War With A Mate - Episode 90: Father Figure (w/KamSandwich)

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

What’s a Campaign For North Africa without friends to share it with? The guys are joined by Kam to review their dastardly Six-Turn practice run, and uncover CFNA’s higher difficulty setting, as well as the larger game group that could have been, other awful board games and the concoction of a gaming challenge to rival the War With A Mate quest in scale of hardship.

stop wasting your nights on a mattress that doesn't get you experience the most comfortable mattress in the world the sleep number smart bed at the touch of a button you can personalize your comfort choose firmer or softer adjust cooler to warmer and right now save up to twenty five hundred dollars during our massive labor day event hurry into your local sleep number store today Because we have your number. Hello, welcome to War with a Maze with me, James. And me, Andy. And it's not just us, not just our sweet selves.

this beautiful duo has become a gorgeous trio because we've decided in the the absence of the board game it feels like we've lost part of of the the character the third companion for the show we have we have aside from the celebrity on the couch but they they don't they're the fourth companion oh yeah i hate them um so we decided who better to bring in than a an old friend of the podcast and the person who really brought us around and educated us on what the game is a board gaming expert it is none other than cam sandwich cam how the devil are you how's it going dudes i'm doing just fine how are you guys we've uh we've we've been better i think we're pretty good right now and we're not having to directly play the game we're getting ready to yeah but

The issue is, Andy, now I miss the game. So I don't know what to think anymore. I don't know what to feel. I play the game and I hate the game. It is, I feel like I, shoot me up with an IV of Campaign for North Africa. Just a little patch. I just need a little fix, buddy, please.

Just one, please, and then I'll be done. Just let me roll the dice once. Just a little weather table. That's all I need. Next thing you know, 40 years are gone. You are telling me, man. It's already went too far. You can't call it a joke because it's went too far.

It's just silly. At what point does a joke become an art project no one asked for? I think around the year and a half mark. Uh-oh. Okay. We've hit that. We've passed the Rubicon now. We can't go back.

It's not a joke. now it's it's it's either a safeguarding issue or or it's art um cam you have a lot of experience with board games would you say this is a concern or is this cool well in terms of my end uh what i would consider a concern is probably a little different than what the common board gamer would all concerned i think you guys are doing a-okay from my perspective you can just say yes man you don't have to you don't have to try and and psychiatrist us we know what that means we know that you guys are doing just fine are you wearing a wire oh no he's doing the thing in like a horror film where they say it'll be fine to get the

other person to go through the door first yeah as soon as you turn your back i'm gonna vanish like a shop that was never there and then the copy will be in your hand then we're just left in a room with the company for north africa exactly there's no door you're stuck there that's what it feels like i feel like the door in my mind closed a little while ago and i've been trapped in this room and hang on this is sounding like it's concerning not really guys just a joke i'm just doing a funny bit we um we decided uh we the best way for you to know cam was um really what was wrong with us is we we just sat down there we've shown you a little bit of um of what we had behind the scenes we showed you my spreadsheets um the the trucks the supply dumps

the aircraft the units um you've seen them once before i guess now you've seen them in their finish state after a practice run how do you feel after seeing that i felt um i was surprised that the supply dump spreadsheet was actually legible to the point where i could understand what was going on and i didn't think that the pilot spreadsheet could get worse and yet i was proven wrong yeah the supply dumps i was really pleased with because it's nice and neat it's something i updated regularly and i didn't have to do an individual tab per upstage i just thought i don't need to know how many supplies were here four turns ago but the pilots when you have to keep track of every individual guy i kind of need to know when they died and yeah i need to know

when i need to know when my my sgsus were killed in a war crime it's probably best to keep track of the fatalities so you don't assign johnson to a plane that was blown up three weeks ago yeah or i guess worse yeah i have a a dead guy put into a plane because you know putting a mangled corpse into the cockpit that's bad for morale yeah you can fly dead camels you cannot fly dead pilots they made that very clear yeah well i guess through through absence of rule you know it's a it's a truth by omission yeah it's the rule between the lines just put the dead camel in the cockpit and there you go you got an extra unit that's a good point maybe that's what you use them for necro camel pilots the sequel to the campaign for north africa strategy no one's tried

yet what dark magic yes yeah we haven't really jumped into the occult rule book yeah i think yeah that's a separate one that's the expansion pack isn't it a different scenario oh my god an expansion pack for the company it's like oh do you want some more no i don't want one you know i thought this game was pretty good but honestly i thought the rules could go into a little more detail with the stuff that it puts together an expansion would really help here i don't i don't know that we should be speaking these words into the world because we but you know we there's some of the emails we get in from some folk who are bold enough to to play the game some of them playing alone

and they they drop in emails to us about rule clarifications and things they found about the game i'm kind of worried if we keep talking about this some bold soul out there is going to decide i know what'll be fun let's give the guys something extra to do i i guess i'm putting bad energy out into the world here because we'll be the ones who reap the... but it should be an expansion for the so it's got the Italian campaign

but because of the shape of Italy, you have to have the five boards we have, then one board, then two and two, so the game map becomes even less like friendly to the space. Not only

is it ten feet long now it's like four and a half feet wide yeah well at that point andy has to move yeah because we can't do it at his house anymore into a warehouse i always thought you'd shoot a warehouse it'll be that storage unit uh plan that we talked about last time you just rent a storage unit and keep the game in there that's a good point and also we can keep andy there and he can move in you can settle in with the celebrity on the couch it'll be great you'll have a great time you can Have a little fan, uh, maybe a book to keep you occupied. Yeah, just the one book.

Well, you can have two. Yeah, that's the special. Andy's allowed two books. Yeah, the land and air rules of play. Oh damn, the books have to be the manuals for this. Oh, that's a good point. By the time that's out, you're gonna have a really hard time playing the game. Just by memory. I think I've locked it in enough now.

yeah we um i think since since we last spoke um we um we were uh victim of our own hubris because last time we spoke it was it was early days i think it was still turn one yeah because turn one was half of it oh yeah yeah you were about a third of the way through turn one if i remember correctly oh wow so so that's off stage one just little babies doing their first offstage so at the time we would have been we would have been two very cautious men we would have been people uh wandering into the great desert with a backpack full of supplies a big bottle of water and moving at a steady pace in the shade with the profound ignorance that makes you think you can walk into the desert yeah i guess it was always there and what we grew into

were two idiots in a desert proving that correct. We found the water, we thought we could do the journey off by heart and we, I guess if we track the metaphor, we died out there.

But we've come back and we want to let you know, Cam, that we've learned and we're better now. Awesome. For some reason it seems like I need to convince you of that. i think maybe i've just needed to say this for a while and it's nice having someone else here to

say it to we we're better guys i promise we didn't mean it see i am i am your a little therapist for this episode you are i feel like you you kind of have been because you you gave us the warning because your video on the campaign for north africa really spelled out don't play this game yeah and we thought well he probably doesn't mean us probably just means everyone else but we can do it yeah we've never played a war game before those same people that you've talked about that have listened to your podcast and picked up the game that's you they're little yous just getting started off oh my god this is like the end of oppenheimer you think we set off a chain reaction that will people wasting their time playing an impossible board game i believe we already have destroyed

hundreds of thousands of man hours so that makes that makes me an andy oppenheimer and that makes you einstein i guess cam sweet i'll take that you uh yeah maybe have you ever thought about styling your hair that way i've not it usually doesn't get out that high before i have to cut it because my hat doesn't fit on my head anymore and i can't film that's a good point yeah you've got a you've got like an appearance going on we thankfully don't need to to worry about that we can just be disembodied voices screaming into the void but you've got you've got optics that is that is something i miss from the early days just being a disembodied voice that doesn't have to make sure that my hair isn't sticking out the front of my hat well that's it you you've you've put yourself

out there you've you've opened up yourself into the the big beautiful world of board gaming and and you're you're you know i would say you're definitely out there in terms of the the variety and depth that you cover certainly some of the most ridiculous games that i've ever seen oh yeah as long as they're bad i can't resist and the campaign for north africa video is i think it's awesome i think um i see very much why that blew up because it's such a a niche game and it needs to be spoken about i'm glad we we picked this one but it's got such a story to it it's just so interesting it's just bizarre the idea of a board game that hasn't been finished and then richard berg is like a kind of mythical figure he fills that role so well

he's a he's kind of a a scary guy like if he was around now it's a real shame he's not i would have loved to bring berg on oh i would just him being like what don't do this this wasn't why i made this just the way that he speaks in his quotes and the way that he writes in the rulebook it's just got such a such a charm to it that also is a little bit terrifying yeah he gives me actually kind of a dumbledore vibe sort of like he knows big picture what's going on he knows the grand design of things but he is kind of a scary guy like there's a he knows what to keep from you too like you shouldn't know this don't go looking for answers here don't worry harry you don't need to know about the camels yet but i do there's rules for them what are the camels for

i think if we did get a chance to interview him that would be the first thing we'd ask him and and he'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? The camels only appear when you need them most. Their purpose will be revealed when they are needed. Which is a shame, because if that's true, then it means the purpose of the camels is to surrender Alexandria, because that's what happens in this playthrough. So their grand design is to give up en masse.

And then in the little narrative we came up with, become prisoners of war, but for camels that means being in a British zoo. Maybe they end up at Hogwarts. No camels in Hogwarts. We don't know that. I'm sure J.K. Rowling

will stick another ad-lib on the end of the Harry Potter lore. Make a tweet and there's a part of Hagrid's house that you haven't seen yet. It's all camels. Oh god. yeah i don't want to talk about jk rowling's tweets i think i think just focus on the camel ones

yeah i'll filter them out to camel specific yeah i've got a chrome plug-in anytime jk rowling tweets about camels you get a notification hasn't happened yet but i'm waiting when that first one hits oh it's gonna be great the um so the game and uh and your your run-ins with it cam um what i what i have seen and this was about i think it was about six months ago you covered the tabletop simulations on on steam of some board games yes and i was i was both amazed and horrified to see that there is a tabletop simulator of the campaign for north africa yes it is a full port of the entire game with every rule book and i believe they add some little tablets on here for some sheets that you

can use to keep track of all the information and on the side i've got it i'm looking at it right now they've got each individual counter included in the game which you can move manually onto the board now that for me was the scariest part because it's not just a digital version of the game it's the fact that you you sort of embody a physical person playing the board game yes this is why i love tabletop simulator so much because you're not playing a digital version of the game where it automates everything you have to play the full game of anything on here like you were playing it in real life which just makes it so much harder to play any game and i love it and the worst part of that is you it takes longer because of that because you have you don't have

the the speed of not that you move pieces very often but you don't have the speed of just moving your arm and picking up the piece you have to absolutely drag yeah it actually just takes you longer than if you played it in real life it's amazing this actually might be the single worst way to play the campaign for north africa yeah i guess the only other the only way to make it worse is if you add time pressure i think that's the only way you can make that a more terrifying add a chess clock which even for blitz campaign for north africa it'd be like you press the thing and you've got an hour each team has 20 total years on their timer that they have to go turn by turn and if your

clock expires you automatically lose i feel like the gears and mechanism within that clock given how much time it's accounting for it would take so much force just to push down the button and click it because there's so many gears to rotate within it'd be that sledgehammer thing at the fair where you have to hit it so it's now become a fitness regime as well as being a torturous game there you go you get your workout in tungsten dice this game is going to make me anything but fit i think i'm actually getting repetitive strain injuries from the amount of time i have to stand up while we're playing and then lean over the board that's positioned precariously over your

furniture at least it was so bad when we were playing on the floor because to move anything you essentially had to do a sustained plank where you had a hand on the other side of the board so you went touching it and then like moving stuff underneath you. Yeah, you know what? That's probably why I feel unhealthy now. I'm no longer planking every day. But your core is insane.

I think whatever is in my core, Cam, is wrong. You know what? I'm saying all this as if I didn't come around on the game and I don't miss it. I do. And I think that's wrong. I think I need help. I'm glad you're here, Cam.

And now, thanks to the magic of Tabletop Simulator, anyone can easily get into the campaign for North Africa right now. That's magic in the same way the Necronomicon is magic. You should download Tabletop Simulator and play the campaign for North Africa with your friends. Is this an ad from the devil? What are you doing, buddy? You can't plug the campaign for North Africa on this thing. That's the exact opposite of what we're doing here. any favorite book well i don't have any projects going at the minute but i'd like to

promote some bad stuff i do enjoy a little bit of suffering every time i guess that's that's why you're here then isn't it pal because uh oh yeah we're doing that we're doing that en masse this is basically my disney world right now i am enjoying every second of this the most stressful place on earth i just the facts of what made timbuk tabletop simulator it's it's just scary that there's now a hard mode

for campaign for north africa doesn't tabletop simulator have a table flip feature oh yeah like yeah so i can right up here i uh i can't screen share because i'm on a different uh screen but you can just click this button like i do right now it flips the entire table so every piece just goes everywhere and

it falls into the void and you have to start all over i think if i was playing that with you andy on on tabletop simulator and you you click that button i think i'd kill you i mean what's what's what's great is i did i did just do that and there's so many pieces that it actively lagged the computer there's enough tiles that they're considered particle effects you have to put on ray tracing to flip the table yeah you know i'm kind of surprised that you didn't click the button to flip the table and then you just dropped from the cold just if i press this button here yeah we're gonna listen back to the audio on this and when you flip the table your audio just

Starts lagging and breaking them horrible. There's no sound. I'm just not in the call for a good 30 seconds. Just a demonic scream from beyond. The campaign for North Africa has touched both parties' lives in a, I guess, an interesting way, because it's drawn people in. Because your video cam, loads of people have flocked to that.

it's a it's a huge huge video and the draw from that i mean i i check out that video every now and then just to see if there's any comments on there that mentioned someone playing it or if anyone has threatened to play it just to kind of poach a conversation from someone who's who's also got bad decision making skills and there are it's there's something about the fact people are still discovering this game and i see new comments on there occasionally where people are like oh this is crazy can't believe this and there's a another guy and this is quite funny because last time we spoke you'd mentioned veil fisk yes who is a youtuber who is who's been threatening for years now to play the game it's next week it's yeah that is that is just a week away yeah

and so when we yeah sorry go ahead go ahead uh yeah so he's been he's been threatening actually just legitimately threatening his audience with posting the campaign for north africa video and he's been doing it for three years now i've been following him for three years since he started threatening to post that video and it's always just a week away and and it's it's worrying because you you spoke to us and i i don't know if you i don't know if you maybe did a good prank on us here but you mentioned last time that it looks like he's going to be releasing the video soon and i don't know from from all of his other ones he posted another highlight that was like okay this time's gonna be the real one and it was for this time specifically

what he said i don't remember what it was but it felt like he was actually telling the truth this time so i'm like oh this he's gonna drop it this is gonna be huge i can't wait i told you guys about it nothing nothing for like six months and and it's still not out now the the game is still not as far as i'm aware gta 6 is almost out and i don't know if it's genuine no it's it's a video on the topic and they've posted i believe they've posted screenshots of they've been playing it they're not threatening to play it they're threatening to make the video on it i think they are actually playing the game see we could we could really we could share some some scary stories with them that would that would hopefully fend it off but then i imagine they've got a bigger

group as well playing yeah they've got probably at least at least six to maybe the full 10 playing this one because he's got a big enough group that regularly appear on the videos yeah so he might actually be playing the game in its in its intended design where you have a full team on either end i do love that on i do love that on the tabletop simulator port they have uh just a group of calculators for each side for each player that's supposed to be playing so it's like you're supposed to have 10 people in this one tabletop simulator game just playing the game there's no way there's you know what that's actually inspired an idea on my part and that is a terrifying statement we we we need to we need to create alter egos for all of the roles

captain andy the pilot in charge of the air force yeah i think i think we need to i think we need to fracture our minds further do a real split yeah i think that's that's it's i don't think that'll be damaging long term no to have five discrete personalities inside you for four years yeah i think that'll be fine that's that's not gonna have any long-lasting effects when i i grow old and my brain's already starting to rot in my skull but you've got it actually there you've got to have some kind of like click tell like snap your fingers three times to go into the air commander or else they're just gonna start to mesh together you want us to create sleeper agents that's your only chance manchurian candidate yourself

and the thing is cam i'm i can i can now pin the blame directly on you for this because i'd like to think this was your idea so oh no absolutely you're kind of like their dad i'll take the blame i'll tell this has on me congrats you've just gained eight children and they have a life expectancy of about 40 years so it's below average but below average but that is going to wreak some havoc on the budget for sure yeah we will be demanding alimony i hope you know that that's gonna be rough Oh, Cam is Octodad Great

I'm getting real sick of Air Commander Andy just demanding slightly more alimony than the rest of them You know what, that is classic Commander Andy Classic, yeah He thinks his stuff's the most important

but we all need fuel I need gas money, daddy No it's all going to Air Commander Andy oh well this became the pitch for a not very good

film yeah I guess I'm sorry I called you daddy Cam understandable I can't fault you for anything that comes out of your brain considering I'm probably partly responsible for the damage that's been caused you warned us man

I didn't listen I'm sorry i think he's also taking the chance to talk to someone who's not me because i have a vested interest in him keep playing yeah that's a good point if um if you had a choice cam would you would you stop me playing no god damn it no i'm subjecting you to another 40 years in the north africa mines get back in there i don't want to mine anymore i just want to i'm probably the worst person you could have asked for an out. I actively enjoy causing as much

mayhem as possible. That is a good point. You are the rap rat of board games. Oh, absolutely. I love just nonsense and suffering. It brings me joy. I guess on

that topic then, so some of the other stuff you've covered recently, I saw some of your videos, and I liked the one about the 24 game. That was that was uh an interesting one that was awful that was straight up terrible i i love uh i love 24 um the show but i'm so sorry format of games they are just abysmal um i don't know if you want to share any of the the wackiest sort of things you've been encountering over the the last last few months yeah so the 24 game was interesting because i've actually played some decent dvd like

remote games in the past there was a really good i spy one i had but this was just atrocious they have quick time events that you're meant to do with a dvd remote and it's just not possible imagine imagine when you press the dvd remote how long it takes for for people that have used a dvd remote before uh how long it takes for it to actually hit play and then the movie starts now imagine that but you have a three frame window that's it the response time the input delay on on a tv remote is crazy i don't know what the technology is behind it but it's not designed for modern video game so whoever designed that is i think just i think what happened is they wanted to make a a triple a video game but they only had the budget for it's

not a video game no not even close and it's further that it's basically just a dvd game because you don't use the board at all the board is just not used in the board game it's one of the few where i've never seen a board game use the board it's actually pointless this is this is definitely someone who wanted to make a video game and they had to disguise it as a board game just so they could put something on on dvd i'll use this to backdoor my way into the industry oh no this is now on my cv i can't get in the industry just creates the worst video game ever made so that one for me stood out i think partially because i really like 24 and knowing that there's a piece of media out there that it's kind of like if i loved the north african campaign

and then i found out this game existed i'd be like oh that's a shame but but worse yeah there was there was that one was really bad i found another target board game which was just as bad as target the game of life target monopoly was an atrocity you just don't do anything you just straight up don't do it you have no agency nothing which is what you want in a board game yeah exactly and then after that we did the we did the global survival playthrough which was just it's a monopoly ripoff but what if it had 191 properties and it takes three and a half hours to get around the board oh so it's just monopoly but you've taken the worst aspect of it and turned that up to 11 also imagine monopoly but instead of starting with 1500 you start with 10 no no

30 000 monopoly dollars and that's how the balance of the starting money is on that one it it's just it's which for andy would be a nightmare because andy hates monopoly i actually kind of like it i'm gonna play that no don't don't don't no if you like monopoly do not play global survival i actually really like monopoly 2 it's a great game i despise that game i think um and this might be bold to say i think we have different appetites in board game length cam i enjoy a long game every once in a while i did spend nine hours playing global survival but did you have fun doing it is the real question i i did not hate my time playing global survival i will say that much it wasn't too bad well you sound like the one who's coping you you are now

the one who's saying this through gritted teeth it is kind of cope because i really like playing the banker and on the playthrough where i did play the banker i hated doing the banker change but when i played it with the live chat that i did it wasn't too bad what was really bad was spending 11 hours making one fatal character that was the most recent project and i think that is the single most miserable i've ever been on any type of tabletop project is that that like hyper sexualized table topology where you roll for like every part of your genital dimensions and stuff but whole circumference yeah that's the one yeah see i i haven't watched that video yet because i was i i feel like whenever i get a chance to watch like a youtube video it's on like a commute

and i don't want to have that up on my phone when i'm on the the you know on the train going to work just in case i don't get you put on some kind of list because i imagine with a big youtube you probably don't show all of the uh the the ins and outs so to speak but i was like i don't i don't know that i want to catch someone looking over my shoulder and seeing what this is but we're making our foot size roll there we go uh then people be like oh this guy's a foot guy he's doing it on the train it looks like he's designing feet no no he's watching a video guide on how to design feet what is this guy i'm not riding this train anymore

this train goes into the bad part of town absolutely horrible that was an atrocious experience all the way through my estimate you can see there are comments on the the vod of the live stream which for some reason people keep checking out they're fools it's 11 hours long but they keep saying they keep pointing out a starting portion where i say okay this i've got all of the stuff mapped out we've got a character creation guide this shouldn't take any more than six hours or else i'm gonna freak out and it they just looked at the length of the video wait sorry it took 11 hours to make one character one character one character that you can play with it took a half a day

to just do all the roles that is insane that's yeah because i i can't imagine what the i've never looked at at fatal in terms of its ins and outs because i heard from i think it was you and you told me about it and i was i was like this sounds like a horrible game to play i think just just through the fact that these are aspects of character creation where there's just something kind of kind of grim about you're rolling for like nipple circumference yep yeah i don't sorry i can't imagine circumference it's areola diameter oh sorry i was talking about the cousin uh yeah oh what a great game what a great game what what's great about fatal is is that it's extremely easy to die in fatal 2 and the dm is like encouraged to try and kill all the players characters

so you spend 11 hours building one and then they die within the first like 10 minutes of the campaign you have to start over that yeah that's truly terrible the man who made this game said it was going to revolutionize the tabletop gaming scene and thought that it would sell very well i guess it revolutionized the tabletop gaming scene as it gave it a fairly commonly referred to worst ever like it gave them for something for the top 10 worst rpg games it gave everyone a villain to root against and i guess by the same merit if they thought this was going to become the new thing a revolution i guess can be just destruction of something i guess quite a few revolutions have been pretty bad yeah i did never consider that that is true it could be a purely

negative revolution yeah i'm gonna revolutionize board games in the way pol pot revolutionized yeah that's a good point revolutions don't always have to end with a positive change sometimes you can just fuck it i'm glad we had this discussion so he was right all along always trust anything you hear from the fatal people i think i think we're spreading more bad messages here what no i haven't said that having said that though we tell people not to play the game and they play the game so yeah check out Fatal guys

you'll have a great time and for anyone who does listen to us please do not play Fatal we do have two other potentially bad games we were thinking about playing that we might run by you then oh yeah which ones are these because we've talked about a few

the Buffy and Angel board games yes which we're going to give a go in the next few weeks and from what we've seen are potentially unfinishable but probably not very good ooh you're speaking my language what are the names of these

so these are so I got gifted these by my friend JPF friend of the podcast and I'm a big big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I think it's an incredible television show it is it is

cinematic beauty and Joss Whedon kind of fell off but yeah there's a board game for both Buffy the Vampire the tv series and its spin-off series angel and i've got the board game of both they are very niche items i don't know where our friend got them but they are very poorly reviewed online and for the few reviews we could find and the reviews all seem to revolve around the fact that the game can just soft block itself it's no way and it just it's when we opened up the board i've

had a look at it it's the most generic looking kind of wander around in a circle and collect things board game i've seen but apparently because to win in one of them you need to collect like soul cards or something and there's a card you can draw that removes the ability to pick up enough soul cards to win and the game just is then locked in a cycle of never-ending rotation on the board oh that sounds incredible so with these being so niche we'll be more than happy to share the experience with you when they when they go alive because yes please we we could be in another situation where we become unique voices for a seldom played board game and we might even finish it in a night or never i guess i would love the opportunity to see another board game that can

soft lock itself like the lord of the rings one oh can the lord of the rings board game soft lock itself yeah so on the lord of the rings they made rose art the crayon people they made three lord of the rings board games absolutely wild statement there but they each go into each other like you can play the first one and play the second one and they combine into one board but on the third one if you play with the right characters in the right order i think it's frodo and sam i actually haven't seen the movies so it's a little tricky to remember the names but if you go with those two and finish their quest there's a chance that the sauron eye in the middle which makes it to where no characters can move if they're if he's looking at them if he goes on to all of the other

characters which are on the same space because they haven't moved yet you can't do anything you just have to start the game over you can't move any characters and the other two have already finished the game what's also brilliant about that is the fact that board games flow into each other so you may have played two board games and then you get yours it's only the third one where that happens so you just have to come right back to the start and i also this is this is getting very nitpicky and i've only seen the lord of the rings trilogy twice i think but why is sauron the tower moving i guess his eye moves i guess his eye moves but i don't know it feels that's the thing the mechanic that's not even law accurate the eye doesn't even move you have to rotate the

tower that's less accurate so he's like the michael keaton batman suit where the neck doesn't move well they built the dark wizard's evil tower with his soul on the top on top of a lazy susan that's what the lazy susan's for it's to spin sauron it's a lazy sauron a lazy sauron

ah that makes so much sense now well it's lower accurate it's lower accurate yeah tolkien designed this yeah we had a we had a couple other games we're looking to play during our um little hiatus before we we play the full game and uh there is a game this one isn't a board game and i don't think we're going to do this one during the hiatus to be fair but have you heard of a game called

desert bus I may have because we were kind of thinking maybe given that I want to go this from Ben and Teller's smoke and mirrors yeah that's the one what if

you just had to hold left very slightly for nine hours straight and that's a question not enough people ask because i've not i've not seen a dead response to it so i think maybe you know we we're kind of pioneers of doing long questions and i think maybe and you'd enjoy cam it's us in pain again so yeah you know what that is kind of similar to me rolling dice for 11 hours straight you know

what we should do? We should have a desert bus race. Whoever can finish a game of desert bus first wins. That sounds good. I think maybe we set this up at some point. We should have a desert bus race and

hey, if you win, we'll send you over a bueno. Let's go! I don't think I've ever eaten a kinder bueno before. Oh, really? Oh, man, these are high stakes. I think we'd assumed they were like a universal

one. They are around I've just never eaten one, I don't think You don't have an allergy to hazelnut, do you? No, I'm good Hazelnut? What? I thought it was just like chocolate and milk Oh no, there's like a hazelnut kind of

cream going on inside there as well Really? Yeah, it's quite complicated for a chocolate bar It's very sophisticated I guess it's kind of a biscuit as well it's not a wafer in there oh kinder also make the eggs as well but yeah yes yeah kinder do the eggs as well kinder buenos oh yeah so if you've been thinking this whole time it was for the egg no no

this is for a completely different bar wow okay i need to look that up right now oh maybe people were confused but you didn't get a little toy oh that's a good point yeah i didn't think about how this translates because i guess kinder in in the u.s yeah maybe maybe this is like the bueno line oh there is no the buenos are definitely in the u.s they kind of look like a uh castello or something a camello a carmelo yeah but um no i didn't i've never eaten one of these before that's crazy oh well yeah there you go high stakes so we'll we'll set up yeah i can't i can't try one because i've got to save it for the desert bus race yeah don't spoil yourself you'll you'll be you'll be salivating at the mouth every every inch that you drive delectable candy bar i've ever had

after nine hours and i i guess in in in kind um if there's some sort of chart what was the one you just said there a carmelo yeah i think that's the name of it because we don't whatever that is i don't think we have that here yeah it's sort of like a similar thing there it's one long bar they're uh separated into like stuff and each are separated into little bits and then each bit has a little thing in it but i believe carmelo it has caramel instead of that stuff that you have yeah they're cad berries okay so we've got two competing egg brands that make a candy bar that has sectioned off with stuff in it that's in that case i guess that can be the stakes for us so we'll we'll we'll go for one of those i guess that would be our prize um yeah i'll represent the carmelos and

you represent the buenos yeah we'll share one we're not gonna ask for one each we're not gonna we're not gonna rig this game and make the stakes lopsided we'll just share one um but yeah we'll lock in for this desert bus race i think it's um i think it's the only way that we can truly determine who is wasting their time more i cannot wait who's better at wasting their time yeah who's better at it that's a good point i could see us losing this oh i could see wasting our time worse i cannot wait to get seven and a half hours into the desert bus run and then i get distracted by a chat message and drive off the side of the road and have to get towed seven hours back to nevada to start over.

And I guess what we would have to do, I suppose, just for posterity, is because the game itself, I'm not sure if you're aware of the full win condition, but it's to earn, I believe it's 50 points. And to earn a point, you have to make the full eight-hour journey. That's one point?

Yes. um so we i guess we wouldn't ever be able to do a full game of desert bus because i i just need to sleep uh and i've got a job and stuff so wait that's a very good point that's a very good point is that halfway through the drive you could pass the controller off to andy well i have to just go the whole time that's a good point actually someone would have to oh yeah that's a good point andy one of us would have to be nominated as the the designated driver i guess no that's the advantage you guys have that's uh i have to overcome the odds and also it might be a disadvantage because you might get four hours in hand it to me in 30 seconds later we're getting

which will cause a physical fight probably yeah i mean either that or you'll attack me or we'll all fumble handing over the phone or device yeah and then we just we slip and it just crashes off onto the road the freaking the entire race comes down to whether or not you can hit the baton toss correctly oh yeah maybe that should be it maybe the challenge is when we're handing over the phone we have to do it blindfolded let's not make it harder we're making it easier we've got a two to one advantage i don't know if this is like a numbers help situation yeah we don't know if that's really an advantage because by hour four and a half i could just be locked in my brain has turned completely off and i'm just on autopilot he's just the embodiment of slightly left he

becomes the platonic idea of slightly left oh that yeah yeah we i guess there we go so this has gone from we were going to play Desert Bus now we have a competition on our hands the Desert Bus race the great Desert Bus showdown yeah 3, 2, 1 and you're off and that is just the least

exciting thing there's a viewership market for it I have an entire chat room sit around for 11 hours to watch me roll dice yeah And hey, we can bring along some people who love when we spend all of our time doing nothing at all. It'll be the most.

It'll be a small crowd, but dang, they'll be invested in the amount of nothing that's going on. Hey, we have some we have some fantastically dedicated listeners who have shared their own anecdotes of strange endeavors where they are also beautifully spending their time on mundane tasks. So I've no doubt this would catch their attention. so hey we'll lock that in sometime that sounds like a not fun but interesting thing to do it will be an event

and what was the other game oh there was one more I'm sure we are going to play Pandemic which is actually meant to be good and yeah Pandemic is meant to be good I don't know if you've played a whole lot of Pandemic Cam but we always get told it's great

I have not but I have also heard of it that's one of them legacy type games yeah because it's co-op and we've played it a few times and we we keep on finding that it's too easy to beat and that is just not fun because of that which makes us think we're doing something wrong because that's far more likely than everyone else's yeah that's a good point we couldn't be wrong i think you're right andy everyone else is wrong i think that's the exact opposite of what i was saying i don't know i've got selective hearing so yeah i have struggled to get into those co-op games because normally the games i like to play are um 1v1 a person against another person or a

team against another team something combative so that i can attack somebody else i do like a good bit of violence in the game yeah i do like it when you can harm the other person yeah working together just doesn't work well with me i like to win yeah and that's that's kind of what broke my heart about the practice scenario is that no one won yeah i don't like the fact that it was a draw well it's the amount of effort for a non-result is a bit disheartening a bit that's crazy how how with that practice scenario ending in a tie how does that bode for the full playthrough what kind of mood does that put you in for the whole game i'm not gonna lie to you cam not great

yeah i mean i don't know doc it's uh it's it's been really bothering me because i feel like it speaks to a level of of caution that we had to a fault and then we decided to go gung-ho at the end and i feel like if that caution has extended over a hundred odd turns and decades of my life i feel like the the the adrenaline rush i'm going to get at the end i'm just going to completely destroy any any well-laid plans that i've put out through the whole game and potentially be in a position where i could have won and then completely mess it up just because i need that that dopamine hit after 40 years of being in a horrible space well that is also something i'm worried about because it's like happening over it's just like you could come in to a particular session like

angry or in a bit of a like impatient mood or something and that just leads you to make a mistake that's gonna mess with you for 20 more years because you had a bad day that's a good point, not many board games see you go through life events yeah, not many board games also have an emotional regulation portion

Cam, we're gonna have to have you on as our in-house therapist for the start of each session, so we can find out where we are spiritually and mentally before we play the game okay, did anybody have a bad day today? all right listen we gotta calm down otherwise you're gonna have a really bad decade ahead of you that's a good point maybe it will it maybe it'll teach us um a bit of measured emotional

response because these things have consequences and it's a very direct measure of actions have consequences yeah there's no abstract stuff there it's all codified and rules yeah it's you mess this up you're stuck with it oh this is beautiful i'm gonna learn so much from this i'm gonna learn so much about myself can't wait to grow you two are gonna come out of this experience the single most enlightened people on the planet earth you're gonna have complete control over your emotional center we're both levitating in the lowest position we don't have to plank over the board anymore because you can just float over it well in in regards to to this cam and you you bringing us into a state of peace a state of zen i feel like the the best way to to really capture

that is is maybe to practice a an age-old tradition of what we usually do and you can maybe guide us through this meditation of common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the wall it's time for some common ground I'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording maybe yeah

of course so if you if you were to hazard this common ground and this this method of meditation what would be your opening statement and mantra so if i were to try and bring us together in a in a way that could improve the average livelihood um i'd say that my first idea would probably be to just get rid of public transport in its entirety oh no oh no cam oh no this is this is the opposite of what i've said recently

oh no i think it would i think it would be a genuine benefit to everyone around us if we would just get rid of all of it oh see now this is a toughie for me because my my argument recently was that we should ban cars from cities and that we should just have public transport because it would make public transport so much better invested and and better structured more reliable and I think, and correct me if I'm wrong here, maybe I'm reaching out and clutching at straws, but I think we want the same thing, Cam

Dude, it sounds like you want the opposite. I don't think we do No, no, no, no, no we do, we do let me tell you. Because I think some of the trouble here, Cam, is you pitched this to two people who don't drive

so really for us, if we agreed with this, we can't go anywhere as soon as no no it's very very easy you see it's a very easy solution see we get rid of all of the public transport and then not only does that free up more space for more roads but then it would force you to to get a car and therefore you can drive anywhere you want see my my immediate my sort of knee-jerk reaction and i think this is just because i i kind of just have a a hate for authority in general is when you tell me it forces me to do something i i get scared and my instinct

is to go well i don't want this idea then but i guess technically technically you're not forced to do it uh you could just walk everywhere if you wanted to that is a potential option and i do like a good walk and i guess we're also we're talking about different environments here because you're over in the states and walking around from place to place isn't always as viable as it is here in quaint little britain because we can we can kind of wander anywhere everything's kind of close by and just popping out to london yeah just down the road anything in anything in my life i could walk to it would just kind of be a bit of a fuss yeah you know i'd be looking at maybe i think realistically of all the places i go

i'm looking at three hours walk tops wherever it is apart from like see leaving the the town yeah but then then instead you could have just a 10 to 30 minute drive and you're good to go oh that is the good thing about cars they are really quick you don't have to you don't have to follow a set path if you want to go to some random lake in the random corner of who knows where you can drive there as long as we've paid for the roads and whatnot yeah it is expanding our horizons by taking away our options yeah you know exactly and you're right cam i am a drifter um you know i am kind of a a wanderer mysterious traveler which is hard to do without a car it's hard to be a mysterious traveler and then get on a bus it does take a bit of the mystique yeah i

guess that's right i'm a liar plus think of how much economic activity this could generate for asphalt pavers in your area of which i have no conflict of interest for at all hang on a minute this is another advert so you've plugged asphalt paving and you've plugged the campaign for north africa i feel like this common ground's been done in bad faith i'm a businessman what can i say Oh, you're just like the rest of them You're just part of Big Ass Fault Yes sirree

How about this then We ban public transport Until me and James Are pressured into learning to drive And then we can have it back I guess that means two things Andy One, you think the world revolves around us Which is kind of the

Hubristic premise of Common Ground but also it completely demonishes any plan that cam had here to invest in the roads because if we're quick off the bat the roads aren't getting built we'll pace it

then we're intentionally delaying public transport for the population that's not good either no but then they learn how to drive too and then by the time you've finally learned how to drive everyone will be so used to their new shiny cars

that the roads are already up and no one even wants public transportation anymore. What about this, Cam? Here's a slight rebuttal. We can get rid of the public transport, Andy and I can have a car, but we get a chauffeur.

Ooh. I've always wanted a chauffeur. That does treat you like the sort of royalty that you are, and it gives us more roads. yeah i think i can see the vision there we get two chauffeurs a job chauffeur business these days um it's taken a real dip yeah yeah you got those figures not the hands so the more economic

advantage yeah this is a boom into the economy it's it's trickle-down economics goes from asphalt pavers down to shoppers and then down to us the people what's great is you can just take all the money that was going to go to quick and easy public transport and put it into the roads it's a win-win and that's true and because of the lost common ground all these new roads won't have roundabouts that's exactly from your last one and it means that yeah the roads are are just real straight and narrow uh they are chauffeur led well for me and andy and everyone else has their own independent freedom because they've adjusted to the new world because they're not sticks in the

mud like us but i don't care i've got a chauffeur i think cam's just in the job of minister of transport for common ground yes there we go i am going to lead an asphalt revolution across all of Britain. Which quote is that again? Which historical figure said that one? Was that Churchill? We will drive them on the asphalt. And that's it, because it's just asphalt.

Just asphalt everywhere. It's just asphalt. Britain has become a huge flat plain of asphalt with the occasional out. Oh, it's beautiful. I'm glad that I've got the Minister of Transport job, because the alternative option of concrete roads are just never presented, despite all of their benefits. It sounds like we've got a future Common Ground setup. That's a little post-credit

sting for the concrete road Common Ground. Where will it have a bit of corruption for big asphalt? Yeah, yeah, we're shallow people, we'll do it. You just gotta have a little bit to make sure it's running smoothly. Grease the wheels a bit. I'm all good with some greased wheels. And greased palms. There you go. You grease my palms, I'll grease yours.

Let's keep our own grease. Keep your grease to yourself. This is my grease, don't go touching my grease. There is much like it, but this grease is mine. oh well you know what cam i i feel like i have healed a little bit i feel like i have i feel like i am i am whole again yes and knowing i'm gonna have a chauffeur i think it's just it's really brilliant my day it has i can't wait for tomorrow it'll be nice and easy to get back and forth from the storage container where

you've housed the game now yeah i'll pop around and see andy he won't need a chauffeur he's gonna stay in there yeah that's the thing the common ground hasn't given us any property yet so we will be getting chauffeur driven to like a self-storage container unit facility i'll take that i'll take a chauffeur ride anywhere i feel like if you arrive somewhere like that with a show for people are like so that's like a kingpin getting his money out of her well cam it's it's been as always a real pleasure having the the the spiritual godfather of war with the mates uh come back on and and chin wag with us about our woes and our future um is there anything that we uh that we can look forward to on your side anything anything fun coming up uh

Just a bunch of, by the time this episode goes up, hopefully I will have finished the upper deck legal dispute nonsense that I've been working on for a month. But yeah, more of the same videos, just whenever I find something absolutely ridiculous, toss it up there for everyone to run into. Well, we look forward to it. I've got a bit of spare time tonight, so I think I'm going to watch the fatal video in the comfort of my own home. Oh, just a spare 11 hours. Yeah, I'll stick that on. I would like to say, I know you quite often will put on, like, a long video as you're, like, going to sleep. Please don't fall asleep with a video about Fatal in the background.

Yeah, I probably shouldn't have that on. Don't let that leak into your subconscious. That's a good point. Yeah, I'll have to watch that one. Do that one awake. That's going to be microdosed. But, yeah, thank you, Cam. It's been swell to chat,

and we look forward to catching up with you next time when we've had yet another ebb and flow and mental breakdown and see where we are with this game. Yeah, thank you for having me on, and I'm excited to see how the full playthrough turns out. It's going to be an experience to follow, I guarantee it. Well, I'm glad you've guaranteed it, because we can't promise that. I'll promise that so I get all the flack for it.

Oh, there we go. Thank God, a scapegoat. A perfect division of labor. oh god, it took the full recording but we finally managed to bait him into it Andy someone's taking the responsibility this is on me now you two better not screw me over on this well folks

thank you for tuning in for the grand trio I've been James I've been Andy, stay subtle, humble and brave Cam, any sign up? thank you for listening and have a fantastic day there we go we will catch you all next time thank you for listening and good night

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