War With A Mate - Episode 88: En Passant

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Here we are in the hiatus between practice game and full game. The guys have kept themselves busy with some chess this week, and are here to announce when the full game will begin. The Mailbag, Andy��s History Corner and Common Ground all return, touching on how they feel about the full game approaching, devastating Italian circumstances leading to WWII, and a blast from the past in a heel-turn from Andy’s Common Ground.

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Because we have your number. Hello. Welcome to War with a Mate. It's the after party with me, James. Me, Andy. we are we're done with the practice scenario of the campaign for north africa it wrapped up last week and it feels satisfying draw oh what a what a climactic finish to spend 22 months of our lives just to wrap it up with a with nothing yeah nothing burger i believe is the uh the hip phrase where something is just, well, pointless.

And that's how it feels. I don't know how well that term will age, but I know what has aged, Andy. I miss the game. Yeah, it's odd. I don't know why. So we explained a bit last week. We're doing a little hiatus,

so welcome to the hiatus, guys. Yeah, welcome to the in-between days. We are going to... Well, we know when we're... We'll tell you in a sec, but basically we're not going to be playing the game directly for a while because we're going to get everything sorted before the run, get spreadsheets, any automation, even getting the website sorted out for being easier and better to update.

Yes, yes. So we've got a bunch of stuff to sort out. So that does mean we are – should we tell them when we're – Yeah, so I guess to give a bit of elaboration on it, so we're going to sort out our spreadsheets. we're going to make sure everything's visible for you guys you'll you'll have heard this a lot we ran it on about it during the playthrough because it was something to look forward to in the future but now it's actually here we've we've got some stuff in mind we've got big plans hopefully you'll

you'll enjoy them all and a core part of that is making sure you can follow the game along in every aspect so the podcast will come out every week with play as it always has done through the practice run but you'll also have sight of the spreadsheets with maybe a couple of weeks lag and i think we'll probably set something up where at the end of a turn that turn will get published that's yeah that's what we're looking at these are the kind of details where we're figuring out at the moment and we want to make sure you can see every detail you can look at the spreadsheets you'll get clear pictures of the board every week so you know where all the pieces are just so you can really feel like you can follow every aspect of the game rather than doing theater of the mind like you

have done for the last two years where we just talk about going to Mercer Matruh or Bardia or Fort Madelena and you have to just kind of visualize oh that's probably where this is or for the more committed of you go out and look at the board and and see what that looks like so that's a that's a big part of it and we have a a definitive stop point a deadline at which point we will be starting the full game and I guess yeah Andy we'll not we'll not sugarcoat it anymore we decided and this worked out very nicely for a few reasons the day we'll be starting the full playthrough of the campaign for north africa will be on our 100th episode that will take place on the 30th of october which is exactly two years from the date that we first discovered the game

yep which is that's a nice bit of a synchronicity uh well no sorry will that be two years will that be three yeah that will be two years yeah two yeah 2024 yeah we didn't buy it and then wait then not learn the rules for too long yeah so we found the game on the 30th of october i found this from a screenshot my phone a little while ago 30th of october 2024 is when we first discovered the game and we'll be recording our 100th episode on 30th of october 2026 and it will be a special episode we've got an announcement coming about that episode and how it will be a bit different from the others so stay tuned for that keep an eye out that will be coming in the next few weeks but that's when we're going to start everything between now and then is going to be prep and we

can assure you this will be a little bit different from the first 15 episodes of the podcast so there will be a bit of a parallel in that the practice run has bookended with prep but prep this time means we're structured and it's not going to be us screaming about the rules um because that's also part of it we are going to go over the rules with a fine-tooth comb to try and really lock everything down before we even start but we're veterans now we don't need to worry about oh these rules are too complicated i know they're complicated and i know i'm gonna suffer i'm gonna have a breakdown part way through maybe every turn but i know what i'm getting into this yes so that that's blundered to the immediate force so i'm pleased about that it means when we're

doing that prep it's going to be about the logistics of it we can we can abstract the pain we can make it all about detail yes and because of that we can continue doing everything else we have done which is history segment yes still doing that common ground yep fruit zone everything everyone loves everyone's favorites everything everyone loves and fruit zone will it'll all still be here and mailbag of course will continue any questions about the game whether it's the practice run or what's coming we'll go through all of those or everything you know we'll answer everything at this point and we've also decided you know that means to to keep the first part of the podcast structured because some of that prep work might be hard to translate into talk as we

found at the very start of the podcast that's why we went on so many fucking tangents yes we can't promise we won't do that the tangents will still be there but they won't be the whole episode yes you for those folk that often give the feedback of really love the podcast first 15 episodes bit crap we heard you and we we know it's fun it's got a charm but it's not what we have got to now so what we will be doing is game recap but not of the campaign for north africa yes we are instead each week alongside all this prep work we're going to be playing board games that can be finished within an evening which is very very foreign for us it's a very alien idea but we did that today and today we didn't actually do any game prep we we decided we're

gonna have a week off i had a late finish from work we thought we'll make this one a bit of an easy one for us so we sat down and we played a game of chess yeah something nice and simple a nice simple game it's it's the it's the quintessential board game it's the non-thinking man's board game it's it's for it's for idiots i mean it's got what 64 squares yeah not even hexes they've got four sides one less side so that means it's a fifth less complicated just from the shape of the squares and then also buddy it's not an exact science yes it is it's geometry it's an exact science it's foundational to human understanding of the world well you learn something every day and what i've learned is hexes on six sides you knew this already this

isn't information that you've just gained so anyway you got 64 squares instead of how many hexes are on there oh i mean at least 100 yeah i'd like to see magnus carlson figure this out yeah that guy would be wet in his pants too many things to calculate you need you need to be dumb to play is he the guy you freaked out when he lost I don't he had something where he was like wearing jeans and they were like you can't wear jeans

and he was just like fine I'm gonna leave it's not a real world championship if I'm not there you can't wear jeans no it's very stuffy for no reason sorry I thought it was for like cheating like anti-cheating rules like jeans no it's like how you could technically

wear jeans to play golf but like a golf club won't let you to make you wear a polo shirt. Oh, it's all optics. Yeah. Oh, well, in that case, I'm never going to play chess because all I do is wear jeans. Yeah.

I'm a jean guy. I don't see if you don't want to take that butt plug out. Well, that's it, yeah. You've got to cheat with that butt plug. That's twice today that's come up to me, by the way. Oh, really? The conversation about using a butt plug for something other than, I guess, butt fun.

someone at work today talked about using it as a means to um use it as like an alarm that's a real fun work topic i'm conversing also what's the alarm i don't know that the guy i talked to really smart guy um honestly really smart guy i'm very into board games actually uh always the issue is i've created this um this mythology mythology around myself of i play the campaign for north africa so he'll always come to me at work and ask oh if you you play tabletop games you play board games have you played and then describes some game system that i've never heard of and i'm like bro i've played the campaign for north africa dnd that's it and honey heist those are the and everyone is bob and everyone is bob yes so i've played very limited tabletop

roleplay games so you'll talk to me about that and you also told me today about ocean gate and this is a fun fact oh is that the that's the collapse billionaires who died yeah yeah he told me that apparently it happened so fast that the the biological processes of death couldn't actually take place right because it happens so quick so they died so hard they didn't die yeah it was so quick that whatever death is defined as in a biological sense that stage didn't occur that's not true they and i they're not still alive no they're not alive more case of whatever whatever the process of death is didn't occur like this death isn't like a it's just you stopping it's but i guess there is a process of death happened when their bodies were crushed into

dust by the pressure of the ocean but it's but you know it's the case that your body has to die at some point like there is a moment where your body is is there but it's transitioned i don't know maybe there's a bit of a gray area but i think under i think it was like 900 atmospheres of pressure they just it was such a an instant thing i don't know the ins and outs but it was a cool fact or a cool thing to say whether it was a fact or not i don't know but i liked it i'm definitely gonna regurgitate that even though i think it's bullshit well i have i'm definitely gonna be at the pub and be like hey check this shit out where did you hear that it'll be like a friend of a friend and i thought it was bullshit at the time listen

to me listen to me talk about in my podcast and it's the clip there if you i think it was bullshit so yeah yeah to get back oh there we go tangents already um yeah so we we played some chess today we thought we'll we'll get back to basics yeah and we we not only played it we also um recorded our gameplay and we will be we'll release this as some bonus content in the future we're working on on some of that as well also stay tuned for anyone that wants to see some high level chess yeah or whatever we did so we'll be recording the gameplay and some of the bits and pieces keep an eye out for the 100th episode all coming out then and we we had two games because the first game i i did a little uh a little faint i believe it is um where i tricked

you andy i uh i hoodwinked you because you you went into this thinking all right i don't know what what james's skill level is in chess it's been a long time since we played we used to play when we lived together yeah we'd occasionally have a that was like seven eight years ago so we haven't played together since then so when we went into it so you've been refining your game over that time i've been playing on my phone earlier today because i knew we were doing this later so on my my lunch break at work i played some chess on my phone is that why you messaged me going what are we going to play so you could download whatever he said and practice at lunch well i'd already been playing chess and i asked that because i was like i think i need a bit more

time because i was playing on easy difficulty on the chess app that i have and i was not doing well and you're you're pretty good at chess yeah i'm all but it's kind of be subtle and humble right no but it's the it's like the thing of like we thought we were pretty good at poker because we are fairly good at poker relative to the people we were playing with yeah but then the second we went like and did like online or anything it was like oh no we're not good at poker i think chess might be a bit like that where it's like all right because of i don't play people who like constantly play chess online poker is very different from in-person poker though oh yeah because i hate online poker i i kind of enjoy online poker just because it's a fun thing to

do i used to do it um when i worked at a place it was a sales job i had during covid and since we couldn't go for like team nights out or for a meal or anything like that we instead would go and do an online poker tournament and play that together as oh i remember this yeah because we used to put it up on the big telly yeah yeah so we would set that up um and play that when we when we had some downtime that's all right i just don't like you know on if you go on like a poker app and you just go into like a random game well yeah i feel like everyone's just like all in yes immediately it's like oh so there's none of the like fun of poker here yeah because poker isn't all in fun that's not the enjoyable part so yeah but thankfully we didn't play poker we played chess we played a we

played a thinking man's non-thinking game but the first time around i thought okay let's make this easy for andy so i lost to you in three turns four i think i think the fourth one was check mate yeah yeah i i hit you with the fools mate and uh and that was unfortunate it was that took the wind out my sails a little bit and i'll be honest and we recorded this i i nearly just stopped playing i i was pretty happy to just shut the board up there and uh and just pretend we didn't do that and just start the podcast today and act like we didn't play any games it's a dick opening gambit well yeah it is so i guess uh for that fuck you but also we played a second game we did and this one went better this one lasted a bit longer yeah and i i did lose i will i will

conceive that i lost again but i did get you in check at one point you did and that for me is a big move because you're you are good at chess and this isn't a case of like oh well you know maybe compared to this there's only one other guy that i know who's definitely better than you at chess that i know personally and it's it's other james you remember that we used to play dnd with occasionally yes yeah because he's a guy who knows all of the opening moves oh he actually knows the name for stuff yeah he knows the names of like all of the different tactics that's the step past like that's the like thing like with poker you know when you go from like oh you're playing with your friends so like someone like knows the odds and ranges like they're actually

doing the maths i feel like that's with chess where it's like oh they're no opening they know like structures and stuff it's like you've gone that step beyond it's like going to like a friendly poker game it's like your friend invites you around from work it's like oh we're having a poker game and you sit down you know everyone there except one guy sat there with sunglasses on a cap and an earphone in yeah and he's just he's not talking to anyone and he's telling everybody he's never played poker before but then he's doing like crazy stuff yeah yeah he's taking your money's what he's doing and that's fucking crazy you can't do that so that is that that's what that guy was like james was was so good but this james unfortunately it doesn't run in the

james line no it's not a it's not a name-based talent no unfortunately not so i i was absolutely completely destroyed um i lasted out a good while though i think we must have played like a we played for about 15 minutes for that game yeah i think so we we got a good inning i think uh when it comes to chess andy since we're we're doing a review on on chess i guess that's where we are here what do you what do you rate chess out of 10 if you had to give it a rating out of 10 i think i'd give chess an eight an eight yeah that's that's really solid but does does a lot of that sway depending on the player that you're against no i was sort of taking that into account i think okay so that's your average i think so yeah so so in a really good game of chess where

does that swing if you have if you have like a really good game of chess like it went on and like you found yourself really challenged and you have like a nail-biting finish and you pull through at the end and to the point where you're like inspired to shake the hand of the player what does that become out of 10 i guess that's like a a nine maybe are we doing decimals go on then maybe like a nine three i guess nine three wow okay i think chess has got a lot of potential to have a lot of fun with it it does it definitely does i think the issue with chess for me is when i play a game i like a bit of a bit of chit chat um whether it's kind of like you know fun smack talk or whether it's just a bit of friendly banter yeah you don't really get that

you're in chess i found that today it's a bit like the golf thing with it being proper like yeah there's a bit of a vibe of there's decorum to be had with chess yeah it's not like poker with poker part of it is is shooting the shit but with chess i found you didn't have that no when we recorded this this extra episode that we've got for the for the release later it it did feel a bit jarring at times where i was like i don't know what to what to say to you you're my friend and i feel like i'm sitting across from a stranger i feel rude talking to right now i shouldn't knock him off his phone because it's so it's so binary of a thing of just right i'm done your go yeah and while that is the fundamental of all board games

there's something about chess where it's like there's an urgency yeah there's a there's a demand there and then you don't sit back and and have a chin wag and then oh oh sorry it's my turn but if you think about poker you you do have that yeah poker is a bit it's more of a group thing that's true i mean yeah heads of poker because if you're playing heads of poker and you it's your bet and you're just spending like i mean you obviously have thinking time but if it gets to the point where someone's like in a heads up game of poker someone has to go you know it's your go yeah you're being rude i guess that is part of it as well i'm just i think part of it and i'll have to get the grips with this over the next 10 or so weeks is i'm not playing the

campaign for north africa with you yeah there isn't so much stuff in the middle where a full turn takes weeks yeah so to go from one move to the other immediately it's that game's kind of fucking broken yeah because the only other game we play together is dnd and there are no turns so to speak apart from combat yeah so i don't know what it is now to have it i've lost that i do chess I think is missing one of the aspects I like from games which is randomness

yeah that's a good point I think it's probably about as that I've not played much Go but I think like chess and Go are the sort of top of the like what's Go? you know with the black and white little dots and you take turns putting them

and you're trying to enclose each other's oh yes bigger in Asia it's probably very reductive but I think it's like Chinese chess apologies to anyone if that's not how you characterise Go yeah I know what you mean

I also for some reason have that connotation with it where it does seem to be more of an Asian leaned game yeah I think it originates there yeah because that took I still think the grandmasters in that are still

holding on against computers maybe oh wow might be wrong that might be out of date but i think they held on a lot longer than like chess that's interesting because now it's at the point where i feel like technology's surely at the point where any computer can be well not any computer sorry i've put this where a computer could beat you at any game any i think anything fixed like you never if it has an aspect of chance then i guess then there's like something there but even like i think poker you can make like a poker bot that'll play like optimal and you'll

make money over time yeah because i guess with with poker it's it there is so much chance yeah and also like the weird thing with poker is if you like if you've got like a 52 win rate that's enough yeah like but you are gonna lose a lot yeah because if you remove the bluff aspect of poker and if you give a computer the means to play poker and you cut out for whatever reason the aspect of bluffing or lying and just go straight off card value

then you end up in a position where you're going to win quite a lot against the computer maybe not all the time no, I think the computer will come out ahead yeah, not all the time not the majority of the time but yeah, I think the computer will win

most of the time but you will still definitely get one over on it whereas i feel like there's absolutely games i think chess is definitely one where you can program a computer and it will always play optimal moves well that was the whole thing what was it there was like a they had a whole thing and i think it was like bobby fisher maybe who it really bad guy um but i think he they had a bunch of games against computers and maybe in the 80s like where they were getting like chess grandmasters to come on and play like the top of the line computers um and then it just got to a certain point where it was like

they just can't they can't win that's interesting i'd like to see the metrics of what games like a sort of chart of like there's probably a chart of like them picking them off over time yeah like a computer will always well even a person can always get a draw slash win

in tic tac toe yes like that's a solved game yes that's one way I used to know that as well I used to know the method yeah I mean if you go first you go on opposite diagonals and then they can't yeah

then they have to block I used to do that because I used to do it in 6th form, I used to challenge people to it and I would always win or draw Oh, a game I played loads in 6th form You know the one where you draw the box and then you take turns drawing lines

Oh, yeah, and you have to draw it in the information And you want to get as much enclosed Yes I remember playing that a lot in textbooks or notebooks in class. Yeah, I used to be quite good at that as well.

Oh, we should play that. What I would like to do is play with a computer in a co-op game, specifically Arkham Horror. I'd like to have a computer companion and just see what they get up to in that game without being able to communicate

with it. I know we talked about AI a bit and not being huge fans, but it would be very funny to have an Arkham Horror a game where none of the AIs know it but every other

they think all the other players you tell it all the other players are players and you're like the only AI but it's like

clawed chat GPT like and see how they get on and they all think they're playing with

humans and see if they freak out at any point yeah that would be fun yeah I think that's

I think that's a good I think that's a good use for AI to trick it to lie to it so that it's

more disenfranchised with humanity yeah yeah i think uh chess for me i would give chess a six out of ten um in terms of like what i what i think of chess independent when i'm not playing it i think it's like a nine i think i agree with that i think oh i think as a game in the like cultural thing in that eight okay yeah i was sort of yeah it might drop a bit in terms of like purely as a game but like as a i think in terms of what it is like i'd give it a nine in terms of its like its core design yeah i think it's an incredible design and that's why it's lasted so long in terms of the fun i have with it like a six like it's a good game but i think it removes

a lot of the aspects of what i enjoy with board games yeah i like the i like the chat i like the chance the random chance is a massive part for me and not knowing what's coming next yeah when it's entirely dictated by each other's moves it removes some of that fun it removes the board becoming a personality well that's the opposite to that is carcass on where you build the board yes and that is we're definitely going to play that because we've played so much of that yes that will also be one of the games we're going to play in this hiatus i also because i remember once i went on a night out uh and i think you'd stayed in for whatever reason and i ran into some like high school friends i hadn't seen for ages i remember this and then we got chatted and then

carcasson came up and then we came back at like 5 a.m and started up a game and i think you came through at one point like what's going on like oh we're playing carcasson we're about finished you want to play the next one yeah and i think you like joined in at like 7 a.m after you'd slept and we were all on like yeah i remember you guys were like oh do you want a drink and i was like Yeah, sure. This is, I guess, breakfast for me. But I was like 20, so that was fine. And I remember that very specifically, because

we also, that night, played Jenga on a Lazy Susan. Yes! That was really fun. I had a good night. Get those guys around for the campaign for North Africa. I'll try to run into them again. Jenga on a Lazy Susan, mate, that takes Jenga up a

level. It's so, so much more fun it's it's crazy how much that enhances things oh maybe we should play the campaign for north africa on a lazy susan would it be each board on its own or we better find a lazy susan big enough to put the whole board on everything's rotating every single piece is on a tiny lazy susan and just i think the lazy susan for the full board is like the swing bridge i mean yeah at that point it's just a roundabout it's you know the things that they put trains on when they put them into the sheds yes the original lazy susan the kind they have in thomas the tank engine do you think that's do you think there's a susan

for that no i know that sounds ridiculous but do you somewhere out there there is a susan do you think the lazy susan is a reference to like a specific susan no i reckon susan has a different meaning i think it's one of those words where it's like something about the name has taken on some of the meaning and a Susan is something else and this is a lazy Susan Right. So I think Susan is

a personification of a type of device maybe and this is a lazy Susan and Susan's like a colloquialism. You don't think it was like a woman called Susan who was sick of handing stuff to someone on the other side of the table so it like invented it so they could wheel it round No because that sounds like some sort of like

teleshopping advert type device where it's like here we have the the lazy susan and it's yeah that is actually the lazy susan is a tele marketing invention before telemarketing yeah yeah it's because it's crap it's but it is handy it's crap but it's one of the things where you're like it'll catch you eye and you're like Maybe I do need that. It's like the X5 Steam mop. Yes, I was literally thinking of that mop. It's like, oh, who buys this?

And then you sit for a few moments and you're like, but I do have laminate flooring, so that would be useful. I'm not a big drunk shopper on Amazon or whatever. Me neither, thankfully. I think that would be such a rabbit hole. I think I'd be a drunk TV shopper if I'd been born like 30 years earlier. I'd hope not, because one of our common grounds was completely... completely against contrary to that but then we also realized that we are kind of in that category

yeah yeah oh man i i missed the game i missed the game yeah never thought that would be the case it feels so wrong to have a week where we're not playing it yeah just even now that i've just caught myself where i'm kind of like oh we need to be talking about the game like oh i've went on too much of a tangent but we're still talking about the games we've been playing but i mean we're talking about lazy susan's not really i feel like the structure we've decided on is it's not entirely eradicating the tangents but at least it won't be for the whole episode yeah um we we i guess i guess any thoughts on the game andy we've we just finished you got any reflection on the game we'll do this as we go for the next 10 weeks

but is there anything that you've been waxing about in your head about finishing the practice scenario i honestly think it's been a bit of not looking at it if that makes sense yeah like it's been such a big thing it's almost been like have a week without it i guess that's kind of how i felt like i i miss it but i'm kind of just looking forward the full game i'm excited to start it's gonna be crazy yeah but there is part of me that i think if i do think about it for too long it's crazy that it's over and i i do miss that we've done the practice scenario yeah if it's one of those things where it feels like it's going to last forever and then it's sudden it did feel like it ended suddenly yeah like like that was like oh wait this was i thought we were months

from well it was so built up like every week i'd be like all right this is it oh we're one one turn to go oh we're on the last stop stage and then i'm just stood there and it's over and i'm like well what do i say now we finished right now what do i say next i guess we played chess off to durham it's just such a surreal thing to commit 22 months and then wrap that up yeah i mean there's a lot longer coming but it is it is crazy i think the the game is going to be more exciting knowing i've missed it when we do start up the full thing yeah i think it'll give us a bit of a or get us through the first few turns with a bit of a surge of like oh it's back and i think comparing i'll always be comparing oh sorry i should say i'll always be comparing the first

six turns like as we play through i'll always be thinking how was it looking when we were doing the practice run yeah how how were my guys positioned what was the sort of pendulum swing of control how many trucks did i have you know what was my air force looking like and i'll always be comparing it i think it's gonna look so different for a couple reasons though caution i think being the biggest one yeah i mean one we've learned from some mistakes we made but also like the last two turns were like such a hectic pace because we knew they were not hectic pace we i don't think You can never describe anything as hectic. Glacial might be the word you're looking for.

But there was like, we were both doing as much as we could because we knew there were two turns left. Yeah. Whereas it's like, I'm not going to make that charge on Bardia on turn six of the full game. Yeah, there's no way. Because I'm not like, oh, cool, I'll burn out the seventh and everything to take this thing.

And then, oh, sweet, now I just have to hold it for 108. yeah we can't work at that breakneck speed we can't even work at the pace that we did the first four turns there has to be a a change in pace i think the way we approach it yeah i think we might get through stuff a bit faster i think there'll be less because combat's one of the sort of the big time consumer well a big thing actually to to bring up i guess uh putting you on the spot on the mic um when it comes to stuff like their broke down vehicle tokens are we going to start putting them down on the board i think we should because we didn't we didn't used to do that we kept spreadsheets for us i think maybe we label everything on the board especially for

sharing us put them on the board we put the pows on the board yeah definitely um i think we i think we even you know the barrage ones i think maybe we don't magnetize them obviously but like even them i'll just put on so it's like clear and they well they're good yeah because we can just pop them down on the on the units that have been hit and put the there's the plane tiles you put when you put for you put them down for the missions where the missions are going yes i think that's a good idea yeah we should illustrate all of it so when we're putting out the imagery there we go see we're doing some of the game prep here and now you're live with it all but we've got some great ideas we think they're great ideas for the full playthrough and it's ways to keep everything

really engaged and and for you guys to be part of it we're really looking forward to it and we really hope you guys enjoy it as well but the best way for us to find out about that is to hear from you and we can think of no better way than reading your actual words from your real life emails we're going to delve into the mailbag let's do it this big burlap sack and first of all we have now i don't know what the subject line says urgent urgent yeah oh it's in morse code i read morse code no you just translated it right there haven't you have you got it up on your screen hang on you've got glasses on it can i read it in your glasses no i closed the top oh right yeah that's the audacity feed um we have an email from steven and steven says would you believe it andy hello

from chicago i've just read the next line i'm not actually from chicago i'm here on vacation but couldn't resist opening with that line i'm actually from detroit i don't know that's that's still in the u.s yeah i i see the u.s as one as chicago i see the chicago now i'm actually from detroit i'm glad i caught up with the podcast in time for the trip here i was able to make the war with a maid pilgrimage to the balboa column uh that's a there's a picture attached as well that's fantastic i love that there is a war with a maid pilgrimage now that's so awesome that we've had more than one email where we've had someone go there uh do you think most of the people that visit that even though it's only two are from us no i think that's incredibly

hubristic of you did you who else is going to it i feel like it's a it's a historical monument people do go yeah even though you know the guy was a bit of a shit bag it's it's still the case that people would go the most recent episode i listened to was 78 i can't wait to hear you talk about the live show as you've not talked about it as of writing this email wow that goes to show when this was yeah because we've ratted on about that now the whole thing is available on youtube so yep minus the five minutes where the camera died um very much enjoying the podcast ever since i first heard of the game i've been intrigued so thank you for letting us all live vicariously through your podcast now to a question with a practice scenario almost over it still hurts

are you more excited to start over actually knowing what the heck is going on or dreading going through the first few turns all right that's a question how do you feel on that andy because now we're in a very good position to talk about that yeah i'm i'm excited to start now yeah i uh yeah i think i did have a concern that like going through the first six turns was going to be a real slog like doing it again yeah i'm pretty confident it's gonna feel completely different yes that it's not gonna be like a let's get through the stuff we've already done type vibe because it's not the stuff we've already done yeah i guess that that is it it's it's going to be such a fresh experience because we're we're not looking at it from from the same

angle anymore we're we're coming in so fresh this isn't about getting through a practice run this is about setting ourselves up for a full game completely different like pacing and tone yeah the whole thing's going to be different it's going to be such a it's going to be an alien experience looking at this from the perspective of we're doing this for 29 years not we're doing this and then we're going to do it yes we're going to be in the thing yeah i think there will be a a sort of strangeness in that because knowing that this is the full thing everything's always on the line yes the risk is always there it's not a case of sandbox this and get to know the game it's this is the game the thing that we've committed to doing we're in it

at all times we're always on a knife edge yeah and things like the truck bandits where it's like oh i could spend these guys to cause a bunch of chaos if they're gone for 105 turns they would probably have done more good if they'd been used more conservatively rather than just losing those guys for they did cause a lot of damage they did you did sort of stabilize from that damage towards the end which is really reassuring by the way that's another reason i think these turns are going to be painted so differently in my head is knowing that you can recover yes and knowing that there's cost to it but you can't i mean i turned around my truck situation yeah which is fairly rapidly once you like figured out your supply lines yeah knowing

where i need to get my stuff so that that's such a strange perspective that i have now knowing that i can go into this and i can fix mistakes but again the the trade-off is this is the full thing this is the whole game if those mistakes aren't fixed if those mistakes happen at all i'm sacrificing everything yes the whole thing can go wrong at any time so i guess i i am excited for it i think more excited than dreading the dreading only comes from being able to to fuck up the whole playthrough yes rather than i'm wasting time i won't feel like the six turns are going through the motions i'll be excited to hit turn seven i'll be excited to hit the milestone of turn 10 turn 20 the the german showing up having all these these other milestones to look forward to i'm

excited for that so i think oh yeah all in all i'm positive when it comes to it i don't think i'm dreading it from the standpoint of it's these turns again yeah i'm dreading it from the standpoint of this is real now yes no takesies backsies this is it but if a very good question very very good question steven uh and uh you got a bit left on the end yeah um i also want to say that i love the common ground segment and often share them with my dnd group i'm sure they love that steven my favorite other than the obvious sea day which i can't remember what sea day is no i know poncho day is a thing yeah is that sea day surely not i don't know maybe we've we're clearly not trendy enough with our own listener base so that we can remember what our

common grounds were is turning the world into islands it's an idea i can get behind because we need more beaches in currently landlocked areas i agree i think everyone should have a beach that's my common ground right now everyone should have a beach a personal beach that's actually uh the idea i had for well not that specifically but i had an idea for a book once everyone gets a beach no it was um so uh some sort of development for um a cure for the the common cold goes out and it involves stem cell development and it creates this like super virus so they have to isolate everybody into uh square mile areas oh yeah and they have to live in these square mile areas for 30 years while this disease dissipates but then people like break out their

areas and it maybe they didn't need to go in or yeah maybe the disease is already gone but they like sort of go across the country and it's this this whole thing this is pre-covid as well so i was kind of a trendsetter for damn if you'd got that out early wow if only i had the commitment to do something wrong for an entire book anyway i will sign off here otherwise i know i will ramble for too long subtly humbly and bravely steven sent from the deserts of my mind oh thank you very much steven perfect i i love a good desert of my mind i love a good subtle humble and brave and i love a good email so thank you for that steven all right next up we have an email from apal oryx yeah what's oryx saying howdy it's the humble and brave icelandic gremlin back at it

again i like a howdy as well i do like howdy i drop howdy a lot in my day-to-day conversation oh really yeah like when i'm at work like i'll pass someone on the corridor about howdy it's a nice one yeah it's my go-to it's my go-to greeting i think it's good i think i think howdy is another lost word yeah it's a great greeting and i think it's massively underrated well it's a good one to pick from the american south because y'all and howdy are both yeah it's a it's a yeah maybe it is just the american south maybe that's where we resonate they're good at greeting people i mean the intro to the the podcast is kind of a western vibe yeah so maybe spiritually that's that's spiritually where we're in the old west since we last spoke i'm no longer working at

the shipyard i'm now drilling for geothermal energy fascinating stuff really ironically the only time i seem to write you know when i get a new job so hopefully this won't become a pattern i mean hey if it's a promotion oryx who knows get in touch every time you've got a promotion if it's a new job then it means it's progress as well by the way moving job to job that's not a bad thing that's a good thing means that you're finding your your feet you're settling into something you enjoy also he's moving from shipyard to geothermal energy which are both pretty interesting yeah they're probably hard but interesting jobs yeah yeah i imagine that they've got like real career prospects and it's also just a fucking awesome thing to be able to

say what do you do for work well i drill for geothermal energy what do you do i work in an office yeah so yeah i mean don't don't talk yourself down here buddy also somehow i managed to get a girlfriend hey as is my duty as a loyal listener i've been constantly talking about the podcast and every single thing surrounding the north africa campaign long story short she's getting a tiny bit sick of hearing about it oh buddy tell me about it i've i've been there and done that uh yeah i've i've the the people that i've been involved with during the the recording of this this podcast i have talked their ear off about it uh i even brought one along to the the live show of the podcast so uh it's i think it's part and parcel if it's an interest of yours you

have to do it and if it's uh the case that we get another listener from it even better and if it's someone that gets annoyed by it even better because then they'll talk about it they'll talk about it frustratedly oh my my partner won't stop talking about this stupid podcast and then their friends will go listen and be like we agree with your partner well my uh the guy i work with um he's he started listening fairly recently and he he's married and she wants him to listen to an audiobook and every time he goes to listen to it or every time she brings it up you'll say oh i've got to finish war with the mate first uh and she's like well how long is that and he's like oh well they're playing this long board game she's like well how long's left and he's like oh i'm not i'm

not sure but i'm not quite caught up yeah he's on episode 15 i think oh no sorry i think he's on like 20 because he's on the history segments and uh i've said well what you should tell her is you'll listen to the whole the whole audiobook but she has to listen to all of wall of the maze start to finish which is an impossible task unless she really locks in yeah at which point i think just by osmosis she likes the podcast yeah she'll she'll become addicted to us by proxies oh that's how the game got us i was seriously considering showing up at gamescon to meet you guys in person but i wasn't able to get the time off work maybe next time oh yeah the uk games expo was a really fun time um so we hope to be there next year yes we will if they'll have us back we'll be there

yeah and it was a great turnout from everyone who showed up whether it was guys who actually came along who were already listeners or some of the folk that have emailed in since and said that they listen uh on the back of showing up so we we'd love to go back and we intend to so watch the space the moment we find out that we can get back there we'll let you guys know we would love to do another show there oh yeah absolutely uh i was curious if you guys had ever read about admiral yi sun sin arguably one of the greatest admirals of all time he almost single-handedly push back the japanese invasion of korea in the late 19 uh 1500s i'd highly recommend reading about him if you haven't already i haven't but i definitely will give that a look sounds

pretty interesting i mean pretty much every history segment recommendation we've had has turned out to be awesome yeah i mean the maori i think was a suggestion oh yeah it was i think we got a couple people mentioned them which is why i was like bumped them up and then was like oh damn these guys are awesome i think that's still my favorite as well i think that might be my favorite history segment still there's just something about the the bayonet charge and just the the really depressing nature of them coming back and yeah turned back there's something really beautiful about the whole story and it's it's it's poignancy and they're just like awesome guys like they're also just bad asses yeah i think i think that's it i've got a sweet spot for

for badass people who are who are tret wrong yeah so yeah any any history segment ideas send them in guys i'm also really hoping you'll go forward with the recap of all aces uh most successful pilots tanks divisions and so on and award the rightful victor the spoils of a punaco or of a piece of chocolate i think that might be a type one poncho oh yes maybe uh or some kind of icelandic chocolate possibly yeah yeah um or i think more likely poncho yeah i think based on on our mythos yeah well that that's that's an interesting point there something i guess we'll quickly touch on as well when we're we're doing our um sort of upkeep of you guys being able to keep an eye on everything as we go along we will be having detailed reports we're

going to be introducing we've talked about bonus content a bit as well um we're going to be releasing more bonus content alongside the podcast we've got an idea for the format that will come as a separate announcement but uh yeah there'll be more stuff that will touch on stuff like pilots and specific units and when it comes to the like sort of maybe like best units that'll be something we'll we'll have a look at as well yeah sort of like mvps so we've got some ideas for that absolutely so very good thing to bring up the oryx um it's in the works absolutely now that you're approaching the end of the trial run is there a particular session or moment that stands out as your favorite and on the flip side what was your least favorite uh but that would be

all from me stay subtle humble and brave your icelandic gremlin well thank you uh lovely gremlin we we love a gremlin we love a fan we love a listener we love all you guys getting in touch it's very very humbling very flattering and with that question favorite moment andy you've got one that springs to mind that is a tough one um it's difficult to pinpoint the the best moment like the most fun i had a lot of fun with the truck bandits as well as them being relatively effective it was also like a fun oh we're going like super aggressive yeah like mobile um yeah i think the the fighting around city barani was probably the like worst yeah for me just but not that it wasn't fun but just like as a strategic

situation yeah like and they're being like i need to get them out of here and you can't force them out yeah i think was the i think my my favorite is probably now that i look back on it when i fought back against the seventh around fort madelena yeah which was around turn two i think yes that was a lot of fun i think being able to to tackle such a a famed unit and getting a bit of pushback against them because that that for me felt like it was the first time where i'd really went on the offensive and started to to really make it yeah and when i got to push them back to that supply dump and make some headway towards them i really felt like oh this could be the swinging point and i think that was the first time where i was like this is actually going well for

me and i know things massively swung around fort maddalena throughout the play but that for me was a real highlight where i was like this can change yeah you can push back against them you can get this round um that tied with the moment i realized i can supply my guys yes when i got my trucks working worst moment is definitely towards the end when i tried that tactic of retreat to your supply dump and realized i couldn't yeah and i just had a moment of absolute devastation and disenchantment with the game completely even more so than usual that is i think my low point because it was so close to the end and i just felt so fed up with the game i think uh shout out as well uh the most we laughed i think during a play session was the double uh surrender at alexandria

you know what that that is actually up there as one of my favorite moments even though it was me losing a full group it was so funny to march my guys all the way to alexandria just to have them immediately surrender on arrival so that that was a lot of fun i do i do hold that in high regard as a as a war with a mate uh shining moment of of fun it was fun and even though i lost i think that's part of what this game is for me it's it's that it is stupid and it's it's still very enjoyable regardless oh yeah so yeah i i guess those are it for me um and yeah yours as well yeah so yeah um thank you for the the question there oryx and um thank you as well steven thank you both for getting in touch we we take all the emails as you know please get in touch we love

hearing from you guys whether it's about the game whether it's a hobby of your own uh anything at all please fire off your questions fire off your pictures of monuments or war with a mate school trips anything you're doing just get in touch we'll probably get through a few more emails than usual during this i'd expect during the hiatus yeah i mean we'll and regardless we've got forever to read through them all so you can get us at info at war with a mate.co.uk the instagram is war with a mate we'll be updating it weekly still we put polls and whatnot up on on there as well the announcements for the big stuff coming will be on their youtube during the actual episodes as well uh but yeah please send us stuff we love hearing from you guys and yeah

uh that's that's it and a a shout out from the uh from the fans for the love for the history segments have come through so many emails and that's fitting because that's what happens now it is because the mailbag has been zipped back up or i guess tied back up it's a big burlap sack that we have here full of mobile phones with internet access so now andy the only place to go is back into the past 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

well andy tell me where and when are we we're in italy just after world war one which you might remember went disastrously for it yeah from what i recall they did not have a particularly grand time no the government of rome is a carcass that cannot even rot decently it is a government of thieves cowards and capitulators who have signed away the blood of our martyrs for anglo-saxon gold that's a quote from gabrielle denunzio who is an interesting figure okay so what i've what i've learned in war with the mage shorthand is that means this guy is a dickhead oh yes um cool won't be covering him too much this episode um there's a fantastic episode of a podcast called uh no gods no mares uh that someone emailed in about as it wants oh yeah where this gabrielle

denunzio takes over a city um i think i might loop back to that at some point because i think it's a very interesting story but we're more looking at how world war one affected italy and sort of sets up the groundwork for this will be a really interesting section because if this is the the gulf between world war one and world war two we're going to get the spellings out of a lot of the stuff that created the environment for fascist italian rule to to take place yes this is much like how fascism in italy came out of an unsatisfying world war one very much the same uh sorry in germany yeah so yeah yeah there's gonna be some parallels i'd expect yeah uh so yeah we've covered it at least major front for world war one so let's have a look at the outcomes italy suffered

between 651 000 and 680 000 military deaths from combat wound and disease and also 600 000 italian civilians uh also die with up to three quarters of those deaths coming from spanish flu so which is absolutely wild yeah and they've also got a million returning wounded soldiers half of which will be permanently disabled fucking hell yeah uh there were roughly seven million military-aged males in Italy in 1915, and just under 6 million of them would be

called up, this means basically everyone knows someone who served, and most likely knows people who died or have come back injured. It's like... Well, yeah. The vast majority of people have been impacted directly in their life

through the war, regardless of the knock-on effect on the country. yeah and the knock-on effects so you've got this like awful human cost um and the economy also has a nightmare uh so before and immediately after the war italy is primarily agrarian about 40 of its workforce involved in agriculture which is devastated by the amount of people who leave to go to the front um and then don't come back um so yeah you've got a lot of people who actually need to tend the the land yeah to allow people to live and if it's 40 i mean what what's the percentage of people who went to war well seven million military aged men six million and something

get called up yes and and the amount of them that died as well again with the flu figures as well yeah yeah so you're looking at like what is that like maybe half of the people involved in agriculture probably probably a lot more because i think a lot of the people who didn't go were wealthier right yeah so they're not going to be people involved in it yeah although there were disproportionate amounts of people who were involved in agriculture would have been sent to war yes because they're poorer and and fit and able yeah although i imagine a certain level will be like well we need someone to stay on the farm well that's what i'm thinking as well like at a high level surely that i mean from what we know of italian leadership that's the thing they're not

i mean last last time we talked about the guy more fitting for fragging than anyone else i've ever heard of yeah the worst boss ever so yeah i don't know maybe they didn't think this through yeah and also the war industry has monopolized machinery and also chemicals which would be used for fertilizers yes so like nothing there not even you've taken all of the workforce and then you've taken oh we're not making any tractors or fertilizer we're making tanks and bullets like so yeah um and then also the war they did industrialize fairly heavily during the war um as you kind of have to yeah um but this will also lead to problems afterwards so like if you take fiat for example um they were a car company at the start of the war but they expanded massively

it become like a major industrial player in italy um like probably one of the biggest ones uh they become the official provider of vehicles to the italian army as part of a pivot away from being a commercial car company um they also diversify into weapons planes and tanks uh to support this massive growth they go from 4 000 employees in 1914 to 40 000 in 1918 so it's like a 10x of their like workforce that's that's a big boost yeah um but then the war ends and they've got all the demand disappears overnight for the government contracts

but also the country's completely broke so there's no market for cars so they've got 40,000 employees all these new factories and stuff they've built but they can't support any of it

so even on the surface they'd look like one of the major winners as it were yeah but they're now in an untenable well there's a huge deficit there that yeah it's yeah they've got nothing to put into it yeah and they've got all these raw materials and then the italian government weren't we're like well we would have bought that off you but we're not gonna like pay you for stuff we don't want anymore this is such a bad position to be in yeah and like this is not just fiat i've just used fiat as an example but this is like most well most italian most businesses that got bigger in the war got too big yeah because what are they going to do with that yeah there is no demand for this what are you going to what cars

are you making who you're making them for yeah because they were making 4 000 vehicles a year before and then 16 000 vehicles a year towards the end of the war who are those vehicles for is that part of the war that's yeah the that they went from commercial cars all right okay they became the provider of the trucks for the italian army um so again also you've got factories of building military trucks like for the masses yeah and then afterwards it's like well everyone's going to come back what not everyone sorry no not everyone is going to come back about half the people are coming back and you're still ready to churn out all these cars yeah you're who's getting the car who's buying the cars you also have a factory for making machine guns that no one's

buying yeah and how do you repurpose that machinery yes i imagine at the time it's it's going to be quite precise machinery well i think there is a thing sort of world war one world war to i think there were and please correct me if i'm wrong on this uh i won't know by the way just just to let you know i can't correct you because i don't like factories were much more i guess generic whereas now modern factories are like hyper specialized where it's like this robot arm paints this door that another robot arm puts on this chassis of a car and like okay whereas then it's more like oh we're machining we're making pipes like you've got production lines from like fords getting stuff going but it's not the same kind of manufacturing yeah it's like we've we've

got a production line here that can make pipes of different sizes those pipes can be gun barrels or they can go into like cylinders for vehicles or yeah maybe a bit more holistic yeah yeah um more like a workshop on a factory scale than a factory than a specific production line of tiny parts for specific things okay right yeah so so they can repurpose it to an extent but regardless they still have too many factories too many workers based around production yeah and this they won't cover it this episode there's a famous uh occupation of a fiat factory by like socialist unions there's like a big like tipping point in the rise of fascism and they're like red two years so this will have a very direct effect oh well i'm interested maybe about that history segment

one day yeah uh we'll get to that pretty soon well yeah okay but not to this week um so italy's also just financially completely wrecked so their national debt balloons over the course of the war from 15 billion lira to 85 billion lira oh so like their entire national debt from the time they were formed in like 50s or 60s more than quintuples yeah in four years wow yeah also in the same time period the lira loses 80 of its value oh that's so you can kind of times that by the gulf by five almost of like we've got this much debt and our money is now worthless oh right okay so that's based on the original value of it yeah okay so the lira loses a it's like if the pound went to like being worth 20 pence for like exchange and like you know

yeah so it's like you owe this much money but your money is worth nothing yeah and we want it as like the value not you're not getting out of this by like giving us a bunch of the worthless lira okay so quintuple it and then quintuple that yes because their debt isn't in lira for the most part because countries tend not to give over countries debt in that country's currency so this their debt's increased by 25 times what it was yeah yeah wow i'd hate to be their accountant yeah so italy has paid dearly for its part in world war one no the issue is they haven't paid oh um and they paid partially because the treaty of london signed in 1915 with britain france and russia who offered large territorial gain in exchange for opening a new front that was like

southern tyrol we mentioned uh in the lead-up one yes yeah those kind of things that got them to join um one of the non-secret treaties no that was a secret one oh this is a secret this is a secret one yeah it's a secret debt treaty yeah because it's a secret treaty because they didn't want to give the terms publicly because then the austro-hungarians and the germans would know and because italy had been negotiating with both i i try and get bought into the war by one side the other i hate the past man it sucks yeah they'd been promised uh expansion in the northeast then around the adriatic uh through monday croatia they were promised the islands they captured during the italo-turkish war uh they also wanted to make albania a protectorate where

uh italy would control their foreign policy why is that always the case why is it always It's, we're going to control your foreign policy. We're going to send in police force to do whatever they want to do if it's against our wishes. Yeah. Every time, they always put that in as a caveat. But it's also, we're going to control your foreign policy, so we're not controlling your domestic policy,

so we're not going to help with anything like rebuilding or schools, or we're just going to be like, you're at war with this country, not this country. It's always the worst end of the deal. they also had a deal with britain and france uh that if either of those countries increased their colonies in africa italy would get like some compensation or the ability to like do that as well uh around eritrea somalia and libya um they also hadn't discussed the city of flume uh which would become a sticking point that's the city that denunzio will go and take over later being

like this should be ours but the problem they've got here is flume or fume is not an italian city ethnically but all the other stuff they said is basically like we need to expand it at least so italians can live in it and then they've got this other thing they want that's the exact that's just purely we want to grab a thing like which makes their like they it's hard for them to have like consistency at the negotiating table yeah because they're like undercutting their own it's like do you want the world to work this way or this way you can't have it work both ways there's no negotiation in place it's all it's all based on a false promise so here's another denuncio quote they want to put the genius of italy in a cage made of paper protocols and false

democratic promises they forget that our peace was bought with the carnal house of the alps so this that's a general vibe power at least feeling as well because they've paid really fucking heavily the problem is they've not really contributed to the war effort because britain and france had to bail them out so they've they've spent a million lives uh and like a million further casualties but everyone else is looking at them like you've not you've not done anything

yeah all you've done is unfortunately you've killed a million of your people yeah and nothing's and we had to come and bail you out and the whole point of this was to relieve pressure on us by opening a new front and now we have to divert people here

fucking hell Italy historically man what a mess this has gone so bad for them so when they come to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference they are in theory part of the big four with Britain, France

and the USA in theory sorry, the funny part I know what happens after all this I know how this airs I know about World War 2 this just

it just gets worse however their disastrous military performance has changed the dynamic Britain and France saw things as a yeah we offered you these things to alleviate pressure on us and then we had to send a bunch

of elite troops to help you out oh no they argued that Italy was a liability and as such they shouldn't have to keep their promises sorry they did it so badly they don't have to stay true to their word anymore

They're basically like, this has gone so badly that we're going to just ignore this tree. You did so badly, we're going to remove the concept of trust from this arrangement. They also knew Italy had been negotiating with both sides before the war, and had acted purely opportunistically and transactionally. Like Mac from All This City in Philadelphia. i'm playing both sides so i always come out on top you shouldn't have told us that you don't say that to us and then the fact that they've also failed to succeed yeah despite doing that is insane uh britain and france also feel that because they were under pressure at the time they over promised to get italy on side and then italy under delivers so they're like well you put

us in a corner we gave more than you wanted to we would have tried to fight back at this anyway and you've given us a reason oh my god um also this is all deeply complicated by the fact when the bolsheviks uh take over russia in 1917 lenin's like oi toy store you go down the archives have a look around and they find this secret agreement and they just put it on the like the front page of the newspaper and it becomes like an international scandal. It went so badly.

This hugely damages Britain and France's global image, obviously. Because they've been presenting themselves as upholding law and sovereignty. Like, even the justification to get involved are like, Belgium's a neutral

country, we have to protect their neutrality. And it's like, meanwhile you're making secret deals to carve up the world because that's the similar secret deal to the one where france and britain were like well you can have this half of the middle east and i'll take the other half against the wishes of anyone in the middle east you don't have the pieces to play here buddy um this actually leaked during the war and caused problems um because many serbians and croatians joined the war and fought harder because they now knew their homelands were explicitly at stake because italy had made this deal that became public so they were like oh shit if we lose the

war we lose our homeland like so it makes people fight harder against the allies in world war one uh and then they've got one more complication for the italians coming in yeah uh which is the arrival of wood woodrow wilson uh who has a vision for a new world order uh president of america uh he's got a 14 point plan uh for how he thinks everything should play out the first point of that plan is no secret international agreements or private deals all peace treaty and diplomacy must happen in public view so he they're gonna hate that so he comes in and he's like he comes in and he's like well right i'm not upholding that because my whole thing is not

doing secret deals so britain britain and france don't want to keep the deal because it's a bad deal for them and they're sneaky bad countries and America's come in and been like no secret deals so Woodrow Wilson's like I'm not honouring that and Britain and France

are like oh no I guess we won't honour it oh well if we can't do secret deals anymore shucks and Italy's just stood there like what the fuck are you kidding me this leads to a frustrated Prime Minister

victoria orlando walking out of the paris peace conference on april 24 1919 at first the italian public treat him as a national hero for this sign that he's standing up to imperial bullies everyone in the country's getting behind this guy from like not nationalist to socialist it's like full support um also mixed with intense anger towards america and the allies this includes huge riots burning american flags oh no oh dear this has went so bad this goodwill quickly dries up when britain france and america just sort of shrug and continue without begging italy to come back britain and france are actually pretty happy about this and use the time to carve up

the German and the Ottoman colonial empires. Eventually, Orlando sheepishly returns to the negotiation table, but after weeks of them just continuing without him, and now he has absolutely no leverage. This humiliation and lack

of respect from the Allies leads to a belief in something called a mutilated victory and a complete disillusionment with the concept of a liberal state and we'll end it with a last quote, our victory has

the face of a beautiful woman but her rivals have scarred her and her friends have abandoned her she is a mutilated victory but she is still ours and that's, yeah what, did they think they were doing something with that bit of poetry there

well yeah, this idea of the mutilated victory is gonna become like a huge through line for like mussolini's rise of like everyone betrayed us we technically won but like what the hell did we get out of it no you didn't technically win yeah it's like you were you joined the winning side late and humped them and then i'm like why are they not why are they not being nicer to us yeah you've been carried across the finish line bleeding wounded crippled and then you're going where's my medal yeah where where are my rewards where's my prize it's like nobody you survived you got through in the end

and you're on our team i guess you don't get the you don't get the big boy prize but this this is all this is the like groundwork of the grievance and resentment that like fascism will seize upon but it's it's like what what would you think they should have got like what do they expect on the back of all that yeah it's a it's a bit of a i guess to go back to the the chess that we played earlier there was a move that you used against me uh and it it feels fitting for this where you you feel like you've went two steps ahead but in reality you only went halfway there and you were killed along the way and you still want to take the glory

for the full move. The Italian en passant is what's just occurred. Well, we've made it all the way over here. No, you died halfway there. They actually moved into the spot you were in. You're gone. You've become a burden.

What a mess. It's just such a mess for them. My favourite part of that is definitely the, alright, well, this can't get any worse so america have decided no more secret treaties yeah i will also say the point that's point one of his plan point 14 is create the league of nations this is also a bad plan this does not help none of it is how it's all secret treaties anyway yeah it's secret treaties the whole way down because every treaty is like by default secret and then it's like oh they made

this one public oh god it's also a very funny move by the bolsheviks to just be like we're just airing all this fucking dirty laundry on the front page of the papers that's a very funny move to just call it out yeah oh we just found this anyway front front page news because they do they do the revolution which causes russia to leave the war and then they're like oh we'll also start chucking hard grenades into everyone else who's still in the war. The past never fails to amaze me, Andy. No. And

the Italians never fail to disappoint me in the past. You know, I've been to Italy and it's a beautiful country and incredible people, and to know that they've had such hard times in the past, historical missteps from

their leaders, is just so wild and and then to see the country so incredible there the landscape the the beauty of the culture i mean it's kind of like i'm not the inverse of britain because we've had a situation where we've been shit in the past and our country's just kind of a mess now anyway yeah where the the infrastructure the government everything about the country now is just kind of what's going on but at least in italy it's still a beautiful landscape yeah if anything there is no no massacred beauty as they try to describe it it's actually just a beautiful land whereas here we didn't even have that we just have kind of a mess of an island well it makes sense the british went out and

conquered the rest of the world they live in britain whereas like you're in italy just stay in italy like it's nothing you're gonna take over is gonna be as nice as just italy especially when you're going there and you're destroying it oh yeah you're they're also bad at colonialism yeah we know that they're historically bad because they show up they they've raised towns they salt the earth even from like a purely like evil like good at colonialism as in making money perspective they never make money on libya no they they paid gaddafi like concessions for the occupation which is also crazy but like none of their colonies ever produced any any money for them because they couldn't manage them properly it just it kind of feels like they had the roman empire

yes and they thought right we're good at this let's give it another go and it's like nobody sometimes you're just a one trick pony and sometimes the trick doesn't work anymore because everyone's old to it they were Romans you're Italians there is actually a difference yes

it's a very different situation you can't just I mean we've seen it, Mussolini we've seen it, it doesn't work what a slice of history you've fed me today Andy it's just such a such a mess

it was all how preventable all of this shit is if like some people had had some like foresight or or hindsight hindsight because it's not the first time exactly it's they are repeat offenders of bad ideas at least they're kind of caught on after world war ii where they're like we shouldn't destroy germany again i guess fine we'll give them that oh god well they they might be at war in the past andy but the interesting spot we have now is we're not at war now however we have committed to to staying close through this and after what happened in chess i am i'm feeling like coming together and and finding some place to unify at the end of all despite the high jinx of the history segment there is important yes so i think that even

though it's the hiatus as always we keep up with some common ground oh we gotta do common ground here we are and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying to intro the common ground i'm recording common ground is of course the segment in which andy and i come together to agree on a topic and each week we alternate who picks the topic and we'll discuss it and we'll come to that agreement that common ground which brings us together as friends usually in the heat of war but right now it's it's just over a simple game of chess and coming together now so i guess the stakes are slightly lower but andy what's your common ground i think we need to update our

protein sources as a society we should be eating more bugs and rabbits right okay okay now Now, you understand, surely, the issue with this suggestion for me. What issue? I thought this would be an insta-agree. Well, the issue here, Andy, is I really love rabbits. Okay. That's fine. In what way?

You just said we should eat more rabbits. And because we are, there'll be more rabbits. Okay. Okay. all of a sudden this is sounding a bit better the issue is andy what i love about rabbits is i love i love seeing them i love i love giving them a little tickle i love i love you know holding them and i love being around rabbits it takes the shine off it a little bit if i'm i'm tickling it and i'm like you're gonna be eaten tomorrow yeah so what do you say yes if i'm gonna say something else

okay sorry i don't know if my intonation uh sort of did something else there uh that's my point okay you know they're like big rabbits yeah they're like the size of a small dog yeah they're the ones i'm talking about right sorry you think that i have some sort of persuasion towards tiny rabbits yeah do you not do you just like all rabbits regardless of size yes very sorry you think i you think if it's a small rabbit i love it and if it's a big rabbit eat it did you really think that was where the line was maybe it seems like a very solid yes yeah okay yeah i'm sorry to have to pick that away from you uh what what no they're a great source of food we should be taking better advantage of why for one they breed like rabbits famously so you get a lot of them

yeah you will and then you can fatten them up more sustainably because like for cows you need to like chop down a bunch of shit and like get rid of forests and stuff rabbits can just be like fucking around in the undergrowth and doing their thing. They still need to eat. Yeah, but not like they can eat stuff from the just nature and the ground. Right, okay. Also

they need to eat far less than a cow. There's far more wasted calories getting a cow to the plate than a rabbit. Is that, do you know this? Yeah, cows are big fuckers and they live for ages. Rabbits live for about

a couple of months and you can farting him up in here you said that with such throwaway cadence that makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about because you said that with all of the conviction of a man who's not looked into this i thought that was an important part of common ground i guess it's not an important part of common ground it's just unfortunately become a staple of common ground and i don't know there's something about this that i and this is on me it felt like for a moment you knew what you were talking about that that's on me for having any level of faith in what you're talking about but it's true you can't just say because it's true cows live like four or five

years right i guess if you kill them which yes i think i think cows could probably live longer than four to five years yeah if they weren't so delicious uh the folly of the cow being tasty are you looking up cow lifespan yeah cow lifespan is something i'm definitely searching right now because that's right okay 15 to 22 years so five years that actually helps my point does it yeah because you need to feed it every day for 20 years but you only care about how fat it is on the day you kill it i don't think they kill cows on the last day i don't think they wait no i assure you every single cow has been killed on the last day of its life i promise you that i haven't looked that up but that is just a thing that's true right don't get philosophical you dick the cows can live

longer yeah we're not letting cows live to be 22 years old and then killing them when they were gonna die of of cow old age they're not gonna they're not gonna die in their their cow hospice okay think of how many cows you could put in a field right i'm picturing it you could get way more biomass in that field of rabbits i i don't know that you can you can because cows are and i don't know how i'm gonna try and explain this cows are taller and and rabbits are all just kind of on the floor yeah like sort of shoulder to shoulder like if i'm thinking like you know battery farm cows are kind of hoisted up on their legs and it feels like they've got more space yeah they take up more space i i don't know well first of

all i still disagree with this because i like rabbits you mentioned something else at the start of this common ground though you mentioned bugs yep talk to me about bugs andy they have all the advantages of rabbits what what are we doing what happens when the game's not here this feels this feels worse very bad for the environment yeah i guess so yeah yeah i agree with that so we have less cows okay that's good for the environment it's good for the planet okay but i don't want to be a vegetarian okay yeah so we fill the protein gap yeah with rabbits and bugs i like rabbits you don't have to eat them and you can't have books right okay now you're putting it here's

the thing no i don't like this you like me in a tough spot so you don't have to eat rabbits but there are places where they eat animals we consider pets and vice versa yeah there are you're putting me in a tough spot here because what you've done is you've made me question meat eating in general because what you've just done there is you've put me in a situation of well i i don't want to eat this animal but i i don't want to not eat meat and i guess that's kind of where i'm like i do care about animals i care about the suffering of animals but i also do like a lot of meat a lot of my diet is meat based i have a lot of chicken a lot of my diet is chicken and beef a chicken is about the size of a big fat but it's not quite as cute no because it's a bird

that's true birds are evil but it's not what i was gonna say you ornithophobe i'm not an ornithophobe i'm just realistic about this i don't know i think it's a bit of column a bit of column b right okay so there's got to be some common ground in this i i agree that cows are bad for the environment i agree there's probably a way to optimize this uh is there is there some sort of bug farm that we that we can do here oh yeah what what bugs you maybe you know about this what what kind of bugs can we eat cockroaches i don't know man that doesn't sound tasty crickets i don't want to know woodlice no these are no but the thing is you with the bugs you grind them up yeah but i okay hang on a minute hang on i can maybe work with this can you make them into

nuggets yeah they're like corn a bucket a bucket okay a bucket of buckets i could have a bucket of buckets yeah all right hang on a minute bucket of buckets and for a lot of ultra processed meat it's barely meat anyway so who let's keep the cows and pigs and stuff we are going to keep around yeah yeah for like high quality meat yeah and you know the like pink sludge meat yeah my favorite let's make our bugs okay i because i'd be fine with that as as you know what this this i've just realized i'm having flashbacks to the start of this i'm having flashbacks to huel and i've realized i'm i'm not actually a different man what i have realized though is you are because you're talking about the same thing the same thing i used to talk about

replacing meals traditional meals with just sludge no i'm not replacing i'm adding an ingredient i'm adding ingredients to the like standard ingredient set i'm gonna spin this on you a little bit hang on a minute okay what what's wrong with huel what is it you don't like about huel it's like a weirdly sterile hustle grind set optimization thing that strips the joy out of actual life so you can be like better at your marketing job like it's not it's just a deeply grim but it's not about that though it's about it's it's a meal replacement drink it's it's a drink that is is the the nutritional value of a meal in a drink yeah so you're talking now about grinding up all the books yeah to be as good as meat

well it is meat it's just from smaller stuff but it's to be as good as traditional consumption meat yeah or at least do the lower bit yeah they're like nuggets burgers that stuff Hanley, you're doing Huel. No. You are doing Huel right now. Look, me and the people at Huel both think human nutrition has room to grow. But I'm doing Bugs and Rabbits

and they're doing soulless drinks. No, you've just compared yourself to Huel. In the same way that, like, Gordon Ramsay and a frycook are both in the culinary business. Yeah. In that analogy, I'm Gordon Ramsay, and Huel is the fry cook, by the way. No. No, what you've done, and you know what?

I'm coming closer to the common ground here. You've accepted that there is a replacement for meal. I'll actually come and meet you somewhere here. I will say, putting bugs in Huel might be the way to Trojan horse this in a society. Andy, I don't disagree. Okay, so the common ground is Huel should have more bugs in it. Oh my god, I agree completely.

I think we need to get bug flavour. I think we need to get the bugget working as one of the Huel meals. Yeah. We've come full circle, Andy. We have. from the start all the way to now, the wrap up the after party of the practice run

we've solved the heel crisis. We've invented Buell It's Buell to fall Bug fuel Fueled by bugs for bugs because there's four bugs in every sip

Oh yeah this is incredible oh man actually that is the reason I don't like Huel is because it's dystopian it actually fits perfectly with putting bugs in food

yeah that's not dystopian at all no it fits it but you're fine with that yeah I think so if it's open about what it is we're putting bugs into a drink drink the bugs fuck the trucks, drink the bugs

because there's a bit of protein in there and probably a lot of a bug is fiber yeah it's gotta be yeah just by the nature of it so grind that shit up and you can also then at that point have have you know huel with bits or without bits yeah where they either grind it up like finally or they don't i'd also be interested would vegetarians you know how you have pescatarians because they're like i don't want to eat meat because it's like a mammal and it's like a thinking thing but fish on yeah you could be a bugitarian yeah

and still feel fairly moral like a cricketarian yeah maybe we've actually found a common ground for people who aren't really sure what bugs are because bugs are in a kind of grey area I've also definitely named bugs that aren't

suitable for, like I know some bugs are I've probably named bugs that are like, you cannot eat them. But, Andy, we're ideas, man. We're not details, man. Join us in a few minutes while we start the campaign for North Africa. Full game, by the way, guys.

We're not details, man. You know what? I think that's a beautiful common ground, Andy. I think this has come incredibly full circle. I feel like this has really been the coda to the practice run that we needed. I think it's been a real game of chess to get us to this point,

emotionally, psychologically, and it's a beautiful conclusion that we've got to here. The rest of this hiatus is going to be worse. You said it. We're going to continue playing some games. We're going to formulate the way

to make the full playthrough fantastic. We're going to read out some listener mail. we're going to have some common ground some history it's going to be great stick along the entire way everyone listening thank you for coming this far we're excited for what comes next and if you want to reach us you can do at info at whatwithamate.co.uk the instagram is whatwithamate the website is whatwithamate.co.uk which we'll be updating as part of this and i guess in this interim before you hear from us next before the big playthrough the big full thing starts episode 130th of october keep an eye out for an announcement about that big episode

i've been james i've been andy stay subtle humble and brave and we are currently meandering slowly but surely through the deserts of our minds good night We'll be right back. We'll be right back. $2,500 during our massive Labor Day event. Hurry into your local Sleep Number store today because we have your number.