be doing is andy and i will be attending the uk games expo this year which is in birmingham in the u of k the united of kingdom we'll be showing up there we will be there for maybe the full weekend we'll definitely be there for the probably yeah friday saturday at least yeah but probably the full thing and when it comes to the game we are trying to figure out how that could work we've been in touch with the organizers and part of the logistical challenge is the game itself it's a big game yeah we're

have to take if we can get to do it we're gonna have to take the picture frames the notorious picture frames we would take the actual game in its current state or whatever state it's in at that point probably scorched and burned after i lose another combat and hit a bit of rage so we we will be going so one way or another we will be at the expo what we're trying to figure out is can we play the game there we'd love to do that give people a chance to see us in action and also a great chance to to meet people yeah listeners in the flesh you can hand us an actual physical mailbag full of letters that you've written to us and then we can read them out we can unfurl scrolls it'll be great be a great time so if anyone is attending the uk games expo this

year and they're interested in a bit of a chinwag about the game by all means reach out we'll be organizing something a little closer to the time that's going to be a bit more put together and structured right now all we know is we're going and the game might be may or may not have the game with us but we'll be there we'll be there and we'll have all of our anecdotes we'll have all of our i was going to say expertise but we've kind of shunned that term this this week so um yeah anyone who's who's interested get in touch we'll um we'll be checking it out so that concludes the first piece of mail now we're going to go a little bit different we're moving away from the email inbox we're going to swoop all the way over to the web form we do we've been neglecting the web

forms a little bit so uh we'll be if you've sent a web format we're going to be putting them in as well you won't get to it and the pacing of the web form it's actually starting to overtake the emails a little bit so we're gonna have to shift that focus where the ebb and flow of correspondence is an untamable beast but we're here with our lasso two cowboys so who know you can never really tame a horse well ranch hands andy take it away subject andy that's that's not part of the email that's the structure of the email history segment for the campaign for north africa happy 2026 gents i'm sending this after listening to episode 55 tomorrow came ah yes in two years time the campaign for north africa will turn 50

years old this means its own development and creation belong in a history segment there's plenty of time to do research but sadly richard berg passed away many years ago a shame a common ground we can all agree on is no seances should be utilized for the production of this podcast no we've we try to stay away from employing the supernatural in our production um that and ai we're trying to stay away from both of those however supernatural definitely more interesting I just feel like there's bigger risks involved. I don't know. It seems to be.

Let's not get into it. Richard Berger's also done his work. The last thing we need is to torment a spirit. Yeah, we'll leave the man alone. Two living designers you should talk to are Nick Karp and Joe Bolkowski. They both worked with Berger at SBI for many years prior to this game, are in their 70s, and most importantly have appeared on at least one podcast. they both would be highly amused that the campaign for north africa has finally part was finally part

of the friday night follies just try to find them before a spiritualist is required also richard burg produced a game review magazine called richard berg's review of games i've not read these directly but contain they assume they contain the same dry humor of the rules in his games if andy's american side of the family lives near north carolina juke university does have a box with the physical issues in their reference library might be worth a trip over a big up to both of you for making this podcast let's play style media has been something i should like but i've always been bored by in the past you managed to make summaries interesting by talking bringing the audience into your perspective this is the closest i've seen any piece of media translate

the experience of playing a game especially one as exotic as this know you are inspiring a future generation of media creators subtly humbly and bravely yours patrick all of those podcast appearance were on guns dice and butter a war game focused podcast from a fellow gamer and friend and also at sbi most of the staff had to play test games on friday this was known as the friday night follies well for certain gonna give a listen to that podcast to hear any any from i can find by anyone who actually worked on the game yes incredible email there patrick because that gives about web form sorry i correct myself so used to the emails that gives us um so first of all compliments thank you very much we we want you to feel like i want you to feel like you're

in the room that you're in here all of you on the couch next to the celebrity yeah you know he smells a bit sometimes but he's been picking himself up a little bit i have noticed that the guy is trying to turn a new leaf and i can't criticize him for that you can't trying to respect a guy he's gonna do something good i can just smell it and i'm not talking about is bo but the idea of being involved with this is sharing the torment yeah you've got to see us go through it that's the fun if we just talk about the game after we finished it or even worse if we talked about the game as we're playing it it would be a very different situation so instead we want people to come along on the journey with us i'm glad you have patrick and

it would be so good to be able to speak with some of the designers of the game to just understand some of the i know some of the the ideas floated is that it was during the monster game craze and richard berg and some of the minds behind it wanted to make a game that really catered to the silly nature of it make something larger than life and they have i think it was almost a case of oh you want big games well here's one like you can't swallow almost yeah it was like you don't actually want this yes it's your own personal hell it's something that you've asked for and you shouldn't have and we didn't even ask for it we didn't play monster games but a history segment of the actual game is a great idea um i think yeah when it turns 50

probably on the 50th is also a good time to do it so thanks for both those suggestions but yeah if we can get in touch with any other designers uh we'll have to look into that because that would be so interesting nick carp joe pogat balkowski if you're listening to this which i doubt you are but on the off chance get in touch drop us a web form fire us an email and if not we'll try and find you in a very normal way in a wholesome way we just want to talk that sounds worse we need to stop passively threatening the creators of the game having a chat with them would be swell so i don't see what we can i'd love to hear about these friday night follies like was it like oh we're doing campaign for north africa this friday like is that a sense of dread

or well i'd love to know how much of it was play tested yes i'd love to know the extent of it if there's any residual emotion from having play tested that if there was any concerns that they had about the game maybe malfunctioning late game any gripes they had with the design anything that would have changed so many questions for them oh yeah so if we ever get to pick their brains that would be outstanding but i'm also acutely aware that these people made this game some 50 years ago so it might not be very fresh in their memory whereas we're doing it right here right now that also means if they're in their 70s that they are around the same age that we are now when they designed the game probably a bit younger yeah oh so what have we done this

we're piggybacking off their hard work half a century ago standing on the shoulders of giants exactly and giants they are because this game has given us something to enjoy every week and by proxy everyone who's listening we owe everything to the designers of this game so So having a chinwag with them would be swell. But until then, we'll just have to put up with each other's company chinwagging and hearing some fantastic mail, which you can send on over to us through our email, which is info at warwithamate.co.uk. Our website is warwithamate.co.uk, and our Instagram is just warwithamate.

You can fire messages through any of those. And again, we'll be at the Games Expo this year. if you're going to be showing up let us know we'll organize some sort of event there whether it's us playing the game or something just me as in a pub nearby we'll figure somewhere on that scale we'll get the gang together we'll answer your questions in in the flesh and we'll maybe we'll even bring along the spreadsheets on a laptop who knows we'll showcase it all you can have a go people like why are they having a business meeting i had a look at that screen that's just excel it's just excel and that guy there is just red all over his pages don't talk

about my game he's on a bar there he's on a bad quarter i've had a bad year we should start separating parts of the game into financial quarters that's how we should decide that's how we break up the seasons oh god giving this thing seasons would be insane i'd love a nice hiatus. Well, it's currently season one, 62. Oh, 63 today. Today's episode 63, Andy. Oh, there you go. I see what you've

done. You've missed off episode 41. I've all now noticed. Well, there was an episode for some reason that uploaded twice. Don't know if you remember that. Don't know if that's still there. It is. For some reason, it's there twice. I just could not find a way to remove that, so it's good it's not been fixed

automatically. Yeah, we just occasionally will duplicate episodes why not it makes it look like a bigger body of work than it is we'll just fluff the numbers no one will know oh yeah we talk about the same shit every week if someone listens to the same episode twice they're not gonna know extra bumper every one in 60 it's just it's a repeat no one will know it's all perfect board game podcast shouldn't have vague well vigor is what we have and pluck and courage is what we endeavor to have what we do have is a history segment we do indeed it's run by our very own in-house

andrew andy take us away to the past the men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to cairo from a most trip the contrast between the east and west of the nile is very marked in the east we are absolutely not qualified to share views on history where are we when are we we are in 1935 oh that's a while ago it is nearly nearly 100 years ago again that's scary so observe that anyone who dies for his country is a fortunate man but death takes what it wants indiscriminately in peacetime as well as in war it is better to die with freedom than without it uh it's a quote from haile selassie in july of 1935 to the ethiopian

parliament i mean i kind of agree with that i'd like to die with freedom yeah so i'm on board with that quote um yeah so it comes to the 3rd of october 1935 at 5 a.m debono crosses the mareb river which is on the border and advances south into ethiopia from eritrea crucially without a declaration of war the first issue that the italians run into almost immediately is they've built boat roads right up to the border but ethiopia hasn't which means once they cross the border it's mainly trails uh which slows the italian italian advance these trails have also been damaged earlier in the year by the monsoon season so it's really rough going this is basically me moving from map c to map d in the game yes the lack of roads yeah straight on the track

but the italians are using aerial photography to scout which is a fairly new thing at the time yeah that sounds an incredibly modern technique yeah this is maybe one of the first ones they did it a bit in world war one but yeah um yeah 1935 hearing aerial photography batted around is not something that i would expect to associate with that time the camera was probably the size of like a fridge yeah it is the plane with yeah so from the north the italians have about 400 000 men it's a mixture of locally recruited uh like colonial divisions uh the italian royal army and then also an influx of black shirts they're supported by the air force uh leading the assault to the north is general emilio de bono and to the south is that rotter rodolfo graziani

What a git Yep, he's second in command here Coming from Italian subordinate land But he is under De Bono's command The Italians have 6,000 machine guns 2,000 artillery guns 600 tanks And almost 400 planes

As well as trucks, supplies and support from the navy The Ethiopians have about half a million men And 400,000 rifles Okay Of varying qualities and ages Just doing the maths there Yeah not everyone gets a rifle

about 100,000 people went in a battle with spears and bows or a shared custody agreement of a rifle yes the Ethiopian army overall had 300 trucks 7 armoured

cars and 4 World War I era tanks, that's their mechanisation and World War I era tanks, not great I guess if you're against the Italians I think even the Italians barely there yeah let's not give them too much credit no their tanks are not great at this time who wouldn't have guessed that the tankette wouldn't catch on

with the italian army they're also traveling with 200 journalists because this is very much a propaganda effort as well as a colonial war as they all are oh yeah so the italians move south uh capturing the town of agate adigrat and then continue on to adwa the next day uh that was the site of their humiliating defeat don't know if you remember it was like the worst colonial defeat against an african force ever oh yes uh so that was the site that happened they take this as a massive propaganda moment that like we have avenged this loss to our honor and all this stuff and, like, righted the scales. They, however, have faced almost no Italian resistance at this point.

The Italians, the Ethiopians, are pulling back and mobilizing. So they've avenged this defeat, but they've essentially walked into an empty town. Yeah, they've really done great jobs there. Yeah. So on the 7th of October, watching this happen, the League of Nations reacts. Rightly so.

uh they do declare italy uh the aggressor in this case would you believe it which is i guess good and kick off the slow process of starting sanctions i'll give you a list of the sanctions they did get through and we'll see how effective you think they would be okay proposal one ban arm trades to both sides right hang on a minute that's insane that's not a sanction on the on the offensive force that's not going to deter the aggressor they're coming with their weapons already yeah that's not a good deterrent okay so i'd give that one a two out of ten okay oh cool we're rating these this is good uh number two denying private and public loans to italy i mean i guess yes when it says private and public loans so does this mean to individuals oh no this means

It's like governments can't lend them money, and banks can't lend money to Italy. Right. I mean, that is more effective. Yeah. Financial sanctions always relatively hard-hitting. I'm going to bump that up to a 5 out of 10. That's going to be something of a deterrent.

Okay. Strangle their money. They blocked imports from the League of Nations country, blocked imports from everything from Italy, except gold and silver. The currency. Yeah. the backing of currency uh that's falling back down again i'm gonna give that a four okay

blocking export of selected goods to italy they however there was a proposal as part of like this was like foray on the proposals yeah this one got turned down which was to block coal oil steel and iron from being exported to italy so you're allowed to export them to italy so hang on i that would have been very good i would have given that a nine yes because you stop them from having fuel the materials for war you get rid of the war machine you get rid of fuel and the metal that you use to make anything in warfare yeah and i i don't i don't know a whole lot about the manufacturing industry of italy in the mid 30s but i don't imagine they have a vast font of metal to tap into they need to import it so this could have been another great sanction but they pussied out

of it or like we don't want to push them too hard they'll join the germans so what we'll effectively do is not stop them doing this at all we'll ban arms deals on both sides yeah an insane proposition oh yeah were ethiopia buying a lot of arms at this point in time trying because the italians were coming this feels a lot like when you get caught in school and the teacher isn't really sure who was talking first both people get punished yeah and it's like i wasn't involved in that i don't want to hear it both of you get out go see the head teacher yeah and it's like that's not fair this is not an equitable solution no especially when it's already not an equitable fight and also again ethiopia is a league of nations country it's not another country outside

the league of nations that's then being sort of are the league aren't protecting them their principles maybe don't matter as much their principles don't matter and being in the league doesn't matter yeah you're sanctioning your own guys your own team for being attacked yeah that doesn't seem fair yeah the british and french also uh talked about but didn't block the suez canal for the italians uh which i don't know when we talked about uh with the i think it was in the operation compass one the distance from britain to the other side of the suez canal is the distance to australia yes basically the same for italy you just go along the mediterranean instead of down yes so it means they can't get there anymore well that would have been what it meant if they

blockaded it for italian ships but they didn't i'm going to give that one uh a 10 i think that would have if they'd done it it would have been huge well that means they can't get there anymore yeah so better than removing the instruments of war is stopping them from getting there so that would have been a 10 you could have had a 9 and a 10 on the board instead you've you've absolutely whiffed this one they this is part of why i'm like bouncing back and forth they've just whiffed the handling of this so badly yeah because their logic for the oil thing is if we don't sell them this stuff the united states will because the united states didn't sign on to the league of nations right yes but what actually ends up happening is the usa increases their

exports to italy and then the british and french and the league nation continue going to italy so they just have basically double the fuel they're like oh they'd get fuel anyway and it's like you could have cut off a lot of that you could have made it so they're just buying from the us yeah now they're buying from both sides um i know hindsight's 2020 but this is all to make sure italy joins the allies against germany in world war ii yeah and there is a there is a bit of a sting knowing which way this goes oh yeah so on the 11th of october i'm gonna give this a go dejazamak haile selassie gugse uh haile selassie's son-in-law uh defects to the italians with a tenth of his force, so he takes 1,200 men with him.

Apparently, before the invasion started, Haile Selassie was given evidence that his son-in-law was on the Italian payroll and just shrugged. Come on, everyone is dropping the ball here. Yeah. This is insane. This, again, is another PR win for the Italians. Of course it is.

The son-in-law has just defected. Yeah. and on the 14th of october uh this is actually a win for the italians in a lot of ways this is them doing a good thing uh debono issues a proclamation ordering the suppression and end of slavery which is good yeah uh it's an interesting time to do this ah well you've immediately spotted the problem here which is this country is at war yeah once they're freed the the owners don't have any like obligation to look after them that was my immediate thought yeah yeah so de bono was to write i am obligated to say that the proclamation did not have much

effect on the owners of slaves and perhaps even less on the liberated slaves themselves many of the latter the instance they were set free present themselves to the italian authorities asking and now who gives me food uh right yeah see this so good idea very badly implemented in this case worst time to do it do it earlier yeah or don't do it now yeah i guess yeah i don't want to say do it later because elongating the slave trade not a good situation but during war you've just you've picked the worst time it's badly timed and not really fought out Yeah, because these slaves are going to be now without a framework to live within, and the state is not in a position to be able to expand upon its current framework to facilitate life. No, so they just go from slaves to refugees immediately. There's not like a...

That's a horrible transition, by the way, of two things you can go from one to the other of. the only way that could be worse is go the other direction yeah i think that's one of the only ways that goes worse so yeah that's a it's a complicated one but uh the day after that they advanced to the historical capital of the exumanite empire in the north making steady unopposed progress the ethiopians are mobilizing though around the modern day capital of addis abab de bono enters the historic capital on a white horse just riding through the streets um but he's being incredibly cautious and methodical which is driving mussolini nuts because he wants fast wins and big headlines like de bono's putting effort into building roads so he can like have

his supply lines and mussolini's just like i need headlines i need pr i want to win which leads to an interesting thing, because the Italian newspapers and propaganda are saying this war's going really well, but he wants to replace this guy. Okay. So he promotes him to marshal of it, and, like, has him come back

as, like, a ceremonial thing. And then he gets replaced by Pietro Badagoli? So, yeah, they're swapping the leaders out here. And while it's kicking off up north graziani's leading forces northwards from the south uh italian somaliland

the italians meet resistance at the stronghold of gorea where approximately three thousand men delay the italian vance they're trying to bomb them here and they're holding off the italian air force with a single anti-air gun and trenches so they're just like diving into trenches and then there's one anti-air gun which is sometimes manned by the commander afferwack so like the guy in charge of this is sometimes like running up and shooting the only the only anti-air yeah and they do manage to inflict heavy losses on the italians that's why i guess i don't know is it because there's less area to target like if you've got like a big array of anti-air guns you can kind of drop bombs sporadically and you'll hit some but if there's just one yeah you have to hit a

precise target yeah you've got the one anti-airgun and they've got like deep trenches so unless it like lands directly on where you are in the trench it'll like disperse the pressure waves and stuff yeah so yeah weirdly enough having one gun probably quite effective yeah that's until the commander gets uh wounded in a bombing run and he gets told he needs to go to hospital and he goes no because it'll affect morale so he hangs around and two days later the wound becomes gangrenous and he dies on the 5th of november and it turns out he was right because two days later his men leave oh great so yeah he stuck around but yeah died in the course of it yeah so after taking the fortress the italians are trying to deploy multiple columns northwards

from there and they just get a lot of pressure put on them to the point where graziani has to pull these two columns back because his rear is getting attacked so much that compound compounded with like heavy rain the italians just aren't getting anywhere to the south this is a nightmare for them oh yeah the war in italy is immensely popular like this is the highest the fascist like approval rating will pretty much ever be uh mussolini seen as a national hero for standing up to the foreign influence and uh the sanctions from the league of nations the sanctions are non-existent for the most yeah the sanctions are completely token yeah he's not standing up to anything he's just doing it because he's just being appeased yeah yeah funny that yeah but by

december uh the ethiopian army it's completed its mobilization and it's ready for its own counteroffensive called the christmas offensive their idea was to split the italian forces to the north locking it part of them between the ethiopian center and the ethiopian right while the left swung all the way around and went in the eritrea okay the italian air force does give them warning of these troop movements but it tries to slow them with aerial attacks and it just doesn't work because the ethiopians know the territory so well they've got local knowledge they can like split into small groups and move through like trails and stuff and this is also where they have a silver lining from their equipment thing which is you can send like a hundred thousand

men through like mountainous terrain that they know uh if they don't have like heavy machine guns artillery supply lines so in this case the ethiopian sort of lower tech works out well for them yeah it's going to be a big benefit to yeah yeah yeah that's a weird swing yeah so in mid december 190 000 ethiopians clash with 125 000 italians along their 200 kilometer front to the north and we'll get to that engagement next time it's going to be a mess oh yeah i know that for sure oh yeah and i don't know my history of ethiopia in the mid 30s but i know this is not gonna go well it does not end well there's a separate war crimes episode in this series it'll either be woven in or just one concentrated

but either way there's a lot to talk about on that front which isn't great brilliant well yeah it's always great when we have to have a little spin-off episode about war crimes yeah but it's it's part of history we do we do need to address and we need to learn about it and part of learning about it is the uncomfortable truth that the the past bit like the present is horrible yeah and our country completely failed yeah like i mean we don't have a historical precedent of being particularly great in every situation no but doesn't shock me but yeah it's it's one thing to know about nebulous failings it's another to hear how precisely bad they were yeah just yeah token is a very good way to describe it like you mentioned earlier it's nothing it's just saying

this is a sanction yeah and it doesn't do anything no it's it's a it's a small tax on but the thing is they're invading a country they're symbolic gestures against very physical and real violence yeah it's saying we disapprove of this look and people are being killed but also not too much because please don't go join that hitler fellow yeah we still want you on our side despite the fact that you're committing what i've yeah war crimes war crimes yeah a lot of gas oh great yeah which is just i gas terrifies me it's so horrible it's such a fucking horrible there's just something about the air becoming a weapon yeah that is just scary yeah mustard gas chlorine gas it's just a terrifying thought of that being deployed nerve gas yeah all of them

anything that you breathe in and that's it there's no like fighting even if there's not fighting against some of the other it's like they feel like they're in the world of the physical yeah like even if i was getting shot at by a plane coming at me i'd be terrified yeah but i'd sort of i'd be able to look at it and understand it yeah it's coming at me if it fires and it misses it loops back around i've got time to dock dock duck and weave and move out the way i can go somewhere if gas is there it's like if i breathe now i'm just done yeah my insides are scrambled it's over and even if i survive the battle i'm just fucked yeah a bullet wound you can recover from... Better. Yeah, with

better odds, depending on where you hit. Yeah. But if you breathe that in, you're inside. Especially around this time, medicine not quite as advanced as now. You're going to be a lifelong disability if you have a life anymore. Yeah, it's so grim.

Almost like there's a reason that you're not meant to deploy chemical weapons. Yeah, it's like the Geneva Convention sort of nailed that one. I'm surprised they didn't just pop in a token gesture. If you use chemical weapons we will stop private and public loans well the weird thing about the geneva convention from what i've seen is it's not enforced in the same way a lot of the international law is

it's more of a well if you cross this line it can be crossed against it's a bit of a sort of mutually assured destruction but on cruelty yeah where it's like oh if we start torturing prisoners of war then we don't get the protections which and this is a grim thing to say it's weird that that works as well as it does because a lot of the people who are figureheads of war don't need to worry in the immediate about becoming a prisoner of war so i'm surprised that they uphold that as well as they do yeah i think it's because i say that but i don't know know to what extent that actually is upheld yeah in warfare from its inception to now it was kind of held for relatively well in europe from what i've read like officers were treated fairly well

they weren't like starving death camps for pows it's less world war ii it's more conflict afterwards yes where i'm sort of like i i know enough drips and drabs of history since then in warfare where i'm sort of like i don't know to what extent that's been upheld well also i guess it kind of hasn't in a lot of ways like the enhanced interrogation stuff yeah by the way that's one of the wildest pr phrases to describe torture oh yeah enhanced interrogation is the most corporate way to phrase what is just causing someone to go through the experience of drowning well it's like a specific phrase to make torture seem boring so you like miss it on memos yeah like torture stands out there's a there's a very understandable and rightfully so stigma

attached to the word torture yeah interrogation it's questions enhanced interrogation leaves it open to interpretation not anymore though no that's now just synonymous with waterboarding yeah i hear that i hear waterboard and i know that's meant to be the sort of the the end point of enhanced interrogation that's like the the worst it gets i don't actually think it is that's what i the only reason i say that is because of a video i saw fairly recently of is it the former cia director who's doing interviews at the moment oh director or so i i think i kind of know who you talk it seems that like everyone leaves the US military or secret service

and then like starts a podcast and writes a book. And just yaps about the horrible things that they were involved with. So I'm sure there was a clip of him saying that that's the worst point, like the end point. And in some situations they started with the worst thing. I've got no doubt they've got worse stuff

they could probably pull out to be fair. Well there's a liquid that you can breathe because it's got the oxygen in it. Oh, I've heard. And they might have talked about this in the past. I don't know if it's a proposed or thing or something that's ever actually been used

but yeah it's this liquid you can breathe but your body doesn't know that so it's the sensation of drowning but without any of the oxygen deprivation of drowning oh no

hate that you know what look we need a bit of a cheer this has got incredibly grim we're just talking about different ways to torture this is insane this is not this is not what the history segment is meant to be do you have a common ground and please tell me it's somewhat jovial and silly it's well they're all somewhat jovial and silly and i think that is that is very much what we need now common ground an opportunity for right now not just us to come

together as friends again during this moment of us realizing our hubris in the game but also the war is scary it's horrible so we need in my opinion to have a bit of a reset and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying to interrupt the common ground i'm recording maybe and what better reset than the opportunity for us to completely recalibrate the way everything works andy your job public transport the way you operate every single day my proposal for this common ground is that for a holy air we get rid of time you're gonna have to tell me what you

mean so it's gonna take a little bit of prep time time ironic um it's gonna take a little bit of prep because we're gonna have to figure out how some of the um some of the emergency things work some of the core structures of civilization all the really important stuff like emergency services medical care but what i want to do for a year is just reset the board and see what the real schedule should be so i'm talking we don't have your usual work schedule we don't have things operating in usual business hours we just see when people are wanting to do things and when things are sort of productive okay you've got the you've got the five day work week getting rid of time well we can't get rid of the passage of linear time

you can't get rid of the passage of time in terms of you know the dimension that we live in but we can get rid of the social construct of time days weeks months minutes for how long free well okay i see what you're doing there for a year and who's keeping track of that there'll be an arbiter who gets a watch there's an arbiter with a watch okay but apart from that we turn off we turn off watches we turn off clocks we don't need to keep track of time for this year it's sort of like you know that film in time the one with justin timberlake that should have been incredible and was it's like the opposite of that time is not a currency time's gone because You're just removing any scheduling.

Yes. Scheduling's gone. And then... So you keep your job. It's your job right now. You keep your job. You still get paid. But you're not going to work in the usual structure that you do. Your job is...

You've got somewhat semi-flexibility in when you could realistically do your job, couldn't you? Yeah. You're working programming. Yeah. There's nothing that means it has to happen between 9 and 5. yeah you can in theory put that work together at any time of the day okay you just need to have it done so that a client can have what they're after and this client when they have this they can

service their customers at the time that their customers want okay and it passes on in that way public transport as well to be honest i think public transport in the uk will have the least issue with it doesn't follow a schedule anyway yeah that's not changing anything yeah all it means is we might have some more nighttime public transport it'll all be based around the demand because what we're trying to do is fight businesses want demand so now they can restructure it around this demand when are people wanting public transport is it actually around the core hours they've built now or is that just because everything else is centered around it okay i like i mean this is chaos and it's probably the end of civilization but i like some parts of it

well we can tweak it okay because we do need time i do think i don't like when businesses have prescribed hours that doesn't feel necessary yeah i've worked in a few roles that aren't customer facing that aren't like admin roles i've worked in a few admin roles where theoretically my job can be done i could start at 7 a.m instead of 9 a.m yes and i could have my work done by 3 p.m instead of 5 p.m and still provide the same deliverable so that it's servicing things in the same way just in different hours

Yeah, because if I could set my hours it would be like 10-8 Okay, so you'd want a later start 10-6 10-6, sorry For a normal 8 hour

Those 2 hours in the morning are more valuable than the 2 hours in the evening See, I would go the other way i would probably go i want an earlier start but there's so many organizations where it's like well no these are the core hours and i'm like well what i think would happen my personal opinion is i think if you gave it everyone the choice and things end up falling into a natural pattern i think you'll find that customer contact isn't going to be as early morning for some businesses

and some are going to be very early i think you're going to end up with a split in industries where you got a lot of people who are early risers and want to go do a certain thing like purchase certain stuff or interact with certain organizations really early on and you're going to get other ones where they're going to want to leave it till later in the day yeah i think it's going to split things we're not going to have the uniform nine to five we're going to have sporadic spread of different industries working at different times i'm up for breaking the night a five a bit and let people especially with flexible stuff and it also tackles the five-day work week does it yeah because some days maybe you don't go to work maybe you work at the weekend

again in theory i'm making a lot of presumptions about your job but could you in theory just bash out a load of work saturday sunday get it ready for the next week kind of well i guess the only thing that's restricting you at the moment are deadlines also you need to be able to talk to people well that's another thing if it's a consensus on the team that they're all happy to do that yeah but it's more like i knew if my manager just if me and him are like things don't line up we just i'll never talk to them but again you'll find that pattern you'll find a collective flow as a team you'll find something that works for you because you still need to it needs to work still i would say a thing of they do teams on they ask you what like shifts you want well

that's another thing the businesses can choose how they're going to approach the situation because i know a few other people who yeah would prefer the later and some prefer the earlier if you did the team yeah that gets rid of that issue exactly i think you've got work you've got public transport i'm thinking of the big things that impact me retail as well when people are going out buying stuff shop opening hours you've got a lot of shops that are open from you've got your sort of typical um sort of convenience shop in the uk uh one stop big brand open from like is it eight or nine a.m and they usually close at like 10 p.m probably yeah more businesses would probably operate like that the one i've changed is banks who are only open during work hours well that is an insane one

that is that's mind-boggling because that to me there's so many areas of like sort of customer contact where it's like well we're going to be open core hours because that's when everyone else is open it's like well yes and that means that the vast majority of people who will be working people during the day can't get in touch with you and yet your volumes are still ridiculously high you're still getting huge call volumes as a bank you still can't handle this you're still getting people who are traveling to your branches or i guess not so much these days it's something isn't working and i feel like it's because we've we've been in this routine for so long i think what we'll end up with is a 24-hour cycle of everything working around the clock in a more seamless way

We'll be the world that never sleeps Okay I mean, I don't hate this I think you went in, get rid of time Well, it's got to have a catchy headline A bit of an overblown headline, but that's how clickbait works Well, yeah, Spotify generates our chapters automatically

I want to see what it comes up with when I throw this one out James, the chronomancer It just becomes an infinite symbol What's your public transport thing? you just want public transport to be on longer i just want it to be available for me whenever i want it yeah and i think there's a lot of people out there like me who are too scared to overthrow society but if they're given the opportunity they'll they'll get the bus later yeah i think that works that's smart well part of that is bus companies like it should be fine running an empty

bus for the one guy who needs it i'm on that bus all the time yeah you might when we wrap up the podcast tonight i'm gonna go get on a bus and for the majority of that journey i'm going to be one of five people and it's going to be traversing a good like 30 minute journey 35 40 minute maybe and the amount of people that are going to get on there and the fare that they're paying it's like £2.50 a head so you're getting i don't know £20 into this bus for a 35 minute period that's going to pay the bus driver and then you've got what like £8 left over

does that cover the petrol I don't know how much petrol costs I don't drive but what is the upkeep on that well the thing it's probably too much to get into but yeah I'm not sorry you had a thought there I was going to go on a rant

no it's a politics rant oh yeah you can't go political andy yeah that's why i stopped myself i think i know which direction that was gonna go yeah i think it's a conversation well you know i know what you're gonna talk about but it's this isn't about politics this is about the way the world is i like this let's free up some times yes let's give it a go yeah yeah 2037 okay so we got some time i saw prep is that might also be poncho yeah you know we've got poncho day that's 2027 oh okay

mid year every 10 years yeah we'll implement one of our common grounds is it really 2027 poncho year

I think so that's next year I think I gave it two years oh wow we need to get our ponchos ready need to double check

well we've kind of found that common ground then yeah I like your my moxie yeah let's have more services available

at useful times and more flexibility for people who don't just naturally wake up nine to five i mean yeah you've really yeah you've kind of um sorry i've taken the magic out yeah you've watered down the the way i opened that and we should also go to that big eternal clock jeff bezos has built in a mountain for some reason and smash it what jeff bezos has built like a big clock in a mountain for some reason it's meant to be like

i'll be there for like a thousand years uh as like a monument to future generations i think we should go and smash it. What's he doing there then? I don't know. He's building a big clock under a mountain. It's certainly nefarious. That's some Bond Village shit. It's Vault-Tec shit. No, I don't like that. I don't think that's a clock. I think that's a countdown.

Let's go smash it. Right, we'll smash that. That has to be the first clock we get rid of. Yeah. Or maybe that's the only clock that runs during this time. Oh, if you want to know the time, you have to check into a mountain somewhere. No, Bezos will do something. He'll send us more

heathcliff comics well right but if anyone wants to send us heathcliff heathcliff comics or anything that's game related game adjacent or not really all that relevant we'll read it and we'll we'll address it and it's at info war with the mate.co.uk is our email our instagram is just war with the mate and our website is war with the mate.co.uk contact us through any of these methods let us know your thoughts on the game everything about it um we'll be at the uk games expo in may this year so if you're tagging along let us know and from me james me andy stay so humble and brave in the deserts of your hubristic mind fare thee well good night goodbye get out of here We'll be right back.