Operation: Game Night
Travis Smith, Jared Erickson, and Clay Gable get together to discuss the latest and greatest in board games in this weekly podcast. What's hot, what's hitting the table, featured discussions about board games and the board gaming culture, and the primary mission objective- to play more board games!
Operation: Game Night
OGN Ep 22: Rebirth, Undaunted 2200: Callisto, Beetown Beatdown, & Organizing Game Collections
Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes when organizing a board game collection? You're in for a treat as we reveal our quirky stories and strategies, from thematic displays to makeshift shelving solutions, all aimed at keeping those treasured game boxes in perfect order. Whether it's daydreaming about custom-made shelves or battling our hoarding tendencies, this episode captures the art of balancing aesthetics and practicality. With a nod to our listeners, we also tackle a recent one-star review with humor and gratitude, urging everyone to keep the feedback coming.
Join us as we unravel the strategic allure of Stamp Swap, a board game that's taking fictional conventions by storm. Our field reporter Clayton Gable shares his enthusiasm for the game while teasing a potential appearance by its designer, Paul Solomon. The excitement doesn’t stop there—get a sneak peek into Beetown Beatdown, a promising prototype with bee troop battles set to launch on Kickstarter in 2025. Plus, we dissect the complexity and dynamics of the Undaunted series, perfect for those who crave layered, strategic gameplay.
Laugh along as Jared Erickson humorously details his unconventional recording setup while we pivot to lighter topics like our current TV obsessions. From the intense drama of "The Morning Show" to the comedic genius of "Cunk on Earth," there's something for everyone. And for those who enjoy a bit of culinary adventure, we share the joys of cooking on a newly seasoned Blackstone grill, hinting at dreams of an outdoor entertainment venture. Packed with wit and insights, this episode is a must-listen for gaming geeks and curious minds alike.
Do that thingy.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Operation Game Night podcast episode 22.
Speaker 3:We have a good show for you today. I'm Night podcast, episode 22. We have a good show for you today. I'm your host, travis Smith, as always, joined by reporter in the field, clayton Gable. How you doing, clay?
Speaker 2:I've been better, travis. As you can see, I am in all black. Morning Morning, the Steelers' abrupt exit from the NFL playoffs. But hopefully this conversation re-energizes me and gets me excited for nine months, or whatever, it's going to be without Steelers football.
Speaker 3:So yeah, that's all right. They can join the 49ers in Cancun, that's okay.
Speaker 1:What's the what's the future for Russ look like.
Speaker 2:I'm hoping they move on from Russ.
Speaker 1:I like the guy he he's done on from Russ I like the guy he's done alright.
Speaker 2:but I want the youth. I want Justin Fields. I want to see what they got there. We'll find out.
Speaker 3:Nice. Alright, he's got your local weather and weather around the country. Jared Erickson, how you doing.
Speaker 1:Jared, what it do. What it do Coming in to you, live from my daughter's closet. Uh, sorry for starting the podcast late. I had to hardline into my router, uh, which happened to be in my daughter's room, so if you see me rocking, back and forth, it's because I'm in the rocker, so excellent.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we got a good show for you today. Episode 22 is all about how we are going to organize our collections, ways to approach organizing and maybe some thought processes. I've seen a lot of people posting on social media lately. It's the new year. People want to start fresh, they want to reinvigorate their collections and they're pulling everything off the shelves cleaning, reorganizing off the shelves, cleaning, reorganizing and I want to get your guys' take on how you would do this if you were undergoing that task. But first we will debrief our week, then we'll do mission objective and then we will go over the fence and talk about what we've been doing outside of board gaming. Before we begin with our debrief, I just want to tell all of our listeners thank you for supporting, thank you for listening, and this week your homework assignment is to go tell three of your friends about the podcast.
Speaker 3:Oh, my gosh and tell them to listen to the podcast, because we need to make this podcast bigger, and that happens through word of mouth. So if you like what we're doing, go tell your friends, go tell your family, go tell your game group and help us reach more people. Clayton.
Speaker 2:Point of order. I was perusing our reviews the other day and I noticed we got a one star on Apple. That hurt. I assume it was something Jared said, but we'll take this opportunity to also solicit feedback from our listeners. Please let us know what you want to see. We are happy to adapt, change, pivot, we'll do it all. Right now, the viewers have us up close and personal. That's new. We wanted to know how close our faces could be without making people uncomfortable, so yeah, again, was that feedback that we got from the one-star review?
Speaker 2:There was no comment with it. There was no comment with it, it was just.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, what's a star without some words, some feedback? Give me something to work on.
Speaker 2:I know that's what I'm saying. If you're out there and we're bugging you in some form or fashion, you don't like Jared's 5 milli, he'll take it off 10 milli Don't let the haters win.
Speaker 3:Don't let the one-star reviewers win. Go on your podcast app of choice and rate us five stars, or tell us what we're doing wrong and we can make it better.
Speaker 2:We'll take a 4. We'll take a 4.
Speaker 3:Not a 2, but a 4. Let two. We'll take a four two, yeah, Not a two four. So let's get this show rolling. Clayton, debrief your week for me.
Speaker 2:OK, so the first thing I want to debrief is Stamp Swap. So I don't know why most Stonemaier games are an instant buy for me and Stamp Swap had just kind of flown under the radar. I saw it came out, I looked it up a little bit. Maybe it was because I hadn't been playing many I Cut you Choose games and I just wasn't that interested in checking it out. But then Amanda came on and had her meeting with Paul Solomon, the designer of Stamp Swap, and talked about how great a guy he was and we're hoping to have him on the pod here soon. So I was like you know what? I'm gonna check out Stamp Swap. I got it and it was freaking awesome. I played it at two players with Mary and then I played the other night at five players, so I spanned the normal player counts that you would do. I hit the extremes there and both cases it was awesome, unlike charcuterie, where I hope that the eye cut you choose just was superfluous and got in the way of the game. It was actually so fun in this game. So in Stamp Swap it's played over three rounds and each round well, they're days, all right, you're at a stamp convention. You're there to get stamps.
Speaker 2:Swap stamps have the freaking get awards from making the best stamp booklet. But each day you have three phases. You have collect phase, you have a swap phase and then you have a collect phase. You have a swap phase and then you have a show phase. So in the collect phase you display out all these different stamps. Some are face up, some are face down. You even include these cards that'll give you special scoring criteria or a special ability for the game, and so all that gets put out into a big pool in the center of the table and you take turns drafting stamps until everybody has drafted stamps or cards. And you draft until everybody has six in their daily collection, at which point you can reserve one of those stamps or cards that you collected in your reserve section and that one you get to keep, no matter what, in your reserve section and that one you get to keep no matter what the other five things you collected. You have to make two piles and put them out for swapping. Then it goes around and turn order again the first part. It's like a white elephant One person picks from you and then you get to keep your other pile of stamps, but then you get to go pick from somebody else's two piles and then they keep their pile that was left over and then they go pick from somebody else's two piles, and then they keep their pile that was left over and then they go pick from somebody else. And what made it so much fun for me especially somebody that likes pushing your luck and not knowing is if you are a viewer you can see the picture.
Speaker 2:There are face down stamps. So during the collect phase, when you collect the face down stamp, you don't know what it is when you grab it, but you can look at it. When you collect the face down stamp, you don't know what it is when you grab it, but you can look at it after you collect it. So now you have a face down stamp. Nobody else knows what it is.
Speaker 2:So you're adding those face down stamps to your pile and they could be these shiny gold stamps that are worth a ton of points and everybody wants them. They're beautiful and they look great on your stamp mat, and so you make piles. You have the. You can't reserve the gold ones too. So if you have a gold one, even if it's face down, it has to be put up for swap. There are some special cards that like let you break that rule. But anyway, the thrill of not knowing what some of the stamps are and like trying to get in people's heads about like okay, they just put this one face down stamp in a pile and their other piles got like four stamps I wonder if that's a gold stamp over there that they're really trying hard to keep and then you take it and you realize it's a faded stamp that's worth negative two and they got you like that.
Speaker 2:What makes it swapping? Like you only have to make two piles out of five items, so there is not that much to think about. I mean, you can think plenty, but it's really two piles out of five items, versus in charcuterie when you had to get 12 things out of a bag and make six different piles. When you're swapping and everybody's doing their thing at the same time. So it moves pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:After the swap you move to the show phase and then each person has like a type of stamp that they start out looking for. Like you get a point for every space stamp, you have every monument, every animal stamp, flowers, so there's all types of different stamps and then you score that and then you, there's four different other scoring criterias and each round you pick one of those to score. So if you pick the one that scores you three points for a single color stamp this round. You're not going to score that in the next two rounds. So you're trying to figure out like, okay, I think I can do a lot better in this one by the end of the game, so I'm going to hold off on scoring that one and you know, just score this one this round.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was smitten by this game. Like I want to play it constantly now With Mary. It took like 25 minutes to play it. Two players, it moves pretty quick, a five-player game. It wasn't too long 45 minutes probably but yeah, it's fun. Just that thrill of trying to get in each other's heads and hoping you get those gold stamps and just then trying to arrange them on your mat to meet these scoring criteria. It's a great game. I don't know why I was sleeping on it for so long, but I'm super glad I have it now.
Speaker 3:It kind of reminds me of Fit to Print, almost If you're arranging them in certain ways to get different bonuses. It's got that aspect of it, but then the swapping back and forth, almost like beer and bread or something. It's like a cool amalgamation of different mechanics that seem to click really well. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was great. That was my first debrief item. The next thing is we were lucky enough to get sent a review copy of B-Town Beatdown. So this was a prototype sent to us from the team there at B-Town Beatdown and they are planning to launch a Kickstarter in winter of 2025. So they said like next November or December. We're trying to get a lot of feedback right now on the gameplay et cetera, but I just want to give you all here on the podcast a little taste of what it's like to get in the B-Town Beatdown and, if you see it, come on Kickstarter, hopefully you can come back and listen to this episode and see if it might be something for you.
Speaker 2:Again, this is a prototype. I know they are very active in working on the game still and they're engaged with everybody that's getting these review copies for feedback. So we'll see what it turns into. But essentially, essentially, you are playing this area control game on this giant map where the goal is to have more hives at the end of the season than the other players, with the caveat that you have to have at least three hives. If you have two hives and everybody else has one, you still don't win. So that's the only way to win.
Speaker 2:Everybody starts out with one hive. That might be different in different player counts. I played it at four and we all started out with one hive. So the game takes place over three seasons. You go through spring, summer, autumn, and during each season you can harvest the resources that are around your hive. So every resource that's adjacent to or on your hive, you get to harvest those. The resources are pollen and nectar, and you can turn nectar into honey, which is a special resource that allows you to upgrade your actions, which I'll talk about in a second. So you harvest and then you go to the busy bees section and this is when everybody takes an action. Clockwise, around and around you go until everybody has to skip their turn and then you move on.
Speaker 2:Guess you would say you have four worker bees and you have four drone bees. You have a four or five worker bees and you have four or five drone bees and you have this queen command mat that they're all sitting on and there's four different sections of that command mat you have you have migrate, you have recruit, you have extract and you have build. So for the migrate action, it allows you to take a stack of your bees of any variety. So if you have five bees on a tile, you can take all five and you can move them one tile. If you have honey upgrades on that action, you can increase the amount of spaces that you can move with the migrate action. So instead of just going one space, you can go two or three, up to five. You can only have four honey upgrades on a single action. The recruit action lets you recruit four bees as the base value on or adjacent to one of your hives, four bees as the base value on or adjacent to one of your hives, and then you can upgrade that with honey as well, to get up to eight bees recruited in a single turn.
Speaker 2:The extract action lets you forego the benefits you get during the harvest phase of a round and just flip a tile to its extracted side that's next to your hive and get that resource right here and now. That's next to your hive and get that resource right here and now. And then you can also explore a tile further away and get a resource from that. I should also mention that during the migrate action, whenever you land on a tile, you get the resource that you land on. And if you migrate into an unexplored tile, you get to reach into this awesome scouting sack and pull out what resource you just found on that tile. So, yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool and there's some that you like. You like hit the jackpot in this little tile and you got one that gives you three nectar there every time. But there's also in the bag some extracted tiles so you could go and pull a dud out, which happened a few times to my co-players and they were not pleased about that, but anyway.
Speaker 2:So we talked about migrate, recruit, extract and the final thing is building a hive which, as you would expect. It's a pretty costly action because that's how you win the game. To build a hive you have to have a stack of 10 bees in a single tile and it can't be adjacent to another hive. And then you have to pay a certain amount of pollen and then you convert those 10 bees into a hive. So those are the main actions you're taking.
Speaker 2:It's pretty cool the way they set up the command map. So the first worker you place every time, or drone, is a free action. You can place it. But then, after you place that, you've uncovered like a resource cost along the top of the board for upcoming actions, if you can see that there. So to place that fourth worker is going to cost you three pollen just to play it, and the workers can be placed on any action and the drones can only take actions that a worker has already taken. And the workers are activated using pollen, whereas the drones are activated using nectar. So you have these two different resources serving different purposes.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about combat, because I was going to say, because on the cover of the box there's a bee shooting a gun. And none of that sounds like combat.
Speaker 2:I want to get the boring stuff out of the way before. I talked about combat. So anytime you move into a tile that's owned by another player, combat initiates and essentially you have a hand of combat cards and these I wish I could remember the some of the names I know I had ron beasley, there was like wolver beam, like these are awesome, like b pun names. You all get to pick a combat. The two people in combat pick a combat card, place it face down and you can add more combat cards by paying a honey for each. So you have honeys like this wild resource that allows you to bolster your actions and play more combat cards. After everybody's done that, you flip them over. You add the amount of bees that were on that tile to whatever boosts. Or there's some that like give you negatives in combat because they have a ability on the bottom that says okay, if you lost this combat, you can take two honey from the person that won. So you reveal whoever won gets two honey, whoever loses gets one honey, and then the loser has to retreat all their bees back to their closest hive. So you're kind of incentivized to fight um in this game by getting that honey, and you're gonna need to.
Speaker 2:So what we realized was the first, the first season. Everybody was just kind of migrating around the map trying to gather resources. I don't think anybody even made a hive in that first season. In summer, though, everybody started recruiting up their troops. A couple of hives went out on the mat, so people were me. I got some hives out on the mat and started getting a target on my back, and then came war.
Speaker 2:And in the summer or autumn sorry, the last season, I mean it was just chaos. Because the thing is, when you attack somebody's hive, they get to add 10 bees to that tile to defend their hive. So it deters you from attacking a hive. But also, if you attack their hive and win, you get to replace their hive with your hive, and again, to win you have to have the most hives. So but those, those bees, like, even if you lost, they don't die.
Speaker 2:The only way your bees die is if there's a draw, like your combat values were exactly the same. All the bees die. So if you get those 10 bees stacked up on a tile and you lost your hive, they retreat to another hive. And then there's just these stacks of freaking like 20 bees just roaming the map and trying to establish dominance and get that, that uh hive majority by the end of the third season. And yeah, it just quickly devolved into like a chaotic game of just battle every time from what was once a peaceful little uh resource gathering game. But yeah, that's a b-town, b-town. There's some other steps that happen after the busy b section. So you flip some tiles over like extract them. Pesticides came and wiped out part of the hive if you had bees on there. They get, they get removed from the mat.
Speaker 3:Did you get a chance to ask the developer or the designer if this is like some sort of allegory for, like nuclear holocaust or something like? It seems like it's like an exercise in deterrence more than anything, as you're positioning your bees and gathering resources to put your hives out there to like impose your will upon the board. So yeah, didn't you say anything like that?
Speaker 2:no, they did not give me the background on that. So far as I can tell, it is just a game about bees fighting each other.
Speaker 3:Um I feel like you could reskin this. You could reskin this as a military game and it would be like an actual you know, it'd be like something like memoir 44 or something where you're you're putzing around, you know, taking each other out.
Speaker 2:So that's crazy. Yeah, at first I was like that's crazy. I had to reread the rules a few times about that. Like adding 10 bees to the hive and then they don't go away. So like just every, every time a hive's attacked, you're just adding troops, like crazy. And at first I was like that's kind of weird. But I think that's what they're going for. Like they want the the last round of this game to just be an all-out slugfest to try and get that hive majority.
Speaker 2:And it is. I mean, you're like, oh my God, carlin's got four hives. I only have three. If I go attack hers, one of hers turns into mine. Now I have four hives and she's got three. And then in comes Spanky from the other front. He's got his stack of bees. So yeah, it's a wild game. Keep an eye out for it. On kickstart, if it sounds interesting to you again, it should be coming out in november or december. I won't speak too much on components or warbook because I know it's just a prototype and all that's subject to change. But I was. I was fairly impressed with the components of the prototype, just as they were yeah, their art is really cool, it's like very distinctive and and doesn't match a lot of the other B games that have come out lately.
Speaker 3:It seems like it stands on its own.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:What happens to these in the winter?
Speaker 2:That's the end of the game. If nobody has a high majority by the end of autumn, you all lose.
Speaker 3:Dang. How many players did you play with?
Speaker 2:We played four, which I think is probably a sweet spot for this.
Speaker 3:How many does it play up to? It plays up to six.
Speaker 2:Oh snap, there's a side of the board for one to three and then there's a side of the board for four to six. It does supposedly scale accordingly.
Speaker 1:Imagine six players in the end, where there's just bees flying around and oh, my God.
Speaker 2:That's crazy, It'd be madness. But it does have a combat flow chart. Reminded me of a wonderlands war.
Speaker 3:Oh, you can see that, yeah, yeah, excellent. Yeah, is that all you got Clay.
Speaker 2:That's all I got B-Town, B-Town.
Speaker 3:All right Beat it down. Thank you. Can you shout out the publisher one more time for the designer.
Speaker 2:I don't think they have a publisher yet. Okay, that was something that they're looking for, according to BGG Looking for a publisher Looking for, according to BGG looking for a publisher, looking for a publisher.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, thank you to the designers of B-Town B-Down for letting us get a review copy and letting Clay give it a spin.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they're on Instagram. Check them out. They post a lot of funny videos about the game and the different things that go on during the game. So, yeah, give them a follow there too.
Speaker 3:Nice, nice, jared, I'm dying to hear about undaunted. Hit me with your debrief, all right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so this is, this is kind of huge. I was not prepared for Callisto. Undaunted, undaunted, 2200. What are you? How do you say that?
Speaker 3:Undaunted 2200?. What are you? 2200. How do you say that Undaunted?
Speaker 1:2200. Colisso Wow, I can't even imagine that far in the future, but it's a pretty awesome game. We are on one of Jupiter's moons, okay, and you have the Lunar Frontier Authority, which is kind of like the I would say, aristocrats, I guess I don't know Okay, that own the planet, the moon, and you're trying to get this ice water off of the moon, but all your workers, the minor unions, they're rebelling. Like there's big-time tension in this, uh, futuristic war and it's a lot of fun. So that the, the guys I was playing with last night, they wanted to know the lore, they wanted to hear more about why are they fighting? So I that that really like got me going because I was super excited but I was also not really prepared. I want. They said, bring that moon game, and I thought they were talking about super, mega lucky box, but they were talking about this game uh holy cow, yeah, dude.
Speaker 1:So we, we eased into the night with a little bit of for sale and then we went straight into calisto. So we you can play this game at one, two and four, and we play with four. So two people were the miners and two people were the LFA, the security force that's trying to take back their resources and this struggle on this moon. I had a lot of fun playing it. We didn't really know what the hell we were doing. So then we kind of figured out oh, like this, this piece is really good at doing this thing and this piece is really good at doing this thing, and if we want to win, we should have been using this piece all along. But next time when we play we're going to go. Ham, they got mech warriors in there. That is a ton of fun. The, the LFA, much more. You know they got all the money, they got all the sweet. You know tech, but the, the miners, you know the people, the comrades, if you will. They know their way around the moon a little bit better. And, um, they're able to.
Speaker 1:You know this asymmetric kind of uh, battle play. Which tons of fun. So it ultimately boils down to either killing the other people's characters, or gaining and controlling a certain space. At least the the version I played, there's like eight different sides to this, this game. You can play so many different chapters. So like, if you really like this game and you got a good group which I don't know, it might be budding here to be getting calisto out a lot more, so you can play this game multiple times, different variations, and it's a ton of fun. But I like how the combat is very uh, do you say thematic, I guess there's high grounds and like, if you're at a high ground you get to roll a die with more faces, like a D 12 instead of a D 10. If you're on the same ground, but if you're trying to shoot up to someone on a high ground, then you take a hit and you only roll a D eight and essentially different locations. Have you know protection or have more importance, because that's how you would win.
Speaker 1:The game is controlling these areas that have essentially victory points or whatever, and different characters have different abilities. So it's a lot of fun. You're building a deck to be able to play cards, to activate these different characters, and so you kind of have to be like okay, how do I build this deck accordingly. If you're scouting, if you're trying to find new locations, you take in I wanted to say fear cards, because that's what it is in Arnek Essentially cards that will block your hand up. They don't do anything for you.
Speaker 1:I had a lot of fun playing the game though it was real exciting and get it to the table. Last night I did hear from one of the guys that you know he almost fell asleep watching the, uh, the youtube trying to teach us how to play it, because I was not. I wasn't a clay, you know, I wasn't setting up the table, I wasn't, you know, reading the rule book beforehand. I was just like here's this 15 pound box, what do you guys like? We'll look at these cool characters and stuff and maybe we'll play it next time. And they're like no, let's play it now. I'm like oh, so next time I'm going to have the because there's a ton of different cards too.
Speaker 1:So you pull out the cards that you're playing with according to the characters that you're putting on the board. So I could take a couple minutes and set up the decks accordingly, lay everything out, put the players where they start. We could rip through this pretty quick. I think Yesterday, when we were learning how to play and understanding, okay, what does it mean to move and what does it mean to scout? Because you have to move these little pieces and you can shoot people, but then you can also just essentially disarm them instead of killing them. So we learned the mechanics, but I think next time we could. The box says like 45 minutes to an hour. I think that's doable if everyone's kind of like knows what the hell they're doing, because we did not know what the hell we're doing um, but this is an ambitious game to punch, learn and play like all on the same day.
Speaker 3:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was punching out player tokens as they're like uh, I need this one. Boom is it? What's his name? The, the guy that does all the the play the rodney rodney yeah, rodney, rodney, rodney was going and we paused the video. Punch out the things get the cards out out, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God.
Speaker 1:I mean, we did it, it was like I said a ton of fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't even have like bags to organize anything yet. That is insane. Yeah, it was a ton of fun and I could see how it would be a lot of fun playing two-player. Four-player seemed pretty seamless, Like you essentially share the lead role, like once you play the captain, then the captain moves from one hand to the next. So like instead of putting it in my discard pile, I move it to my partner's discard and then they lead off, which means they can have more cards in their hands to start with and they check for initiative and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But I mean mech, are you kidding me? You get out there with these freaking big old robots. But yeah, again, I like I mentioned it's like asymmetric, though like the people, the people have a lot of good strengths. They don't have the mech, but I mean they can. They know the good hiding spots, they know how to shoot better. When you use the mech, you have to use there's like three different kinds of cards that you can use to like activate the mech, one to move them, one to shoot them, one to like kind of command it and so like it's not super easy to use the mech, but they are powerful. But, oh my gosh, look at those things. Yeah, if you had the mini figs, this game would be insane.
Speaker 2:But thank you. Has anyone else played this one.
Speaker 3:No, I have a copy of it and it's just sitting there because I'm I'm a little, it's kind of daunting and I need to be undaunted to play this thing, okay I'm to get metaphysical with you guys.
Speaker 1:All right and this is maybe I'm confessing on the podcast this is a leadership downfall that I also have. Is that like I'm worried about pushing something onto someone because I'm like I don't want to overwhelm them, or they're not ready? Or like the people are ready, let's test them out. Give them a little bit extra, stretch them. They will amaze you at what they're gonna do. I mean, it's wild, going from for sale all the way to this one.
Speaker 3:Um, I cannot believe you. You learned this game and played it in the same night.
Speaker 1:That's crazy so I mean the next time we get together.
Speaker 1:I would be more than happy to lead us through calista, but but you can only play two or four player, because it wouldn't quite work with three. I mean you could one dude could double hand, but the whole idea is that you don't table any table talk has to happen openly. You can't have secret table talk. But you also can't be like I have this character and I'm gonna do this. I know that part is kind of weird, that you're you're sharing uh, information but trying not to disclose like what cards you have in your hand and stuff.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think primarily I think it's like the, the main thrust of this game was to be a two-player game.
Speaker 1:That makes way more sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think they threw in a four-player mode to allow a little more flexibility in the gameplay, but I think it was designed primarily to be a one-v-one, just head-to-head battle, do you?
Speaker 1:know if you can play co-op, like two players play together, against playing the solo mode. Is that an option? I don't know enough about it.
Speaker 2:Well, jared, if this, if you like this I don't know if you know this, but this is, like I don't know, the fourth game in the Undaunted series, yeah, and this is, I think, the most complicated by far, from what I've heard.
Speaker 1:We played in Undaunted, didn't we? No, I thought there was one that we were in a spaceship and we were trying to get it.
Speaker 3:No, that was Nemesis. Nemesis, yeah, undaunted. The other ones are largely based around World War II battles. So there's Undaunted Normandy Undaunted. The other ones are largely based around like. World War II battles. So there's like Undaunted Normandy, undaunted Stalingrad, undaunted North Africa.
Speaker 1:Battle of Britain. That makes a lot more sense, like when I was reading some of the lore, because it was like now we're jumping from World War II straight into the future and I'm like, okay, what, why world war ii? I don't really know, what does world war ii have to do anything about. But now I'm looking on bgg and, yeah, battle of britain, yeah, whatever, yeah, okay. So, listo, though, knocked my socks off, I can't wait to hit, wait to get it to the table again, nice.
Speaker 2:Was Normandy the first one.
Speaker 3:I think Normandy was the first one, and then maybe Battle of Britain, then North Africa, then Stalingrad.
Speaker 2:I want to compare the weights here. So Undaunted Normandy is a 2.25.
Speaker 1:And the actions are pretty straightforward there's just a lot of them that much higher.
Speaker 1:But so you and I, my only critique is like I wish they had more, uh, player card or um, like help sheets, um, because sometimes we'd have to be like, okay, what does this action actually mean? What's the difference between like, like commanding, versus influencing, versus scouting, and recon, like these words they all kind of get jumbled up. But then, once you're like oh yeah, and we say, like a player met too, to like here's where your discard goes, here's where you're playing in your draw pile, all that.
Speaker 2:Thanks. So do you think the gang you played with is did it like pique their interest, so like, oh, games can be like this, or were they like yeah, let's stick it for sale no again.
Speaker 1:Like I said, I was like shame on me for not wanting to get this to them sooner. Literally this morning, the group chat uh, randy says the moon belongs to the faction down with the LFA. I'm like, yeah, and then there's a, there's a Braveheart gif in here, and then obviously the wives are sending gifs that saying that we're nerds, of course, and then so the crowd is loving it Nice.
Speaker 2:Good on you, jared man. I would have crumbled under the pressure of somebody asking to play an unpunched game of this depth.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you. I mean, it was not that long ago that I realized this about my personality trait it's chaotic, so it's hard to uh, you know, put a finger on me, I'll do any like, I'll just do anything.
Speaker 1:Also a ding, ding, ding, something I need to work on with my leadership traits. You know I need more consistency in my life, so hopefully, hopefully, uh, more people want to get Calista to the to the table. How'd that go? Yeah for sure. For Sale went great. Gemma had to go bedtime so, unfortunately, but shout out to Dree for letting me stay and play For Sale and Calypso. She's a huge fan of For Sale. She's actually the one who threw it in the Amazon cart. All this Christmas money we've been rolling in it.
Speaker 1:This was an easy one to add to the cart, but it's super fun betting, drafting, and then, like, didn't you guys call like a reverse, uh, drafting or something like that auction, reverse auction, reverse auction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, initially you're trying to buy these houses, these properties that are numbered 1 to 30, and you're putting bets down, you're anteing up, really, because you can put more bet money down. Then if you pass, you have to give half of your money to the bank. Or if you haven't put any money down, you just grab the lowest card available and so you might get a cardboard box which is the number one all the way up to the space station which is 30.
Speaker 1:Then you use those properties and then you auction, do another auction where, instead of taking turns around the table, you do a blind reveal and whoever has the highest number will go in and take pots of money. So those money cards are anywhere from $0, which everyone gets scared about all the way up to the $15 one, and so you're using the properties that you just bought in the previous round to now essentially sell them off because the market is hot and you want to sell your properties and then you're getting that money back. I think we had almost one. We played at five people and we had one person almost get 60,. I think they're really good. These dudes are very smart. They pick up the strategy like that. We played twice and everyone already had it figured out by the second time.
Speaker 1:But everyone's consensus was like don't blow your load on the 30 or the 29. Because if you just focused on anything that's like at 15 or maybe a little bit higher than 15, once you go to the selling phase, like sure you might not get the 15 when that comes out, because the $15, when that rolls out, everyone's putting their big money out, but you're going to win everything else. You're going to play the averages You're going to get, you know, a bunch of nines and a bunch of elevens which end up getting you about 60 points by the end of it. There you go, hot take. But we will definitely that will be in the rotation for sure yeah, it's a good one.
Speaker 1:It is always a good one, tried and true.
Speaker 3:Okay, are you ready? We're ready. Travis, I got a lot of grief and a lot of groans when I mentioned the word Warhammer on this podcast. But that same week, that same week, uh, gabe reached out and he sent me a bunch of links on how to learn Warhammer, which is great. Love it. Thank you, gabe. The other one was Amanda, who said that she audibly groaned on her morning walk when she heard me mention Warhammer.
Speaker 3:I didn't realize there was this tension surrounding Warhammer. Some people love it, some people hate it. Amanda's on the side of like hey, it's taken up space in my friendly local game store that could be filled with board games. I understand it, I get it. I've never been like had any animosity towards warhammer taking up a corner of petries, but it's there and I like to look at it sometimes. So amanda had two copies of warhammer quest lost relics sitting on her shelf and she's like I got these for seven dollars at barnes and noble on sale. I've never played them. They're new and shrink. Do you want one? And I said absolutely I do. So she was nice enough to send me, uh, warhammer quest. That's amanda at empty nest board. Mama shout out to her friend of the show, our first friend of the show, uh. And so she sent me this game and it's a 2022 production by Games Workshop Limited.
Speaker 3:Okay, and you look at the cover of this thing like before I even knew what year it came out. I looked at the cover and I was like this came out in 1996. Like, it looks like a old, like DOS computer game. Yes, cover. I was like, okay, this is going to be like the first dungeon crawler ever on a computer, but came out in 2022. And so when you first open it up, you're faced with a bunch of plastic sheets that have parts of your warrior. You see those little blue things at the bottom and so you gotta get out your little uh like wire cutters and like clip these things out. And it's got instructions in the manual on how to assemble these things. They just kind of snap together. I know that there's more complex sets you have to glue. Uh, they have pictures of like these beautifully painted minis. These, the minis, are like the highlight of this game because you snap these things together. It's like doing legos, right, it's like what if your hobby had a hobby of its own? And my hobby was model building, so you snap these things together.
Speaker 3:The characters are super expressive. The one guy is like running off a step and like drawing a bow and he's got his big, hulky, bulky armor on. Um, let's be clear, this is not warhammer 40k. There's no space marines. These guys are like warhammer also has like a fantasy realm and all these other realms okay. So this is more fantasy that one guy's like a wizard and he's like raising rocks out of the ground. One of the characters uh, you control her and you control her pet eagle that can also move around and do stuff, which is kind of cool. So it honestly kind of reminds me a little bit of like a zombicide.
Speaker 3:The maps are kind of like. You know, you're looking straight down at these dungeons. There's different rooms with different symbols and you are trying to navigate these four heroes plus one eagle through these rooms to eliminate all the baddies. In each of these scenarios and I don't want to go through all the phases and everything, but the highlight is you basically roll these three dice, these d6s per character, you slot them into the different characters and then you use those dice to do actions. Most of them are fighting. Okay, the cool thing about it is like normally it would be, one hero takes a turn and does an action or fights a baddie or whatever, and then they get to, like Rick, reciprocate. But if you can string together combos between the characters, like if I, you know, let's say, I'm playing with four players and I have one, the person to my left has two, three, four, five, six you can potentially chain off these combos where, like, we all get to go before another bad guy gets to take a turn to attack us back. So you're, you know, dungeon crawling, you're running through these rooms, um, there's, if you roll a certain number, you can like boost the abilities. It's kind of cool, you know you're, you get upgraded attacks and stuff as you go along.
Speaker 3:Um, so, first experience with warhammer, clipping them out and like putting the things together was great. Uh, I was kind of disappointed, like looking at all this awesome, you know, these painted pictures and the little player mats. As you see on the, on the youtube video, the player mats have these like nice printed minis sitting there and I'm like man, maybe I should just paint these things, but for a later date, for a later date. So, uh, it was kind of cool. It's like a dungeon crawler. I didn't knock my socks off. Uh, it was pretty light and I think that's the whole purpose of warhammer quest is to like get people into it. So maybe I'll give this another shot.
Speaker 3:There's, like I don't know, 20 scenarios in this book and I played the first two and it took me maybe 20 minutes per scenario and I was playing all the characters. It flies by, it goes really fast. Each little chapter has a theme and a story and everything and you get to carry your progress as you level up and you run through these different levels of the of the game. So that was warhammer quest lost relics and that was my first play. Then I got the itch for some more dungeon crawling so I got out iron helm. I know I shouted out game crafter sale last week. Okay, iron helm is a game that I procured on game crafter sale like two, three years ago and I have played it a couple times. But I was just getting the itch to play some more dungeon crawling action.
Speaker 3:Okay, iron helm comes in this box. It's like pretty small box and what it is it's like a card driven solo, only dungeon crawler, where you are taking this like dungeon deck, kind of in the vein of like one deck dungeon. If you've ever played that one, it's on board game arena. If you want to give it a try, uh, and you take two cards off the top and you play them face down. You pick one of them and that's like the path that you're trying, and it's got two different actions on it First action, second action. Let's say, because it's the first card that I flipped, I don't want to take this first action. Maybe it's a big bad guy that I'm not ready to fight, or a trap or something crazy. Whatever. I can always opt to flip the other card, but I have to take the second action. So it might be something worse, it might be something better. I might get to open a chest and get some loot.
Speaker 2:It's like Captain Flip.
Speaker 3:It's like Captain Flip yeah.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't describe it as.
Speaker 3:Captain Flip Wouldn't describe it as Captain Flip, but it does have that kind of press your luck type thing where you're like, oh man, do I gamble and maybe flip this other one and get stuck with that second action. So that's a pretty cool mechanic. As you go along, you get to open chests and get loot. You can level up your character and equip them with armor and weapons and new attacks and all this other stuff. And then as you battle these enemies, as you go along, you're totaling up the enemies that you've defeated. They have these little symbols at the bottom of them and the number of symbols that you have at the bottom kind of determines what bad guy you fight at the end. So I just I like this game because it's not like a huge publisher. It's uh, what was it? Gray gray wolf games, standby gray gnome games, gray gnome games, and designed by jason glover. And these are the types of games that you find on something like game crafter where people can go in. They have like really cool art. People are pretty in like ingenious with their designs, and this guy has published so many of these expansions and small box upgrades for this thing and they're all great. I mean, I have, um, the iron chest, I believe, which is like a whole new scenario. It has like a couple little minis that come with it. It's got new equipment, it's got new everything. And then he sells these like little booster pack missions that you can get for the game and they're like I don't know, three to five dollars each and you rip those things open, they've got new monsters and equipment and all that stuff. If you're like I don't know, $3 to $5 each and you rip those things open, they've got new monsters and equipment and all that stuff. If you're like, hey, this sounds interesting but I don't want to invest in another board game that's going to sit on the shelf. They have Tin Helm, t-i-n Tin Helm. It comes in a little mint tin. It's like this game but in a mint tin version.
Speaker 3:If you're interested in dungeon crawling, this is a solo only and it's. I know if I'm gonna play a solo game, it's gonna be a game like this where I can like go on a little adventure by myself, try and see how long I can survive. You know it's, it's thematic, it's cool and and worth pulling out, super easy to set up and get going. So that is iron helm by jason glover, published by gray gnome games. Last Last one that I played was Rebirth. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago on the podcast. This is Rebirth, reiner Canizia's latest publication by Mighty Boards, and this came out in 2024. And I've talked about this before.
Speaker 3:But basically the whole action that you're trying to do is you're trying to take a chip and put it down on one of these hexagons and you're trying to create bigger groups. You score bigger groups depending on your groupings of energy farms and food farms. You can take control of abbeys and uh, castles to get you points at the end. This game is super simple and I I wish that I would have tabled it sooner. I was a little intimidated by the one hour play time of this one and I was like man, like it's rachel gonna sit through a one hour play of this game. So today I'm like, hey, I'm gonna teach you this game. It's gonna go pretty fast. All you have to do is pick a chip up, put it on a space with a matching symbol and you're trying to create bigger and bigger groups. You're trying to control castles and that you know whatever. Explain the rules very briefly, and we played it.
Speaker 3:The first play took maybe 40 minutes. Okay, baby Gwen gets fussy and so Rachel goes upstairs to take care of her. So I'm like, okay, and I sweep everything off the table. I pack it up upstairs to take care of her. So I'm like, okay, and I sweep everything off the table. I pack it up, boxes closed. Rachel came back down, she goes we're not playing again. That's like, that's the only review you need. That's the only review. She was ready to run it back so, uh, then I I've heard to set a timer the first time. Uh, I set a timer the second time and I unboxed, set up and we played this game two player in 30 minutes. So don't be intimidated by the 60 minutes. That's not real.
Speaker 3:Your decisions are super simple. You're just picking a chip up, secretly, looking at the symbol on it and then playing it, and so the board is broken down into these hexagons that have different symbols on them, either energy farms that have a lightning bolt, food farms that have a little like sprout looking thing, and then your settlements, that are these outlined sections, and what you're doing is you're playing houses to those for like a area control majority to score points. Then, when you place a any symbol, any chip next to an Abbey or a cathedral, which is the yellow spaces you get to place one of your little cathedral pieces onto that space and you draw a card with in-game bonus objectives and then, if you have the majority around one of the castles, then you own the castle. You put a little castle token out there that's worth five points at the end. Yeah, super simple. Token out there that's worth five points at the end. Yeah, super simple, super easy to teach.
Speaker 3:This game is like Cascadero. If Cascadero was more enjoyable. It has easier decisions, way easier to teach. The scoring makes way more sense. The only thing you're missing out really is like you're missing the secondary decision of like traveling down the river that you find in cascadero, cascadito. But I, I really enjoy this one. This one's great. Um, the game is actually pretty sustainable too. All these little tokens, or the. The tokens are made of like recycled material and then the castles and stuff that you see are made out of. I wish I knew the process I think it's called rewood where they take like wood shavles and stuff that you see are made out of. I wish I knew the process I think it's called rewood where they take like wood shavings and stuff and they dye them, put them in like a press. So these are like giant wood, like wood pellets and like old cardboard scrap that they push together into these molds to make these little figures. So yeah, I I really enjoyed it. This one's gonna stick around for a while.
Speaker 1:It's getting a sustainability medal and I I like you know brainstorming medals to give out the rachel run it back reward or something I don't know, I mean that's, that's big that's probably that's the equivalent of our medal of honor she.
Speaker 3:She came down and she goes what why'd you put it away? And I was like because we played it. We have never played something back to back. And she's like, no, let's play it again. So I pulled it all out, set it up, played it 30 minutes or less. So, wow, if you're playing quick and you're able to make decisions fast, then this game will fly by. If you got somebody that's not paying attention sitting on their their thumbs or on their phone in between turns, then this might drag out.
Speaker 2:That's it, I'm getting on eBay.
Speaker 3:This game is great Christmas money Christmas money.
Speaker 1:I mean shout out to the United Kingdom, Huge fan of Edinburgh.
Speaker 3:You know what I'm saying. Yeah, so one side is Scotland that's like the beginner version when you're ready you can flip it over and England's on the other side I'm sorry, no, scotland. And then Ireland is on the other side. Ireland has a couple other spaces that do some different things, but I haven't really dug into that yet. That is Rebirth by Rainer Knizia, published by mighty boards. Ready to hit the mission objective. Let's hit it. Okay.
Speaker 3:Today's mission objective is all about how we organize our collections. Every hobbyist out there, whether you're building model trains or collecting figurines or collecting gigantic number of board games, you eventually have to organize and sort and, you know, make some sense of your collection. I've seen a lot of people online this week, especially after new years, reorganizing their collections, doing a refresh, collect and culling some of the things that they never play and putting things back on the shelves, nice and pretty, ready to greet the new year, so that they can meet all of their gaming goals. So I want to hear from you guys about, like, how you approach organizing your collections. I know we might not be organized right now, but like clay, you're moving in a couple of months. I'm moving in a couple of months. Jared, you're moving in a couple of months. How are we envisioning that we will organize when we get to our new spaces? So, clay, take it away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my current state of organization. I'm pretty lucky. I had this little office room that came with the house. It has these nice built-in shelves in the back. They're nice but they also are not. They weren't designed for board games, so the the sizing of them, if you can see, I would prefer a nice vertical arrangement of my games so they can all sit next to each other vertically. But these shelves are pretty short so a lot of my games have to be stacked horizontally, which I don't think is the most efficient way to be storing the games. I generally have them laid out. I have a Kinesia section. All right, that breaks most rules. If Kinesia designed it, it's going up in the Kinesia section because I want to be able to hit that well, easily, quickly, efficiently, when I need an awesome game.
Speaker 1:Are those the ones that are displayed on the wall?
Speaker 2:Sometimes. So I have a outside of the office and where the gaming table is there are some shelves on the wall and that is where I display games. Occasionally I switch it up. So just yesterday I did a reorg, my excitement about stamp swap. I did my ode to stonemaier out there, so all my stonemaier games are displayed, stamp swap, right there in the middle. I got the worm span, wingspan. Bit of culture, tapestry side boom, boom, boom, whoa whoa.
Speaker 2:They're all out there. I like that to be like a themed wall. That looks nice. But in general in here I try and keep games by the same publisher together. It looks great to have all my all-play boxes, all those little all-play boxes, stacked nicely next to each other BiteWings games, their boxes all stack nicely together. Yeah, apart from that, it's really just.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of small box games and they mainly just make their way. Like right now there's a very small height shelf and I just throw them all in there and stack them and it's ugly to look at. But then I also have my CCG box which holds my darker demons, and I only bust that thing open every now and then. But that's where I have all my lorcanic cards. I have all my pokemon cards, all my one piece cards. Like it's just like this chest that the sides come out and and they I just got a bunch of freaking cards in there and they're different tuck boxes and portfolios or whatever they're called binders. You keep your cards nice. Yeah, so I have Star Wars Unlimited in there as well.
Speaker 3:What is your plan in your new place, In your dream setup? How would you organize?
Speaker 2:I would get some made for board game shelves. I mean, this is this is my dream, right? Sure, I've seen the ones that, like I don't know who makes them, but they have, like, each board game basically has its own like little shelf. Have you seen these? Yeah, I have. Um, that would be great. Probably what's more realistic is I'll probably just get some calyx shelves, like everybody else, and throw them in some area of my house where I'll probably be doing my gaming. Yeah, god willing, I'll have a house where I can have a game room. Um, if you're out there, god that would be nice, but yeah, hopefully that's it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't know what I'll do at this point if I don't have a place where I can um put mason counted the other day. I'm up to 250 some games and I need a. I need a place to store them, or else I'm gonna have to make some sad decisions get a storage locker and just get a little gaming den.
Speaker 2:You know what? The saddest thing I ever saw in board game organization was Carly. Well, yours is another type of sad, but Carly used to have this stand. The TV would sit on, they had little see-through doors and all her games were in there. She papered over the windows to the thing, so they're hidden away she was going to hide her nerdness.
Speaker 2:I about left the dinner party when I saw that that's where I'm at. I mean, to me, games are like art and I like displaying them. I like seeing them. It gives me joy because they're fun. They're fun things to look at and see and I want them prominently displayed somewhere, are?
Speaker 3:you going to to like, let's say, in the ideal world, you get your your shelves, everything looks nice. So you get your nice shelves, everything has its own little tuck box. Are you doing by publisher? Are you doing by, like alphabetical play counter?
Speaker 2:like not play player count, wait time to play theme I'm a publisher guy, I like to, I can keep them by. Keep them because they are the publishers. They try and make games that look alike. You know, yeah, I like, I like the vibe of seeing them all together, like I have kind of my leader game section back there too, yeah, yeah. So I go with that. Maybe I'll rethink it in the future. But it would be nice to have like a two-player section where it's oh, here's all my two-player games.
Speaker 2:It's just me and Mary, let's grab one of those. Yeah, and party game section Are those?
Speaker 1:big shells behind you going. No, they're built in, they're built in. Oh yeah you going? No, they're built in, they're built in oh, yeah, yeah I just remember the the nice, the progression of clay's collection.
Speaker 1:It was like first he had these two big, nice, beautiful glass display. You could see all the games, two big ones in the living room and then slowly there was another wardrobe upstairs. Then he's like right, we're moving downstairs, takes over the basement, shout out to your MTV Cribs reel. If you're listening and you haven't seen that, go check out Clay's MTV Cribs. Now you have what you got behind you, which is beautiful. It's going to be tough to recreate. I'm like a utilitarian. I just need a big, freaking shelf. Give me big metal shelves and I'll fill them up, like you. You have beautiful wood built-ins right there. That's gonna be tough to to follow up.
Speaker 3:I know, jared, I know that you don't have the biggest collection here, but like how it's growing, you organize it it is growing um, avery has been on this amazing uh new year's kick of reorganizing stuff, throwing stuff away.
Speaker 1:I'm a bit of a pack rat. That's in my blood. My dad, you know, bless his heart. He's probably a little bit of a hoarder and it rubs off on me. I don't like getting rid of, like my engineering magazines, my. I still have all the crap from from college, like who knows if I'll have to redesign a bridge and use this I. So I struggle with uh storage and you know, keeping things, getting rid of things. Um, I am, true to form, still very chaotic.
Speaker 1:My buddy tanner, who might he might be a little ocd uh, that's okay. He came in after I got my super mega travis box. He just reorganized my, my shell. It's very similar to what I have behind me. It's just like this wire shelf in a in a closet in one of the game room next door. So it was very it's not no, no rhyme or reason um, if it fits, it trips type deal.
Speaker 1:But who knows, maybe I should be planning for the future because I mean I just got calisto to the to the table. Who knows what else I can do? I I think there's room for growth. Um, but also shout out to everybody who's you know trying to downsize, maybe upsize jared's board game collection? Just send them to me. Uh, I'll give you my address. If you're not, you know a scammer? Um, just hit up the og and instagram. But yeah, so I'm looking forward to you guys's discussion. I'm not going to add scammer, hit up the OGN Instagram. I'm looking forward to your guys' discussion. I'm not going to add crap to anything good, but I'd like to know how do I get myself prepared for the exponential growth in 2025?
Speaker 3:Here's the thing I had a handful of gains when I moved to Colorado. That collection just grew and grew and grew exponentially. But I didn't want to, like you know, go to Ikea and get a Kallax shelf. I didn't really have like that many games my collection and they're like sitting in a mountain on the floor. We had that like recording studio in our old house and it was literally it was just a mountain of games, just like sitting shoved in the corner. You couldn't find anything. You had to, like lift games and, like you know, sift through them to find anything. So then I, you know, just as simple as like laying them out and standing them up and pushing them against the wall so that they're like lined up and you can see all the spines. Like that was step one in organizing, organizing. Then we moved here and I was like I'm doing it, we have a huge house, I'm getting some Calix, so I have two Calix downstairs and I, the games that I brought, not counting those that I put in storage, they filled up those two calyx, like that, like so fast, so fast. So all the spaces are filled and the top is all filled and as I've been like playing and moving them around and stuff.
Speaker 3:I found that they're definitely grouping more towards like the solo and two player games definitely go together Right. Like solo games need, especially if they're solo, only go on one shelf, two shelves, whatever they go together, then the two-player games probably go together, because if you're looking for a two-player game, that's where they're going to be. But then I think for me I appreciate theme in a game. All my Star Wars games started like drifting together. All my Lord of the Rings games drifted together, and so I think it's hard. It's going to be hard, especially when we move, because I'm going to want to do the theme again.
Speaker 3:But now that I throw this like more games into the mix, I think I might have to just go publisher, because I think I'm immersed in the hobby enough to where I know if I'm like looking for a game or I think of a game, I know who it's published by, especially if I own it already, and so like I know where to go to get that. But yeah, it's been. It's kind of stressing me out a little bit, like think about packing up all these games and like moving them back to the states. I'm a little stressed out about it, so I don't know. I I just wanted to pick your brains and see what you guys thought is like the best way to do that, because there's like a thousand ways to do it nowadays.
Speaker 1:so I'd say the germans are going to take good care of your stuff. You're not going to diddy anything from germany, so I trust the germans to take good care of your collection I'm sure that they will do great and all the board games will make it in pristine condition.
Speaker 3:I think you'll be good, yeah, so anyways, I just want to see new year, new us, new collection. I just want to see how you guys were approaching your board game organization I might have to tear it all out and redo it.
Speaker 2:I just did it a few months ago because I was spilling out over into like just stuff on the office floor and uh, I was like, all right, I need to pull everything out. I need to figure out how these all can fit because, again, my shelves right now are not like the right height to fit things. Very naturally, they're all horizontal, which kind of stinks when you need to pull a game out. If you are watching and you can see the top shelf up there. If I want to play Tigress and Euphrates, that's going to be not a lot of fun to get that out from underneath. Milli Fiore, blue Lagoon and Whale Riders up there. Probably El Dorado is going to come down too.
Speaker 1:I think we should probably ask AI. You could probably take our recordings from this podcast, load them into an AI and watch as your selection has moved over the last couple episodes and you'll probably be able to optimize it, because that's the kind of things we need AI to do these days. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But the bottom line is, if you're going to take a selfie in the new year, see lots of selfies popping up on the gram you're taking a selfie, you want to make sure that it's pristine and it makes sense that people can, like, scan through your games and know what they're looking at. So, yeah, I I'm excited to see what your new collection looks like when you move like, because that is that's a lot of games to move and that's a lot of games to sort and keep track of. So I am I'm really curious to see what it ends up looking like.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm glad you, your curiosity is peaked, because my anxiety is All right.
Speaker 3:Are we ready to go over the fence Hit?
Speaker 2:me.
Speaker 3:All right, clayton, what you've been doing outside of board gaming.
Speaker 2:You know I spoke before one of our first episodes that I was listening to an audio book, brandon Sanderson Alantris. Never finished it, but I did. I'm a good, I'm a good starter of things and I agree, sure, but I did get a recommendation. I was talking to a guy had been going to the gym with for a while and he was he like posts on Instagram, something about reading, and I was like, oh, you're a nerd, whatever. And then I was like, just kidding, I I really should read more. And he's like, do you like like sci-fi and fantasy? I'm like, yeah, if I was gonna listen to something, it would probably be that. And so he recommended another brand brandon sanderson book. This one's the stormlight archives, oh yeah, and the first book in that series is the way of kings.
Speaker 2:And I am now probably like 15 hours into listening this thing. It started out like very confusing because it was like bouncing around different timelines, different people, but after that first like couple hours, it's really settled in and it's. It's an awesome story. It's like game of thrones s, there's like political intrigue, it's. It's a cool book. I'm. I look forward to walking riggins every day and listening to it and I'm nice. I go on my runs and I'm listening to it. I'm like, oh my god, what's calvin gonna do next?
Speaker 1:but bird song baby.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's bird song you know it.
Speaker 1:Uh, yeah, that's my yeah, yeah, uh, over the fence. Uh got a blackstone grill with my, my christmas money, um, and I seasoned it last night. I'm about to hit it with some bacon or some juicy blts this afternoon. I'm looking forward to that. I almost can just start my own outdoor entertainment company, because I got the pizza oven now. I got the Blackstone, I got the smoker, the Weber for the charcoal taste. I just need a bouncy castle and then you can just hire me. Hell, I'd probably make a pretty good clown. I could get into that so we'll see what about?
Speaker 3:you Travis you'll have to let me know what you think about your Blackstone. So when we watched, when we were going to watch Wicked, we signed up for a one month trial of Apple TV and I've been really enjoying going back and experiencing the backlog of Apple TV. And we started we started with the first season of the morning show.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is nothing new. This show came out like 2017.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:That first season is so intense and still so relevant.
Speaker 3:We burned through the first season, okay, like the finale, my hands were like sweating, I was so tense. Okay. Yeah, star said Cass great acting, okay. But then they're talking about, like you know, such sexual misconduct on a new show, and the week that we watched this, all the Fox sports scandal started breaking, and so that was like some weird parallels. And then they fly out to, uh, pasadena, southern california, to cover like a wildfire that's burning down homes everywhere and that's happening. So then we started going to not as good as season one, for sure, but it's like the covid season, so it's kind of weird. I know people are trying to, you know, figure life out. So I'm, uh, I'm curious to see where it ends up, because we're like towards the tail end of season two and I'm we're, we're committed. The other one that I've been watching is mythic quest, which is a video game development yeah, created by rob mclehaney and charlie day yeah, oh
Speaker 3:wow, a company that is developing like a skyrim type video game. That's like a world of warcraft and skyrim like mixed together basically, and that show is great. It's pretty funny. They have some like really good um commentary about what it's like to work in that sort of tech sector and the video game industry as a whole. Um. But in the middle of the first season there's an episode I think it's episode five where they do like this whole completely like spin-off story about two developers and how they like met each other and they like fell in love, they created this game and how this like creation gets away from those that are like the creatives and the owners of that idea and so like it starts to become successful and what that means for a product that is. You know, at the end of the day it belongs to the people and to the companies that fund these projects of the day. It belongs to the people and to the companies that that fund these projects and like this pull, push and pull between creatives and like the suits on what to do with this franchise once it becomes popular.
Speaker 3:And that was like the most poignant episode of the whole season. It's really good. It's got, um, the one of the guys from new girl and then the female that acts alongside him. I wish I didn't. I've seen her in a thousand things. I feel like she's like from freaks and geeks or something, but she's really good. Um, so yeah, give mythic quest a shot if you're interested at all. And uh, is it ashley birch?
Speaker 1:it might be I don't know, I'm just, I'm just looking at the, the uh wikipedia on it. It's been around for a while, huh it has.
Speaker 3:I think they got like four seasons now. Four seasons, yeah. The last one that I want to shout out is I've been waiting for this to come back to Netflix, but it's Kunk on Earth.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that show.
Speaker 3:It's so good, okay. So this is a comedy team that has done a whole bunch of stuff for BBC in the past and Philomena Kunk C-U-N-K is played by.
Speaker 3:Give me just a second Diane Morgan, okay, and so she does one that's like about history of mankind and it's like a four or five episode series where she has these very serious interviews with people that are experts on the field of, like, roman culture, and she's like, well, it doesn't seem like they're really effective because they're all dead now and their, their society is in ruins. So like, what was it all for? And it's like just so great to watch her play this deadpan and watch these like interviewees get their like they can't even compute the questions that she's asking because it's like it's so ridiculous. But her, her new one just came out. It's called kunk on earth and we are gonna dive into that asap because I love this chick.
Speaker 2:She's so funny mary and I watched it and mary said she liked this one better than the first. So oh, I'm so excited. Yeah, it's funny, it's.
Speaker 3:It's a good watch, yeah her dry british humor is like just perfect for asking these deadpan questions. These people that like have devoted their whole lives to studying this like very specific thing. And she's like so what did people do before wheels were invented? They just like sat around and you couldn't even call a cab or anything. And then these people like their brain is like short circuiting because I can't even comprehend the stupidity of the question but yeah, I wish I could remember some of the stuff. Oh, it's so good, it's classic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so anyways, comcon Earth and Apple TV, both great. Did we do it? I think we did it. Dismissed, all right. This has been episode 22 of the Operation Game Night podcast. I am Travis, he has been Clay, he has been Jared, and we are out.
Speaker 1:Well done, Travis.