War With A Mate - Episode 85: Bardia

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

The final push has begun. Op Stage Two of Turn Six draws to a close as Andy makes a devastating push, taking the fight exactly where it needs to be; Bardia. James’ units flounder in attempts at defence, but not all hope is lost for the Axis forces. It’s all to play for, in such little time. This week’s Mailbag sees an original story realised, Andy’s History Corner gives some high-altitude, high-octane action and Common Ground brings Andy and James back to where it all began.

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Because we have your number. Hello, welcome to The End Times with me, James. Me, Andy. This is War with a Mate, and we have just wrapped up Op Stage 2 of Turn 6, which means all that is between us and the end of our practice run is a single offstage yeah it's really crept up i mean i can i can tell you're nervous andy because there's a big wet patch on your jeans i had a an unfortunate accident before the show seconds before he decided to open a beer and uh the beer was entirely full of foam you got a bad one yeah

that's that's unfortunate but these things happen they do that's showbiz and and what we found in showbiz is that nothing lasts forever because this is the end andy this is you know we have one upstage left and how do you feel today went good not decisively good but i feel pretty good about it attentive positive yes yeah that's a good way to put it i think i'm set up for the last turn but by no means feel confident going into the last off stage yep that i'm gonna win all yeah you moved your pieces around you made some decisive tactical moves but it's it's not over yet even now in the final upstage it's not quite decided which for me is exciting and today marked a crazy milestone

for me. A one I didn't ever think I would get to. Okay. When we wrapped up playing today, I wanted to play a bit more. Oh! That's good to hear. That is something I never thought I'd say. I don't know if it's the psychological need to just wrap

this up and be done with it, or if I was having fun. I'm self-aware enough to know it could be either. You know what? Let's not examine it too much and let's not burn out the feeling because that's a good one to hold on to going into the main game. Let's break this down a bit further.

So if I was happy, then I feel like maybe I would have pushed for it a bit more. But the impending sense of an ending, I think, is also tarnished a bit. Sorry. Watching you adjust your chair, you just sank down like a good four inches. I was hoping you wouldn't throw it out.

Go on with what you were saying. You think, Andy, just because this is audio only for the audience that I'm not going to call out all the visual bullshit going on. All right, since you've called me out then, I'm just going all the way down. Why?

I don't know. Why do you want to be that low? I'm feeling weirdly defensive. Oh, well, that's a good way to go into the final part of the game. Yeah, I think the nature of this is I want this to end, but I know what's coming.

That's scary. Yeah. I actually have a really strong sense of dread about the full game you're like a time traveler getting through world war one i know what's coming it's like if world war one just lasted a couple years and world war two lasts the rest of any point in your life 50 years so shall we recap what happened on your well today was just in essence your land movement movement part two with a tiny bit of mop up at the end yeah so the seventh have gone to bardia they have arrived at bardia they they snuck all the way

around and then killed 50 of the people there yeah they did so that was they didn't clear bardia but they're threatening bardia going in the last off stage and the guys in bardia are pretty weak yeah i don't think you realized how bad they were no you roll up with the seventh and they are pretty well equipped they've had their fair share of batterings throughout this playthrough oh yeah but they are far from done they've held pretty firm really firm i think the most i've done at any given time that i can remember is like 10 or 15 percent yeah i think that's about right because they did lose free infantry battalions uh company or just two points no the the actual like groupings yeah whoa i did not realize i did that well but then i attached

to bring them back up ah in that case i did nothing that for me balances out and is pointless they showed up to the gates of bardia and i had the oreska regiment and i had the first libyan division now calling them a division is pretty liberal because in that division are i have one infantry and i have two guns and an armor nope oh is that gone that's oreska that's the oreska regiment oh okay first libyan is made up of one infantry and two guns the ureska regiment that's also there that's that was a tow point of tanks a tow point eight oh okay a tow point and i said eight zeros if that clarifies it more that's a different number that's that is a scary force to be right yeah that's the most tanks in the entire area where are you going to put all those

tanks well thankfully i don't need to worry about that i have fucking no tanks so yeah that's what you went up against i think you were probably expecting a bit more from a division and a regiment i was that's fair i i put them in there with the expectation that i would be able to move more guys in before you got there did not think you'd take the dangerous route of going there and expanding so much cpa and you must have burned through cohesion yeah get there because it was what 24 capability points just to arrive and then five to fight they have 30 on the top level so a bunch of the lower level ones and you barraged with some guns yeah yeah so really going ham oh yeah and you you were bewildered i would imagine to find that i have nothing of substance there at

all uh that was kind of not you know i was going to say it's a bluff that makes it seem more intentional i put them there a while ago to stock up on ammo and whatnot i had a bunch of tanks that were worse for wear and i didn't want them to suffer breakdown just darting around doing nothing yeah and i had the first libyan who were just on their their last legs so i was i was swapping them out with some of the other guys for a while and the rotation ended up they were the ones in bardia everyone else moved out to fight you and i thought well at any time i can just swap these guys out i'll have at least an offstage notice i really depended on the maletti division and the other guys keeping the seventh where they were last offstage sorry this offstage just with

last week yeah they didn't so they got there so now i'm in a bit of a sticky spot because when you attack them like you say 50 that was devastating so i lost half of those eight tanks i lost half of my guns and my infantry were already worse for wear in the first libyan division so i just halved what i had left of them so all in all i have a very minute force left in bardia yeah and you have a full division sat outside yes that's bad it is bad for you by all metrics by all moral societal and board game codes this is a bad situation for me to find myself in that's not the only thing you did though if anything that was actually weirdly the smaller thing that happened uh yeah smaller in in terms of uh the time it took for us to resolve

definitely the biggest in terms of what this means for the end but the biggest thing the majority of today's play session was you approaching my escarpment yes well before we get to that i guess the other thing i did was i fired off two recon units they're one hex away from to brook yes another important thing no combat there no you do have two groups sat two hexes away from to brook yes so they didn't have to fight but they are there poised ready to go against the third ccnn the third black shirts yes they are the only guys in to brook the only guys holding it they are gun heavy gun heavy right very gun heavy but they are the only guys in there and they are a two on the stacking point which means that they are they're not a division but they're also not

just one group of little guys yeah they've got a bit of meat to them will that meat be enough that is to be seen it is i can only imagine that you will definitely be attacking because it's the end of the scenario why would you just sit outside there's nothing else to wait for a good question i'm amazed that you didn't go in this time around just cpa wise it didn't make sense yeah that's a good point you already burned a lot to get there to bruce a lot further away yeah and they might be i think next up stage is going to be like it's just basically going to be attack until i run out of cohesion cpa yeah ammo so i kind of wanted to i think them keeping their cohesion is probably useful vital for next turn which has left me a bit of

a scared boy because you've got guys at bardia you've got guys right outside to brook and then there was a big clash at the escarpment yes now for those who may remember from last week i have three groups there i've got the first black shirts the fourth black shirts two divisions the biggest grouping you can have and i also had the tabrook garrison they are also there we've had a bit of an update from emails in the time since i moved them letting me know that they can't actually move no they can't move from tabrook uh it's it's late in the game it's late in the practice run so we we've kind of decided since they moved so long ago and there's been material impact from them that will just let bygones be bygones and they are there but about half of that

group are meant to be static gun placements coastal defense guns that should only go for naval attacks they should only be fighting your naval forces so when it comes to the full game this huge behemoth of guns should be half a behemoth of guns mostly just the guys they can move around yeah but all in all i've made a bit of a whoopsie there we've accepted it to the end and the impact they have it's been beneficial will it win me the scenario after their clash i'm not really in the side of yes because they were sat there and you met them with two divisions yes you met them with the second no the 16th the 16th infantry and the fourth indian yes and what a clash it was didn't go well but wasn't really meant to we had and this was fun towards the end

some rules clarifications yeah real big one because i had my two guys next to each other and you had three sort of making a bit kind of like an l yes around them they're hexes so bear in mind the the sides you can have on a hex it was two inside of three uh a full house if you will yeah and it was uh it was italians full of commonwealths so you were pincered uh right in the middle there so both of your guys had to attack two people and one of them in each scenario was going to be my gun guys because they were smack bang in the middle it was good placement it was tactical and it it didn't pay off the way i hoped it would but it did still have its benefits yeah so with the rule we were looking up is is everyone involved yes but it's you must attack

the hex is next to you but it's not like everything that's connected just gets pulled into one fight yes it's not a chain reaction where everyone who's interconnected fights you launch an assault from your guy whatever hex they're in they have to fight every hex adjacent yeah which meant a maximum of two a minimum of two as well so your guys in this situation had to go against the gun unit and then either the first or fourth black shirts yes another rule clarification we found out this time is that if you want to engage in a combat that involves everyone all of the units have to be adjacent yes so you can't flank a unit one side of the head you so you know say you have a guy in the middle uh you are attacked from the north and the south that isn't one big fight it's two fights

two individual fights you need to have your guys side by side to unify them in one big fight yes which is worth bearing in mind because tactically it would make sense if you box someone in flank them it feels beneficial in the game it actually plays out as two separate fights yeah so it's not all that good i guess the benefit you do have thinking about it is if the first fight you lose like 30 percent and then the next fight happens you're 30 percent down it would be good but you need to make sure that both sides that you're fighting on are kind of balanced yeah so that was another thing we picked up on today something to bear in mind for the full game because that's a biggie because i play well we play dnd a lot so for me the idea of flanking i'm immediately like

well i've got advantage that's the big one that's what you do yeah that's the big move we we do variant rules it's very generous to say we play 5e fifth edition to be fair we play our own d20 system at this point it's kind of i think that's how all fifth edition goes yeah but that's not this isn't dnd this is campaign for north africa the rules are written they were written 48 years ago they were decided rule i was playing with this week that i've not really used before uh holding off barrages holding off barrage was a that was actually kind of the um the real hit on my side. Are your dials down, by the way,

on your mixing board? They're not the voice... These ones are the... The sound waves are fine. Okay, cool. I was worried none of this was recorded. No, the sound waves all look good. Oh god, look at that, Andy. We're 85 episodes

in and we still don't really know how audio works. No. You already know how cans work, by the looks of it. You got that big wet patch, boy. That was the can malfunctioning not me no user error no the can would have been fine if you just tapped it on the top a few times that's not real yes it is it's just a thing from a tv show well how come what tv show better call sol that's definitely where you got that no he spins the can yeah he talks about centrifugal force and it's actually a metaphor for the silencer the suppressor

being screwed on by lalo at the end of that episode i don't think it is i think it's just a conversation about plot. Just a weird coincidence. Yeah. Vince Gillian doesn't, like, tie things together or... He's known for having non-sequiturs in the middle of his episode. It's all just loose, random shit. No, Annie, you're thinking of us. Oh, damn it. Yeah, that's the crossover.

Yeah. No, he's a genius. Vince Gilligan doesn't have the Campaign for North Africa podcast. That's mine. Ours. Mine. Really gonna jump in there. Mine. I've got this. You can have the vince gilligan shit you can have the the hit show the the best rated television show of all time i'm gonna have the silly podcast i'll take the deal and also i'm also listed as a special

guest on every episode so really i don't even have this so anyway hold off barrage holding off barrage um because if i'd had to do close assault on both of them it would have gone very badly yeah you'd have to go up against a million guns uh you'd have to go up against i think i've got 10 10 groups of infantry yeah which vary between five and six toe points each and then when you add them all together you divide that by 10 that's your actual close assault value so i the 16th foot of the south and i got made them holding off barrage the the guns the taboo garrison no they Oh no, they held off the... Because they're just working like a ladder, basically.

Yeah, they held off the fourth. Yeah, and then attacked the guns. But with a minus four, that escarpment is a... That escarpment's a real bastard. Yeah. So I think I lost... I've got to note it down. Was it 10 or 15%?

You lost something. I think it might have been as small as five. Yeah. And then you hit me. I lost five. yes which i'm happy with um oh no sorry i lost zero in that one yeah i lost zero in the first one i lost five in the next one uh yeah i lost zero in that one you lost about five or ten maybe yeah so not a whole lot and i think the fourth lost 15 yep yep they lost quite a bit more which

i was happy about and i lost five percent there which i remember because it was a very small sliver of my first ccnn black shirts yes and it was a hefty barrage on my part which see the issue is i pinned a bunch of your guys it didn't really end the fight because with the holding off barrage you didn't have to fight in the first one the 16th didn't have to engage in close assault they did against the guns yeah but yeah with my actual division yeah and then in the second lot of combat with the fourth indian you had a scrape with them but i held back on the barrage from my massive gun garrison yeah thinking that in the fight they'll need that ammo and lo and behold turns out pointless because they were held off yes so it was just the first black shirts in that fight

i didn't quite think how bad the escarpment would be and how big those units were yeah because my kind of go my goal basically there was to if i could have made the black chase retreat one hex you open up a doorway the fourth could have got to bardia as well and then my two premier divisions would be both knocking down the door yeah that would have been terrible for me i would probably if that worked i would probably have pushed and tried to take bardia i think that would have been a fair move at that point because those guys had used barely any cpa to get to that point yeah they'd move one hex and i i held off um my guys fighting the 16th even because i kept them back to conserve ammo yeah so i could have absolutely decimated the the 16th

if i committed all of my guys it would have swung that scale instead of minus two it would have been you know climbing into five or six possibly yeah so that would have been a crazy difference but i thought keep back some ammo for the next fight and then the next fight i also kept back ammo from the barrage and then didn't even use them what that does mean is i have a lot more ammo yeah because i ended up not using all of my guys so they can go for a second fight which will come yes but the benefit is i've picked to have the first go in the final op stage which means if you are moving those guys it's the end you have one thing left to do yeah so if i can hit them hard with all the ammo i have left and i will then hopefully i can do enough damage that they get

there and it's not all that beneficial yeah which i guess brings us to the end of that upstage in essence the only truck movement we had was you supplying some of your guys from city barani you moved them from there yeah and then i also emptied out that supply dump and just added everything other than some stores and i think some water yeah you don't need too much water these days no i think i filled up on ammo and then fuel and then i think the remaining water that got taken was just like well i can take it it might as well like out of spite yeah that's what why keep it there yeah so my only truck movement because my biggest truck convoy is in bardia so they can't leave yeah so they're just stuck there my guys on map a my convoy have supplied the airfields

so i've got some guys ready for air missions and i also had my decoy convoy that i've had sat around the middle of map c for the whole scenario they've been sat there with supplies and i moved that one truck. It's a single truck. You guessed this a while ago. I moved this one truck up to the 64th Serene Division, and they are going to motorise

a towpoint, and I'm going to drive that towpoint somewhere. I don't know where. Can you split off a towpoint? I have some guys in there that are down to one towpoint, I believe. Oh, so yeah. I can break that off.

Otherwise, no. if i look at that sheet and it turns out those guys are actually in real good health then that truck's just there for show but we'll we'll see what i could do i could also break off some of their supply trucks and motorize them that way yeah so i've got options if i want to motorize some guys there i can it'll be funny uh it's the end of the game why not i can maybe find something interesting to do with them but my real plan the real thing i'm going to try and do is I'm going to try and move my gun unit, the big

Tobruk garrison. I'm going to move them slightly up north. I'm going to slide them down the escarpment and abandon all of the infantry. And I'm just going to wheel the guns along that coastline that you were hoping to move along. And I'm going to put them in Bardia. Yeah, they are engaged

at the minute. They are. So it'll be a big action. Will it be four instead of two? It'll cost four. Yep. And then they'll have to go into Bardia and then barrage like no one has ever barraged before i'm going to try and pin all of the seventh i'm going to go hell for leather do everything i can and i'm also going to try and break off the first black shirts and move them up to help with the efforts at bardia and i'm gonna loop the fourth all the way around this is crazy stuff and then try and use them to bracket your guys the seventh so they

can't retreat and move to to brook yeah because that would mean you can just storm to brook with all the strength that you have so i'm going to try and trap you at the the outside of bardia and tear the seventh apart as my final move in this scenario

good luck i'll need it i will need it because cpa is a real issue here cohesion is an issue here this could end with unit surrendering oh yeah and i've also got my ships for the last upstage do you really so i didn't know that the boats will be showing up well i get to use them once

at upstage and i've been holding off it's not once in upstage it's uh you use them and then you one upstage of use two upstages of chilling out yeah but i think they've had like four or five at this point right so yeah they're gonna play a part in this yeah hmm damn i need to get my guys they're fast then yeah okay and unfortunately bardia is on the coast so right on the geography wise you don't have much geography wise i'm fucked that's the geography is a callback to the everest episode i think it was 11 maybe we talked a lot about geography in that one no did we i remember that one well i don't yeah you don't listen back to them i have to edit them every week yeah i just i they kind of sit in my head for some reason the early ones especially

because i don't think it was at that point a podcast about the board game really it was a podcast about getting ready for the board game yes other things but we did one more thing at the end we did we rolled weather we started technically the last stop stage by rolling weather and i rolled it and i rolled snake eyes the most normal weather possible there's never been less anomalous weather than there has been now we've never rolled an 11 on weather no so this is as desert as desert this is as normal as the desert gets it's not hot it's not wet it's not sandy it's just a desert it's exactly as you would picture i suppose a desert of your mind look at that verisimilitude callbacks it's all coming together andy this is it this is the conclusion man i think we've got

we don't have long we've got we've got air combat yeah which we can all partake in because of the weather yes and then it's just the scrap it's the fight on the land and then that's it yes it's so close to being over could be over next week maybe the week after then that's it practice scenario done we'll have a long one next week we will we will i'll finish my my job early so that means a lot could happen yes and that then sets us up for a bit of a hiatus and then the full game for clarity hiatus we will be releasing episodes we've got some ideas yes what we'll do in the meantime so that you're not just listening to us ramble like we did for the first 14 episodes where we talk about spreadsheets we've designed and then michael mcintyre unfortunately we will be

talking about spreadsheet was designing because the gap is also so we can get make sure everything bootkeeping wise is as it needs to be because this scenario has been a lot of some spreadsheet a lot in the notebook and then update the spreadsheet yeah we we kind of we fell by the wayside a bit when it comes to where we're keeping the records and then updating them on the fly we want to make sure when it's the full game we can share them with all you guys so you can you can watch along and it'll be with a bit of lag just so we don't kind of spoil the ins and outs for each other because you know anything can happen in terms of people revealing that we'd love if no one did that would kind of spoil the game so please don't do that

that's not nice but we we want to make sure to share them so yeah we will be talking about the spreadsheets but we also plan on we'll be playing some other things in that gap yeah finishable things finishable things in one sitting so we'll we'll get back to you about that as we start the hiatus but rest assured in the gap between this and the full playthrough uh we will also let you know when we'll be starting the full playthrough it is this year it's we have a definitive date based on how long this is going to last so when we get to the hiatus we'll we'll let you know exactly when that is so you can all brace for it um and that way we also can't just linger forever it means we have a set time scale to finalize the spreadsheets to make everything work the way it

needs to we won't meander we'll have a deadline so you can count down the days i will be very nervously doing the same and it's all set up so plenty to look forward to but before that we have the final clash the epic conclusion to nearly two years since we started this crazy crazy stuff i'm excited andy yeah same it'll be good to finish it it feels very odd that we've made it this far so feels odd we're gonna have like a few weeks where we're just not actually playing I'm interested to see what the withdrawal's like because for 18 months I've played this game every week

I'm gonna I think miss it we've really come round on it it's gonna end on a high note is the weird thing I'm gonna end on a situation where the adrenaline's high I'm excited someone gets to eat a bueno and get a sugar rush

so there'll be so many feelings all up a height that I'm gonna have Stockholm Syndrome fond memories so i'll go into the main game thinking that was great and then i'll i'll slowly realize over the first five years that it's not actually that fun i also it's quite funny we did completely rinse the game at the start including for cam sandwiches uh worst board games of all time and then since we put in for that entry we've started having fun with the game yeah you know

what we might have to next time cam does his uh worst board game of all time series maybe we'll be defending it we're gonna have to we're gonna try and disqualify it from entry yeah i think we talked about it previously um i think it was actually when we were playing dnd i don't think it was on mic with uh with a pal at the weekend where we were asked what we would actually give the game out of 10 as a rating oh yeah that was during dnd wasn't it yeah and i think you settled on a three yes i think i think a three or a four for me which is wild because i'm the one who has crash outs every few episodes about how i hate the game but i do think it has it has its merits it has its excitement and i think if this is the rush i'm getting finishing the practice run

based on my age when we finish the full game i'll probably go into cardiac arrest well this scenario has worked out to be very well paced i guess from the way we played it to come to like a really exciting conclusion big worry in the main game is a winner is essentially decided in turn 50 but it's 50 more turns of attrition yeah it's uh i don't know what this is going to look like in the full game but i'm excited i'm nervous and you guys have got plenty of episodes to come the rest of our lives until one of us croaks it or we finish the game you'll keep on hearing our voices every week but aside from that we we have your voices to hear yeah let's hear from them that's one of the best parts it's listening to you guys in the mailbag the

accountability tool that turn into a thriving community of avid board gamers intriguers and just fun oddballs who have their own interests and questions an incredible assortment of interests never before have i seen a more wretched hive of fun and sillily nice yeah that last word sillily that's that's wild there's a guy who prides himself in his lexicon you do yeah fuck you let's go to the mailbag so our first email is uh well it's a bit of a brief one and uh one with a bit of um bit of background needed so i think we've mentioned it previously that one of our listeners alex got in touch with us around the time we'd mentioned the fruit zone bit yes and sent in a jingle and we replied to him and uh we let alex know that um it is the case that

we will be doing the fruit zone and that we're going to be utilising the sound clip we had an email back from Alex which is just four words what have I done well Alex I'll tell you exactly what you've done

the fruit zone Andy my fruit zone is green apples or red apples green i know red they're juicy and they're cursed the fruit zone that is what you've done alex and i hope that sits heavy on your conscience because

everyone listening they're listening because of you because we wouldn't have committed to that this is an accountability tool that's it got big that's why we keep on playing and because you sent that in we're doing fruit zone so bear that in mind when you try to sleep at night next email what a nice message for someone who did something for us did they do something for us or to us andy because now we have to do fruit zone because we have the juvenile sense of humor that means as soon as we get funny audio clip we can't not make it a bit in the fucking podcast i guess it's a bit of both we'll take 50 50 on that yeah so what's the next email andy uh victorian board games ah yes here we go hi me again uh thanks for reading out that mass message i'll get to

the egypt thing when i have slightly less due uh at the end of the week but you asked a couple of questions about the old uh about the old board games that i can definitely answer the monopoly of 19th century europe was something called the game of goose i'm immediately interested yes which is pretty much mechanically equivalent to snakes and ladders roll a die or spin a top as dice were sometimes victim to gambling taxes that would make a dnd dice collection contraband i like that a lot that it just requires the shift from die to spinning top because it's the same thing it's just a chance engine yeah it it functions exactly the same what a what a fucking stupid loophole yeah they think they found um move uh however far as it says and then move somewhere else or

perhaps wait a turn depending on what space you uh you land on says unfortunately the vast majority of victorian board games beside abstract strategy games similar to chess were effectively re-skins of the game of goose well that's the next podcast yeah for example there were uh a lot of educational geographic uh games which involved racing around a map of england europe the world etc boring i don't want to play that i say unfortunately because these games all therefore offer no player agency which makes them somewhat less interesting to me no yeah there we go boring i'm focused more on some less prominent games one i'm yet to decide but the other two are the pirates and the traders of the west indies 1847 and another is invasion 1888 invasion involves

simulating a probably german or french invasion of england in a relatively basic early war game not quite as complex as campaign for north africa boring that all actually sounds interesting just because it's called invasion yeah and this is an invade we're doing invasion now andy okay if you want a fun complicated board game you've got one you can't have your cake and eat it leave invasion alone okay i guess it's not the one i want to play of the two either really no you want to play the pirate and the traders of the west indies yeah well the pirates and the traders is an asymmetrical game where one player is the pirate hunting the other four traders these are relatively good and certainly have more player agency than most other non-abstract games of the time

right okay i'll be honest uh brooke sent this in brooke you've kind of won me around on that one that sounds quite fun yeah how how on earth do we get our hands on a copy of an 1847 game ebay i was what we got this one we can probably find that one there if you're curious i've attached a draft poster uh i've had to make for a presentation on the in-process research project uh for this friday humanities research doesn't normally involve this sort of poster presentation it's much more of a stem thing but the faculty and their infinite wisdom decided we should do it anyway because clearly anything the sciences do must be perfect and universally applicable to any other academic field i i there's there's something really

relatable here brooke about something that you're so invested in but so disenchanted in the nature of i i relate to that a lot um but the poster is really cool though that you've put together um i don't know that we should show your your work anywhere um i don't know how private this is but it's really cool yeah um yeah got lots of uh comparisons here between monopoly or methodology as you've uh re-skinned it and invasion um enemies at the table victorian board games and perceived threats to britain it's actually really cool yeah what does the box tell us about the world as understood by lieutenant chamberlain yeah no this is actually really interesting yeah well hopefully this went well for you. This was a while ago that you

sent this, so by now, if you said you need to put this in for Friday, hope it went well. Yeah, good luck with that. In the past. Yeah. I'm not annoyed by this at all. But it does

do a decent job of at least suggesting what sort of thing a culture, a cultural history, a cultural history through board gaming entails. Sorry, had a complete brain fart there. um admittedly not great for sharing on air given it's an audio podcast oh well we did it anyway don't you worry this bit is mostly for you guys anyway ah well well if it's for us we'll inflict

it on the listeners that's kind of how that works yeah we're talking to you alex i'll make sure not to tread on your turf but uh if i was hypothetically doing a similar thing with uh campaign for north africa i reckon it'd be a great source for someone trying to reconstruct how a well-informed non-historian imagined world war ii and that campaign in particular in the 1970s uh through it'd also be useful for a history of games looking at ultra long games not sure what i'd do with dnd but uh although i have ideas i'd be interested to see that brooke so yeah next time you end up on a project and it's dnd related fire that one over yeah i think that's also a good point on the non-historian but very well because they did so much research but yeah there's no

enigma because they didn't know about it that kind of thing yeah so it is sort of a window into like what information was available that's a good point at the time because we've talked about interpretation on our side of um like certain things that we know of each other's units in the game that we wouldn't realistically know we talked about it being a sort of information gathering aspect of the game but they designed it without actually having the ins and outs of that information yeah so we've really taken some liberties with that yeah because they wouldn't have known that but it does speak to that quite a bit yeah i think uh a good point made by brooke uh maybe richard berg in his in his knowledge has taken a bit of creative license with quite

abstract information available and has turned it into something i'll not say beautiful because i've not finished it yet but interesting certainly intriguing you know i'd also be interested to know what the first game was because it was mentioned up there the first game that implemented the land on the square miss a turn because miss a turn is such a quintessential part of board games yeah where it's like oh you've you've messed up in this part you've picked the wrong card oh fuck you can't have your turn even jail in monopoly yeah it's all the same thing i think is it just jail or yeah i think it's just jail and monopoly where you don't get your next go i don't think any of the chance cards from what i remember are the community ones are like

i think they're all financial penalties i think one of them might be go to prison this is definitely if you go to prison um ps you can find an image of the pirate and the trader here. I only know of one intact copy of the full Invasion game, so if any listeners know of others, I'd love to hear it. Yeah, if you find if anyone's got one of them in the back of their

cupboard, it seems like an important item for prosperity. Was that prostitution you were about to say? Not posterity. Is that the right word? That's the behind. No. Posteria. Posterity.

Prosperity. Like for history. Ooh, you've lost me here. Here I am talking about my lexicon. But you said prostitute. I didn't. Yeah, you did. I can edit this. I can pull together audio clips.

The board looks really cool as well. Or bit of paper. Yeah, the art's pretty cool. I don't know that I can play this. This is getting too old in terms of timescale. That way we're getting into board games. but brooke does encourage us to keep getting subtler humbler and braver so we'll we'll do our best we'll try we're trying i think we're braver in what we're doing it's definitely less

subtle yeah we're putting stuff out we did a live show that's not subtle anymore um humble i i think we we are humbled by messages like this it's nice to see that people much more well informed are taking out their time generously to send us stuff like this so that's that's really cool brooke i hope everything goes well going forward and uh yeah if you do the dnd one send

that over or if you know when the first skipper go game was let us know but don't spend too much of your time it sounds like you're busy uh we have uh well we'll do one more here from dan dan has sent us an email titled common ground

idea wonder what this one's about i've enjoyed the progression of your podcast for both the game and different segments the common ground is fun and now i sometimes think of subjects i can discuss with my friends and i just thought of one that might give me something of an interesting discussion flaws should not be labeled by numbers since many emit certain flaws and different countries start at different numbers just use a different system label them alphabetically or by body part or animal by size keep up the good work Dan

well Andy quick mini common ground there what do you make of that because I know there's certain countries that miss off floor 13 or just buildings it depends I think in America is the ground floor floor 1

whereas in the US first floor is the bottom it's ground floor whereas in the UK ground floor is ground floor and then one is up a flight of stairs yes yeah so yeah we do need to make this universal kind of like the clothing size one that we did a while ago um where something should just be universal yeah you should be able to go into a lift and know what you're doing yeah um fun i like body parts from the so ground floor is now

the feet yes the top floor is the head but depending how big the building is you have to differentiate more and more yeah you could have like if it's a small building like a new york skyscraper you're doing like muscle groups every bone you're going to like muscle groups and like like eyes forehead whereas other buildings it's like bottom half top half yeah i live in the mid-peck of the burj khalifa i'm in the mid-peck i'm right in the nib uh fun anecdote um this is lyft related i came across this yesterday i was watching a video i was watching a youtube series about reviews of bad hotels and we went to scarborough not too long ago we did and you know that massive hotel the grand hotel when you first get into scarborough it's

kind of along yeah is it still a hotel yeah yeah it's still a hotel it's the worst rated hotel in the uk really yeah it's got the most one-star reviews it's like 10 000 one-star reviews or something crazy it looks really nice and i read a review last night and one of the reviews is that when you press the ground floor button in the lift it just takes you down to the staff room below that's fun that and apparently in the corridors there's just like half-drank pints just like scattered around oh because it was like it was like a real fancy resort at some point wasn't it it has to be just let it slide because that building is beautiful from the outside and there's so much stuff around it like like a separate room gallery of you know the big glass

gallery just below it yeah yeah that whole area well it's where we first stopped when we were like heat exhausted and uh we had like the the lift that goes down the um yeah cable car kind of thing that goes down to the beach um it's right next to there and we saw it and it looks fucking awesome and i i at one point nearly booked a stay there because i like to go around those parts quite a bit every year at least and i nearly booked myself a stay there glad you didn't i think if i was on my own it's not too bad i think if you take a partner there it's like romana getaway oh sorry this place is the fucking dogs the lifts go to random

floors that's kind of fun though I kind of like a bit of RNG in your lift game yeah so yeah there you go a bit of fun extra stuff and there we go Dan we've come and grounded it we are in favour of the body part size of things I think that'll be a lot of fun

I'd like to hop in and hit the bell take me to the nipple the nipple penthouse please no the head is the pen out no no the nipple at that point you broke the system immediately

well it's a little common ground we don't have time to get into the ins and outs maybe one day Andy are you just doing this on your common ground I'm not going to tell you what I'm doing for my common ground it's this I'm going to be so angry it feels like a cop out so I won't

we're dedicated to doing the whole shebang so thank you for sending that in Dan and to Brooke and to Alex, especially for the jingle, and for anyone who wants to send in anything, if it's a question about the game if it's sharing your hobby your interest, if it's

just a fun anecdote, something silly or if it's a jingle for a segment that you want us to try and do, god we might just do it, you can reach us at info at warwithamate.co.uk the website, warwithamate.co.uk will be undergoing changes in the hiatus, we will be getting it

ready for the full game, and our Instagram is warwithamate i see a lot of you guys have started following that recently that's awesome you can follow it we put a weekly post up it's not much right now it's just a picture of the board a bit of fun some polls we put some polls up we recently put a poll up actually this week and it was to ask who thinks who will win in the game let me quickly get it up andy i'll get you the results because we put the the question to the listeners to the the instagram followers as to who it is they think is going to win the practice scenario and the votes came out there were four options

uh of the options we had uh andy winning me winning um you won't make it to the end tragedy will strike and who cares board game go brr this is for the practice scenario right practice scenario so tragedy will strike in the next two or three weeks yes um that was second place what so you got the majority of votes okay 31 i'll take it 31 of people think you will win only 21 think i will win 26 think tragedy will strike so a fifth of people think you might win a quarter of people think one or both of us will die in the next three weeks yeah or some other tragedy i guess something else could happen i guess and 21 said who cares board game go brr and i think that's fair because if you slice down an episode and how much of it is common ground

i feel like that last one is that so that's fair we've we've made a rod for our own back but yeah stuff like that so follow us uh on there and send anything in we've committed a while ago to read everything we'll get around to every single thing so that's the mailbag it is which means because we've done the here and now we've done the over there it's time to do the what happened before and that means it's time for the history segment the men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to cairo from a 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

so andy where and when are we well it's still world war one we looked at the ottomans last time now we're gonna have a little look at the italians well world war one had plenty going on so we're not going to run out of content oh no we are not even though this is a world war ii podcast this is a board game podcast i guess yeah and at times it can even be loosely described as even there so in 1917 new york world correspondent e alexander powell rowe on no front not on the sun-scorched plains of mesopotamia nor in the frozen mazarine marches nor in the blood-soaked mode of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous

an existence as up here on the roof of the world? I've done my New York impression before, haven't I? Give it to them. I'm from New York. Yep. You love it when I do that. Yeah. I don't know what's wrong with that, but yeah, I can't do it.

Something about that is just so wrong. But there you go, guys. Any New Yorkers listening, i'm sorry so yeah the italians did not have a great war pretty rough they ended the war in may 1915 looking to conquer parts of austro-hungaria which were italian speaking their front goes from the south of switzerland winding through the alps and then down to the adriatic the entire front is roughly 600 kilometers wow three quarters of which is high alpine terrain that is a nightmare yeah and we're going to talk about that because it's freezing there's glaciers vertical foot

cliff faces ravines and they're also fighting each other here yeah walking that would be treacherous oh yeah fighting battles in it is silly because the campaign in the alps was the highest altitude conflict in world history and it's known as the white war taking place between uh may 24th 1915 and november 4th 1918 positions were created at elevations exceeding 3650 meters which is 12 000 feet above sea level i love it when you drop one on me that i've heard nothing about it's so really exciting yeah this sounds like a wild one that's far too high to be fighting anything apart from your own breath i mean yeah it's so rough that it's estimated that more soldiers died from environmental factors than combat up to 70 of all the of roughly 150 000 deaths

god were from the environment that's another scary thing by the way this is nothing i've heard of before and 150 000 people died yeah that's far more people than i've ever met oh yeah Or will ever meet. At least in a meaningful way. Yeah. It's terrifying numbers. Yeah. And that's environmental, and they're fighting a battle.

Yeah. So this is crazy. I hadn't heard about this before I started researching either. The White War is crazy. So temperatures can reach minus 30 degrees. 30? 3-0? Yeah.

Fright. leading to thousands of deaths from frostbite hyperthermia and exhaustion the cold isn't the only issue they've got so they were the way they were setting this up was they'd set up artillery and like machine guns at the peaks of the mountains yeah which means a guy might have to climb 3 000 meters with an artillery shell to be able to load that gun do we have a weight on these shells i think it varies but some of them are like multiple kilograms and you're having to climb with that yeah and i presume when you say climb it's based on some of the environments here it's like climb it's not uphill no it's climbing rock faces climbing ice sheets climbing glaciers

climbing an ice sheet by the way what the fuck are you doing yeah and also the thing is i've done a bit of climbing not like this obviously but when you do you pick a route up and then you can like pick it by your difficulty level um yeah well like rock climbing like centers and stuff like that yeah yeah but here you can't just pick the easiest way up because when you're climbing there are snipers and artillery. So you can't pick the easiest way up the mountain. You have to pick a way where the mountain is

between you and the enemy, which might be the more difficult climb. Well, presumably they're watching the easy part. Well, they're just watching the parts they can see. You need, like, a mountain in between you and their position. Yeah, so, and again, if you're sensible and you're a sniper,

you'll keep your eyes on the easier part to navigate, because that's where the guys will go yeah that's where you get your your kill shot yeah so it's there's also you've got storms fog whiteouts uh fog in that situation yeah so scary oh yeah because if that fog clears part way up a climb because that's not gonna be just exposed yeah that's like a 30 second climb that's probably like minutes days how tall is it again three thousand meters right yeah but you know the thing i don't know how big the cliff you know the for free solo was uh oh yes yeah yeah but that's comparable i think the el capitan he did that in like four hours it takes the average person

like a week i think really yeah that just makes that impressive that's a side thing that's also one of the most impressive physical feats i think a human's ever done um but also yeah this is crazy and these are not professional mountaineers or rock climbers these are a lot of them are conscripts or from what we know last time or the last few weeks these are ill men that have kind of made it into the bracket of being healthy enough to fight yes and they're carrying kilograms of of munition yeah that's per shot to be loaded yeah at that point and i know this might sound a bit like counterintuitive but don't put the guns up there you can't put them low though yeah yeah because if because as soon as they put a gun on a peak you have to put a gun on a peak

so unless both sides decide we're not fighting on this front but for how frequently you're going to be able to load the thing yeah is it not better to put it lower down and just try and fire over or around well we'll get they do come up with some solutions for this and also you do want them on the peaks but we'll get to that you want them yeah we're talking about wants yeah and needs and i think once are very frivolous here yeah but i'm i'm maybe getting ahead of myself if they find a solution or work around so here's just a quote about one of the threats from lieutenant hans schindler an austro-hungarian in charge of a special mountaineering unit he recorded this in his diary from the camp of peak of mount konixpiz uh definitely said that wrong but this

peak is 3860 meters above sea level it's tall then yeah he has this to say have we been blown up shouting everywhere a seething mass of people the enemy nowhere any guess what he's describing here an avalanche a lightning strike because they're at the top of mountains with a shitload of metal so you're dealing with the cold and also some people are just getting blasted by lightning Sorry, I forgot about the extra, extra threat. Yeah. I was thinking environmental from a typical glacial mountain. I forgot about the sky killing you.

Yeah. Stupid. Yeah. But you did mention avalanches there. Well, I imagine if lightning's striking at the top... Yeah. That's going to cause an avalanche. Avalanches are really bad here because they're both happening naturally

and also they're firing artillery shells at snow banks above enemy positions to trigger avalanches oh i mean that's smart yeah but it's kind of fucked yeah all this is also compounded by the winter of 1916 to 1917 was the heaviest recorded snowfall in the alps for the entire 20th century so this is the worst winter in the alps for a moment there i thought you meant like the worst like avalanche rates but no it's snowfall so there's just more snow yeah so for example here in early december 1916 there were nine consecutive days of blizzards which dumped 12 meters of snow across the peaks so much snow yeah this is followed by a wave of unusually warm air being pushed north from the mediterranean which dislodges this new snowfall this leads to white friday

that can't be good it's so bad that this day holds the guinness world record for the single deadliest avalanche in history which is 332 deaths in a single avalanche christ that's that's so many people from one avalanche 2 000 people died on white friday from avalanches alone oh sorry so that was one avalanche that happened that day there's multiple avalanches yeah there's 10 000 people die of in avalanches throughout that december just avalanches how long did this like conflict last um because you mentioned it's it's from so it's 150 000 may 1915 to november 1918 so it's 150 000 that died yes if i've got that right Did you say 10,000 in avalanches?

In December of one year. And that's in December? Yes, of 1916. So that's not the whole conflict here in the mountains? No. So in terms of environmental threat, it's not just people falling from the places, it's not exposure,

it's also just avalanches as well. 10,000 in avalanches. Yeah. Insane. I mean, it's insane that they're fighting here. i don't know i mean i'm sorry i know why you would fight here but it just feels like at a certain point you'd kind of go you know what we'll fall back we'll fight them elsewhere yeah we'll fight them when they're coming down the mountain they can have the mountain and yes they might have i

guess a vantage point but the place is a fucking death trap yeah sit at the bottom with a bit of cover maybe that would be better i don't know and this is a because of global warming it's melting the ice up there they're finding people and weapons and equipment now that's been like under the snow since then well yeah i mean even now you've got people on everest yeah they've been there for like you know a few years yeah i think it was as recently as like 2024 they found two italian soldiers that are just like thawed out oh that's they'll be preserved yeah yeah if they're frozen they'll be like guys still yeah jesus yeah so you've got all these environmental challenges but they're also fighting a war so they have to overcome these incredible issues just to be able

to fight so they come up with these engineering solutions there's no roads or really even paths to most of the peaks so yeah it could take up to an a day of alpine climbing to get a single artillery shell at the peaks to combat this they built a series of cable cars that allowed supplies to be quickly taken to the peak where they could ascend a 3 000 foot cliff face in 15 minutes by the end of the war in 1918 the italians had built over 2 000 of these cableways which collectively cover 2 000 kilometers with the austrians having a comparable system that's a lot of cable cars to make oh yeah this isn't the second time cable cars have been mentioned today which is unusual yeah i guess they've been on my mind

i think i brought them up in scarborough though yeah oh yeah i guess what a what a nice little congression yeah congression is that the word confluence that's the one yeah lexicon um so they're cutting paths directly into the cliff faces mountains slash glaciers uh there's this path called the path of 52 galleries that the italians cut and they're going back and forth on one side of the mountain because they can't expose themselves around the other side yeah i was looking that up and it said today if you wanted to do that walk uh you it's not recommended for anyone below like advanced hikers yeah that's today like that's without a war going on i thought it's melted as well so it's just rock for the most part i expect so the austrians also

built a massive military complex called the ice city which was 12 kilometers of tunnels carved directly into the Momolda Glacier. Sorry, the Ice City. Yes. It's carved up, down to 150 feet below the glacier at points. And it can house one and a half thousand troops with barracks, kitchen, hospital, ammo depot,

offices, radio stations. And this is all gone now because it was in a glacier. so it's just this incredible like feat of engineering is just gone like I didn't expect them to last

I guess no but it is kind of crazy that they built this like infrastructure into the mountains and then it's just for the sake of mounting guns and arming them yeah also because it's insanely difficult to assault

an entrenched position at the top of the mountain sometimes they have to come up with other options like drilling hundreds of feet into the mountains either through like solid rock or ice while using stethoscopes to listen for counter mining from the other side oh my god imagine having that job yeah like you know Peaky Blinders how he's the clay kicker in Flanders. Yes. It's like that job

but in a glacier. It's, oh. So, they dig these tunnels, and then here's a particular example of what they do with the tunnels. This is the mountain Caldolana, where the Italians mined into the mountains just below an

Austrian-controlled summit, and detonated 5,000 kilograms of explosives blowing the peak off the mountain changing the geography of the alps they blew the top off they blew the top off the mountain um this was to kill 110 people that no that's not that's not they killed 110 and captured the rest of like the shocked people as pows but like literally you can see the damage with high res photos you can see

this from space from space? yeah that's not a measured response to kill that amount of men oh that's not a measured response oh no because the Austrians came back I don't have

this down here but it's roughly oh yeah here the Austrians respond by digging under another mountain and packing 45,000 tons of explosives below the Italian defences, detonating it and creating an 80-metre crater. It's like a meteor impact.

They did that to kill 64 Italians. Fucking hell. This war, I've never heard... This is so crazy. I've never heard of this before, and it's changed the Alps. Yeah. I've heard of the Alps. i've heard of more than space they think the cable car system they made um that laid the

groundworks for the alps becoming a holiday like it also changed the alps by making them accessible for like skiing and winter sports accessible feels like a very loose term to be used in this yeah uh throughout the entire alpine campaign uh neither side made any major strategic or military wins this entire three quarters of this front is a stalemate the entire time pretty much i can't yeah i couldn't imagine it would get any further than that when everyone is entrenched in the worst situation you possibly can be but a kind of in a way all of that was did not nothing really change the alps yeah change the alps i guess i it did keep a lot of austrians busy so they couldn't deploy to other fronts um but most of this campaign isn't happening here most of this

is happening along the lower lying is onzo river uh which is bad in its own way but we'll get to that next time but yeah this one this is going to be the italians in one episode but this this is such a crazy conflict good grief that is absolutely wild yeah i i think so far of all of the the tales we've been told in the history segments bar chemical warfare which i think really takes the biscuit when it comes to horrible situations this is the worst like in terms of the situation i would least like to be in yeah i can't think of another one where it sort of makes me so terrified at the notion of being in amongst these mountains being told all right james it's your turn to load up the gun yeah off you go watch out for the snipers and lightning and avalanches

you're also just climbing up an icy mountain yeah this is a horrible front like this might be the worst environment to fight in just like icy mountain yeah i see lightning mountain high altitude like that everything about that is just such a claustrophobic feel it's like claustrophobic even though it's also agoraphobic because you're like it's so expansive and vast mountain range but also if you're like clinging onto the side of a mountain yeah it kind of yeah it kind of mixes the two where it's like the space you actually occupy is tiny and that you're safe in yeah is minuscule but the the danger is the vastness it's it kind of feels comparable to being like the space shuttle or a submarine where it's like your safe environment is tiny

but you can you are immersed in this like endless i i hate every aspect of this and it's an incredible history segment andy so thank you for sharing that part of history with me but you've given me nightmares i'd highly recommend uh looking up some of the pictures from this because one it gives you like a lot of context but also it's like they're incredible alpine views as well it's like this bizarre but yeah i'd highly recommend looking up some of the images from this on another historical note andy okay um tonight is the uh the night of the semi-final of the World Cup

2026. Yes, it's ongoing. That match is happening now, isn't it? It's got 20 seconds left, and we are losing 2-1. Oh, because we were up 1-0 before we started. We are losing 2-1 to Argentina. Okay. So we will be losing

the World Cup. Oh, well. So that'll be fun. Five seconds to go, so yeah, that's going to be a fun journey home for me. Oh, God, yes. Because I'm going to have to navigate all of the unhappy people who've dealt with the result of us losing 2-1 to Argentina

it's now after the extra time so I think that's that well this is historical the history segment is historical we've just lost the World Cup by the sounds of it I don't really care about football so that's fine

this is more to measure the temperament of people at work tomorrow and my journey home tonight so we've covered off history we've covered off the history way making by playing the game we've listened to the listeners so all that's left now in amongst these final few death

throws of this fight is to come together Andy and there is only one way to do that. A little bit of common ground. It has to be common ground. And now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground

I'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording common ground is the only chance we have at the end of each of these play sessions to come together again as friends to reunite as pals in amongst this conflict leave on the same page and it's important to because we're going to do this for a very long time so i thought andy while we're revisiting the past in the history segment that this common ground my suggestion is that we should bring back the would you rather drown in oil or podcast no it was incoherent it was bad i'm ashamed of some of those recordings we're trying to give a bit of context as to what this

is because you're you're batting back against this very very strongly yeah sometimes when we'd finished dnd this was like two years ago wasn't it no this was five years ago jesus christ um we'd just be very drunk going to the kitchen after playing dnd and just the scenario was would you rather do x or drowning oil hence the name of the podcast would you rather drown in oil or because we always had it in us we always had the the podcast bug yeah i'm glad we held off and picked a good idea but the the notion of it was yeah would you rather drown in oil or and then a suggestion and we had a few one of them was would you rather drown in oil or have to raise kiefer sutherland as a child and the only stipulation in that was he has to star in the

movie stand by me the stephen king adaptation uh you have to make sure that happens um and another was would you rather drown in oil or every time you clap your hands they become random kitchen appliances yeah and we recorded a few of these uh me you a jurassic park friend a few others who would be playing dnd at the time and this this spanned about two years that we were like five episodes every few months we'd record one and it was shelved forever because we'd always spiral into a bit of a tangent and i think i think that is a notion that is is still is still strong i think that was a solid podcast andy i think that could have blown this one out the water what are we doing playing the campaign for north africa when we have would you rather drown in oil

or i strongly strongly disagree just because you don't like the record i still have the recordings by the way delete them i still have all all of the episodes of would you rather drown in oil or i don't i don't want to know what i don't want to know what i said 14 pints deep five years ago that was that was our that was a that was a real progenitor to what this is i think if anything it was the the true common ground it was the it was the ultimate tangent capsule it was at the end of a long dnd session that we could discuss that it was art in its purest form we really bore our souls they were fun at the time but that can just be a private fun thing that never needs to be touched or referenced again but imagine if we brought that back now the strength that we have now is

as seasoned podcasters we could drop this and we could we could do that we absolutely could i don't know what common ground you want to reach here because you want to end the podcast and do a worse one i don't want to end it andy okay you want to do another we can find our own time and we can do would you rather drown in oil or we have so many ideas we don't have time for that That's so much better than this. Well, Andy, I'm going to give you one right now. Okay. I think maybe the best way to figure it out is to do a dry run,

or I guess, with it being oil, a wet run. So I'm going to give you a situation of, would you rather drown in oil or go back in time and just play the practice run of this game? What do you mean go back in time? we're still doing it but we can go back in time and just play the practice run and we never record this podcast oh then absolutely not i'm not doing this without the podcast so you're drowning in oil i guess that's the first time in all five episodes that we've ever had drowning oil as the selection

oh is that really what you're going for you're going for drowning oil i guess i'd play the game but i don't know what this is this is this is an important moment to reflect andy i think this is this is really a chance to reflect on everything you you have become as a podcaster think long and hard about how this started how this could have been oh so bad are you happy with what you have now yes or would you right or would you go on or would you go back just do a practice run of this and do the would you rather drown in oil or podcast much rather do this one okay well that's that's interesting would you not well

i i think release a podcast that 10 people would ever listen to and then your boss finds it and you're fired well that would depend on i guess some of the conversations we had because some of them did go well all but one of them went kind of too far off the rails where we couldn't release that because we we got a bit giddy with it yeah and and we stopped really caring about an audience and it just became quite just quite volatile a conversation yeah and quite personal one of them the only one that didn't was the one that was just personal towards me oh yes the party yes yeah the other you know what the good thing is now i've got enough distance between it where i'm actually now it's fine but at the time it was bad because i was

going to go to a a party it was a house party where there were um like three or four of my exes there and they were the only people you knew yeah and you during this this recording of would you rather drown in oil or just kept on bringing up the fact I'm going to this party later that night and now it's a stupid idea and I was so certain that was going to be the one we release

but I remember distinctly pausing it and saying right guys you gotta stop talking about that you gotta stop bringing that up and you didn't so I cut it there and that was it I'd say that might be

place no we can't release any of them no i don't like a five minute clip of like one of them possibly but that's kind of it yeah but i i guess what what in a way this is a roundabout way is a chance for you to assess if you could go back and you could do it all again but if you could do it all again if you if you think about what you're doing now yeah are you happy that this is the podcast yes of all podcasts though if because in this situation remember and this is kind of how would you rather drown in oil or works you could go back and you can really change things in any way you want you got to raise kiefer sutherland i remember in that

episode you decided you were going to go back in time you were going to write harry potter a year before jk rowling did and then you're going to try and derail the train that she was on So Kiefer could start So Kiefer could start It was all for Kiefer It's all for Kiefer It is So this is what you're happy

You're happy with this one Andy Yeah are you not? I am I'm very happy with what we've got I'm very proud of it And I think would you rather drown in oil Was really the sparkling in our eye The notion that we can do this

and if you can look back and you can stamp your name on this and think this is a good podcast and not that one then that works for me as a common ground Okay, I'm happy with that and would you rather drown an oil hulk and go in the iceberg?

Yeah it's now in the law iceberg it's not in the mountain iceberg of the conflict of the white wall but instead we've really looked upon our origin story maybe that's what this was a chance for that to look back to what we were it does make me glad

we were slightly out of the put everything online at all points in time yeah we were never really extroverts to that extent where we were ever comfortable putting everything out there no i also like we didn't have the internet as it is for the entirety yeah we because we we must have started doing that around 2017 or something like the first few that we recorded oh yeah it was when we first lived together and i just said the address uh yeah that's a good point it would just be someone when we first lived together we did that a few times i remember back when i lived with there with my parents we recorded some on the few occasions that you were there i actually think you might not have even been there for some of them i don't think i was but that thing was

it was it was oddly long lived despite its sporadic recording date but it never saw the light of day thank god no no really should it no which is why i'm like why did you bring this up because all it can do is create curiosity for something you literally can never release it can create curiosity but it can it can more importantly create reflection i want you to delete those files you want me to delete those files they're here in the sound recording file it's where i keep all of the episodes don't don't maybe i'll accidentally release one do i have to start listening to the podcast before i upload and you've released three already just into the bracket of war with a maid we've never released a single war with a maid episode i just

release snippets of would you rather drown in oil or this is my big reveal it means all the emails i write them yeah i write them buddy okay i do a lot of research and you should be grateful for that would you rather drown in oil or be tricked by your friend for 18 months drowning oil you keep on saying drowning oil i don't think you know how bad that would be yeah i think it was i think it was an original premise it was i guess in a it was a premise it was a very original premise i think it had some legs to it but i don't know maybe maybe it's it's been and gone i think it had its time and it time was fortunately in

private. I think I'm braced now for what's coming next with this. Maybe I need to let go of the past. Maybe I need to let it go of drowning oil. I'd agree with you. Maybe it's time we say farewell to it and accept that this is the podcast that we're going to do.

I'd like you to do that because we're almost two years in. I feel like you haven't got over the last one. I've been over it. Yeah, maybe so. maybe so well i guess i guess maybe that's the common ground andy that the past is the past and we move forward i guess because it's such a nothing statement that it is true i can't agree with it uh the common ground is the past is the past only because you're not gonna do drowning oil

okay it's a good compromise well then we'll meet in the middle as always and i guess that's this week's common ground as gentle as it was but thought-provoking that was one for the soul andy which means we can move forward with lighter shoulders the burden lifters assurance that this was a better idea this was and is a better idea i'm happy with war with a mate i'm happy with what we have and i'm happy that we're coming to the end of a two-year run just about of what we've been doing here we have one op stage to go and then this is it for the practice round cool as long as you're not backdoor piloting us quitting the show spiritually maybe but i think i know that the accountability tool has worked a little too well we have listeners we have

incredible listeners engaged with this we have a fan base that's it's growing bewilderingly it's growing people are listening they're interested they're going to see us through to the end one more offstage andy which means we've got to pick it up next time we do possibly wrap it up god we'll see this could be the end which means from me james me andy stay subtle humble and brave in the impending end from the deserts of our mind goodnight

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