War With A Mate - Episode 89: Singular And One Of A Kind

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

The guys have taken it back to Medieval France, spending this week playing Carcassonne and setting in motion some prep for the full game playthrough. This week’s episode sees a Mailbag that gives Andy and James each a silhouette, Andy’s History Corner takes a look at Britain’s recruitment during WWI, and the guys get giddy in one of the most Common Ground-y, Common Ground segments to date.

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Because we have your number. Hello, good morning, good night, guten taggen, bonjour. Welcome to a worldwide episode of War with a Mate with me, James. Me, Andy. Do you know why it's worldwide, Andy? Globally available? It is globally available. You can listen to this globally,

I think pretty much anywhere in the world. Maybe not North Korea? Probably not. I would expect there's probably some broadcast restrictions in some areas. And the exciting part is it's always been available worldwide. This is nothing new. Yeah, I don't know why you're bringing attention to it.

I just thought people might not know. People might have thought they've stumbled across a hidden gem through a VPN. You're actually allowed to do this. this is fine this is allowed it's legal wherever you are this is okay i promise it doesn't matter where you're even in north korea i promise this is fine don't do that yeah i don't want to be responsible for someone getting in trouble i don't know how i don't know what type of laws are there i don't want me to get in trouble i feel like they're pretty tight yeah reputation really

precedes itself in north korea have you seen the interview the the film yes i have that was that was all right it was fine it was it was much hullabaloo about nothing in that it was this big controversy and it was fairly tame it was it was like yeah it was all right flick it wasn't anything particularly outstanding it wasn't super controversial i don't think it wasn't saying anything i remember seeing a thing because no because sony got hacked by north korea remember yeah yeah i remember that that was a big thing yeah that was because of that yeah that was i think months before the film came out yeah but it was like when it was like announced yeah but no one's hacking us and that's not a challenge stop doing that i said it's not a challenge

okay don't we've got nothing here for for any nation to try and uncover we're just two subtle humble and brave guys playing the campaign for north africa the game that is notoriously unfinishable. No one's recorded a full playthrough of it. We'll be the first ones. And today, we've not been doing that. We won't be for a few weeks, as you know. We're in the hiatus. We finished the practice run a couple weeks ago now.

We've been playing different games instead. Yes! And we'll be coming back to the full game on the big old... not D-Day, that's the end of the war. Uh, W-Day? What's the W? War?

Sure. On W-Day, which is the 30th of october that's when we're going to be starting the full playthrough we're going to be doing it on episode 100 some announcements to follow it'll be a very fun occasion we'll make it a special episode but until then we've been keeping ourselves busy between prepping for the full game and playing some other bits and pieces i guess first and foremost this is the the podcast about the campaign for north africa should we talk about that part first yeah sure we've been doing this week and you mentioned to me you've been busy doing some homework yes i've been doing some of the baseline sort of infrastructure stuff for

the automation very very important stuff yes so that needs to be nailed down yeah so i wrote a bunch of not a bunch of rappers and uh handlers and stuff for rappers yeah eminem not quite dr dre it's in handlers like the cia yeah i guess but yeah i built basically it's a bunch of stuff that'll make it much easier to copy move rename edit files that all the other stuff will like use i love the sound of that you're very much the back end guy when it comes to this you put together all of the bits and pieces that we need for excel and it's it's greatly appreciated because it's going to make our lives so much easier i hope so i guess i've been doing something quite contrary to that oh what are you being up to making your life more difficult by tactics what does that

mean i've been planning the game i've been planning my playthrough that's outrageous i've been actually thinking about strategy andy that's not on i've even recorded a few little tidbits because we're going to be releasing some extra bits of content as we go through the full playthrough which we'll we'll get to as well around the the big 100 and i've put together some uh little insights into the way i've been thinking and i do have a pretty solid idea of what i'm going to do in the first turn oh no care to share i've been looking at my units i've been looking at where i can position particular guys i've been looking at where other guys start and I've been trying my very hardest

to learn from my mistakes. What I haven't quite looked at yet is trucks. That is the... yeah. I've got a lot of ideas that involve units going to places, but I just need to figure out how I'm going to get them to those places with full bellies and guns that have bullets in. That's really

the important part. Both things you desperately need. What I did find when I was looking at the plans I had is fuel does actually play a big part in it. Oh, so? Because I'm... I don't want to get into this too much with you, I guess, because this is the

real game, but a lot of back and forth really starts to wear down on your fuel, and I think what my plan is will involve quite a few back and forths. Not just pushing in one direction. So, I'm interested to see how that pans out in the full game, but

I've been planning. That's what I've been doing this week. We've been needing to do the spreadsheets that I guess is part of the automation that you've been doing, but formatting them will be an important part yeah this this stuff is like sort of spreadsheet agnostic i guess as i've done and then once we make the spreadsheets this will still be relevant yes because my my thought i don't know if you agree with us is maybe we redesign the spreadsheets not just in the way

they're laid out but also maybe put some color into them no okay that's ridiculous that's insane i think make them a bit more fluffed up you know when we did these spreadsheets in our sci-fi dnd campaign yes the ones that i had yes the the sort of beige and green yeah where it had a bit of like a standout popping color scheme i think that works yeah we can color code some stuff a lot of the sci-fi campaign we did for was the business simulator it was just filling out spreadsheets i think it was actually the precursor to this yeah that's really shows how much fun we have in our spare time well it's spreadsheet spreadsheet brutal fight consolidate spreadsheet spreadsheet yeah that was the cadence of that i missed that campaign it was very good very unique i like when

we went mining that was always good mining for different elements oh that was yeah early on when we were doing it all ourselves before we just hired people before you got high powered machinery and you instead you were just going down there with little little blasters and little pickaxes yeah good old days just prospecting basically that was one of the skills you got yeah ah good times good times but we did something a bit different today we didn't do dnd we didn't do campaign for north africa we took it into the past even further than the campaign for north africa sure we went all the way back to medieval france yes we did we played some carcass on today what a game it was a real game of two halves in that the first half of the game happened and then

the second half of the game also happened i had a winning position for the first maybe 25 minutes yeah and then it rapidly fell off like yeah it did go it wasn't a neutral game for us i'll say and that it was ridiculously high-scoring. We never have high-scoring games. No, and this was a crazy high-scoring one. I think you reached 300 points? Yeah. And you were like 220 or something?

Maybe 250? I hit 200. Yeah. So way higher than I usually do. Yeah. Normally we're like in the 50s. Should we give a bit of background on how we usually play Carcassonne?

Oh, I guess what Carcassonne... Yeah, so if anyone doesn't know what Carcassonne is, it's a tile-based game where you'll pull tiles out of a bag, place them down, and like dominoes, they all connect in some pattern. So if there's like a road, it has to match a road, city has to match a city,

and field has to match a field. And they'll always be... That's it, right? Yeah, yeah. There'll always be a way that they can connect the pieces. They're just squares, so you can just slide them up four sides, and every time you put one of them down, you can put one of your little guys down, one of your little meeples, and claim

that space, whether it's claiming a town a farm, a road but the other player can contest that by placing their guy in that same area. They can't if you're already there, but they can place it somewhere not yet connected. And then connect them. By placing down more tiles.

So that leads to some fun when you're building a big road and somebody's trying to intercept it by building another road that comes up from down below and connects up with it. And we have a bit of an issue when we play Carcassonne. It's mean.

with Mega City. Yes. Well, there's two things, really. Yeah, Mega City has two prongs, and I think I know what you're going to say about that. Because Mega City is its own thing, but also no one is allowed to finish Mega City without a tremendous amount of effort and putting roads into city tiles

so that they need very specific pieces to finish. And quite often those Mega Cities don't finish. sabotage is the name of the game yes because we'll we'll start building one person will have a town going on and another person will put a tile nearby clearly planning to intercept and if we're playing with more people the third player will put down another one nearby and then all of a sudden these towns get closer and closer but then the tiles start expanding further out so these three towns that are colliding are getting bigger independently and then they join but then someone goes well i need to get into this bigger city so they go off to the edge of the city one away and put a guy down

to move in and all of that tends to lead to the cities being complete bullshit and not finishing yeah and there's also a piece called the cathedral which increases the points for the city from two to three per tile for a completed city but if the city isn't finished it goes to zero yes and to finish a city you need to have all of the walls enclosed so you need to have tiles that that wrap the entire city around in on itself and every part is closed off at some at some point and what we'll often find is that never really happens because it continues to expand out so there's just so many open gaps yeah and the cathedral as well is a tough spot because that is each of the four sides are all city so it just it explodes the size of the city further so it just spirals even further

out and i've seen a few times where we've had a cathedral in the middle which expands it further out and then someone slaps a cathedral on one of the edge pieces so there's at least three more pieces needed to finish it but they just branch out into further parts of the city yeah so it ends up in a massive mess and the hard part with carcass on and i i think it's not quite in the spirit of the game but we do have it sometimes is because it's tile based you can run out of space on the table you're playing, and you can't continue to place stuff when there's no physical space. Yeah, so you do have

borders rather than... Yeah, and if somebody builds the city up to the border of the table, you can no longer place pieces. We've got a rule you can't put the last piece on something. As in, like, you can't put the piece in that takes it

over the edge. Yes. But if someone's got a city, they can in theory. As long as they're closing it, we kind of have a you can close it there but you can't literally just be like this road runs directly off yeah to the point it's falling but it does then mean oh you've got one square one tile to solve whatever conundrum you've been put in exactly while you can't technically force it off the table you can leave it one tile away from the edge and a bit like messed up where it's like well it's one tile off the edge and i need a city and a road yeah they go like curve in a specific

way a super niche piece which means that it is de facto broken and that that's that's how we usually play we usually play so that mega city sprawls out most of the city pieces the tiles are unusable in the end this one was really neat though it was kind of beautiful in the end yeah because normally it's like huge gaping holes in the middle of the map like it doesn't look like a map at all this one i was actually fairly compact it looked nice yeah the end you captured you you did a bit of a spree where you got monasteries which in order to get the points from them you need to have a tile bordering it completely it needs to be completely closed in by other tiles and you kept on monastery hopping where your final tile to close off one of them

would be another monastery and then you would close off that and move to another monastery Well, the Cloister Cluster is a classic Carcassonne move. The Cloister Cluster is. It's like one of the moves in chess. It's a named tactic, apparently. And the fun part is we recorded this as well. We've recorded the whole game of Carcassonne, the gameplay itself, so you can actually see the gameplay and our commentary as we play along, which was mostly us getting confused as to what we're going to do next and me getting very upset as the game progressed. So that will be, again, part of the additional content we're putting out. That'll be available at some stage. But it was

good. Like you say, really high scoring for what we're used to. Usually we end up, because roads are worth one point. Yeah, unless you get a specific piece. Yeah, if you run it past a little river lodge pond, then it's worth

two points per road. We didn't count up the resources at the end. we forgot to do them as we were going yeah that would be difficult to go back and count but we also didn't use we have the expansion pack as well where there's a dragon involved and the dragon eats your little guys

yeah you if you draw a volcano tile it like appears and then you you each take a turn moving it and it moves like six times I think if you draw a dragon piece you can move it I think it appears

again, we didn't do it but I think it appears at the volcano and then when you draw a dragon piece the move happens and there's also like a fairy who can go into people's cities or something I can't remember exactly how that worked I think it fends off the dragon

I thought we did something where you could get enemy meeples out of the city possibly, we should play the expansion sometime yeah definitely that was a that game was just there's a bunch of other expansions that are we haven't got either yeah we should we should give that a go sometime because there's also the old the like ancient version ancient carcasson yeah where it's like the settings ancient so i think instead of roads you have rivers instead of cities you have forests maybe

that was the first version i played my cousin had so we can build mega forest mega forest or mega river i like the sound of mega forest that would be great yeah because i want to because you if you have the biggest road in the game you become road king yes and if you have the biggest city in the game city king city king yeah that'll be fun we should do that yeah remember that other game that our friend tried to get us to play photosynthesis that i think could have been really fun it just wasn't a great guy to play board games with yeah i think that was that was down to the company yeah yeah i think most of that was spent him analyzing the pieces to see if there was any warping on the pieces oh you remind i got so annoyed

we didn't get to play the game because he was analyzing the pieces and the fact you have to analyze the pieces to see if the damage means they're probably fine and it was one piece i remember like a tree had a bit like you know where the like print the picture bit on a bit of cardboard peels yeah that was it down at the bottom yeah but on like one corner and he was like well i need to like evidence all this and like send it back and like it's ridiculous they sent it to me like this and it's like that guy did not take good care of his stuff so it's 90 chance he just fucked it up at some point yeah and you know we're in a difficult position to try and soapbox here given that we've stuck magnets and blue tack to every piece of the

campaign for North Africa, a game that we spend £1,000 on. I mean, I've sat on the box twice. You have, you tore the box open on the side. But it's fine, it holds together, it still closes. But his, yeah, his etiquette was, it wasn't great. It was poor.

It was poor. And I think if you're going to complain about the status of a board game's upkeep, then maybe look after your bits and pieces. That would be my advice. Or, just do as we do, follow our actions, and destroy a valuable collector's

item. Unpunched version of Campaign for North Africa. I'll stick some sticky goo on that. I'll cover it in magnets and then put it up on the side of the wall. If you're going to play, you kind of have to trash it because it's not like

another game where you can bust it out and people can be like, okay, make sure your hands aren't greasy. Don't spill anything for like 40 minutes. It's like, you're going to play this game for two probably three thousand hours like on the upside the pieces won't get much like wear and tear because they're very seldom touched that is true yeah i wonder what what like unit i've moved the most like how many what piece i've touched the most i think probably the seventh for me

yeah that makes sense they've been moving around a lot oh is it the seventh or is it the truck bandits i think if they had a longer run yeah truck bandits the seventh were around every every offstage yeah they moved every offstage yeah that's a good point i wouldn't because there were a lot of units i didn't move every offstage no so a lot of my guys are probably in pretty good condition we could resell the game no we can't no no i know i know it's just a nice thought it's just in this little hiatus i will occasionally wrestle with the idea of never playing it again but like last time i do feel like i miss it same yeah it is weird sitting down but you've gone on you've clearly missed it enough that you're like i'm gonna start thinking

about the full game stop psychoanalyzing me no what are you my doctor i can't handle that yeah that's just too much to unpack yeah 1600 pieces to unpack man you're not the campaign for North Africa, buddy. What is this all about? Doctor, Doctor, I feel like the campaign for North Africa. Pull yourself together. I'm going to have you sectioned under the Mental

Health Act. Yeah, it's weird not playing the game, and it does feel like it's building up a bit of excitement for me, when I've been looking over my guys again, looking through the rulebooks, but then not getting to play it. It is building this kind of

uh yeah there's this this tension this fascination it feels new again that's good feels exciting i do feel like i'm gonna go into it with that little bit more prep than i did the first time around as in preppy excitement yeah because i know the rules enough where i'm not gonna have to go through and trudge through the whole rule book completely blind yes instead i'm gonna go in like right what did i miss the first time what is what what are probes look like and also like construction options are yeah and also you've got the grounding and the basics of the game when you're reading them because when we were going for the first time the problem was like okay this is how barrage works i have no context yeah it is pinning two guys good

is for ammo a lot of ammo yes so all of these things when i'm going to be going back through the rules we'll do them i guess i think the plan is look at the rule book independently and then together yes and do it and like we'll chunk it up so like maybe next time we'll do the movement that kind of thing then one time we'll really focus on combat type yes just to sift through and we can start making some sort of flash cards yes of things that we didn't realize the first time around if we ever come across something where we're like wow that is not something we realized is the case then we stick that up as a note somewhere maybe stick it on our whiteboard and just

really list off these things so that we've got big, bright, colourful prompts for all of these small things Blink-182 mentioned, and that way we should hopefully mitigate any of the mistakes that we've made, either through

omission or just getting a rule wrong. Yes. It's going to be an interesting read going back through that whole thing again. Because there are definitely going to be things where you read it and you're like, oh that was a huge mistake i think well the fact that the rules exist like divorced from each other in so many sections you'll be reading one part and it'll have the the solution or continuation to a rule elsewhere but all it'll do is mention the case number but that original case number which

will be you know 15 pages earlier doesn't make reference to something that comes up later so it ends up in a weird spot where you kind of if anything want to read the book backwards in some positions to be able to hit all of those case notes. Yeah. Seems to be the only way. Yeah, the rules, there are, there's also some rules where it's like, why is this not

its own section? Why is this like a throwaway clause in a thing that's about something else? Yeah, like one section that's a throwaway clause in like Barrage will clarify something about unit surrender. That's not a specific example, but that's a sort of generalized

point of that that's kind of the the relationship the rules have with each other so reading through them in their entirety again cover to cover i think we'll come across some some doozies oh yeah i'm worried if there's going to be something that's so so fundamental that the 16th practice was pointless that that could be i really i don't think anything that that big there could be something that would have changed it dramatically oh for sure like uh this is how we did losses wrong or something yeah well it's kind of like when we found out about reserves and i don't think i ever then put anything in reserve no i wasn't i wasn't quite i didn't see a situation for reserves i'm sure there are some

but i didn't like yeah i think it was for me there was a few occasions where i considered of putting some trucks in reserve to keep them away from the truck bandits. But then I remember that I had forgotten that the following week. Yeah. Because then you took some more trucks and I was like, I was going to put them in reserve. I guess also reserve lets you go, if you're first, it lets you go

after the second player. It's kind of like readying an action in D&D. Yeah. Which wouldn't help you with truck bandits would it? Because they'd just get grabbed in my turn. I think it makes, I'm sure it means that the trucks can't be touched if they remain in reserve. Like if they go to

reserve two and they just stay in reserve through that whole op stage, I'm pretty sure it means they can't be touched. That's weird. We will definitely fact check that. That's like a force field thing. Kind of, yeah. That's really weird. I'm sure that is the case. That ring's really

familiar as a feature of that. I mean, very well could be. It's not like all of the rules have been intuitive, common sense. Yeah. A lot of them may be historically accurate. What I've found fun recently is looking through comments on some of our stuff whether it's reddit or youtube and seeing people mention the pasta

point which always comes up that's the first thing people mention i think it's the like first thing you like learn about the game when you look it up is like that's always mentioned super early yeah well it's like this game's super complicated they make you boil the pasta and loads of people always go well this isn't historically accurate and it's like yeah you know a lot of it is complicated and it masquerades as historically accurate but i think as i play the game more that verisimilitude it's it's more poetic license yeah i mean i think in the rules it even says there's like a comment about the pasta point being like this is a historical but we thought it was funny yeah and i get that i get wanting to to goof around a bit

yeah and just make something that's kind of a funny feature but it's i mean it's a fun aspect of the game and i i think as an advertising like snapshot like if you you know not that richard berg is here with us now but i think that is a cool little thing that does catch people's attention it definitely caught our attention i remember thinking that was crazy well yeah it was the first thing we we found was like a oh there's even like the italians use extra water because They have to boil that pasta. Yeah, when JPF, Jurassic Park friend, brought it up to us, that was definitely one of the things mentioned.

And for some reason, a couple weeks later, that had stayed on our mind, and we decided we're going to play this thing. First JPF. What a git. What's he like? Then he ran off and abandoned us. Living his life, free as a bird.

We're shackled here. What a bastard. Occasionally he'll drop in. Dropped in for the finale. What a guy. Not ruining his life though, is he? So I'm not happy. My friends aren't spoiling their days with me

and I don't think it's valid. I'm not bitter. You definitely are. You're incredibly bitter. Well, you think I'm bitter? How do you like these apples? The Fruit Zone. It's The Fruit Zone.

And I'm going to say... fruit zone is red apple or apple mac i was gonna do the apple leaving fruit zone one but not a fad um i'll do red apple apple mac i'd rather have a computer than fruit i have to work with a mac oh i don't like it i'd rather just have an apple the fruit zone there we go not that bitter after all eh i think when it comes to the full game i'm i'm i'm confident that there's going to be some rules i can make use of that i haven't yet i mean yeah but i mean like i mean rules i could have used in the sixth turn oh yes not not rules that are like just aren't relevant yeah not like the the what is it the flotilla

raid you've got stuff like that you've also got a bunch of stuff like you get planes auto-generated in europe to like help your uh convoys yeah i got i got crazy planes towards the end yeah messerschmitts yes yeah yeah they're pretty awesome i think you trump me when it comes to i think the spitfire might although i don't think it actually gets spitfire do i know i don't think so i could be wrong but i don't remember seeing it in the book but back when i read it i mean when i read your stuff it was yeah actual years ago maybe i don't maybe they didn't send them send them down south possibly not kept them all for the battle of britain ah that's where it all happened not really yeah campaign for north

africa is where it's at much more so than the battle of britain yeah yeah this is this is the place to be this is the game to play but unfortunately we haven't played it this time we've been playing carcass on we're going to play something else next week i guess we gave chess a rating what are we thinking of carcass very true yes we gave chess a rating um carcass on for me i'm gonna have to give this a really solid nine i think i've got to agree with you and it's also chess got some points for cultural relevance and stuff yeah carcass on i think is one of my favorite board games if not my favorite coxon's an incredible board game i think if you go sort of like cultural impact i don't know that i can speak to it too much no it's not like chess

where i know the impact it's had it's very visible in every piece of media that ever references anything to do with the the intellectual chess is the well it's always the shorthand for like you know this guy's smart because he plays chess that's it you know there's quite i can't remember the name of it but there's quite a funny uh youtube channel where a chess uh grand i think she's a grandmaster but she reviews chess scenes from films or like legal eagle with uh better call soul yeah but it's just like when the show's doing stuff to try and uh make the character seem smart and it's just like none of these are chess terms this is not a thing like if you actually know about chess this makes them look way dumber a good chess show is uh queen's gambit on netflix

yes i really enjoyed that anya taylor joy and uh dudley dursley good old chudley from harry potter number one chudley yeah that is a niche reference if anyone can email in and explain to me what number one chudley means off the top of their head is that even a was that not like a locally sourced joke no it was from something yeah we we found it collectively and then i got a t-shirt with it on and i've i found that t-shirt last week yeah the one of dudley with the straw hat on leaning against a fireplace it's from his um oh it's like fancy school it's a school um it's called like some boiling tins or bowling turns it's like yeah uh yeah something like that uh yeah it's a picture of him and i've got number one chudley as the little text

if anyone can email in with what number one chudley means i will i'll give you a special prize i don't know what it is but i i i swear to to any god that listens to this podcast um the cia uh i i swear you will get a prize only the first person um but yes carcassonne nine for me culturally definitely not as big as chess no by far and away uh one of my favorite board games oh yeah that's one even like my parents are always like bring around when you come for christmas it's such an easily accessible game oh yeah because it takes two like a minute to explain it's that yeah it's one of the ones where you place down like four tiles, and you can

demonstrate everything immediately. It's like, oh, you've put down this, the tiles need to connect. I mean, anyone can really put that together, where it's just, you know, the shapes look like each other, put them together, and if you put your guy down, you control this piece, and then you can conflict that with the other pieces. I guess at the end of the game,

counting up the scores, it might take a little bit, and translating as to, like, how beneficial it is to do that. I guess becoming good at Carcassonne is different from learning the rules. Yeah, because it was at the Expo, but it clashed, so we couldn't go. Was it the national or regional

Carcassonne Championships? National, yeah, it was national, because we were going to go, but our live show was, I think, running at the same time. Yeah, although I think when we worked it out, it was like it would only have clashed if we'd got to the finals.

Yeah, it was like the last two hours. Which is a very arrogant like, I don't want to join this because if I win, it'll clash with my live show. to be fair i think we would have just spent a lot of the time being nervous playing that game knowing we had a live show coming up yeah and that was spending the prep time playing cocks also like if someone had like a fluky run it's like well i guess you win by forfeit bye please come to the show yeah that would be really awkward we get to it and i what a horrible

impression i say i'm gonna i'm gonna play up this uh this game of carcassonne i'll meet you afterwards andy you gotta call from me that i'm gonna have to miss the show man i'm about to win i'm gonna become the carcassonne national champion i'm not doing the podcast i'm leaving all this shit behind i'm big now i'm a star andy you can't ask me i give up the big time would you really do that would you crush my hopes and dreams you know i want to become carcassonne champion you literally only mentioned this now you know what i think i would prefer to become carcass on champion then i think you've got better chances of finishing the game i know for a fact that dude because there aren't many people stupid enough and i'm gonna use the word

stupid enough to do this not stupid i reckon stupid is definitely a courageous brave even no no visionary uh there was definitely a unique vision this is unique i'll have to give us that it is yeah it's kind of our only selling point how many other unique stuff happened well i mean you know what was i saying you know what that's weird i wasn't i wasn't actually gonna call you out on that how many other unique thing happens well that's one but apart from that we're two white guys with podcasts you know we're like unicorns

yeah this the premise is really the only thing that sets us apart and of course common ground fruit zone history segment it all ties together to make a nice unique blend our unique chemistry that's it our unique chemistry makes it something as well

what I find crazy by the way is we get a lot of reviews that come in on various platforms and the ai summary when you google us has distilled it down into people love our chemistry and it's clear we've been friends for a long time i don't understand what the usual podcast dynamic is the two strangers just start podcasts well i actually i think it started out like this where it's just awesome people who are friends decided to do a podcast then podcasts made inexplicable amounts of money and now every single podcast is yes it actually is two people who are both famous but don't maybe know each

other that well who are doing like you're doing the spotify parenting podcast because you're two comedians it's like maybe they're not mates that's a good point i didn't think about for some reason i just you're locked in on like early podcasts yeah i think that's what i think of podcasts as still now even though i'm constantly talking to people about like stuff going on like the um oh what is it diary of a ceo podcast i'm not oh yes i don't i don't love that one very much i think that's a good example of get a stranger on hit some hit some sort of buzzwords and topics that are sort of in the zeitgeist like business or or anything i guess that one's an interview show which is a different i don't think he has a co-host i don't think so no but yeah i guess i

don't i don't enjoy that one you know i can't wait for when we get a producer we berate but they don't have a mic because that's a big podcast well that's a celebrity on the couch i guess yeah berate him right now why why aren't you also producing that's a good point you've got really good experience can you not check the levels you have produced actually i've seen your IMDb, you've been a producer on several films, and a director. Let's not dox the man or woman. Well, we've alluded to the fact

that it's a guy. We say he a lot. I was trying to put the genie back in the bottle. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. That's the famous thing about genies. The genies have, like, two characteristics. They can grant wishes, and they can't go back. And I guess

they float, is, like, a tertiary thing. Which is cool. it is cool if i could float i would but i can't so i don't would you go in the lamp sorry would i go in the lamp yeah like what what's the consequence of going in the lamp well like at the end of the lamp it seems pretty bad for the bad guy well in that case no sorry if you're asking but that's also because he's a bad guy because the genie seems to be having fun that's because he's out I bet if Jafar got out the lantern

he'd be pretty happy I don't think Jafar would be doing impressions he would be if he was trapped in there for god knows how long Robin Williams was trapped in there you think the lamp is what imparts your sort of zany improv skills

no I think psychosis is Andy and I think that's lamp onset psychosis yeah that's a lamp onset yeah it'll it'll make you go crazy we're gonna have campaign for north africa on set psychosis we might already i'm pretty sure i do i think my personality has fundamentally changed since we started this you certainly talk about it a lot more people i do i do i don't know why i don't i don't know if it's like because part of me at first i used to think oh you're you're bragging

you you've got this like ego you you want people to listen to your podcast but then i was like no because i know if someone listens to it they're just gonna go i don't really get this and i know every time i go into that conversation that'll be the reaction where they're like ah do you have a picture of the game like do you oh is it like video as well i mean no no it's just us talking about what we did for the last four hours you don't see the game at the moment don't even see the spreadsheets. We just talk about it. And they're like, oh, right, okay. So,

what are the rules? And it's like, oh, I can't explain it. That's the point. It's too complicated. And they're like, right. Okay. Maybe we should just stop talking. And they don't listen. But then people do listen. And those brilliant people. Sometimes send us emails. Those people listening

right now, they're the ones who send us emails. You wonderful folk. You people that we do it for, that we'll always do it for we'll be doing this until we die or win we are going to read some emails that you send over and it's it's one of our favorite parts because it makes it validating it keeps us right it means that we have a reason to keep on going and it's it's why we haven't stopped a long time before now so andy do you want to bring up that first one yes i've got one here from quinton all right what has quinton got to say for himself subject loving the show brackets history suggestion hey we are

You're loving the show, Quinn. Always take them. Hello, James and Andy. Last time I sent you all a message, it was through the web form when I was around episode 14, a.k.a. right when the show was getting good. Yep, that tracks. And I've been very delighted with just how good it has gotten.

Thank you very much. You have kept me very good company through many a bike ride to and from work. and i often burst into laughter at your tales of woe mostly in the game uh but are your real life ones too and your characteristic british wit oh yeah presumably startling at least a few passes by i also do that a lot just chuckle aloud at stuff yeah but also like the bad like at a time where it's like what's he laughing at oh i watched a video i'm gonna show you a video after we're done recording

something that we watch there's a good episode of something to show you Is it the thing with the doctor? No, no, but that is good as well, I love that I wish it was that, that's way better I have currently caught up

to episode 49 at the time of writing just before your first anniversary so I still have a ways to go but I'm enjoying every bit of it Well, I hope you enjoyed the anniversary That was a fun one I'm a big history buff, and most of the podcasts I frequent are history podcasts. So imagine my delight when the silly big board game podcast also turned into a history-themed one.

And Quentin, imagine my surprise. Yeah, that was a shock to us too. That was really Andy's brainchild, and something I did not think would gel well with what we were doing. Mostly because the only thing I had to go off was, this is a podcast where we don't talk about the campaign for North Africa, so why on earth would we talk about the history related to it? But it's a godsend, so I'm glad that worked. What a lovely little twist of fate.

I suppose it was natural, given the game in question comes with literal dates in the title. Yep. Still watching two laymen discover all the fascinating and horrifying truths of World 2 in its preamble. I mean, a very refreshing experience. I've really enjoyed that. Yeah.

I think it's been fun, and you don't often get to listen to someone experience something for the first time yeah i guess except when it's an intentional setting like this but i always enjoy stuff like that i love watching i love listening to podcasts where people review like tv shows i love where they're listening to it or watching for the first time yes um and maybe have like a different perspective on the show you like or a new way of like thinking about it yeah um i had that with Boltmove. They're a podcast channel. They watched all the Walking

Dead. And I was really, really big into the Walking Dead. And they end up hating the show as they watch it. And that's such a fun experience for something I really enjoyed. I mean, the show did drop off. But hearing someone go through that for the first time and just tear it to pieces,

even though I enjoyed the show to an extent, I think I had an abusive relationship with that show. I think it set you up to play this, to be honest. Quite possibly. It's long and not very good for most of it. I think that's just my entire personality. It's just long, arduous tasks. I mean, my favorite book's House of Leaves.

I'm playing the campaign for North Africa. I've set myself up for tasks that are traditionally not enjoyable and long. And then I don't enjoy them. Yeah. So, yes, I'm glad that we've been able to be that

for you, Quentin. Additionally, my fascination with World War II is primarily with naval battles of which the mediterranean had a fair few shout out to the friends of the pod abc abc shout out and the far-flung corners the war in places like the aluots and new guinea what is that um is it up towards the arctic um i don't know it's not a region there are a chain of islands in alaska just in a quick had no idea there was any

fighting in Alaska I didn't know they even got that close to America ever that's interesting as such my nerding out has generally skipped over the campaign in North Africa nor has it usually been focused on

individual infantry units this means that I'm still also learning a lot from Andrew's history corner and I thank him immensely for his time spent delving in the deserts of the minds of people long past that that's interesting because quentin here mentions andy's history corner which i've only recently updated the the description on the podcast uh well yeah as andy's history corner will you always just refer to it as the history segment yes but that andy's

history corner makes me think there is some instance where it's being mentioned have we been using it like somewhat interchangeably for longer than we thought i guess we must have mention andy's history corner at some point quentin if you could do us a real solid let us know if we have mentioned that before or if that is just serendipity parallel thinking because yeah or maybe something else like in other media is called like history corner wouldn't shock me yeah yeah i don't know if we pull that from somewhere else yeah we've just nixed something all the fates have come together in a beautiful way one of the two i've peeked ahead at the future episodes and notice you've already tackled what would have been my top suggestion for a history segment

the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 to 1912. Oh, I hope you enjoyed that one. It was very good. Yes. Yeah, just I love hearing about Italians being bad at war. There's something like... Well, that's what the listeners are going to hear for the next 48 years from my side of things.

Well, to be fair, they did take a bunch of stuff. It was one of their better ones. Yeah, but in the game, that doesn't have to be the case. I will offer instead an obscure front of world war ii the east africa campaign um which yeah i've not really looked into i think that's like america maybe like france and stuff over in morocco i tell you what better not have a board game i'll tell you what it almost certainly does we're not playing that one no uh it features both italy's most successful campaign of the of 1940 and the allies first

successful liberation and it was the proven ground of north african commander and brother of friend of the pod abc alan cunningham also given the italian east africa uh had control over the southern end of the red sea which andy will notice is where the british supplies come from a quick allied victory there was vital for british outfits in north africa i don't think they uh have made any overly long board games about it for you to play oh thank god that answers my question but i can recommend andrew stewart's the first victory as reading material oh that's a book on the list uh as a final note you've expressed in previous episodes that the expectation that people will skip over common ground because it's just a silly thing unrelated to the board game

well i'm here to tell you uh that not only do i stay for common ground uh i'm making a list of all your dictatorial edicts to satisfy my own desires uh to make lists of everything uh so i will be holding you account if you accidentally repeat any ideas five years in greetings from belgium uh stay subtle humble and brave quinton well thank you very much quinton it's always nice to hear people are are still enjoying common ground it's we need it at the end to make sure we have some room for tangents so we don't spoil everything else i'd also quite like to get a look that list so i don't just about to say is it better if we just sometimes we come back to them by mistake yeah you know what quinn um please if if uh well first of all the annie's history corner

let us know if you have this list we'd love to see it because i know for a fact we've forgotten so many of them also don't know when we'd do it i think the idea of it yeah an rpg like dnd or something in the common ground of this oh that's not what i thought with all the islands and the stone monuments and outdoor cat i think it would be a really funny chaotic not intentionally designed dnd saying i'll run a say uh a common ground common ground dnd one shot yeah campaign maybe a one-shot show we'll do that we'll put that online somewhere um i thought you were gonna to say, do you like a bracket of the best common ground?

Oh, the most common ground. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, think of the stuff that we have the most... Actually, I guess the winner of common ground would be the one that is the most divisive. That we manage to bring together.

Yeah. That would be interesting. We should have a look, but if you got that, Quinn, we wouldn't mind seeing it, so by all means, send it over. And if Andy's History Corner was our creation or the universe's but thank you it's uh very great i'm a great to hear from you quentin and glad you're enjoying the show on those bike rides yes we got another one here from nathaniel nathaniel writes uh chicago in it is the uh is the title i imagine that's a reference to the fact

that we are from the uk in it being uh more of a southern term actually we're northern so it would be uh we don't have like a thing we say at the end of something do we isn't it chicago isn't it those yobs down south going in it whereas up north we go isn't it well up in the north uh The Northeast specifically. We are, is something they say. Why I? But, yeah, I don't really carry the accent very well. No, I don't think you're as particularly, like, stereotypical Geordie.

Yeah, kind of thing. We are, mate. All right, go on. Other mags. Yeah. Ah, Ballybroon. There you go. That's a little bit of Newcastle.

Nookiebroon. That's our Northeast coming out. I don't know what's wrong with my accent. I feel like such a fucking alien. Oi, mates. I sent a web form, the one about the shit fountain in Chicago, through the website a couple of months ago, as I was still catching up.

Then the next episode, you started to tell listeners what a mess that was, and we should email instead. In that web form, I suggested you make Chicago your first live show, and very soon after, you announced your first live show. Glad it went so well. I hope this email does not bring about some other jinx. i mean if the other drinks is something that goes as well as the live show jinx away yeah please

jinx it and also if we ever do a live show in the u.s which uh we we may do at some point things are a bit dicey over there at the moment you got all sorts going on so we might give it a bit of breathing space while you guys figure out what's happening there but um chicago would be the place oh yeah chicago would be where we do that i mean a few of my favorite bands are from there rise against fallout boy so lincoln park uh yeah yeah lincoln park from chicago yeah yeah lincoln park's in chicago i know that yeah i just didn't know if if they're from chicago yeah i don't actually know a whole i love lincoln park but i don't know where they're from but there we go maybe now i do uh y'all are that's a lovely y'all are like juxtaposed all all together um i've juxtaposed

why can't I think of the term? Contracted? No. Smooshed? That's it, yeah. Oh, it's all smooshed together. Perfect. Now I sound intellectual. God, the only thing I have are my words and I can't think of the bloody words, so I'm going to

go with smooshed. You're all a fantastic fun to listen to. Portmanteau! Portmanteau's the bloody word I'm thinking of. And I just listened to episode 80 with a very cracky james oh well i'm glad that's changed oh is that the one that's when i had my bad day that was right before the the final stretch when i have my last little hiccup

yes i have it in my head that james is a kiki and andy is a boober based on language shape studies and the wikipedia article there um we we did have a little look at this when this first came through a while ago now, and yeah, I think it kind of fits. Yeah, it's also really cool. The thing is, it fits with so many things. I can think of so many things that do fit this.

Like the shape with the word, like some things. Because it's like the word feels spiky. Yeah. Another dynamic I can think of is Mike and Sully from Monsters, Inc. They have that.

Mike would be Kiki and sully would be boba oh so i'm sully i guess so yeah i'll take it i'll fucking take being mike wazowski of course you would cinema legend of course it's like pacino for animated films i'll happily be the pacino to help lift my fellow real combat veteran uh board games 100% count don't let anyone gatekeep our valor out of his rage please look at my dog john jonathan jack james and what a dog that is a fluffy dog oh yeah there's a bit where he's wearing shades yeah like uh like the sort of reflective visor shades the kind you wear skiing yes um he's got a jumper on or a t-shirt in this one he's looking out a window very uh sort of wistful look in his

eyes i was getting sea captain vibe oh okay yeah so he's like sort of standing on the he's kind of proud of what's going on looking out he's kind of going through the motions yeah it's another day but the day for him is a beautiful view very cool dog yeah very very loving eyes very loving eyes you know i wasn't a dog person for a long time but uh i came around on dogs a few years ago really did for a while i was like kind of overblown don't really get the hype i've met some cool dogs oh yeah met some cute ones i've come around um but uh beyond the pictures it continues the rest is just some thoughts i've gathered along the way as we've journeyed through the deserts of our minds in episode 70 you talk about roundabouts and we have some in chicago

on some small quiet side streets we are midwestern americans though so of course we installed stop signs at all of our roundabouts that's just like a four-way stop it's not a roundabout my italian friend almost had a stroke when he saw that little bit of civil engineering that's very fair i'm with them on that but by the same merit tell them about war history in italy and that's the i guess rebuttal to that oh you're round about some badly designed well your country's shit yeah you know actually maybe historical debates about war and conflict with your pals you know unless you do a common ground speaking of which i forget when you had the common ground about wearing a single outfit all season but i cannot recommend it enough i have six of the same white buttoned down

collared shirts, and three pair of olive green pants and three blue pants, all of the same size design manufacturer. So I either look like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin everyday at work. That's a nice staple, though. They're both tied to the

working family man. I mean, one of them's called Family Guy, for God's sake. So, yeah, I think that's a good look. I also feel like I'd like that, just having no... There's no fought yeah that well that was the common ground i love the idea of just that's what you wear well funnily enough i'm once again wearing the outfit i wore for the live show well it's also a white

shirt blue are you doing this guys yeah you stole this guy's look i don't know i'm doing my own look i'm doing my own idea but i love these jeans great love them great fit and this is a shirt that it's it's not like a completely formal white shirt it's got like a bit of texture to it so it feels like you can wear it outside of an office setting love it can't get enough it's not quite linen but it's not far off whereas i think this t-shirt is as old as me that is your look though that is the quintessential andy look it's old t-shirt well like the text is faded from it because it used to belong to a charity shop or my dad i need to go to more charity shops oh i used to you know when we you know the first place we lived yes such good charity shops on that i only ever used

it to buy novelty glasses i got like sherry glasses and that kind of thing half my wardrobes that still that stuff because they did i think it was jeans or trousers were all three pounds oh my god shirts were two pounds and t-shirts were a quit so i'd just be like check in once a week and if anything even remotely caught my eye, I'd just buy it. I'm going to start doing that. I could become real fashionable real quick.

Or real vagrant vibe. It depends on what I pick out. There was something about missing brushing your canine tooth on the side of your dominant hand because of the angle. This is true, and it's why I train myself to switch hand mid-brushing to get full coverage. My dentist noticed and

commented on the change. I've actually started doing that since we i've i've done that for a while i did it not long um before we started the podcast i was talking to someone um it's actually someone who i used to speak with about the idea of the podcast um and and she gave me the advice of of doing that and the thing is it came out of nowhere like it was just middle of a conversation it was oh did you know yeah and maybe that was my inspiration for common ground well yeah look since we did that one i literally did yeah it's such a good idea um the fruit zone is a perfect segment uh say no more nathaniel i agree uh it is yeah a potentially fun history segment in 15 years when you have scraped the barrel of directly

game related history is to look at world war ii gliders my granddad was a glider the only aircraft built to crash fun fact unlike parachuters there was no pay increase to be a glider uh also nathaniel my great granddad was a glider at one point so we have that in common um that's such a fuck job my have you seen those gliders yes my uh my great granddad knew the guy who was in a glider that was destined for the cathedral in Cologne in Germany, and something went wrong with the glider,

so it didn't get hit. That's a story he told me. I don't know the ins and outs of the detail, but that's something he told me years and years ago. So that's pretty cool, because I've also been to that cathedral. I went on a school trip. Oh, cool. So, kind of a fun

through-line with that. But yeah, those gliders are crazy. I wouldn't get on that. I'd rather parachute than glider. Yeah, I think I'd... I don't want to be up in the air in that altitude with those kind of devices. At least the parachute's job is like, we're going to get you to the ground.

Yeah, glider, I mean, the clue's in the name. It's just meant to keep on going. It's not really designed to stop very well. I mean, yeah, as he says, it's built to crash. So, yeah, I'm glad I didn't have to do that. well in this part of my life anyway who knows what's coming next uh and then enigma encryption top secret there's some sort of coded message that's been put in here and i don't understand it entirely oh um do you know uh so the message is

kalashi betting on the full campaign market manipulation profit i think it's one of those you know those, it's polymarket one you know those sites where you can just gamble but it's on like literally anything, oh yes oh I see and it's, yeah you, Nathaniel wants us to make it big

presumably with a little slice for himself um well, the downside of that Nathaniel, is that the only stakes are possibly actual stakes um, so if you want to get in on this, you're going to have to play and you're going to have to try and win a meal

But the good thing is, the more people that play The bigger punishment it is for the other side Because they'll have to buy a meal for several people Wait, so you just Are inviting people to play now? Yeah, I think it's about time we open this thing up If anyone wants to come and join War with a Mate for the next 48 years

Submit your application And we will take you on Andy's address is Meep Wow, you put more thought into that than you have Time to dox natural listeners That muscle memory really let that linger

alright yous until next time and what has been included here is a picture a demonstration of the split of you guys and y'all across the United States which is actually

awesome I might see about putting that onto the Instagram as part of this week's post and as the podcast expands I'd like to see that y'all area getting bigger i would like to see let's push that y'all up into the northwest it is important that uh we we allow ourselves to impact the the culture of the u.s you know australia we're big in australia we're big in chicago we need to push that guys let's keep it going your subtle sorry your humble

subtle and brave listener that's out of order that was scary whoa i don't i don't know about that, Nathaniel. That threw me off a little bit. You had me up until the end there. Nathaniel. He signs off a couple of times there, but one of the times mentions his surname, and he's done a bit of a bit. If we did both, it would just be his full name.

So, thank you, Nathaniel. We're already in a state where we have to bleep things sometimes, because we get confused and we just read people's full name. I would recommend against trying to throw us off, because we will make that mistake. But, thank you so much for the email, Nathaniel.

Quinton, everyone else who sent in some awesome emails that have come up. We've had a quick skim over all the ones that have come through so far and there's some really cool stuff in there. Anyone who wants to send in an email, game related about personal anecdotes comments, questions, anything you want to fire

over, we made a vow early on. We'll read it all and we will stick to that vow. It's info at warwithamate.co.uk We'll be updating the website, warwithamate.co.uk as we build towards the start of the full game, and all the way throughout. And we also have an Instagram,

War with a Mate, where you can keep up with the weekly posts that we put up, we put up polls, try and keep it engaged where we can remember to, but all of it will be very much revitalized come the full playthrough. And I will also just say, because we've not mentioned it for a while,

we will read out every email that people want to be read out, but if you want to get in touch and not read it out, feel free and just put something in the subject of the first couple of sentences, saying please don't read this out, but

if you still want to get in touch, go for it, yeah. It doesn't have to be show content. Very good point, yes. We can read everything out, I guess, is maybe a better way for us to propose that we can read everything, but if you want to fire something over just for us to read through

a bit of information, questions, we can reply directly to you, completely fine with that. We're more than happy to fire off a reply if it's Just something you want to know and you don't want to be part of the mailbag. Entirely fine. We get that some people just want to have a quiet question. It doesn't all need showmanship. But on the matter of showmanship, keep an eye out.

We will be announcing something fairly soon about what the 100th episode looks like and starting the full game. Going to be a little bit different. Hopefully very fun. And we're excited to share that. But for now, we have nothing to share about the here and now. We've done that. we've done a practice scenario we've done carcassonne and that's all kind of tied to the

past so we may as well stay on brand yeah andy how about some history the men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to cairo from a month's trip the contrast between the east and west of the nile is very marked in the east at this point i gave little thought to my past but i'd always be interested in the sea I am more or less in a position of a campus In command of a ship Which is on the point of sinking Because errors are present

We are absolutely not qualified to share views on history So Andy When and where are we? World War 1 We've done the Ottomans and Italy's experience We're going to do Britain's now Oh, I remember those guys Yeah

That's us It is um we are told that this is a war for liberty but the first thing the government does is take away our own liberties that's a quote from an anti-war speech by someone uh called james marx arguing against restrictions of free speech at a political rally before being promptly arrested he's got a bit of a point going on then he does so britain entered world war one on the august 4th 1914 when it declares war on germany in order to protect belgium at least that's the public reasoning um after germany uses belgium to get into france basically so when the war kicked off

britain was the only major european power that didn't have a draft or compulsory military service at the start of the war oh wow yeah so most companies like germany france russia had systems where young men did two to three years service and then became reserves so when the war started those three countries could each call up roughly four million people who had at least basic training that's a big number to call in and i know that our guys weren't fit for it based on what you said previously yeah well britain had a small but relatively well-trained army for the time of a quarter million it's not bad going with a half million in reserve to call up at the start of the war but britain did have a very successful initial recruitment drive at the start of the war

this includes the famous uh lord kitchener wants you or your country wants you poster yes i'm sure you guy with the mustache pointing absolutely yes which has inspired a bunch of like uncle sam it's like a very that's a very very well-known one i'd be shocked if people haven't seen that at least once in their life i mean that's such a i think that's been like it's like almost fiction as well yeah where it's like you know your country wants you etc etc it's so well known so that they had that and that worked pretty well they also introduced this concept of pal battalions where you'd get to stay with the people you signed up with so like you could sign up with your friend group your workplaces even like football teams would sign up together

so this leads to things where you've got the 10th fusiliers who are all stockbrokers and are known as the stockbroker battalion that's interesting yeah you've got the grimsby chums who are all former students of winteringham secondary school in grimsby and another one is the 17th service battalion aka the football battalion uh where the late in orient fc captain fred parker signed up with uh along with 40 players and staff and then players from other major clubs joined the regiment so they ended up with 120 professional football players in it which meant they easily filled up the rest because thousands of eager young men wanted to fight alongside their like sporting heroes that's really cool yeah that's a very very good pr move yeah well footballers were getting

loads of stick in the press what around that time yeah what for well they're healthy young men oh and they're not on oh so it was there was a i mean sure a lot of them wanted to serve but there was also like this huge amount of pressure on them like why are you why would you of all people not you're able-bodied yeah famously able-bodied yeah the football battalion also contain contained uh someone called a walter tool signed up for it who was the third mixed raced person to ever play top level football. Oh, wow. And also one of the first

mixed race heritage officers in the British infantry ever because up to 1914, you had to be natural born or naturalized British subject of pure European descent. Which is... What a weird way to cut your legs out from under you

when it comes to recruitment. Yeah. But I'd recommend looking that guy up. He's got like a incredible life. Like... Might do an episode at some point, even, but if not, he's definitely worth a Wikipedia scroll. Well, presumably between football career and then, sounds like, military career. Yes. Sounds like he's had a time.

Yeah. This recruitment drive was incredibly effective, with 2.5 million men signing up in the first 18 months of the war. I mean, yeah, you're already hitting some solid numbers that are comparable to that 4 million number. Oh, yeah. however casualties on the western front eventually started to outpace the rate of recruitment that's scary because of the numbers you've just mentioned yeah this leads to the uh introduction of the military service act in january 1916 which instituted compulsory enlistment for all single men including childless widowers as this law was coming closer there's actually a massive

surge in marriages of people trying to avoid the draft uh this leads uh to an increase from roughly 300 000 marriages in 1910 to 400 000 marriages in 1915 um maybe love was just in the air well you can't really know how many of them were cynical or transactional like i want to get out of it and i'm sure there was also another big contingent of like i want to get married before i go at the front and maybe don't come back well yeah that's another thing how many of them were like i don't want to go and how many of them were like if i do go i want to have done the thing that i need to do to yeah solidify this i'm guessing you can't know the the ratios but yeah they don't go all right you would take this person for avoidance of war yeah the government reacted

to this though so when the law passed in january 1915 it contains the clause saying if you were uh if you weren't married before november 2nd 1915 i see what you were still technically single even if you'd got married since okay so yeah so they've thought about this they've made sure that people can't scapegoat the situation or like yeah fully just marry out of going i guess yeah that's fair because you can't really find another way around that so another way the government prepares using the law um and government control is they set something in really early four days after the formal declaration of war uh the british government led by the liberal party instituted the defense of the realm act or dora um explorer yeah uh this was a wide-ranging pro-war effort piece of legislation

with a large number of different goals and objectives, despite being one of the most extensive and controlling pieces of legislation in British history. It passes in record time with almost no parliamentary debate. Oh, wow. Yeah. So a lot of it makes sense. So the first few clauses they have,

and I'll expand over time, but it's like securing infrastructure such as ports and railways. So this extends to like, you're not allowed to loiter near bridges or tunnels. or, like, harbors. Counter-espionage, stopping communication with the enemy, securing critical information.

Part of this was you were not allowed to talk about the war in public. That's interesting. Which was to prevent leaks of information, but also intended to block people publicly speaking out against the war. Okay, that's interesting.

So it's sort of a two-fold... Don't want to leak any info, but also this is a perfect excuse to round up anti-war people, and people will be on side of us doing it. Yeah, that's a

sneaky tactic. So a bunch of people go to prison for that. Do you know Bertrand Russell? Yeah. The philosopher. Yeah, yeah. He goes to prison during World War I for being anti-war. Oh, wow. Yeah. And there's a ton of other people

as well. this is all backed by allowing people who broke these rules to be tried by military court-martial rather than civilian courts. One of the bad things for this, I guess, is the death penalty is on the table in military tribunals, and it's not in civilian. So you've got hugely wide-ranging laws that can...

They didn't immediately go to it. They ended up... I think they killed 11 people during the war. for this who were like from what i saw seemed to be like pretty genuinely spies yeah i guess they executed them by firing squad at the tower of london really making a spectacle of it then oh yeah so another one of the most important aspects to all this as well is this is a framework that allows the government to issue like decrees and regulations without parliamentary oversight it's kind of akin to they can just add stuff to this bill rather than passing new laws oh okay they can just amend whatever comparable maybe i'm not

a legal expert obviously but kind of like american executive orders yes that's what came to mind yeah yeah um well you can just bypass the like legislative branch yeah which is crazy because you really don't see that now like no if that came into place now in in the uk that would be insane oh yeah um so it gets a man it has six major amendments during the war um the first amendments on the 28th of august which was just a refinement of the original uh with a large expansion to press censorship um so at this point as well the british government have a department who are like in newspaper offices and stuff being like you can print

that you can't print that you can't print like casualty figures I guess that's kind of reasonable I don't think that's too much control your enemies are going to be reading your newspapers so if they're like we've lost this exact number of people

it's confirmation they can disseminate information based on that yeah and then they update Dora again in November um this one sort of overrides the previous two and like consolidates them and then also gives the state the right to acquire private land buildings like workshops or factories they can just requisition like anything for the war effort so this is like the end of like private property

for a bit yeah this is getting dicier yeah um there's obviously pushback against this law even though they're like world war one's going on people are still like what is this yeah i mean the loss of private land is a heavy one yeah not printing casualty figures i get yeah because you can very clearly see how that would be taken when it comes to like private land it's like oh is there not anywhere else you can take it starts to yeah you know i can imagine people getting a little bit funny about that well one of the main things they hate the idea of the military courts so this law gets softened that British civilians

will still have the right to a civilian trial with the proviso that if Britain itself is ever invaded things are going right back to the most extreme

military tribunal thing which kind of boots on the ground like let's sort this out um so yeah 11 people killed um executed at the tower of london and they must have done like bad stuff like where it's very measurable and very clear that they were spies yeah it was like german national got caught with like radio equipment in his bag and like copious notes on like who's going in and out of a port type thing it was like it's like proof that your actions are going to kill people yeah to be fair i mean 11 people during the whole war isn't

feels fairly measured it's small that's why i think they must have been caught with like solid evidence where it's like you are the guys that we caught there's probably a ton more spies but these are the ones we caught and when we caught them it was like yeah you were you're about to carry out actions of spreading information that would have killed people oh yeah so you're gonna you're gonna go um they get a new amendment to this later given the massive power when it comes to munitions which has given the option the government further options to take over any factory turn it into music munitions or weapons factory not too dissimilar to what we spoke about last time yeah um the italians oh yes with fiat yes yeah every country sort of yeah you have to

you have to industrialize for war on this scale but also they do a thing you know Conkers the game the nut are Conkers a nut they are a nut aren't they maybe a seed I don't know

I think they might be a seed actually but the government were like kids you have to stop playing with Conkers we're going to buy them off you I think it was something like 7 maybe shillings for a hundred weight or something like that but basically if you process um conkers you get i think acetane or something you basically get one of the ingredients for smokeless gunpowder

so it's to a point where they're like you can't play conkers we need you to bring them to us so we can get like the marginal amount of ingredients out of individual like conkers The Great Conquer Armistice. Yeah. You weren't allowed to whistle for a taxi in London. Right, now they're losing me. Because it might be mistaken for a warning and cause panic if they hear a sharp, high-pitched noise. I think they're stretching it a bit now.

No flying kites. Because it could give positions away. German Zeppelins. I don't know, they're kind of losing me around this mark. uh multiple people got imprisoned or fined for feeding uh stale bread to horses or ducks no sorry no no now we've went too far this doesn't make any difference because it was it was like the whole thing of like you literally can't get anything away like that someone could have eaten that gone worked in a factory it's like that's how dire the food situation gets yeah but then are

Were they going to give that food to a person? No. Of course not. They were never going to do that. They were going to throw it away, or they were just going to feed it to a horse. Those are the binary options. So as we get into 1916,

the amendments are built more around social health and readiness. They changed the rules around alcohol and pubs in June. Part of this is pubs could only open between 12 p.m. and 2.30 for lunch, and then 6.30 and 9pm? That's not too bad. No. I think that's fine for pub opening hours. All the drinks were watered down.

Oh, dear. You could not buy rounds or buy a drink for anyone but yourself. Good. You know what? Big believer in that. Okay. I think buy your own drink and then you get rid of the round situation because what if you want to go home and now it's your round?

That's literally the logic on that if people were with five people they'd be inclined to stay for five drinks and they'd be hung over for the factory the next day. Exactly. So it's you buy your own. You know what, I'd be a great war general. Because I don't like going

around either. Later in the year they banned the sale of cocaine and opium unless you've got a prescription. That one turned out to be a very good idea. So no recreational cocaine and opium because get to the fucking factory or you might be called out for war.

Yeah, no, that one is, that's a solid choice. That one traps. Yeah. So by mid-1916, the war really isn't going great for anyone, like, on any side. The war isn't going great is a fun sentence. Yeah. But it's also a point of, like,

it's not like one side's going out. It's like everyone's having a nightmare. Yeah, I mean, based on the stories we heard, I mean, the ornaments are gone. Yeah. um so by may 1916 britain has already lost half a million men with a massive offensive on the way that they and recruitment started to dry up because like despite the press censorship people are noticing hey people aren't coming home and the ones that do have like a thousand yard stare

and no friends because they went with their friends which is also a huge problem they realize with the pal battalions they'll figure out the SOM really highlights this, which we're about to get to, but it's like, oh, so that all the men from that village because they all signed up together

are gone. All dead. It's like yeah, it means that losses are spread through like, yeah, it's just like that unit went over the top, so those free villagers have no men. Yeah.

at first I was like, oh that's a cool idea it really builds that sense of community and camaraderie and you already know the people, you care about them already you're invested in them surviving and going through this together, you've got shorthand, you know each other but then if they die one, you've lost your friends

and two, the knock on effect is you go home it's just you or you and like three other guys out of like a hundred in the area that's it, desolation of the population um so yeah so they set up the second military service act on 25th of may 1916 and this is all men between 18 and 41 married or not uh which must have been a real fucker

for someone who went in a loveless marriage to avoid the war and then they got caught with part um they're doing this because they know they have a massive offensive plan which is the battle of the psalm yeah um so this leads up to the first day of july um which is the first day of the battle of the psalm uh britain receives 57 000 casualties on the first day of that battle which will last until November. Fuck, I did not know it was that long. It was a it was an action to relieve

pressure from Verdun. So it's not even the primary offensive. It's that we need the Germans to focus some of their guys here to lessen pressure elsewhere. Whoa.

Yeah, and so Britain loses just under half a million and Germany loses about 300,000 people the line moved 7 miles did not realise the Somme was nearly a million people collectively

and for 7 miles I mean we mentioned this a little while ago, I think I used this comparison when we went on that walk on our trip and knowing that that was about 10 miles more or less maybe that was this

oh it would have been because we didn't do the last three because we got a taxi from because it was starting to rain and we were fucked yeah so yeah that's so that journey that we took that walk is months worth of work and a million lives nearly

for that push that is insane and just to also put something from the Italian thing in perspective that you know the 12 assaults yes like that Italy did 12 of them Britain and France did 4

and like the Battle of the Somme is one of them so like the Italians did 12 in the time it took everyone else to do 4 and it's like oh so you really weren't prepared you really hadn't like consolidated

anything yeah because they rushed it yeah we know for a fact that they rushed it because it was also just repeat the same thing there wasn't any adaptation to the situation it was run into machine gun fire and die with the italian move there crazy stuff this is such a the western front is just such a nightmare it's just churning through people just yeah bodies it's just the amount of losses is insane i try to quantify that in terms of like just people that you know like 57 000 die in the first day casually so it's either dying i guess either way it's like so if they survive the medicine's not great yeah and it's gunfire

that got them yeah and also i'd say with when we were looking at italy i don't have the exact figures here but 50 of their casualties were permanently disabled i've got no reason to think that's not the rate. Yeah. I think any level of bullet wound

in, you know, in 1914, I don't imagine that that is going to be something that your life doesn't change

because of. Oh, yeah. Well, like, plastic surgery becomes a thing after this. Oh, is it this early? Yeah.

Like, there's been, there were even stuff like, further back that were, like, really crude stuff. But it's, like, cosmetic surgery becomes a thing after this because you've got so many people

with, like, disfiguring wounds and stuff. Yeah. So I guess something a bit light to the end as we wrap this one up. Something else bad happens in 1916 in May. Something else. When they introduce a

scourge that persists to this day. Okay. Any concept of what this might be? I mean, based on... So at the minute, you're framing this through like sort of like government implementation of things yeah um oh i want to say it's like some sort of like tax or i don't know some sort of commonplace thing that there's an issue for me it is commonplace uh this is the introduction of british summertime oh you you see you've picked the wrong audience andy i don't mind the clocks going back or forward oh i i really

don't like it but it doesn't it really has no impact on me other than i know that at some part in the year it's going to get lighter or darker for longer yeah um i don't like it as a concept we should just if you need to get up earlier just change your alarm rather than change the whole of time i mean yeah if i could go back in time and change it for convenience sake for everyone i go why just change it but nowadays because it would have been different you know now everything 20 years ago it's all automatic you don't have to change your clock manually you don't have to change your watch for the most part so it it really has no bearing on me every the world kind of does it around me okay so i guess maybe it's a bit selfish going well it doesn't affect

me now because it's automatic but yeah i don't have an issue okay uh well the germans instituted daylight savings on april 30th 1916 in an effort to save coal and power um britain followed suit and daylight savings was born uh people had actually been agitating for for a while such as this british guy called william willett who wrote a pamphlet called the waste of daylight in 1907 and unfortunately for willie willett uh he died in 1915 of influenza a year before his dream was realized fortunately for us we didn't go with his solution which he proposed which had been a jump the clocks forwards by 20 minutes each sunday in april for a total of 80 minutes and then push them back 20 minutes at a time on four sundays in uh september okay yeah that one

would have been a nightmare yeah the thing is this guy i really felt from there and it's a shame he didn't get to see this this vision that he had but i think he went about this the wrong way that's that's too fiddly also who was that guy william willett yeah like what was his job oh he's a builder a builder yeah right so he's not like a politician or anything oh no but he like got really he like hyper fixed he basically the story is he was on a bike ride in and it was sunny but he'd realize he was looking around and loads of people's curtains were closed and he was like we're wasting all this daylight and then he just started bothering people oh i love this guy there is i there is something very like

the hyper fixation about something like that just guys you're wasting all your daylight and the greek tragedy of this guy is hyper fixation becomes changing the clocks yeah and he dies a year before comes in yeah that is that's so poetic that's so beautiful and i really feel for this guy he might be one of my favorite history segment characters ever maybe we'll do a william willett deep dive i think we should please do please do i'll pay you if we can do this i'll give you any amount of money you need to do the research we'll go to his house where was he born where'd he live down south oh in it yeah in it he was an in it guy he was in it um but we'll continue with britain's various conscription acts and amendments to the defense

of the realm hack next time as well as you know world war one oh that's uh that's that's some real swings and roundabouts that was uh part devastating um given the losses and part incredibly endearing yeah because i i love the idea of of petitioning for that what was his name again william willett william willett yes remember his name say it tonight people when you look out at the night sky and you see it a little darker than it was yesterday william willett yeah will it get better will it will

oh I'd actually be more in favor of daylight savings if they called it will it day I love that I love that part that part did bring it back around into a bit of a lighter mood yeah I thought we needed a bit yeah

it's world war one a million lives there's something about world war one that just feels so much more bleak and grimdark I think it's so grinding and it's so it's just like throwing like bodies at machine guns

like the whole over the top thing is just it's so horrible like the thing with like the campaign for North Africa if you take it as an example like Operation Compass gets past Benghazi to like the marble arch

yeah And then Rommel gets to El Alamein And they like go back and forwards Like thousands of miles Yeah World War 1 is like The same level of losses Greater levels of losses

But you're moving like inches Yeah Like it's so much Effort For like when you look at it Such a little Well like if they made a Battle of the Somme board game, you'd be fighting

over, like, two hexes. Yeah, a hex is eight kilometers, so yeah. Yeah, in the campaign for North Africa, you boil it down to a single hex. I guess maybe spread further, like, vertically. But yeah, seven miles a kilometer, I think, is eight.

Yeah. So that would just be a strip along the board. It would just be a single hex. Yeah. And that would be the SOM board game. Yeah. With more units? Yeah. Crazy.

And a much quicker board game as well. Yeah. So, yeah. Actually, I don't know. That might be as grinding a board game. Only in terms of the scale of the time that you're covering. Oh, yes. Instead of covering multiple years.

You're covering about six months? February, November? Was it not July to November, did you say? Oh, sorry, yeah. First of July to late November, I think it was. well yeah six months yeah so yeah you boil that down that's that's insane oh yeah when you compare it i i hate i hate that aspect of history but it's so cool learning yeah i'm paraphrasing it but someone um there's a quote i saw from someone who fought in it i think it might have been a

french soldier which was something like if you get two armies together in a situation like this you might as well have just got one army here to commit suicide yeah that scale of loss hundreds of thousands of people dying is

unfathomable losses and also I think another scary thing about World War 1 is it's it's the like colonial age the like slamming into the industrial

age and the industrial age is like no more cavalry charges no more bright uniforms like because the start of this like world war one people are doing cavalry charges into

machine guns well that's it yeah you say you don't have it you do you have that but there's a there's a gatling gun up on a hill yeah there's you know 40 men riding up on horseback with sabers and guns. And also because cavalry is

expensive and like limited to the nobility because you need to be able to like buy and train on horses, which are expensive as hell. But you have like a German peasant like on a hill holding machine gun

Just click trigger. Mowing down like Decades of experience. Decades of experience. centuries of like familial tradition for like because you've got all these families who are like officer families like the cunninghams for example yeah where they all go in and then they all come back and like bring their expertise back to the family and that's that's passed down to not just their family but to the people they train the people who are beneath them yeah throughout

the wall and because they're british aristocracy there's probably like lying to her like yes we can trace ourselves back to like the normans arriving in 1066 yeah and now they're all gone because of because yeah because of man on hill with gun yeah like you yeah you think about you know they these families that you know rear the horses and they're part of some you know family that you know harkens back to steeds being brought for god knows who and then the horses are raised the horses are trained the men are trained the men ride the horses they transport the horses all the way across the the seas from from britain to france and you get them all there and all of this stuff culminates in metal coming out lightning fast from a barrel on a hill and it just shreds

up it just tears history apart it's crazy it's the end of the like jolly good hip hip let's go like you know that like type of British aristocrat who's like everything will work out for me yeah I've got this like god given thing I think the Boer War was the start of them being like oh fuck these guerrillas like

uh ten guys with rifles can fuck up like a battalion yeah that's an over but that I don't think that fully got into the zeitgeist not enough for a war of this scale and then World War 1 came in

he is because that that gun on the hill metaphorically and literally tears through heritage and removes it as a yeah a concept of passing that kind of knowledge down because that knowledge hit a wall yeah and it's it's now at the barrier that you can't actually pass it on anymore you don't know anything anymore like there will have been kids with like big starry eyes who's like would it be great grandfather maybe but yeah great grandfather would have like charged against napoleon yeah and like that would be like a family thing and then they arrive especially in imagine in 1914 what just the because you've got no concept of the new you don't know what's happening next reality yeah so you just this is this is just you know the next step in this era

you're continuing what's going on and then all of a sudden everything you've heard about war all the stories your grandparents told you everything you expect to be happening here you're then all of a sudden just met with a flash of light on a hill and everyone around you is just gone it's kind of like i don't know if this analogy is going to work you think war is the film 300 and you're the spartans and then you're suddenly saving private ryan on the beach yeah it's like that level of disconnect between that's such a weird dissonance to come to to grips with and i mean we're we're not in a dissimilar place now no the the difference between warfare over the the 21st century and the 20th century i think well i wouldn't be shocked if

uh ukraine and iran with the use of drones we're unfortunately kind of like the boa war as in like these are the proof of concepts you know what that's a very good way he's like technical things but i hope it doesn't it does at times feel like oh the large scale yeah whatever is coming from like whatever comes next it will be a different type of war and And I think for a long time, everyone's sort of analog was, well, World War III, it's just everyone fires their nuclear weapons. Yeah. And it's like, no, I think there is something happening. I think it will be, you know, there'll be people lost in very direct ways.

But it will be, like you say, yeah, drones. It'll be cyber attacks. It'll be use of, you know, AI, I imagine, to some extent. I don't know how that will be implemented. Even if it's not effective, they're going to jam it in there. Oh, of course. Everyone does. yeah everyone loves to use ai these days but not us we are we're two guys just plugging our way

through war is is grim it's horrible there's horrible things happen in the world of course but that's not what this place is we'll reflect on it we'll talk about it it's important to you need to look at these things you need to look at the past to move forward with grace and a lot of people don't we are going to try now move away from this somber topic lighten the mood a little bit as we always do because we're a couple of goofy guys playing a board game so the only way for us to come together and maybe bring some of you guys along with us is to somehow find that little bit common ground let's do it and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground

I'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording maybe yeah common ground is the segment in which we will pick a topic, discuss it and try to find a way to come together on it

and today I've got one Andy that it comes from maybe a similar sense of resource management that we've heard over recent history segments. My common ground is that we should be limited to one item, one

type of item, one quantity of item per person. So you only get to have one of each thing. Okay, I don't... At a time. How's it... I like that for the immediate things that jump to my head

are houses, that kind of thing is it do you get one book or do you get one of each book one book at a time at a time is the key part of this you get one of each thing at a time

pretty dystopian but now now tell me why do you need more than one of each thing at a time what is it you need more than one of at a time well i'm currently reading three books okay so i'd like to be able to read all them well read a book finish it go get another book but i read a fiction a non-fiction and now a history so non-fiction plus i guess perfect so that works so read the fiction finish it then read the non-fiction then finish it and continue

and read as much as you would like why do you need them all at once why do you need to have them all at once because i might be in the mood for one or the other you've picked a really bad one here because books i'm gonna fight you on the entire time yeah books you are right tell you what we'll circle back to books we'll see if we can find some good points and other things okay we'll Come back to books. Find something else. Okay. You're in a book headspace.

Because you're a book guy. Yeah. You love your books. I do. So let's think of something else. Think broadly. What else do you need? Clothing.

Okay. I need more than one of each. Okay. But do you? Boxes. Boxes? Well, I'm either... These aren't clothes.

Boxers. Oh, boxers. Yes. I think that's boxers. Because I can wear them. Yeah. If I'm being really stanky, I can turn them inside out. Oh, okay.

And then I need to wash them. Yeah. So I'm going commando every other day. If I want my hygiene to be good, I'm going commando 50% of the time. If I'm willing to stretch it a little bit, I'm going commando a third of the time. Okay. You got your boxers. Yeah.

You got your briefs. Okay. You got your long johns. Okay. You got your commando day. Okay. At which point, wash your clothes. Okay.

You've had enough time. Okay. Just a three-day cycle. Laundry day. I don't want to wear briefs. Well, you know, maybe think about the world, Andy. Don't just think about yourself here. So there we go.

but i okay uh what you're wearing on top uh t-shirt yep jumper yep button down yep button up okay vest okay shawl so i'm gonna look completely insane like every other day than t-shirt and burnt hand day and no more than anyone else everyone's doing it just think about it if anything it'll become a sort of status symbol if you can be creative enough to think of all these different things if you're good enough maybe you'll have a whole year where every

single day it's a unique thing it sounds like you're describing a prison colony on the moon it's all it's all gonna be different you only need one of each thing you know I think one television per household

well per person sorry per person no this is per person Okay. So, you know, it means that you don't need to hoard things. Production doesn't need to be overblown for certain items. But certain items are only viable if you mass-produce them. Yeah, and you can mass-produce them. But mass-production will look different.

It'll be mass-production on a smaller scale. There's not enough use for it anymore. And when it comes to money, and I know what you're thinking, Oh, well, what if I want to have, you know, two £5 notes? Digital money, Andy. Everything's digital now. Oh, God. I didn't even think you were going to apply that to notes.

Well, unfortunately, I am. So, you know, everyone has a £1 coin, £1.50 coin. Shoes? What do you mean, shoes? Well, I need two of them. They come as one thing. It's a pair of shoes. That's what they come as.

Okay, that feels like you've had to concede. No, that's what they come as. A pair of shoes, a pair of pants. They're a pair, they're one set. Just because of where they go on your body, it means that they can't. But if you do push me, I will say that shoes are now connected by some sort of material

so they are one thing. Sure, I guess if I push you, you'll have that in your back pocket. If you push me, I've got stuff ready. I guess I'll avoid that ruse. Yeah, be careful, it's a trap. You'll walk really fucking weird from now on but i will make it happen so you basically want hyper enforced

minimalism uh i guess so yeah that's a very good way to put this okay you don't need more than one of each thing here's the you can cycle through it i think there's a lot of things you truly yes you do not need more than one of absolutely i'm glad we agree on this so thanks for listening I think the low level stuff is you should have more like you need two toothbrushes you need two tubes of toothpaste at a time toothpaste, toothpaste at a time

you need that really don't think so one one's about to run out then go buy the next one but I've got a bit left in this one then use it so

I can't prep for anything Why would you need to? Toilet paper. Yeah, and it'll always be available, because no one's going to buy it all up. I will sometimes swap over a roll, mid-clean-up. Right. In your system, I'm just half-done cleaning, and now I need to, with a shitty ass, go and get one roll of toilet paper. No, Andy, because of my previous suggestion, quite a while ago, everyone has a bidet.

And everyone just needs one bidet. okay you can't roll it I think you'll find I am you've got a B day so you don't need to worry about that wiping is not a thing anymore so you're willing to get rid of every single one of your dice

other than one of each no you're not in this situation I am if this is a way to make the world better then yeah fuck it let's do it let's go so fireball is gonna suck fireball is gonna suck no it's not

Rolling 1d6 8 times. Nope, because you guys are going to be here. Me, you, and JPF. So I'll have 3 six-sided diamonds. I'm not briefly giving you 2. It's not mine.

I'm using yours. That's a loophole. It's not a loophole, Andy. Yeah, it is. It doesn't belong to me. Because you can have multiple monies because they're digital. Multiple monies. Yeah. Were you about to say, that's what I said?

Because it's not. I've never said multiple monies. You said something fucking weird at the start of the episode, which wasn't a sentence. You might be thinking of that. So rich people can just pay poor people to hold on to that one thing until they want it. No, because that's renting.

That's having. The same way you can't rent four houses at once. That's not allowed either. You're not borrowing stuff. But you were borrowing my dice. As a friend. There's no transaction in it. If you're willing to let me have a turn,

have a go of it for five seconds. Okay, here's another one. Okay. You want to drink one can of beer and then go to the shop and buy one can of beer and drink it and then keep going back and forth. What a great way to cut down on binge drinking. What a healthy way to help the country.

Such a prick. Sorry, do you hate healthiness? You hate good health. Yes. For those listening, I gestured to my body. This is a foolproof plan. What about this? You can only have one of something if it costs more than £500.

Nope, no deal. Fuck's sake, we need common ground. I know, so meet me. Meet me on my end. That's not how I'll compromise with it. I just know I'm right on this one. I just can't budge. You need to solve my book problem.

Okay. You say you're going to be in a mood for something else? Yep. Try something else. I'd have to return. No, no, no. Not another book. try something else

great you want to read non-fiction when you're busy reading fiction do something else expand expand your hobbies find something else that interests you that isn't necessarily the book

would you have one board game? at a time, yeah, I'd own one board game you'd own one board game we'd give that a go and we'd take it to wherever you go to buy or trade these things we're not getting into that, we don't need to and then you'd swap it out you'd get something else, you'd play something else

we have one mini for D&D? yeah I'd have my guy, you'd have your guy no enemies we'd have lots of small things on the board that we use to take the place, one bottle cap one thumbtack you know

all these different things one little the top of the shoelace, a little plastic bit one of those we'd have all these different things it would be a lovely, eclectic mix of things. Because everyone would have to jury-rig things out of trash.

Not trash, Andy. They're belongings. Because with this, we reduce trash massively. No! Yeah? Because I'd have to throw out so much stuff to just get to the baseline for this rule.

How? Well, I'd have to throw out thousands of books. Well, you wouldn't. How are you going to do that, Andy, when you're only allowed one piece of rubbish at a time? You stupid moron.

It's just good business. What? You couldn't have businesses Andy You're gonna wrap this up We've reached common ground I'm gonna put a bow on this Do you wanna

Do you wanna have more than one bad day Do you wanna have More than one person you've Lost okay so do you want to have one more more than one sad day more than one regret

I'd like to have more than one good day can't do that can't make that happen you look stalled I'm afraid I can't make that happen not within my power thing is we need to find common ground

but this is such a bad idea and you're being inflexible on it so I don't know what to do well I don't know it's tough isn't it can we not go back to maybe the price limit thing I don't know if we can

tell you what tell you what Andy because you're close to me we're good friends in theory I'll let you, hang on go on, keep going no, okay

I will let you you can have two books oh cheers, oh no problems then let's get this implemented ladies and gentlemen I've been James I've been Andy stay subtle, humble and brave

in those singular and one of a kind deserts of your minds thank you for listening no, desert of your mind, it's singular goodnight the only night We'll see you next time.

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