War With A Mate - Episode 64: F.I.A.H.F.T.F.D

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

An episode far too long in the making, cursed with audio issues is finally here almost a week late. Andy is faced with a confusing move by James’ North Wall, while the Italians of the past are confused by geography. The mailbag circles the guys back to The Worst Boardgame Competition 2026, and the very first War With A Mate Live Show is finally announced!

well this episode has been an absolute disaster cursed this is a cursed episode we've the episode itself great we recorded this like what two weeks ago now and we've been trying to edit it i had an absolute nightmare with it because for some reason one of the audio tracks andy's audio track was running at a faster pace than mine so it kept on outpacing it so we've had to chunk it up into segments recalibrate the audio get it to sync up change the the speed of it so that it sounds at all a semblance of a conversation so if you do during this episode notice any slight audio hiccups we're really sorry we have spent as much time as we feasibly can on this without it becoming a separate campaign for north africa quest so i hope that the episode is serviceable i hope it's

enjoyable we've we've bled for this one so hopefully it's worthwhile and there will be another episode accompanying it because we don't want to leave you empty-handed we owe you this one so there will be another one coming but just bear with us for this one because we're not technical experts we're barely even technical we appreciate any patience that's been required oh god because whatever we have put into this in terms of patience we know you've been doing it too waiting for us we promised you something and this is us delivering we're just sorry that as with most of the things that we deliver it's kind of a mess it's slapdash but not slapdash it's not being quick it's being bad and slow except your audio track which is for some reason

really fast everything seems to be up and running again now in terms of our audio recording so we shouldn't have this problem again if we do we at least know turning it off and on again seems to work for the next recording it's just this one is irretrievably damaged but we've salvaged what we can so enjoy hello what an all it's war with a mate with me james me andy that's everyone involved that's the full cast list in order of appearance so i'd be first i spoke first you would yes and you'd be second yep and that would be it celebrity on the couch isn't going to be uncredited a bit like susan bones in the first harry potter film christopher columbus's daughter i believe it was played susan bones but since oh yeah i forgot the director was

christopher columbus but yeah that's a weird crossover it's one of those names that is just you don't really get many people like that where you have huge historical figures and they just happen to have the same name apart from michael jordan and michael b jordan that's the only time i can think of the b does a lot of heavy lifting yeah you don't get like a you don't get like an albert einstein who is a like a tv presenter also you know how the sag thing is like you can only have one person with each name yeah if michael jordan didn't do space jam would michael b jordan just be michael jordan i don't know if he's in the screen actors guild i think he on the back of that you don't have to be in the screen actors guild to be in films do you it's just i think

maybe you do is it not just i think there's like union films is it not just like having good insurance with your job is it not like a a nice to have i i don't know i genuinely don't know actually i don't know that's that's one for us to look at behind the scenes but this isn't a space jam podcast or even a screen actors guild podcast it's something much more it's a podcast in which we both play the campaign for north africa all the time until it it ends until we end well it's gonna have to be that we expire because this game's going on forever we have some gameplay to touch on some movement but first of all we actually have an announcement outside of the game I guess, tangentially related to the game.

It's very related. I guess it's related to the game because we're related to the game. And that is that we, and I don't know how this has ended up happening, because it's silly, but we have our first live show. It's happening. We've waxed about it. We've joked about it. We have a live show.

We will be there in the flesh, and it will be at the UK Games Expo in May, 30th of May. Birmingham. saturday middle of the expo will be there slap bang in the middle um i believe we're the main event don't do that i'm already nervous everyone is going to be waiting andy they're all going to be queuing up standing outside you've got a few months to get ready for this this one really feels like someone's called our bluff like we mentioned live shows but it's like well yeah that'll never happen and nope it's happening there's been a few milestones of this whole

thing where it just feels like a silly distant idea but unfortunately like people listening yeah but unfortunately fate has come a knocking we will be there in the flesh um the only downside is we've we're trying to find we will be there we try to find a way to play the game there however with it being an exposition well sort of an exhibition style event we aren't able to play the game so while we will be there doing a live episode of the podcast we won't be playing the game so you'll just have to use your imaginations for that part we might bring some bits and pieces and props but probably not the meter by 60 centimeter board game uh map holders yeah and we'll still we can still act miserable if you'd like to feel like we've just played the game to

get the genuine experience yeah instead of playing the game for several hours we'll be on a bus for several hours yeah because we've got a similar experience so if you're if you're at the games expo we floated the mention last week of us attending but now there's a live show so if anyone is showing up the timing will be put somewhere available probably in the podcast that's where we should communicate definitely because that's where people listen love for anyone to show up yeah that would be great so if you're going to the expo or if you're on the fence hey now you've got a reason to i promise we're not getting paid for this so show up see us there we'll be doing this live where we talk about the game and everything around the game we'll even

maybe throw a common ground in there who knows oh a live common ground oh that will that will get the crowd riled up andy especially if you bring that kettle shit in we can do a by show of hands who agrees oh i like that get a vote on the common ground yeah okay no now we're now we're cooking with gas maybe we both do a little one oh i don't we don't have enough time to be doing two common grounds especially i feel like we we're bad for tangents sometimes when there's not a whole lot of gameplay see today and i feel like if we go to a games expo and we spend the majority of the podcast talking about not the game anything but the game that's like the one time we can't do that man yeah we should probably dial that in so watch the space we'll get more

details out as it comes but uh we'll be there so be there or be square and that is the worst ship i guess i don't i thought you had a rebuttal i don't have a strong opinion i thought you're a big square apologist for a moment there i'm not a big square fan no that's that's fair i'm a hex guy yeah i can see you being a hex guy we're both hex guys i guess today we were hex guys because today was all about movement moving around those hexes and that's what i've just done there i've just moved from one idea to the other one part of the podcast to the next with my capability points. If I had capability points in real life,

it'd be like six. Yeah, well, highly trained infantry units have eight to ten. That's a good point. I'd be nine. Okay. I think I'm not the best of the best, but I'm pretty great.

Real middle-of-the-pack guy. Yeah, I'm subtle, humble, and brave, Andy. That was the bravery coming out. you know what else was brave my actions today because it was my movement and i hit you with something you never saw coming that's all general retreat a general retreat i got scared and moved away no it's not out of fear it was a it was a tactical retreat now this will again we update the um the instagram every week and most of the time it's with a picture of the latest play session sometimes that doesn't transpire sorry but this week it will be this will be showing what the

board now looks like after my tactical retreat because i decided sticking around in the current wall that i've made wasn't panning out the way i hoped instead it meant you were just flogging the first libyan division chipping away at them bit by bit and i didn't really have a great supply line going on so i thought if i pull the guys back put them in that supply line yeah shuffle them up towards bardia which i'm making good headway on getting back because you're still digging in there really not happy about that you will take it over they're called dead bodies that most of them are already dead i just need to pick off the last few there's a hundred guys hanging in there i i can do that i've got two divisions because part of the movement was getting

a second division up there so now i've got the 62nd and the 64th and they are both just battering you guys we had combat today around that wherein i the differential worked out at 12 that was because i had some fairly good plus one cohesion that's always nice to have because my guys don't often have a plus so plus one cohesion between the two divisions rolled on a morale table no effect so their morale is minus one you rolled on your morale table and you were one result away one single digit away from surrendering en masse. It was close. You got a 61

instead of a 62. So that meant that you were in the fight, but with a minus 4 modification to your morale. Which brought you to was it minus 3 then, I take it? Yeah. So, that with the divisional difference

and the forces committed, 7 actual strength against 1 actual strength, that meant a difference of 12 so when we went down to it got into the nitty-gritty it turned out i took off 20 of your forces and you took off zero percent of mine that's it i just needed you to say that because it's not often i get this i've been battered the last few weeks so yes i know it's two divisions against the smallest possible fixture of men but i just need this need to have these small wins and i'm not taking away from you i know but i'm on the defensive i'm on

Graziani's defensive. And that's kind of what this has become, because I've pulled all my forces back, the wall is no longer there. I've split the wall, in a sense, because now I've got, along that little corridor where the road is half-repaired along the north, around City Barani,

Sollum, all that sort of space, I now have three groups on the south side of that, and then I have another three on the more northern side of that. Yeah, sort of coast and then desert. Yes, including the second Blackshirt division.

They've just shown up there. Are they the ones who came in from Cripple of Tania? Yes, they came in from there. They've been chugging away since the start of the game. And now they're finally on the front line. Are they the ones who moved into Tobruk? They were in Tobruk previously. They've just moved from Tobruk.

And the third have moved into Tobruk. So I just wanted to have one of them still stuck around Tobruk just in case you've managed to pull anything i feel like it's good to to garrison that with something more than the existing garrison so i've got them there i've got my second black shirts up in the front line and the rest of them have all pulled back a little bit further west because if my supply lines are going to be intact then i need to have them a bit more accessible for the trucks because right now getting those trucks down there it's just a logistical nightmare especially with all the hot weather you keep rolling which leads us into i suppose the next part which is trucks

you've moved your trucks which are very straightforward uh yeah up and down the line i did make a new convoy out of the trucks the saharans donated to alexandria don't say donated and that's now attached to the six australians so they they have a lot of trucks as well now I think you know damn well they didn't donate. It wasn't willing. They rode up to the city and surrendered. There was no force. They were scared.

It was coercion. They might have been scared, but they don't donate to trucks. That's like if you got held at gunpoint in the street and someone demanded your wallet and you gave it to them and then someone phrased that as, oh, you willingly just handed over your wallet. That analogy kind of works if I'd gone to the robber's house knocked on the door.

But they still pull a gun. They still pull a gun. You didn't expect that to happen. You shouldn't have been surprised by anything that happened. You knew, to keep the analogy going, I knew I was showing up at someone's house and they wouldn't be happy. I didn't think they'd pull a gun on me.

Or I guess since it was down to morale, I suppose what the analogy is, when I got to the door I didn't think I'd be so scared. And then I, as a friendly guy with a gun, said come on in would you like a free trip to europe this sound i don't know where but somewhere the analogy became a lot darker there's aspects of like international kidnapping and i i don't know there's something about that that doesn't sit right with me so i'm gonna i'm gonna forgo

the analogy i'm gonna give you this one you can have the w on this one that means win and i'll take the l which means loss or loser you can even say i've completely mugged you right so okay so i see what we're doing here so um for context today's play session has been rife with andy using his new favorite word which is mugging which is a a new hip turn of phrase which from what we we've managed to ascertain is to cast a disparaging look at another party as a way to assert dominance um whether that's because of you looked at some of the examples what were they they were academic prowess you can academically mug them you can mug them in gaming so yeah it's to it's to cast a look to present yourself as some sort of victor and it's such a

meaningless action and you love that for some reason that you've really taken to it today It's just the idea of people spending a tremendous amount of effort so someone more attractive doesn't glare at them briefly. Maybe that should be the prize at the end of the campaign for North Africa. That one of us doesn't get mogged by the other one. Okay. We're great with, like, modern slang. Yeah, this is some boomer shit.

Oh, back in my day. Back in my day, we called it the stink eye. We didn't have mogging back in my day. We had old... Well, we didn't really have dial-up in there. I think that was... We just avoided that. I just avoided that.

I could play RuneScape to my heart's content. Well, I couldn't actually. My computer was quite slow. I digress. Yes, we are. Yeah, we've got a lot of mogging for fuck's sake. So yes, I want to get my trucks into good shape. And part of that means them being closer to my units.

I need to move my trucks, that's where we ended. Your trucks moved, mine have not yet, because I have something to balance up here, which is, do I put more resource into airfields than I have been, and actually get all my planes armed up, ready to go, or do I instead just give my units the stuff they need? Because either way, you're now facing a bit of a daunting task moving further west. Yeah.

the situation it was before it was like oh I can like break your divisions as they come in and then once that's done move yes

you could chip them away whittle them down but at the minute it's if I move further it'll spin out yeah stretch supply lines quite a lot

and also because you've got those guys in the desert it would be very easy for me to push too hard and then you move them up to the coast and my divisions are just trapped isolated yeah well that's part of what i realized is that and

it was proven again today with the truck segment on your side is that your guys are just sat at the end of the road butchering my guys and a truck shows up every op stage and just fuels them back up yeah i can't allow that to keep happening that i know that they've got probably a steady amount of supplies already within their truck that are attached yes but if i put you into a situation where your trucks have to start going off because my whole issue is i thought that the trucks were going to get really damaged by my bombing of the road and it hasn't played out the way i hoped so now i'll just use geography i'll just get them off the road yeah that's the way to do it is the way to do it yes means i don't have to expend bombs and ammo i'll just i'll let you come to me

and then your trucks come to you that's the way to do it you play the guitar on mtv that's some diastrates i'm in diastrates yeah i've retreated but i still feel like i'm in a lot of danger it's an interesting one choosing between your land units and your air units because i think your land units are probably more valuable but your planes feel more it's a smaller impact but it feels more immediate you're like i've done the bombing mission i've pinned the thing i've damaged the road whereas it's a bit more nebulous with your ground forces yeah and the the the benefit of being able to pin stuff with air force at the moment is really vital to how i'm going to navigate your movement further west because if i can start

pinning you with bombs being dropped on you it's really going to send your movement completely skew if whereas if i have my guys equipped on the ground it's all good and well but it's only useful when you finally get to me because leaning towards get your air force back up and supplied i think so because right now if i'm if i'm supplying up my guys it's all good and well and i do need to do this at some point but i'm clearly because i've retreated it goes without saying i'm not coming to you you're coming to me that's going to weaken your supply line it's going to compromise the structure of your little huddle that you've got going on and it gives me

plenty of opportunity to then flank you if I want to. So realistically, I'm in a much better position this way. You can come to me if I've got air force ready as well and I can start pinning you, making you split your groups into smaller ones or even just start

strafing you. Yeah, because it looks like you've got, yeah, SGS you've got Magdalena so you'll have a squad of airplanes next turn. Yes, spiders as well and did you are you that's what you're still working out with your trucks of supplying that block on map b up at the coast of all your planes yes because i've now got two more convoys in tobrook that are split up from the black shirts that were the black shirts motorization yes so i can have them run along further west and they can start supplying the

b zone um airfields as well so i've got to decide do i want to do that and supply loads of those or do i want to zip further down south and east and start filling up these units and supply dumps that's where i'm at at the moment i'm torn between these choices and i think realistically the boring answer is i'm probably going to hedge my bets and just send one convoy to each okay so then i've got a bit of a trickle of supply going to my land units and I've got more of an air force than I did. You could potentially because Storix, it's

upstage one, Storix expenditure just happened and it's for the turn. Yeah. You could spend upstage one and two getting your airfield sorted out and then upstage three you supply run so they don't get hit with...

Oh, hang on a minute. Why would I trust you? You're the enemy. I see what you're doing here. you're trying to give me bad advice thinly veiled under good advice no no no no I won't be giving them any food now I see through your lies

your deceit oh drats you've seen right through oh you thought you could get past me oh I'm too fast for you Andy my men are going to starve how's that for your plan I feel like I'm such a fool watching them starve

is that you or me were you doing an imitation of me maybe this is indeed the imitation game i am an enigma i am starving my man that's my secret captain my men have been hungry the whole game they just run the enigma machine the first time and the message is just we're so hungry please send food i don't think we've cracked the code correctly there must be an error they wouldn't do this intentionally to their men you want to bet cheering coming to my house cheering see what happens that cheering test to also just as a another digression not a good test because it turns out pretty rudimentary ai can fool most people i think humans are just bad at knowing what a human is well bearing in

mind andy we got um wrapped up in the idea of mogging earlier and then you've got boomers on facebook i've got loads of like posts that come up on my facebook and it's like very clearly ai generated images of uh it's one of two things it's either marvel like mcu film trailers that are fake or it's very inflammatory political propaganda which is also very clearly fake and people are eating it up left right and center my parents are fairly switched on i've seen like if ai's fixed where it's like i think that's like there's an age where there's just a thing in your brain like 50 plus or whatever it is you just can't see ai you know what it's like you know that noise that only young people can hear like the frequency and people have those machines installed at their

homes to drive youths away yeah it's like that but for elderly people you get to a certain point you can no longer distinguish reality from an animated picture excuse me this is a very cool hip young bar uh can you look at this picture is it real or not we're gonna do real life captures in bars to keep out the old guys yeah wow that is that's the dystopia we live in now well you can't even tell if it's a real picture of robert downey jr or not well you can't tell if it's a real inflammatory piece of propaganda that clearly didn't happen that would be all over the news if that happened but people are stupid us included well that's actually the the core point here we're the stupid ones andy but there's bravery in that stupidity

don't you think i mean i kind of need to believe there is otherwise this is even more of an indictment good that's what i was hoping for as well so with us having moved our guys around we've started turn four we're past the halfway point off stage one is coming to a close of turn four what are your thoughts now i'm in a relatively positive state yeah but also this turn has had some oh we've got some rules wrong we'd be getting a bit overconfident with the rules yes as things have got more intricate that sort of pace we were getting it seems to have maintained but not got any

quicker so far yes so that's making it feel very daunting again yeah it does now feel like a big question mark this overtime mode that we've entered into after a victory condition was hit

it does feel like the rules questions and the maneuvering of the game state it does feel a lot like we almost got excited that we got to a win condition and then looked back at the board and realized wow things are a mess or at least that's how i feel so now i'm trying to pick up the pieces this retreat i'm almost trying to reinvent the game state so that i can come into it with you know these last two turns five and six i want to be able to go into

them feeling like i've got a united plan again whereas i feel like turn four is going to be me scrambling to try and figure out what my tactic actually is beyond lure you further in. I think we had some like end of turn three when we realised there were win conditions very close.

We both had some I guess you'd say unsustainable that don't set us up well for the main thing. You moved a bunch of guys into a position you probably wouldn't. Yeah, and held them there as well. I

chewed through ammo and also cohesion trying to get the first Libyans. Yes, that's a good point. Cohesion took a hit. On that third turn, when I was trying to get the first Libyans off,

the seventh went in with ten cohesion, which is the max. Oh, yes. Attacked, used all their CPA. Attacked, used all their CPA. Attacked, used the cohesion, which is five. they didn't retreat so they didn't get it back

attacked again oh wow so they went from 10 cohesion which is actually winning 4 battles because you get 3 at a time to 0 which I with how important morale is

ok like burning that kind of cohesion to not achieve an objective is like feels not that was a big mistake i feel like that's a that's really reframed that combat in my mind because in my head part of what i was going to say on the back of this is one of the unsustainable things i did was keep the first livian division there yeah because having them there and swallowing

up these attacks you've whittled them down they're like half the size they were and now that's a division that's been completely clipped so those guys have moved back around they are now a small portion of what they were but knowing that i've eaten up massive levels of cohesion which affects morale which affects the combat ratings it means i've actually held that location stopped you from advancing for an op stage or two and have now leveled the playing field for the next fight and you've drained a non-renewable resource in a way that like fuel water stores ammo they come in through supply lines you can't resupply cohesion positive cohesion not unless you win another fight which ideally you won't yeah i'm setting it up in such a way that i hope

you'll come into it now with balanced cohesion i mean i've got a couple of guys milletti division i've got them i think three cohesion positive so i could quite possibly end up swinging maybe even the morale side of things or at least keeping it level yeah because i think they're on minus one morale uh yeah minus one morale so something like that would be wild cohesion is such a massive part of the game that being able to whittle down your positive cohesion just by sticking around that makes it feel a lot more worthwhile that's actually reframed that whole combat massively for me oh cool so i feel a lot more positive i didn't make any mistakes i'm actually great at this game i think the next step for me is going to be making sure my guys are fully equipped in every

sense of it um pretty much all of them great for water great for fuel it's ammo and it's stores a lot of my guys around that little cluster they're gonna have to wait for you to come into them anyway so you're not rushing i guess it's not like them not being supplied it's stopping you doing an operation yeah if anything i'm kind of playing to their strength their strength being weakness they can't make an offensive move so their zone of control is their offensive move and i've kind of bottlenecked you in that area so if you want to come towards me you're either going to have to come through that bottleneck and then take on a very undesirable formation of taking on the where you'll always be flanked you'll be boxed in by units on the north and south

or your alternative is to come down south immediately and then zip along that little slice of land and even then there's like three divisions yeah it's not a great well two divisions and friends so there isn't really a perfect situation and even then if you if you fight through them their resources because of what i've just said dwindling you're not going to be able to pick their bones clean they're just bone anyway and your supply line doesn't reach that far reliably yeah i can't do the supply off the captured loot yes you can't just feed off my corpse and more importantly if you tried i'd just pull them back i'll just continue to retreat further into the desert and then you're gonna have to chase them we'll let them just stay there

i'm learning from your truck bandits i learned from watching you they've been shockingly successful i think for this playthrough well they inspired my saharan detachment it was based on how effective you were with them that i wanted to send the saharan detachment to just zip behind enemy lines and try taking the resources I could. I took out some of your airfields, and I tried to take Alexandria. It's almost as if

in history, there was an idea to do this with the Long Range Desert Group, and it worked brilliantly. Yeah, and they invented special forces in a lot of ways. So that's what I think, yeah. I know you've mentioned it in the history segments and stuff, but I've kind of came up with the idea

of special forces completely independently. that's so fun about that that desert that just puts the idea in people's mind when i'm in the desert of my mind andy i think of all sorts of genius ideas i think it's because the environment's so fucked you're like i need something different yeah no no i think i am just really smart oh okay i was just running it over on my head then i don't think that's it oh okay but good idea good suggestion oh i like your moxie kiss i'm trying and that's it you I'll give you the attaboy for that.

I think, though, we've talked about the game. We have. Maybe we should talk about people talking to us about what we've talked about about the game. Babushka Doll of game information. Yeah, we've nested our narrative here, and now the narrative is being passed over to you, the listeners, because we're going to dip into the mailbag.

so to begin i believe andy you've got one there from oryx what's oryx got to say uh andrew since oh yeah andrew since we last spoke i'm no longer unemployed i'm now working at a shipyard welding and cutting and everything in between great fun hey that's very awesome to hear you back on your feet as well yeah yeah good on you good on you uh especially since i got no clue how to weld uh lol so if you hear any news of ships sinking close to iceland i'm not the reason um well i've not heard anything yeah well keep an eye out yeah maybe we should uh maybe we don't address the name at all on this evening maybe we bleep that bit out just in case this broaden the criminal proceedings in the future but enough about my humble self

i've been wondering uh you guys mentioned that andy has been doing some r&d with excel sheets and i'm wondering how that is coming along and if it has actually helped or not um i mean i would say yes massively i say this quite divorced from the situation because i've not started using your spreadsheets but you've shown me them and how they work in practice i've been too scared to try and shift all my stuff over in case i lose track of it yeah i've done some slight automation on the spreadsheets i'm using now but the spreadsheets i'm doing for when they start the game i'm also not moving over yeah till the start but i have it's going well i've now added it so you can apply new turn and new op stage to like everything at once it's just ideal it's

going to be just save a lot of that stuff i'm terrible with spreadsheets so i'm really glad that you've got the acumen to be able to do this because otherwise the automation in this sense wouldn't be in play so yeah from what i've seen oryx it is the case that andy has done some great work but maybe he's implemented some sort of formula so that if i put in my resources it just chips them away with such a small amount that i don't realize i don't know how spreadsheets work maybe that's a function you can put on there if i'm italian in the spreadsheet it does have penalties i thought so if italian cost more that's code i've heard of that one i've have heard of that formula also i'm sure you heard this quote before but i can't emphasize enough uh while

tactics win battles logistics sustain campaigns and determine overall war outcomes and i know uh for sure uh you guys feel it andrew uh sorry not andrew i know you guys feel it and know it all too well you're just reading your own name instead of the word and i'm turning into a pokemon like a sleeper agent you see the word and you just fill in the blood i use some sort of like predictive text of your own name of a narcissist um well you know what that quote i wish someone told me that quote before we started playing i mean yes it does say it in the game in the rules yeah and it's certainly run true and it it does i think if i was to know that going into this which again i should have i read the book then it said the trucks of the game

it really does make you realize that this game isn't a game about soldiers fighting it's about the players fighting the urge to make bad truck decisions and i lost that battle a long time ago uh and since you guys love logistics and planning i highly recommend you look up the berlin air bridge it's post-world war ii but it's really interesting and i think might be a cool history segment that is a very interesting do you know much about that uh no never heard of that they you know how they split berlin up after the world war ii and you had like east germany and west germany yeah yeah berlin is in east germany but they quartered that city as well okay so then when the cold war got bad they blockaded the city so they couldn't drive supplies in right so they

were flying in the supplies to feed the entire city for like months and it would be like plane lands plane takes off plane lands plane takes off constantly it's like one of the greatest logistical feats ever and i've never heard of it yeah i'm looking at that that sounds really cool yeah that sounds like a group of um logistics that i've not got any possible way of matching at any point so that'll probably put me down a little bit in the morale sense but i'll learn something that's always fun uh also i'm sad i wasn't able to get my gremlin hands on the pilot episode uh but you guys have been absolutely splendid to listen to many great uh laughs and i keep learning a lot of history ironically you guys are my go-to podcast to listen to

if i want to laugh and learn history anyway that would be all from me this time stay subtle humble and brave uh thank you very much for that yeah um yeah we're very glad that andy's able to dish out some history i learn a lot as well here so i'm glad that it's not just me and there's because my concern was everyone listening to this is going to be much much better informed than us to be fair they are yeah from every email we've received everyone is better informed than we are yeah but it is great that other people get to learn some stuff along the way instead of it just being james learns for 20 minutes every week but um you mentioned the the pilot episode i'm also sad that i can't get my gremlin hands on it because we don't know where that file went

the original episode we've lost that to the ether it it has to be somewhere it was it was an offering to the cloud that's the price you have to pay if you want to put out the the podcast you have to occasionally sacrifice an episode yeah so if if we do ever find it or it's sort of a firstborn thing the firstborn episode of your podcast we hope we can find it one day it's where it's where deserts of your mind came from yeah that was first step that that was in the unreleased very very first recording where we had one microphone that we shared and that's i can't even remember how that phrase came about but i i wish i could go back and find out but yeah that's um that's awesome and thank you for getting in touch and you've given me a little bit of learning so a mini

history segment something i'll never shy away from we uh we have some more there's a very brief one that came in around the same time as oryx from justin so i'll quickly get through this one as well which is from justin saying i'm only 15 episodes in but with you lot consistently crying about not getting emails uh here it is i'm justin from canada love your pod and honestly love how you are quickly going from completely uninitiated to actually starting to get into it i'd often myself up as a proxy general in case someone dies but i don't really know how long i'll last myself all the best justin i think that's a very accurate description of completely uninitiated to after a year we're starting to get it i was actually really pegged how i feel we're doing

yeah that's a good point i think justin unfortunately you may have seen that change from completely uninitiated but we haven't got past the actually starting to get into it phase so when you catch up to this and you realize that it's still the same i'm sure you'll feel immense shame for us um and thank you in advance i do like the trap we left in the first episode but we didn't think about the fact people listen through podcasts when they find just get quite a lot of messages like you're begging for emails yeah we did really front load the begging for that yeah and then the commitment to read every single one so we we have a nice little indicator if someone started listening to us because and again it's wild that

people binge it so much so we get someone who says i started yesterday i'm now on episode 12 and then they'll say what you wanted an email here it is yeah so it's a nice like um sort of a subscriber notification that comes with a message yeah i'm now listening here's an email about the game we have another email this one's got a bit more meat to it which is from kate the the subject is question world's worst board game 2026 approaches what does this mean for the campaign for north africa the desert war 1940 to 1943 well let's find out hi andy and james congrats on reaching turn four and congrats james on the bueno thank you i'm still i'm not quite decided on which one i want but i'm leaning towards dark chocolate i've been listening

since the start and it's been incredibly satisfying hearing the news that you've beaten the demo. It gives me hope that you'll be able to beat the full game. I wish I was with you there, Kate. Andy, I'm wishing you the best ultimately coming out on top in the second half of the demo game to balance the

scales. Potentially the person with the best score at the end of the demo could get a packet of Walker's Ready Solid crisps. Maybe McCoy's? What about Wotsit's? Well, I see what you've done there. You've picked out bad crisps. Wotsit's great lover what's it um ready salted walkers i think that would be to me what he will list to

andy you're not a fan of plain crisps i used to love ready salted crisps i'm a very plain jane when it comes to food like i'm i'm incredibly beige well it's fried potato and salt which are your like of your five food groups that's two of them yeah yeah salt and potato then i've got chicken i've got pizza as its own food group and then i have beer beer yeah um i guess beer is the only liquid and then miscellaneous snack where i tend to get a bit more exotic so i'd be i'd be up for winning a second prize which is crisps but i think andy might win this i think you're right now down to business the world's worst board game tournament 2026 is about to begin and i have a dilemma and for those who aren't aware that that is you probably are most of you have come from

cam sandwich it's his youtube channel cam sandwich a great board game youtuber covers stuff from every kind of board game you can think of he has an annual board game tournament for the worst board game and we that's where we we had him on last year it was around the time of the board game which is wild that's a lot crazy how fast that went did they make it to the to make it to the semi-finals last year ah yes i think it was semi-finals because it was breaky and something else yes rap rap rap that's it oh how could i forget i was i was vouching for rap rat to be the winner that doesn't mess you i'd love to play that by the way um i i digress um so you have a dilemma for the last two years i've been ride or die for the campaign for north africa being crowned

the world's worst board game for all the obvious reasons of the game length mechanics the pasta point etc but now i don't know you two seem to have reached a point of having genuine fun with the game on a regular basis it's bizarre but i'm happy for you both this however raises a philosophical question of can a board game be the world's worst if it can bring moments of joy maybe in this case a game like right or racist what is that the thing is i remember when i was watching the tournament last time that game came up and i didn't quite grasp what it was and i completely forgot that that's a i'm gonna have to go and look into what that actually is is truly the world's worst for sounding utterly miserable and contributing nothing to society what do you

think if asked for to advocate for campaign for north africa's space for being the world's worst board game would you or does it deserve better now that's an interesting point where do you sit on that andy i think it is tough because yes we have been enjoying it but there's a few factors there that i think might count against the game overall yeah one we've locked ourselves in so it's either find joy or the next several decades will suck once a week uh forever yeah so i don't know we have been enjoying it i think stockholm syndrome might be a factor um yes also we're starting to enjoy it after we've put several hundred hours into just being able to play the game so yes i don't know if the bits of joy we're experiencing now outweigh that

enough yes I don't think I'd put it for worse board games but also like we haven't we're doing the smallest scenario like I can see turn 50

it going past like out of the joy but then also past any negative experience you can have with something that isn't a persistent part of your life like the board games that are bad are bad for 30 minutes well this has potential to be bad for thousands and thousands

of hours of your life i think that's what makes it difficult because it's such a hypothetical of playing the game because if you ask someone you know if you would rather do something that's quite unenjoyable for half an hour oh this board game is not very good or were you are you going to commit to something for hundreds of hours thousands of hours would you ever realistically do the thousands of hours it becomes quite divorced from the conversation because it's not realistically going to happen it's it's sort of like would you rather fight a a dog or a dragon yeah well you're not really going to find a dragon are you so it becomes a different kind of it's very hypothetical and i think another factor of all this while we can outline our experience

check out the podcast um i think because of that and this being the game we play we play dnd we play some of the board games occasionally a shout out arkham horror but i think we we're more expert witnesses than we are the jury i don't think we're allowed to testify to guilt of this board game because we don't have enough breadth of experience connected to the game and also yeah we the board games we've played we've mentioned pandemic which we didn't have a great time with yes carcass on which is just amazing love carcass on ticket ride was okay we played that like once arkham horror is amazing love arkham horror and then i think it's this yes and d and d yeah we don't we don't really play other board games frequently enough or or you know wide enough

range that i think we're allowed to make a judgment we can tell you what you want to know about escape the dark sector is fantastic if you want to play a co-op game that isn't going to take like 10 hours like oh hours in the same way that arkham horror does escape the dark sector and escape the dark castle yes both brilliant great games art styles awesome love that sort of dark fantasy um industrial for the the space one lets you sort of make a narrative as you go through of like whose character's doing well who's not, who's getting consistently like just

falling down holes or whatever it is like. And that's a game with a challenge so yeah, Escape the Dark Sector Escape the Dark Castle, check those out it won't be in the worst game tournament because they're great, that's the thing we play fun games apart from this one we don't play bad ones

I mean, we should maybe we'll have a look at the should we have a look at the semi-final of Cam's Bracket this year and see about trying some of them out. I think we should. I think it's sort of our duty at this point to tackle some of the

bad ones. Because if we can stomach this, we can at least play our game of something that's going to be like half. I want to play Rap Rat. I want to play Rap Rat. So I think that's our view on it, Kate. We maybe aren't the best ones to speak about it in

terms of making the decision. But I'd say not the worst compared to some of the other things i've seen yes like you mention uh sounding utterly miserable and contributing nothing to society uh we were looking at the ghettoopoly a few weeks ago that doesn't just add nothing to society it actively makes it detracts detracts like that's a a harmful thing someone's put into the universe in the form of a board game yeah like it's what you were reading out shouldn't exist you were reading some of the cards and stuff in that and it's just it's it's clearly trying to be controversial like racist edgy humor but it's just that's a bad fit i'd say that's worse than

campaign for north africa 100 well i guess that's it it's part of the intent as well i think maybe games like that you kind of have to exclude to it i don't know what cam's criteria is when it comes to that actually but are they too they're just distasteful it's not even really a board game it's like a shock stunt yeah it's like those video games where they're like what was that one where it's like modeled after like a mass shooting stuff like that postal or hatred maybe yeah and it's like this you've made this game to make either either a statement if you think you're being artsy or just to be inflammatory if you think you're being funny when you're just you've got weird edgy no stuff like that doesn't fit into a category yeah so um yes i think take us

as evidence and interpret that as you wish for the tournament that's a good way to put it last thing before i go my partner ben has just joined me as a listener to the podcast hey recruiting for us nice one i'm excited for him to reach the episode sisyphus where you read out my last viewer question regarding the common ground of putting cats to work that's an oldie but a goldie that one still stands out my hall of fame i really appreciate that in your darkest hour where you both had to amend for past mistakes and process the emotions. I got a good chuckle from you both, as Andy had to clarify he is

not pro-evicting pets, and you in fact had a history of smuggling your own pets and concealing them from intrusive landlords. Inspirational. Anywho, can you give Ben a hello, if you don't mind as much as a little reward for catching up on 60 plus episodes. Much appreciated.

Stay subtle, humble, and brave, Kate. Well, Kate and Ben, thank you. A lovely couples activity. listening to war with a mate nice candlelit dinner glass of rine rine that's a rine yeah someone's got the camembert and they're not taking the skin off oh i've done that before i yeah i i ate the rine from camembert oh and i thought i didn't like cheese in that style for a while of course it's kind of like saying i don't like oranges because i ate the skin yes but thank you both

hey Ben thanks for getting a 60 well done yeah if you're here now you're on 64 so nice one Ben you'll have heard all of you've probably maybe switched off by now I don't know that love is enough to keep someone listening to something like this

but there is no bond stronger than the listeners of War with a Mate and the people in War with a Mate so thank you for sending in anything you want the email address if you'd like to join in with such an endeavor is info at war with a mate.co.uk the website is war with a mate.co.uk and the instagram is just war with a mate and you can message us in any of those three ways or if you find a secret fourth way by all means please don't

because that's that's a personal contact method okay i meant more sort of like carry a pigeon or smoke signal oh okay yeah don't send us mail to our actual homes that will be quite scary yeah there's no prize for finding out our personal details and doing that also you can't send someone a message or a message a pigeon they only go home so it means that they're here someone's in your house to train a pigeon to think of my house as home which is much scarier than someone just being like i know where you live it's i know where you live and i've trained a bird since infancy to return here without you noticing i i want to tweak my answer slightly if someone can do that with a pigeon for andy's house i'll give you i'll give you anything don't do that

we have a very smart resource for listening yeah that's why i think it might really happen well send anything you want we'll read absolutely everything we've got quite a big backlog um we're trying to work through it in order but occasionally we'll pick some bounce around a bit more relevant such as the board game tournament one today that one feels topical we had to get in there before cam starts announcing the um the brackets yes we need to we need to see what's going on we're topical we're up to date with modern affairs andy better yet we're up to date with past affairs we are and some of our listeners politically may

be lazy fares oh and some of the structuring of bus tickets in our country are lazy fares there you go i've got quite a few more however we'll stop there because i'll just do it all night andy the history segment The men of the long range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to Cairo from a month's trip to Libya. The contrast between the east and west of the Nile is very marked. In the east, the country echoes everywhere. At this point I gave little thought to my future, but had always been interested in boats and the sea. I am more or less in a position of a campus surprise where I had a telegram which is on the point of sinking because errors are present. We are absolutely not qualified to share views on history.

So, Andy, when and where in history are we today? We're in 1935 in Ethiopia. Ah. And those nasty Italians are, well, invading. They're being nasty. Yeah. They're keeping up their bad antics. And while that's happening, the international community led by Britain and France is failing utterly to handle the situation in any way.

Yeah, they're not really doing much about it. Which leads to a quote from Haile Selassie, which he gave to the League of Nations. Something good, I hope. Yeah. I have heard it asserted that the inadequate sanctions already applied have not achieved their objectives. at no time and under no circumstances could sanctions that were intentionally inadequate intentionally badly applied stop the aggressor this is not a case of the impossibility of stopping an aggressor but the refusal to stop an aggressor that is basically everything we

discussed last week yes it's willingness to just let things get worse this appeasement and Eurocentricity and stuff but He's called him out for it. He's very good he has a lot of very good speeches in front of the League of Nations and he sort of takes them to task. All I know is information given from

the history segments but I'm liking this guy so far. Yeah, I've not deep dived him but from what I've seen related to this he seems, yeah. Yeah, hopefully we don't have to eat our words and he also does something horrible. So far so good. Yeah. So when we left, the Ethiopians were starting their Christmas offensive to try and push back the Italians. In the north, the Ethiopians had about 190,000 men, led by four commanders, all of whom held the royal title of Rass.

Yes, yes. Seymour Mangeshe Imru Haile Selassie Who's the Emperor's cousin Kasa Haile Darug And Mutaleg Yaginzu The Minister of War Apologies for those pronunciations

Yeah, giving it your go Your jolly old go And they're facing off around 125,000 Italians And Eritreans um this is a good time to note as well uh i'm mainly saying italians when i'm talking about them uh but colonial troops with a massive part of the army um basically also for any colonial force like the commonwealth in the game we have the fourth indians yes a lot of mixture of colonial

and yeah european um so the ethiopian's plan is to split the uh italians into two uh the center uh led by ross samu uh his army the army of tigre and the ross casa and his army of uh beggar mender uh they're going up the center to try and break it through the center and then isolate the left and white rings of the Italians. Okay. So I'll split them off, divide and conquer. Kind of what you've done to me in the game, inadvertently.

Yes. I did it by choice. Yes. So, once they've done that, the Minister of War will descend from the... There's a table mountain called Abba Aradam.

It's like several thousand feet just sheer cliffs and then flat plateau at the top it's like a great natural fortification sounds pretty yeah i'd go there yeah a lot of the pictures i've been looking it looks like a beautiful country most places are and then we ruin them with war oh yeah um so bad golio uh knew about these movements um but expected them to attack a place called mikhail which was also the most heavily fortified place for them but instead the ethiopians travel through this like impossible mountain region that the italians were like well no one can move an army through there so they get stuck with that

quite a few times every 10 years or so someone circumvents natural geography and just surprises the italians fascist italians are hunted from the fourth dimension that would be a good name for your book that would just be a fun concept for fascists being hunted by extra cleaner see the campaign for north africa um but yeah the uh if the opens aren't playing that game um and instead they cross the front ends up being this river called tekeza which is in the north um the italians are holding the region the Ethiopians are going for with four black shirt divisions

as well as 150 irregulars who form a thin defensive line. Irregulars are basically people in a war fighting for a side who aren't part of the army. So mercenaries, militias. The black shirts could be considered irregulars although they're part of the army at this point. Oh, yeah, I get it.

Yeah, so they're extra military. yeah yeah they're not prescribed by a government yeah so to speak but they're like very much on one side yeah they're in the cause still sort of um some of the people who went to ukraine yes fight would probably be irregulars yeah i mean there's a few guys from the uk i think that yeah just flew over to be part of the fight yeah i guess they're irregulars yeah um so on the 40th and 15th of december the ethiopians attack the ford uh with 2 000 men uh immediately engaging them uh while this is happening uh they have 3 000 men cross uh the river 15 kilometers north where the italians didn't think that the italians thought they were holding all the fords

but once again the ethiopians know their country and just use the terrain um so they loop around behind them and create a horseshoe shape behind them, so there's a force pushing across the river, and then a horseshoe behind the Italians to block off their retreat. So, realizing this, the Italians send out their

tankettes to clear a gap. Oh, that'll work. It doesn't. They're easily neutralized, of course. Naturally. Here's a quote. It's not from this specific engagement, but it is telling about how tankettes are dealt with in this war.

um one ethiopian soldier boarded the tank and began banging on the turret and demanding the occupants open it as the driver of the tank reversed the gunner opened the turret and the soldier decapitated them with his sword oh dear yeah but like great tank again yeah the ethiopians have half a million men and 400,000 rifles. These tankettes are being beaten by people with melee weapons. That's like a factor

down from tank. Like, tank shouldn't have to worry about a guy with a sword. In fact, I think that might be the cutoff between tankette and tank is if a guy with a sword is concerning, you aren't in a tankette. That's the criteria

for being a tankette. um so the italian uh colonial forces and the irregulars had to fight hand to hand in order to treat retreat um and but by evening the italian forces had managed a fighting to retreat to a town called selecca lecca which is garrisoned by an entire division uh the grand sasso division do you know if that's one you i'm not off the top of my head that doesn't sound like one that i've got so they might not have a great time here yeah um so the ethiopian advance they keep pushing uh despite constant aerial bombardment they have the italian air force is like seven planes if i remember rightly and like three of them are broken and they're led by i think it's a french pilot

like their air force is not really existent um so complete air superiority for the italians yeah it was just a handful of planes yeah this is also the first reported deployment of mustard gas where they reportedly on the 18th of December

gassed the crossing points of the river bastards despite this though 20,000 men led by Ras Imru do make it across the river spreading north threatening the italian fortifications axum and adwa and also starting to threaten the

eritrean border so the italians are really pushed back here yeah despite their use of chemical warfare and modern mechanized warfare like they should be doing a lot better this is not a good move but this is pretty embarrassing yeah this is not also just to mention as well this is all incredibly tightly controlled what's getting released in italy well you mentioned last week that this is seen as some massive success in italy yeah everyone's cheering this fight on unaware that their tanks are being beaten by men with swords yeah um it's just not good um so uh bagholio uh orders the division uh to retreat to axum which is the previous ancient capital of the ecumenian empire they'd conquered previously but not the capital of

that's addis ababa it's like the former capital yeah um so this is like really bad for italian morale at this point it's like we're in a general retreat what is going on um so thousands more uh italian troops get deployed to try and hold the towns already taking coming out of reserves while this is happening as well paranoia is running through the italians because they believe the enemy must be supported by spies and saboteurs and traitors because why else would we not be doing well um and like they will later on um the coptic clergy also take a real hammering here there's hundreds of arrests overall of people being accused of espionage and treason and stuff and presumably without any real evidence in the end yeah um and also yeah they just go after the

clergy um again couldn't see any proof of them actually being involved yeah yeah that sounds about right they certainly spoke up for ethiopian ideals and like supported ethiopian freedom but they weren't they weren't necessarily involved in a technical sense yeah yeah um so while this attack has all been happening another 8 000 uh ethiopians are advancing on the town of abuwa adi uh it's an important location because it's one of the major froufres through ethiopia called the king's road okay uh so if you sort of hold that especially where this town is because the road splits off uh it's just essential for like moving fast around the country okay yeah um so they're advanced and then again the air force is just uh ordered to slow them down as much as

possible but it's not working too well uh the ethiopians are really giving them a hiding up to this point uh which unfortunately will change um the italians burn uh every town and city they leave so it's like we captured it three weeks ago now we need to retreat burn the town it's just yeah i know there's probably some logistical benefit to it but it's just so fucking evil it also feels incredibly counterintuitive from the perspective of you're trying to conquer this country so you can integrate it to your empire you're burning everything you're killing civilians and you dropped gas all over it yeah you're raising the entire place that you're traveling making it not a useful territory almost

yeah it's borderline uninhabitable in the sense of there's nowhere to inhabit you've got rid of the town the homes yeah where are people going to live you're gonna have to rebuild yeah and you're not in a great spot for that kind of industrial action no so they kept coming the italians retreat until they eventually arrive in a past that they like decide this is where we're gonna make our stand uh but they're just continuously getting attacked at this point the ethiopians made huge gains for their lands they've almost taken back pretty much everything the italians have moved through um they're however not able to achieve a decisive victory due to air superiority and also uh despite mussolini hating it um bagoglio's defensive

attitude means he's not having like divisions get isolated and picked off yes uh so he's not actually he's losing territory but not men the forces he needs yeah um he is feeling the pressure though he sends a message to rome asking for two more divisions um and this is also where they he gets the order to start using gas which is reportedly on the 22nd of december which you'll notice is after they've been using gas okay right so they're asking for forgiveness rather than permission in essence well no um they will drop between 300 and 500 tons of mustard gas during this campaign in clear breach of the geneva protocol and conventions which they are a signatory to they claim the use of gas is justified how we'll get to that next time uh oh

i'm very interested to see how they spin this one yeah because they are the aggressor not only are they the aggressor but they have all of the mechanized benefits to suggest that they should be the superior force so they've arrived they're the aggressor they're in a general retreat but they have tankettes they have air superiority and they claim that they are justified in using chemical weapons. Yeah. Chemical weapons which they've been stockpiling in Eritrea since World War I.

You know what? That's a very good point as well. Where were the chemical weapons coming from? They were built and designed in World War I and then over the following years since 1919 sent to Eritrea which is

their colonial holding that they're looking to expand. like and 500 tons is not a small amount what really freaks me out when i hear tons used to describe deployment of gas is it's not heavy yes yes because i know that i'll probably refer to it maybe in like liquid form yeah before it's like aerosolized but that is still a an insane amount of chemical to be used in a fight. To be fair, I say a fight.

As soon as you're using chemical weapons, it's not really a fight at that point. You're just inflicting casualties on people where they can't fight back. Which is kind of the core as to why it's outlawed. Because it's just... It's not a fight anymore.

No, and it's... Yeah, you're turning the air. Yeah, it's uncontrollable once it's been deployed. So, I'm interested to see how they spin this one I can't see how this could I know whatever their justification is it's going to be bullshit

but I'm interested to see what that is and hear what they try and use I'll give you a little I guess preview of next episode the justification they're going to use happens after the first time they use gas

okay so they're rewriting history as well yeah um but the world is letting them get away with it yeah that's that's horrible that's horrible news yes that we were i guess yeah we as part of um the the nations involved just permitted this by not intervening and i reckon if they had from my readings you might not have got world war ii in the same way you did because you would have had a functional league of nations but their appeasement of hitler and mussolini because they're scared of a conflict ironically gives them it's the give them an inch they'll take a mile or you know give them an inch

and they'll take the rhineland and austria oh wow this is yeah this is eerie because you did mention at the start of this history segment that you cover in that this did lead as a domino effect in a sense to World War II and I'm starting to see how this divisive approach, I say divisive

unfortunately it's quite unified it's just the wrong unified approach has contributed towards World War II They're unified in their sense of we're going to do appeasement and everything but also france and england are also trying to cut secret deals where they're like unified in the same way

that like a team on the traitors is unified yeah they've undermined their own establishment that they didn't need to do no they they chose to do this and it was with a clear idea behind it and it wasn't also it wouldn't be justified at all but it wasn't like oh this is members of the league doing something to a non-league nation yeah in the league of nations yes you've undermined the integrity of it not just through not upholding the ideas and the cause of it but you're actually facilitating infighting and then while that's going on you're not punishing anyone and you're also infighting in secret with your own team who aren't helping the rest of them yeah it's so many degrees of mistake and while that's going on the nazis are sending guns to ethiopia

to slow down the italians who they will eventually ally with and we're looking at stopping all arms trade with both sides yeah so the only arms coming in are from the nazis yeah who have if i remember rightly broken away from the league around this time i wouldn't be made probably as the aftermath of this so they would be in the league which is where we're up to in this so far i think i guess that's worse yeah because that means that we're not even upholding the phony aspect of the sanctions because we'll let yeah yes there's nothing within this that makes a lick of sense it's so frustrating like war happens at war like but the complete failure around it

is just so frustrating. It's when the aggressor is given every grace and just allowed to continue with it with minimal opposition. And then afterwards it's the sort of approach of, these guys, we're actually going to fight them.

And it's like, you weren't really doing that earlier, though, were you? And a lot of this as well, I think, is you talk about appeasement and stuff. It's a european power doing it to a non-european power yeah almost like the class thing it's like they're fascist we're a democracy but we're european yeah like yeah it's like a separate tier system that they're using to measure things yeah fun that's that's maybe not the word i'd use

no uh horror yes and it sort of feels like oh so no one really learned from this did they no i don't think i don't think the appeasement thing is like it didn't work and now we're doing it again there's more of it happening right now yeah day there's appeasement on a lot of fronts yeah the scale of it differs but there's there's appeasement in a lot of places in the world right now yeah it's a scary thing yes we didn't learn no the only way we can retreat from this andy we've got to get away from the horrors of the world we've got to we've got to go somewhere else we've got to retreat back to a safe space

where you i everyone listening we can remember that we're playing a board game we're having a fun time sometimes and more importantly we're friends we're on the same side we are and we have means to do that and we won't appease we will debate this to the bitter end we will find a common ground it's not about appeasement it's about us consensus that's what this is and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro common ground i'm recording maybe yeah so here we are with our common ground common ground being the section each week in which

you and i come together by discussing a topic usually fairly unrelated to the game and find that common ground and it's your week to propose a common ground andy yes and i've got potentially a bit of a two-parter okay that's interesting i'll hit you with part one let's hear it okay um topic sentences we need to split up some of the words for big concepts okay i'll give you an example of what i'm thinking about yeah um the word i'm love in english seems to have encompassed like a lot like too broad a range of stuff it's like incredibly intense and also like i love pringles yeah but i mean that when i say it yeah the spicy ones anyway yeah but i like the greeks didn't have yes one word they had like eros is sexual passion physical love

philia which is just friendship yes um i like that way of like break it up so people can be more like precise no i i like that i i think that is an idea um so we've got an example there of of love yes and and having the breakdowns for that so presumably you maybe have another concept that doesn't have words so far yes i want to do it for the opposite it because i also think hate has the same problem love has as a word yeah like i i hate prone cocktail you've used the same word to describe like someone who killed your most loved person with like that guy on love island's annoying oh andy you've oh my god right so i i love you right now okay and that's because i have this i don't know if i've mentioned this to you before and

You've either consciously or subconsciously picked this topic. Something that really grounded my gears was when I was in school and teachers, I feel like going back, teachers are the things that stand out as being the real perpetrators of this issue, is when, say, a kid, I'm going to use myself as an example because it would always be me, forgot their homework or didn't do their homework rather and then lied and said they forgot. and then the sort of words thrown around were like disgusting um despicable abhorrent yeah it's like immediately goes to 11 you've watered down these words so incredibly that now what are you going to use to describe people who commit horrible crimes yes is it the same word because

you kind of want to discuss it like and some of these people were english teachers by the way people who words really kind of that bread and butter i also i don't think it's them i think it's an english language problem to a certain extent i think so and maybe you've hit the nail on the head that we don't have enough intensity scale for the words so i had some some options for versions of hate that need some new words you've got examples i did come up with a couple yeah um one type of hatred that needs a new word a public figure you will never meet whose actions also don't affect your life okay sort of like the celebrity guest on our sofa celebrity guests people on reality shows or like oh i hate when he that person's on this comedy panel show or

whatever yeah yeah i've got a few immediately that's pretty yeah hate feels overly strong but i do think you need a word for that and i thought distaste but it doesn't get it across it feels like there is a word lacking yeah another one hatred for people you will never meet whose actions are directly affecting your life so i guess in this case like a politician Politician, foreign warlord, like, yeah, anyone who's sort of billionaires. Yes. That kind of, and I think you'd want a differentiation because you want to be like, one is harmful, one isn't.

Yeah. No, that's good. Do you have words? Have you come up with an example of words? I didn't come up with the words. You're no wordsmith, eh? No. I'll hand that over to the linguists.

I'm just going to give them a brief. ah there's got yeah i i think this is this is good stuff i like this because i don't like when words are completely stripped of their meaning especially when people mean it earnestly i don't mind if people are being hyperbolic because i i think you get a lot of fun from that yeah you're gonna have some really wacky times by using a word that's far too intense for what you're talking about that's that's where a lot of comedy comes from it's exaggeration but if someone's being sincere i sort of start to lose respect for them i i used to be like that but i've just kind of like literally used to annoy me and now i've just accepted no that's different it's just changed

that one did annoy me it doesn't as much now because i've kind of become like blind to it it's just so frequent the meaning of the word has actually changed enough it's now an intensifier yeah not but yeah the new one that took its place is physically yes where people refer to stuff like i physically cannot handle yeah whatever but i hear people use that it's usually in a professional setting i'll hear people interact with um like clients customers anything and it'll be a case of but i physically can't do that and it's like no you've used that wrong you can physically do that you can you can do the thing that someone's wanting you to do you can't because of a process or policy so you can physically do it yeah you've used the word and actually the antithesis of what

it is in the same way people use literally to mean figuratively yeah so that that word i think is my that's my new literally because i don't like that word being used that way and again this is i like to think in a lot of ways i'm very open-minded and i'm very accepting of all sorts of different ways for people to live their lives without infringing on personal liberties. But for some reason, I don't apply that to words. You can

live such a breadth of life and I won't care at all. But then when you start using words in ways that slightly irk me, I really start to dislike that person. That's such a big flaw. That should not inform my opinion of someone. And I'm well aware of that.

I think it's a bit of a language problem. It is. And a bit of a vocab problem. This would fix my problem completely because this way it would... There is the issue, of course, of redefining language and introducing whole new swathes of words. But we're not worried about logistics and common ground.

No, absolutely not. And what it does fix is like a minor gripe for me. So that's really important. So if we have to rejig all of the English language and it saves me some minor inconvenience and prejudice towards people using words wrong, I think that's a net positive. or we just introduce we'll we'll figure out the actual words for the various things and we'll just

start adding them in and we'll encourage people to use them correctly yeah do you have anything else you think falls in you got hate where hates to i think um having a good time with something like enjoying something like this the scale of that sort of uh oh that was really good oh i had a really good day i hated doing that so like a hatred of an activity sort of but but for enjoyment so the scale of you know i had a great time i had a fantastic time oh sorry you're not talking about different types of hate you want to add more oh sorry yes yeah different concept sorry oh other things you want to differentiate out yes enjoyment would be a good one because enjoyment you kind of have like i liked it it was fine it was quite good yeah but yeah it's sort of

the the scale of you either if you if you enjoyed something you maybe yeah you either you either didn't enjoy something it wasn't fun at all you hated it you had a good time you had a really good time you had a great time it starts to blur at that point and also you don't know if someone going i had quite a good time and someone going i had a fairly good time one of them might be like higher for the other to that person yes but you don't know it falls into the because if someone said i had a quite a good time i'd think oh you didn't have a very good time yes but also some people use that to be like oh it was one step like short of great exactly and i think it falls into that trap of reviews or ratings because if you ask someone to rate something out of 10

if it was if it was all right and they didn't they you know it was seven yeah it's it becomes a seven immediately i've seen the thing where you ask someone to rate them and you take seven off yes so you go rate something between one and eleven you can't say seven yeah i like that when you weirdly get a more accurate yeah i think that and it's sort of like um if you get a one to five rating people will say four if it's all right yeah and it's like well really it should be three if it was all right i think language has fallen into the same trap so an example i'll use i i at work um over the last week i i was sending a message to someone and i found what i think is one of my most enjoyable bits i've ever done um i just had a

really fun time and i i wanted to find a way to measure it because it felt in the moment like it was the funniest thing i've ever done and it was i'll let you know what it was annie i think you might enjoy this i was i can't remember how the conversation started but i was sending someone at work a message and then somewhere along the line i started to send them messages as if they were my google search engine and i was really into garfield oh so i started sending stuff and Why does Garfield like lasagna? But it was something like, best way to watch Garfield. Garfield online free video.

Is Garfield based on a real cat? Garfield scary video. That's a good bit. How to get rid of Garfield virus on computer. How to get rid of Garfield virus on computer iPhone. And I was sat there. And the person I was sending it to was sort of like, oh, that's quite funny.

And I was there with, like, tears in my eyes at how funny I thought I was. That is one of those perfect jokes for, like, your mate will be cracking up and everyone else will be like, what are you doing? It was so good. And then I was putting stuff in, like, Garfield birthday party. Garfield birthday party near me.

just there's something about the small specific changes it's the you're honing in on something yeah it's not it's not a three four you're on a quest garfield granddad coffin garfield flowers for sad occasions just putting them in these little categories where someone's had something that they've there's an event they need to sort out and it's garfield related and they're not quite sure you can you can paint the picture yeah so i think it's so good it's so funny so i've genuinely not seen you on this one in a while it's so i just so fucking good oh i'm good i just i'm so proud of it i just think it's the funniest thing i've ever done and i want and the thing is i know it's short-lived like i know this i can't keep this

bit going no it's not you don't want to be the garfield search guy because also then people know what you're doing it's funny because people are like what's going on and i enjoy that because someone else didn't really get it so i so that's in this instance i want a way to describe a an enjoyment that has the intensity but it's short-lived yeah so we've got two scales it could be like euphoria but again

that's the thing I think everything's been like shrunk in intensity like all the bad words have gone from if we're using the 1 to 10 scale everything's gone sort of 2 to 0

and 9 to 10 yeah you can't use anything it's oh this is awful yeah and it's like well no it's just a minor inconvenience and i think it's because people are bored of words like bad or this isn't very good and it doesn't sound like you're expressing yourself if you give someone a new word and go this this is specifically for this what what we do need to do is we need to factor in the adjustment of that where people will they'll over time they'll start to use the dislike of a public figure to describe or the dislike of the public figure who affects your life they'll use it to describe the public figure

who doesn't exactly that kind of but we'll keep an eye on that we will and i think that's a very good common ground and i'll say it at that it's a very good okay and that's a good way to describe it yes because it's not because we don't have a better word we don't it's not the best thing ever and it's it's definitely not a bad one it's good in fact it's very good it's not just a good common ground it's a very good one andy you should be proud of that thank you very much and i think we have we have three words that we we know very well and we use them very aptly when it comes to these episodes andy and those words don't need to be redefined because they're perfect the way they are they are i love you oh oh oh that was one of the ones we need to redefine oh oh god um it should

be i feel it what were you gonna say stay subtle humble and brave oh yeah that one in the deserts of your minds farewell and good night We'll be right back.