James Geist: Welcome to dads on a map board game podcast by dads for everyone. I'm James and I'm John. And on today's show, we'll talk about building your game group, how to do it, how to keep it going and share some of our experiences. And we'll also talk recent plays of gods and mortals, Mexico and Das Ferd von Troy. Enjoy the show. Cold read that German title that John put in here. I love it. John, welcome to Dad's on a Map. ⁓ For people who don't know who John is, if you're in the Discord, he's John in the Discord. If you play like async games with him, his name is Cybot in most places. In BG stats, I call you John Cybot. That helps me remember who I'm talking to. But I'm really glad to have you on the show and welcome to Dad's on a Map. Thanks, yeah, mean, I, Dad's on a Map is one of the only podcasts I listen to, gaming podcasts, and I'm just honored to be here, so I appreciate it. So for any listeners who are not Discord junkies, you know, give people, and I guess people who even are on the Discord that know you only as a name, you know, posting old dusty German games and things like that. Do want to give a brief background about who you are? You don't have to give us your social security number or anything, but... Who you are, you know, what's your gaming life like and yada, yada, yada. I feel like one of those like Korean shipping companies probably has my social security number. ⁓ they do. Yeah. But yeah, I'm John. I live in New Hampshire. I grew up in New Jersey. ⁓ I love board games and ⁓ just talking about board games and exploring them and always excited to be in async games. But I got married. have three kids and I'm a dad on a map, basically. That's the back of the baseball card stats. Yeah. The dome, the dome card. ⁓ And a lot of people might recognize your voice or, or name from heavy cardboard where the find you on streams a lot of games there. ⁓ How did you get into, how'd you find yourself in heavy cardboard land? guess. Well, it kind of does. dovetails into what we're going to talk about later, but I aggressively pursue gaming opportunities. And he was doing an Ask the Elephant one night. And I realized that they were located in Wakefield, Massachusetts, which is only 45 minutes from here. And I just typed in the chat, how do you get on the show? And he told me to email him. And his first question was, are you pleasant? And yeah, of course I said yes and then he invited me to a game day and that was it. So. ⁓ that's sick. You essentially just brute forced your way into the cardboard. That is amazing. Yeah. Like you said, main topic later, we're going to talk about finding those gaming opportunities and finding your game group. So I'm sure that'll come up some more. Sweet. Yep. And then how did you stumble into Dome? Like I always ask people that because it's always kind of curious to me. Like that's a great question. ⁓ okay. I remember I was searching on Apple podcasts, either coin or 18 X X. I can't remember which one. And I saw the coin collectors or the choo choo crew. can't remember which came first. ⁓ and then I just, I got hooked. mean, is it's like the only podcasts except for the occasional heavy cardboard podcasts, but dad's in a map is really speaking my language. So I just got hooked. It's like such false advertising too for people who like find us looking for coin games in 18xx and they're like, the hell is this? And then we're talking about Bauer and Schlau, right? They're like, what did I find? Cool. Awesome. All right. So a little bit of housekeeping before we get to some of our recent plays. As always, eternally grateful to our patrons who have pledged their support to Dads on a Map. We have a new one. This show, ⁓ Ray just joined us as a patron. Ray ⁓ also just won the Dome Madness Bracket Prediction Contest. And as we theorized on the last show when I had Joe here and we were kind of live calling the numbers as they were coming out, Medina did in fact win Dome Madness ⁓ to the surprise of many, to the joy of many, to the chagrin of others. but Medina's name will appear on the Dome Madness banner at DomeCon and that's pretty, cool. Ray, I believe, had Medina in the Final Four, which propelled him to the win. And for his winning game, he actually chose Broom Service, which I found a used copy of that had like an expansion in it, which I didn't know existed, and like a mini Christmas promo or something like that. that's cool. Ray got some goodies and Ray has given back to the community, which is awesome. So I love it. So congrats, Ray. Congrats Medina. Can't wait for next year. Now that a dark horse has won the thing, feel like anything goes and anything can happen now. The bracket prediction just got harder. Like it's so cool. I'm so happy that it, that it actually happened. And also no, like I'm not even like shit posting or going with the meme here on Medina. Like more people are playing Medina. Which is awesome. Like I can't even tell you how many people have found it, 3d printed it, played it. And they're like, ⁓ my God, you guys weren't, it wasn't a meme. You were serious. This is a great game. So I'm really happy about that too. ⁓ segueing to DomeCon still some beds available. You can find the information here in the show notes. You can find it on dadsonamap.com. You can find it in the discord. ⁓ we have, I don't know a dozen or so beds left. So I'd love to see you at dome con. If you haven't signed up yet, it's about that time. Cause I'm like looking at my calendar and next month I'm going on a family vacation and then it's like fourth of July and then it's dome con. So it is time that we're no longer in the, can't wait. It's like, it's around the corner at this point. John will be there. So I'm super excited, man. Like it's my first time. My buddy from my local game group, Alexander, is coming too. ⁓ Which is awesome. And I promise you're going to have an amazing time. I can't wait to game with you and have you game with everyone. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited. Yep. I'm always excited. Like I always love seeing everybody that comes back, but it always makes me a little bit happier to have new recruits join the family, so to speak. Right. And so I'm super excited for any any newbies that come and like I said still spots available. So we'd love to have you know, you're something right, right? When new people are showing up and that is true. And I love that we've managed to keep it also still small. Like my fear actually around like Domecon 4 was like, everyone's having such a good time. I'm not really looking to be in a hotel ballroom with 200 people. Like, so I love that it still is a nice tiny con and that's my my favorite kind of cons to go. So, all right, that's it for the housekeeping on to the recent plays. I'm gonna start us off with a game that is still on crowdfunding right now. This is called Gods and Mortals. This is from the publisher is Wolf Designer, which is the studio behind ⁓ Guards of Atlantis 2. And the designers are William Borg Barthet and Artjom Nichiparov. And this is a game that is super overproduced. If you kind of look at it on, on game found, or I believe it is a neoprene mat, right? A bunch of different factions in this game. They all have their own wooden pieces, all our roots and yada, yada, yada. But gods and mortals is kind of a area presence game. It's not really area control. You don't actually care about controlling anything. You want your faction to be present in as many locations as possible. because each location that you're present in kind of creates ⁓ your point scoring ability, basically, your share price, if you will. This game is unique in that it is kind of an area presence, area control, mixed with a little bit of a stock holding situation because you invest the kind of income of the game and you buy shares in these companies, you go up these share tracks and you try to pump up your... your area presence in order to have a higher value. If you're in five of the 10 areas on the board, you have a value of five and then you sell out, right? To get five per share that you sell out of. It's an extremely incremental game. Doing the things you need to do in order to move and gain presence is hard. It's small, small movements at a time because generally speaking, anytime you do a thing on the map, moving pieces, they exhaust. they lay down basically, they won't move again. Like, you know, that's not a new feature to games, but once you move them, they lay down, they're not going to move again. A lot of times they're a little bit locked in place even. So incremental movement, where it gets a little juicier is every faction of course in 2026 has asymmetric abilities, right? There's a little bit of a card play system here where you're playing a card to your tableau, almost brass like where the card is going to have a color. and also a location on it. You can play a red, let's say Athens card and either affect any faction in Athens or any red anywhere on the board. So that kind of has that, that brassy feel to it, right? You can build coal or you can do something in, in, you know, like a Shire or whatever, whatever. But then alternatively, you can kind of save up these special tokens that you can gain. And instead of just playing one of the basic actions, you can play a power specific souped up action that is a little more destructive, a little more chaotic and whatnot. I played this on table Topia with ⁓ two other players, Chad and Josh. First of all, I haven't touched table Topia since like pre COVID. I remember trying a game there and be like, despite being comfortable with TTS table Topia feels like a new language you're trying to speak. And it did again here. I hated it. I wish. It was anywhere but tabletopia. took us so long just to figure out how to like stack cards and reshuffle a deck and do things that feel really normal on TTS. I don't know why we were following the rules and looking at like the little cheats and stuff. And it just, was a struggle that didn't help our experience with the game. But ultimately it was a fun game. ⁓ It's not, you know, it is a stock game. It succeeds in doing what it. kind of has been billed as by a lot of people, which is stocks and area control area presence. I keep saying, ⁓ however, the price tag for a game that it was not, it was not like, ⁓ I've got to have this. Right. It was a successful attempt at doing something new stocks and area control, but it's like a hundred dollars to get even like just to get it. Like there's, there's really no tears here. Like, You got what you got. think the first tier, the first, the base game is 69 pounds or euros. can't remember what we're speaking in here. And then of course there's like a faction pack add on for like 20 more. By the time you do that and ship to the U S it's over a hundred dollars. There is no like, me the crappy version. There's no winsome, you know, version here, but it could totally be played with cubes and a paper map. Yeah. At that point I would actually be more interested in playing it and exploring it because the, gameplay was snappy. The turns were quick. And I think not being on table topia, which hamstrung us a bit, I think it would be a fast, fun experience. So I kind of fall in the middle, right? I had a good time with it. I would play it some more. It's not going to be a top 20 game for me. I just can't see that happening based on what I felt of the system. ⁓ but if you are in disposable income person with a hundred extra dollars laying around, the production looks, looks great, looks cute. And if it is gets, you know, a thousand more people to play a stock game, I'm always in favor of it existing in the world. Yeah. If it was less expensive, would you back it like 60? If it was 50 bucks, if I get it to my house for 50 bucks, I think I would back it. Yeah. Yeah, I I would. I probably don't need to, but I think I would. You may seek it out on the secondhand market. Is that something that you would do? I can see that happening. Yeah. Or, know, when I looked at it last, I got to be honest, it was not, uh, it was not doing great numbers. That's right. Yeah. I was going to ask that too. So, I mean, it definitely like made its pledge level or whatever, you know, cause they always set it so low. Uh, only 1400 backers, which feels really low for I don't know, coming off the guards of Atlantis design studio. It seems like their goal. It's met. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. They have, they set their goal at 10,000, uh, euros and it's 133,000. So yeah, they smashed that, but just feels, I don't know if my brain is a little scrambled from reading about the new brass and stuff like that, but 1500 backers. That's, mean, we're talking like train game level right there. Yeah. So maybe it really is a training. Right. And I do like how the theme is doing a lot of like the attraction there. It's kind of almost tricking people into playing something like that, which, like you said, I don't think that's a bad thing. think that's, you know, that's a good thing. So there you go. That's God's Immortals. Good experience. A little too pricey for me. Maybe it's for you. ⁓ another, facts with back my baseball card. I've never played brass. You should probably just. keep it that way. I'm like, like world's number one grass hater over here. It's just, it's just insanely mid like across the board. ⁓ So, all right. What do you got to tell us about John? ⁓ yeah. So, ⁓ the first game I want to talk about, ⁓ is I love this game. It's so it's called, I probably won't pronounce it correctly, but, ⁓ coo coo handle master and, ⁓ coo handle or coo handle stands for horse trader. So it's horse trader master. It's two H's if you're looking it up. Coo handle. Coo handle, yeah. And it's a reimplementation of a game called You're Bluffing, which is I believe from the 80s. It's an hilarious card game. And I highly recommend people seek this out and try and play it. so the goal of the game is to have the most points at the end. But what you're dealt is you're dealt money cards. Just like container, some of the cards have zeros, but they go from zero, 10, 20, 30, 50, and 100 or something like that. And everyone starts with the same amount of money. And then in the middle of the table is a deck, shuffle deck of animal cards. And there's animals ranging from pigs to donkeys to goats to sheep. And each animal has like its own value. So like a goose, I think is 40. and a dog is 160, for example, right? So what you do on your turn is you turn over a card from the top of the deck and you're the auctioneer. So think like the estates essentially, it's gonna work kind of like that. And when you turn over that card, everyone at the table besides the auctioneer is gonna start bidding in increments of 10. Not in order, just kind of like an auction, right? And they're gonna say 10, 20, and they're gonna go up. And then when it stops, the auctioneer is gonna end the auction. And then at that point, the auctioneer has an option to either, just like estates, either pay the cost in their money cards to the person who made the highest bid or take the highest bid. And that person wins the animal card. Right? So what you're trying to do is you're trying to make, and there's three different auctions in this game, but the reason you want to win the animal card is you're trying to make a set of animals. So if each goose is worth 40, you have to have all the geese to get the 40 points. Right. Um, and then each animal has what's called a pedigree card. And if you win the pedigree card, it increases the points of those animals. So when a pedigree card comes out, you don't, you don't do the auction. Uh, like I just described, you do a Dutch auction. So at that point, uh, you start at 10 and there's no change by the way, if you give you, if you bid 40 and only have 50, you got to get a 50. Um, yeah. And it's so you start this Dutch auction and you start at 10 and you go 10. nine, eight, whoever wins that auction has to give the auctioneer the amount of cards that won, not the amount of money. So let's say the Dutch auction went down to seven for the pedigree card. The winner or vice versa, the auctioneer can pay it, has to give seven cards. It could be any amount, even the zeros, right? And the zeros start flying around the table. What's going to start to happen is a lot of bluffing that happens in this game and quite a bit of negotiation. Then another type of auction, there's these rat cards. When a rat comes up, it operates differently than the other two auctions. What happens is you don't want the rats, because rats will give you negative points. But the rat turns over and the next person in turn order, if they don't want to take it, they put a card in the middle of the table, any card. And that goes around the table. And if you take the rat, you get all the cards that were bid. Cool. Yeah. So you may get a bunch of zeros. You may get some Or if you ran out of cards because you overbid on something, you're going to be forced to take the rat. Right. ⁓ And then you can use all these zeros that maybe you picked up in the Dutch auction to really screw somebody. Right. ⁓ And then the other action, because it's called horse trader, is instead of starting an auction, you can ⁓ horse trade. And what that means is if you have, a pig and somebody else has a pig, you can trade with them. And what happens there is Let's say I'm trading pigs with you. I'm going to make you an offer. I'm to put down a certain amount of cards on the table. You don't get to look at it, but you get to decide if you want to take my offer or not without looking. Otherwise, you can make a counter offer and put your own counter offer down on the table. Then at that point, we both flip our offers over and whoever bid the most wins the card and the other person keeps the money. Right. So remember, you're trying to get like four of pigs or whatever. ⁓ And if you do the horse trading with a rat, you're doing it to get rid of the rat. Right. So it's the opposite. And then at the end of the game, once the deck runs out, ⁓ one more thing in the deck, there's also donkey cards and it's called donkey money. So when the donkey flips over, everyone gets more money into their hand. So it keeps injecting some economy into the game. And then the donkeys are also have point value on them that you trade for and bid for. ⁓ And at the very end, the game doesn't end until everyone has complete sets. So there's a bunch of trading that happens at the end too. ⁓ And then the game ends and if whoever had the rat set has to get rid of their highest set. So there's some set collection, but the auctions are just, they're hilarious. Like I hope I'm getting it across the right way, but like when you're giving people zeros and you're bluffing, it's just like every time I played this game, it's just a lot of laughter and a lot of just. clever moves and negotiation and, ⁓ brinksmanship. So, ⁓ yeah, it's, I don't know if it's like super easy to find, but, it's definitely like in the dome vein, right? I would say that, the only downside to it is that, that the very end, that horse trading that has to happen. If you're not playing with people who want to wheel and deal, it'll slow the game down a little bit because everyone might be trying to like min max a little too much, but. It's just a fun time like you know think of cash a catch with the Dutch auction and then think of the Estates with the way like you're paying the auctioneer, you know, yeah Or like yeah good modern art like several different types of auctions in the same game and yeah. Yeah, exactly Yeah, and the artwork is funny. Yeah, it is artworks amazing looking. So yeah Yeah, and I'm not sure how it changed from the original you're bluffing ⁓ but ⁓ yeah, I have the the master one. So yeah, I kind of clicked on that when I saw there were no copies of the actual handle master clicked on the year bluffing said re-implements. I'm not sure it your bluffing doesn't mention anything about the auctions. It mentions, mentions like the trade system that you talked about. It does. guess it says players auction off, but it doesn't mention much. I don't know. left a little. Yeah. I think if I recall correctly, the your bluffing doesn't have the pedigree cards. So I don't know if that'll make it better or worse, but yeah, I think it's something like that. So. Cool. Yeah. All right. Well that is Cahandl Master Horse Trainer. Yeah. Cool. ⁓ next game I'll talk about. I said in the intro that we were going to talk recent plays, including Mexico, ⁓ before John and I pressed record here. I said, apparently I've always read it as Mexico, but I think you're supposed to say Mexico and he's, said I was crazy. I mean, maybe I found a BGG thread that suggests that it should do to its roots. it would, it would have been pronounced Mexico in the time we're playing this game basically. Right. the BGG threads are always right. Everyone is right on BGG all the time. So if somebody said it, But anyway, I've been calling it Mexico. It makes me feel less like a, yeah, less like an American who would pronounce something wrong. So maybe I'm doing it wrong sounding more like an American who would pronounce something wrong. So Mexico or Mexico, whatever you want to call it is a game from, ⁓ Kramer and Kiesling. This is part of the mask trilogy alongside to call and Java or Kuzco. ⁓ we've also talked about Torres on this show, which is kind of the unofficial fourth of that, ⁓ set of games. I didn't love to call. I didn't love 10 action points and kind of the, ⁓ what it potential AP that it's, you know, kind of pushed us towards. There was a lot of like when I played to call a lot of like trying to rewind your turn and then be like, ⁓ how many did I spend? And blah, blah. ⁓ I didn't like that. I did not play with the, the, the option set up into call, which I've heard people say makes it a better game. So I'm not writing it off completely, but getting a taste of Mexico. ⁓ man. This was like slam dunk right out of the gates. First of all, only six action points, which is a much smaller pool. And frankly, when you spend actual points in Mexico, you spend them much faster. Like there is small incremental movement to walk around the board. You're not usually doing that very much. You're usually either surfing on some rivers that exist on the board, or sometimes you're even spending five to teleport anywhere across the map, or you're spending big chunks of them on building temples, two, three, four at a time. So in Mejica, ⁓ three to four players, I don't know if it's sports two or not, but I've played with three or four players. We are all on this big open map. just big open square grid map to start the game. And what you can do with your action points is either walk your ⁓ your mehica around the map into position. You can lay these water tiles that are either one by one squares or two by one rectangles. And when you're laying them, you're kind of carving out this entire civilization. You're trying to make an area that is X squares big. because when you make one that is a certain size, if there is a matching ⁓ token over here that I can't remember the name of, ⁓ then you can take that token and put it in that area and found that territory. So for instance, on my turn, I might move my Mejika for one, two, I might lay one, two, three water pieces that have now created me an area of size five. There's a five ⁓ Capituli token. I think is the word. I think that's a down here in the supply. So I can then found that area by put that five in there. get points essentially equal to half the size of the area that I founded immediately. And now this area is an area that's up for grabs at mid round and end game scoring. Whereas the person who has the most presence in it is going to get the largest number equal to its size. The person with the second most will get the smaller number and then a third place player will get the third place number. Presence though is not your Mejica himself standing there, but these temples that you will build out onto the board. There could be size one, two, three or four. That is the levels of the temple. They cost one, two, three or four to build. They also are a little bit of a game timer because the halfway point of the game is when all eight of the current Capituli tokens have been put out and one player has exhausted all of their temples, which are essentially half at the beginning you get half and then at the kind of intermission you get the rest of your temples. So they've exhausted all their temples. All the tokens are out. We're at mid scoring. Basically we're going to score all the regions and then we get some more temples and we get some more Capituli tokens to put out and then we keep doing it. Now, depending on how you carve out this map, you may make areas that can never get their matching token, and those tokens are then just discarded from the game, so you'll have less areas scoring. In addition, at the end of the game, you also score any areas that are out there, regardless of if they were founded, you're going to score them based on their size, with a first and second and third place awarded there as well. So... incredibly contentious area control situation here, lot of blocking with building these ⁓ rivers, if you will. And then there's kind of the movement system. Like I said, you can walk your Mejica around, but if you ever want to cross water that's been played, you can place a bridge for one point and then walk across it, which will cost you a bunch of movement points as well. ⁓ If you run out of the supply of bridges later on, if you want to take the place of bridge action, You literally rip one up off the board and move it somewhere else. The rule book even explains this away is like when they built these bridges, they were just like short-term land bridges that could literally be picked up and moved by the locals, which is really cool. ⁓ and then there's movement. Like there's easy movement of walking around. There's teleporting anywhere for five of your six action points, or there's kind of this like surfing mechanic on the, on the rivers where if you're on a bridge, You can essentially jump on a boat that's cruising down the river and let it take you to the next bridge or into the ocean that surrounds the map and come back in anywhere on another river. So you get this like crazy spatial thing where you can go a lot of times you could go anywhere. And depending on who you're playing this game with, they might've built the map so poorly that you can't go anywhere. There's a ton of blocking. trapping people in the area that they're in where they have to essentially use five to teleport out just to get somewhere new. ⁓ Really, really good. I played it with three on the table recently and I'm in my second four player async game as well. That's on BGA and it's terrific on BGA. ⁓ I am loving everything going on in this one. It is hitting the sweet spot for sure. Yeah, Mexico is awesome. Mexico is awesome. I haven't played Torres or Takao, but I have played Cusco or I think Java. played Cusco though. That's a good game too, but it's much different than Mexico. It's a little more thinky, puzzly. I love it. I love it in Mexico in the rule book. Like you were kind of alluding to it. Everything is thematic, right? It's made sense. You're walking and building, but you can also teleport. ⁓ And the rule book is just like plus teleportation, you know, for like six points or something. There's just so much like, you know, when you are in an area and you enclose it, that that Capitoli token takes one of the spots that could house a temple, right? To build a temple in an area, you have to be present. So there's always going to be one less temple in there than the space. You know, someone has to walk in to build a temple. So you to these like small crappy, crappy ⁓ areas that are only three or four. And there's not a lot of places for temples in them, but you can have sole control over them where you're the only one getting three or four points at the scoring versus when you get in these big areas, you have to burn a lot of action points to place your temples there to then contend for 10, five or three points, right? And you're almost sharing. Like there's this little bit of like, Do you want to focus on the small ones and get the points all to yourself? Or are you going to wander around the map, you know, just sprinkling your temples to get a bunch of third places? I don't know yet what the, if there's an answer to that, but you're just trying to find the points where you can find them at times. Yeah. And it really does that wonderful thing. Medina does, where it's the Brinksmanship. It's like, do I place my, my palace roof now? Do I put this one down here now? Can I wait it out? Is he going to do it? ⁓ And then you're building the shared map. I buy it by the end of it. It looks beautiful. Like it really does. Like Mexico on the table when it's done, just like Medina just looks really neat and everybody built it together, which I like. Yeah. It isn't underrated of both of those games. Like to be like, we look, look what we did everybody. We built a civilization. Look what we've always say that at the end and everyone looks at me like I'm crazy, I think it's awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, that is Mejica. It is gaining steam, ⁓ in the discord. A lot of chat about it. ⁓ very difficult to find. You could find a first edition. The second edition is the, I forgot the name. Super Meeple. Super Meeple. Yeah. And it's like really nice resin, resin, ⁓ temples and stuff like that. Jacob who made a Medina PMP, a 3D print PMP, is also making a Mejico one. So you could also look forward to printing that if you're a 3D printing person. Yeah, his temples look really nice. They do. They look cool. Like I almost bought a first edition and I was like, I'm gonna wait, see what Jacob ends up at here and see if I can give him some money to bring me one to DomeCon or something like that. we'll see. No jumbo Mejica coming to Domecon, but there will be jumbo Medina. Not yet. right. Not yet. Yeah. All right, John, what's next for you? Yeah. So over the weekend, I was at a convention called Circle DC, ⁓ which is a historical game convention down in Washington, DC. That was awesome. Just a great time. I visited the Supreme Court and that was just a really cool experience. ⁓ played a few games there, but the one I want to talk about is called Peace 1905. It is published. I think it's coming out this year, Fort Circle Games. They did Votes for Women and Shores of Tripoli and I think Hump for Blackbeard. So I had a weird kind of reaction to this game because it was billed to me, or maybe I misunderstood it, as a negotiation game. And it's not. It's themed to negotiation. So I was a little taken aback by that, but it's still a very good game. After I kind of got over myself with that, um, um, peace 1905 is a three player game. can be played with two players, but three players is best, um, about the Russian Japanese, uh, treaty of Portsmouth in 1905. Um, and I love these games because I get to learn something that I really didn't know about before. I was attracted to it too because Portsmouth, New Hampshire is like 20 minutes from me. So I'll probably go visit that site at some point. But yeah, so one side plays the Japanese, one side plays the Russians. And then the third player is playing Roosevelt. He's delegating or brokering ⁓ this treaty. It is Roosevelt, right? I is. I'm reading the synopsis coaching you while you're telling this. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So- ⁓ What you're doing is, ⁓ well, thematically what happened was, ⁓ the Japanese kind of decimated Russia, ⁓ but they had used all their resources. So they were in a bad spot and Russia had resources still. ⁓ so they, they kind of had to come to a begrudging agreement and that that's where Roosevelt came in. ⁓ but what you're doing in the game is there are these key issues that each side wants to win. ⁓ and when you win these issues, you get points. ⁓ the winner of the game is one of the most points. but to win these issues, you're playing cards that have a value on them. it's not, I cut you choose like Hanna-Makoji for example, but it does kind of feel like that. Like there's Elaine in the middle and you're playing these cards down and you're gonna try and win the issue. But there's some bluffing that happens there too because the order in which they get turned over is somewhat unknown. So you kind of wanna threaten the other side to say, hey, like I'm gonna come hard at this issue. So you should probably back off. or maybe feint some weakness and see if they let you get it for pretty cheap. ⁓ And what Roosevelt is trying to do is he's trying to balance the scales. He wants the deals or the key issues to pass, and he wants both sides to be happy with what happened, right? But what I really found interesting about this game is that you can just outright win a key issue, say if you're Japanese, but what you'll do is you'll raise the tension of the other side. Let's say if Japan wins an issue four to zero in points, their tension will go up by four. And if their tension maxes out, they instantly win. Right? So, so you're raising your opponent's tension, but if you raise it too much, they win outright because they essentially walk away from the negotiation table and they have all this adrenaline, you know? So you want to win, but you want to do it in a very subtle way. And sometimes winning the negotiation actually means losing. So. I really kind of liked that, the balance of that game. ⁓ the, the ⁓ Roosevelt player was pretty neat because he was really trying hard to, to broker deals between us. So I think, I think there's probably some negotiation in there that could happen, but it's not like a lifeboats negotiation. I was kind of hoping for something like that, but ⁓ if you're into like kind of quick playing card games with like historical theme, with some bluffing and brinksmanship. think Peace 1905 is, probably interest you quite a bit. And so is the game, it doesn't exist on a map, right? It's just kind of a, is it just cards? Is it just- It's just cards. There's like a little board in the middle to hold the cards, but you don't even need that. And there's a tension track that goes back and forth. ⁓ But yeah, it's all cards. Each player has a deck of cards that are symmetric. They're not asymmetric. So you know what- each other has, which I think it's better because you that's where like the bluffing kind of comes in. I know what you have and are you going to play that now? And yeah, so that sounds interesting. That sounds really having the third player, you know, be the peacemaker is really is a really interesting game idea. Yeah. Yeah. I think that made the game. You can play it with two players. But I think the that third of the three body problem kind of Elevated it to something that was a little ⁓ more exciting. So yeah All right. That was peace 1905 ⁓ I wanted to briefly talk about I have found myself in the Twilight Imperium for a sink world ⁓ So coming out of Domecon jr. We got my first taste of ti4. I was pretty hungry I was pretty hungry for more. I started trying to arrange a local play. I wanted to get six players for first ever play for everyone here locally, which is a chore to get six in our local group. It's just difficult. ⁓ I failed. We were supposed to do it actually in a week, didn't ever get to six. And then my son had like another school band thing come up and I was like, I just have to cancel the day altogether. whatever. Right. But in the meantime, someone over on the punch board paradise discord, it just had happened to say, I'm looking to get a TI four async group together. Is anyone here? curious about the game or are they TI4 fan that's always wanted to try async? And I was like, hey, I'm interested. I am a complete noob. I've played one game really poorly, but I'm interested in knowing what async can be for TI4, right? Because honestly, one of my impressions of TI4, and it could be a completely wrong impression, it's kind of a, you get to play in your own sandbox a lot in TI4. Like, It's a lot of min maxing what you've got, making a plan, going for it. Yeah, you're going to eventually smash into each other. like, I felt like I could, that would be useful ASIC, especially for me as a new player to be able to take the time to go Google rules that I didn't know existed or don't quite understand and yada, yada, yada. Now what I need is some rules enforcement, of course, as well. Right. So anyway, I got myself into this group with these people that I really I really don't know any of them. I've gamed with one of them once at PP con in the past. And we end up, they're like, I kind of felt like I got thrown, thrown to the sharks here because they're like, okay, we're going to do the draft and I'll kind of explain some of the pieces of, of async TI 40 you guys. So we're scheduled a live draft. I literally like type in the, in the chat, I'm like, what are we drafting? It was crazy though. I actually loved the draft despite having very little clue what was going on. We did like, it had a name. I forgot the name of the draft style, but we were drafting a faction. You could, it was a snake draft where you could pick a faction. You could pick your starting position on the map. You could pick your opening wedge of the map as one of your choices, or you could pick your, ⁓ if you wanted speaker or your relationship in seed order to speaker basically. Which was really cool like to do as a draft because all of those things are actually extremely valuable in their own different way. Like do you want to wait on your faction power to see what planets you end up around you? Do you want to go faction power first and then make everyone else kind of play defense? Of course, I don't know shit, you know, I just don't like. So I left my faction power for the end, cause I'm reading all of them and I don't know anything. Like, I don't know. I have to look up every factions, like special texts, every factions ships. don't, I don't know anything about anything. So I'm just flying blind basically. And these guys are in the chat. Bless their hearts, by the way. They have been very patient with, with noob me, but they're like, ⁓ they're just chatting. They're like, they're so over my head with what they're talking about. They're like, ⁓ he's going to take this and then we can't let him have this. And I feel like the guy who like says he wants to play TXX for the first time and like a bunch of sharks sit down at 1830 and they're like, ⁓ don't you let him have the CNA for that. What are you doing? You know, I don't know anything about what's going on. But then there's, I really want to talk about the async like discord thing that's happening here. So it exists in its own like discord forum. And then we exist in another one. It's called like Stroder's. What is this thing called? When he sent me the link to it, I was like, should I click this called Stroder's Paradise? I don't even know what it means. Your discord might get banned if you click that. So we're like in this Stroder's Paradise TI4 thing. I don't know who named that. I don't know what it is, but it's insane. The discord like bot thing that's happening is insane. There's a map that's populated. You can open it in browser. And then every time you do something, like, like, so say someone calls, you know, diplomacy, it'll pop open a new thread for diplomacy where everyone can choose to react with like buttons or not react. And if they react, they have to spend, you know, potentially spend a command token to do things or not do it trade. ⁓ my God makes my head want to explode because when you take trade, You have to like click all these commands to make deals, to wash tokens versus at the table where it's just like, you do it right. So, and the map is kind of like slow to slow to refresh. So you know how many trade goods you've actually like flipped and, ⁓ my, it's, it's a lot. is like, where it's been 41, ⁓ in the sheet, in the spreadsheets that you guys use the book. It's probably not worse than that. It's probably not worse than that. But it's a different kind of overwhelming for a new player. You know, I joined this because I just wanted the ability to hammer home the mechanics, the reasons to do things. Right. I don't care if I get completely dumpstered. I'm trying to hammer home, ⁓ capacity and movement and just understanding everything. These guys are trying to win. Right. And so I know I'm going to get my ass kicked. ⁓ I'm enjoying it. But it's, it's a lot. It's a big, big ask. is doable on mobile, but I would, I feel completely overwhelmed if I try to look at it on my phone, because you have to like bounce back and forth from the discord to the browser view. And it's just, it's too much. I I've got to the point where I'm like, I'm only taking turns at PC guys. I'm going to be slow. ⁓ you got to deal with it. There's a ton of like, where you can bank your decisions essentially. like so-and-so calls trade. You don't have to react right now, but before you take your next turn, the game is going to tell you, Hey, you never reacted to if you want to follow trade. By the way, after someone called trade, somebody called leadership and you, you need to react if you want to do that, which is it all kind of gets a little hand wavy too, because I shouldn't get to my turn and know that three of you called these things that I need to follow before deciding if I was going to follow the first one, you know, and that's just kind of a concession of the of the format, I think. And then there's like some serious meta. Like these guys were like, and I'm not talking shit. Like they say, like, if you play async TI four, there's, there's an expectation that for the first round or two, we're all going to wash and be friendly with each other. And so everyone gets to do everything. I'm like, that sits so poorly with me, just as a gamer to say, like, if we're going to do that, why don't we just give, give everyone six trade goods and start the game. Like, you know what I mean? Like why they're essentially telling me I'm forced to, to wash that person because that's what we do here. Right. And again, they are not being aggressive or dismissive or anything like that. So I'm trying to be fair to them. If any of them listen, I'll probably tell them that I talked about it here because it's fun to hear people talk about games here. Right. But we're only in round two. Hey, I did score a point in round one. I was going to ask, what's the points at right now? And I'm going to score a point in round two. And my secret objective opening draw was complete shit. I hate it. was control mech, it's all Rex, which for a new player is an incredibly daunting suggestion. And then the other was build off, build five dreadnoughts. I'm like, on bro. Like I got things to do. So I took it. kept build five dreadnoughts and now I'm just. going to be trying to spam my dreadnoughts when I get a chance, which is so expensive. And I basically just ran out and gathered planets because the first objective was four planets of the same trait or whatever. And I was like, I could make that happen around one, even if I my ass kicked in round two. And I have already lost a planet in round two. And people are going to start just absolutely chopping my legs out from under me. And I'm just going to be along for the ride, taking my time. It's, definitely cool. We'll see how I feel after 10 rounds of this. ⁓ if it's something I'm going to be willing to do going forward, ⁓ it's, it's, it's, it's overwhelming. It's daunting and it's incredibly technologically impressive what the bot and system can do. It's not like fully rules enforced. Like it will let me violate capacity when moving things, but it will have a pop-up says, Hey, you are violating capacity. If you don't resolve it, you're going to be expected to kill those units, right? But it doesn't make me do it. So if you were in a game with like six newbies on here, I imagine you'd just be breaking rules left and right, because you wouldn't have someone there to be like, Hey, remember that pop up? You did not do what you need to do with that. So, so it's cool. It's cool. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you like TI four. I don't know if I liked TI four. I know that I enjoyed, I enjoyed my one. thing on it. And I'm, I will never probably play it at a con again, because I don't want to do that. I don't want to give away a full day to one game. I just don't want to do that. So I'm trying to find alternate avenues to find out if it's a game for me, right? Yeah, when I saw my saw ti for async on the show notes, I was gonna give you shit. But I can't because I just finished an arcs bloated roach as they're calling it campaign with a Yeah, with Derek and Corey. I have no room to talk and that was a thing, but. All right. Well, that's TI four. Cool. Yeah. So the last game, um, I mean, you said it so eloquently. I don't think I could pronounce it, but, uh, it is a Das Ferd, Troy, Troja, um, DAS PF ERD TROJ. I think it is. And it's the Trojan horse. Um, this game's dumb. I mean, but I was attracted to it for a couple of reasons. One is Alex Randolph. And I do like to explore his games like Diver, Boatine, Stop, that one that you were playing and several others. And it's got this like big dumb plastic horse in the middle of the board that you play with. It's just that the toy factor is pretty neat. But I was looking at BGG and it says children's game. I think it's You can definitely play it with kids, I think there's a little more to it than that. ⁓ Essentially it's area control, ⁓ but the gimmick is this horse and there's four colors and each player has their own color. And there's, definitely a memory game too, but the horse can hide two of these little pawns and you stuff them in there on your turn. ⁓ But the amount you stuff in, so there's like a random selection on the side of the board that you pull out of a bag, like four to pick from. And you have, and there's cards numbered one to three. And on your turn, you're just going to guess. You're going to say two, right? And then you turn a card over and if your number was lower than that, then you win. But if it was, if I said three and it was a two, I bust and I don't get to put any pawns out. That's kind of silly, but that's the way it works. If I get the right number, I get to take that many pawns and push them in the horse. So in the top of the horse, there's like a hole and on the bottom of the horse, there's a hole, like think the Trojan horse. But before I, before you push a pawn into the horse, you, you direct it towards one of the areas on the map, because there's like six or seven areas with a number on them. And then you push down and it like, pops one out. that's where you're putting it. So you kind of have to remember. ⁓ what's going to pop out because you're putting that pawn in the space to contribute towards the area control. That's awesome. Yeah. And then each area has a number and that's the points it gets, but then there's also cards that you randomly put out in each area that have a number. So at end of the game, you flip those cards over and then that'll contribute to the points. Are those, are those surprise or have players been putting them there? They are surprised unless you turn over a trident, then you get to look at a card. Or something yeah something like that so you may know ⁓ But what I really like is the way the area control works is at the end of the game if there's a tie like if red and blue have five Yellow has four and green has two yellow wins, right? So like the most tied cancel each other out and the second most would win the area ⁓ So yeah, I mean it's like it's not like a phenomenal game or anything, but it's like it's from 1992. It's got a big plastic horse You get to push things in a hole and they jump out of another hole. I mean, how could you go wrong? You know, so it's not going to help the people who say dome just plays children games from the nineties from Germany. Yeah, it's a yeah. Well, you know, it looks awesome. want to play. Yeah, it's pretty neat. The box is ridiculous. It's like roads and boats size box. Yeah. Also the cover. It's like, looks like Charlton Heston, like down here at the bottom. it's a very like weird, weirdly like lifelike cinematic, like illustration of a man down here. then just Romans in the background, like running into a building. Yeah, it's, it's ridiculous. Oh yeah. If you get a chance to try it, it's, it's, I think it's worth a couple of plays. So, um, but speak. So, okay. So speaking of old dusty games, just. had a quick anecdote that you know about sort of. So when I was at Circle DC and I had shared this information with James and Steve in our little 41 ⁓ chat and James had encouraged me to kind of bring it up real quick on the podcast. I think my exact words were, are you comfortable doing some name dropping when we record? I'm not super comfortable, but it's okay. I just cause yeah, whatever. But so anyway, I was at Circle DC and I It's crazy. Like I had I got to have dinner with Cole Whirly, which is nuts. Like, you know, I love Cole and it was I was it was wild by the time I was done with it. But anyway, he had said a couple of things I think might be interesting to dome. So. We had I brought up Verat for some reason, and like he he moved his conversation and me and him just talked for like 45 minutes because all he wants to talk about was like old German games. And I swear to God, he said. My favorite thing on board game geek are games from the nineties with a 6.3 rating. I knew Cole was one of us. just And I was like, it's like he must listen, you know, like it was awesome. I didn't say that to him, but like it was just really cool. And like, I think you mentioned James in the, in the discord a week or two ago about interviewing people and sounding like Chris Farley with the Beatles. Yeah. It wasn't like that. Thank God. Like he was super humble. He's asking me like where I was from, but so I was, I was worried about that too, you know? ⁓ But here's a tip. So he did tell me about a game I never heard of before, and it's called Aqueduct. A-Q-U-A-D-U-K-T. And he claims it's very good, just like the games we were talking about. So if anyone wants to try it, it's got the whole-worldly stamp of approval. I feel like I have heard somebody name drop this at some point. Discord or something. I'm gonna have to go search and see 2005 aqueduct Bernard Weber. Hmm. Yeah. I read some of the reviews and they didn't excite me too much just based on what they said. Not because they were bad, but just what people's experience was, but that's usually a good sign. You know, I said, six needs to stay in the sixes. So we got to have some haters in the comments. So you'll see what I mean if you read them. It's more like, it was a friendly light tile layer and stuff like that. So yeah. But I don't know. He said it was, it was really good. So hidden jam. ⁓ so that's pretty cool. mean, think you said Cole drew early as well. And yeah, and Mark Herman, Mark Herman, pretty cool dinner there. like, was, it was wild, man. Like it's, didn't know make a wish was doing board game seriously. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Congrats on the fun, ⁓ fun con weekend. And that's a pretty cool cherry on top. for the whole thing. Yeah, it was really neat. Okay. Well, that is recent plays a lot of them and let's talk about our main topic. So when I invited John to come on the show, I kind of reached out and said, you know, what do you want to talk about basically? What would be an interesting topic to you to kind of direct towards the domers or just put out there? What haven't we talked about on the show that you listened to that we should talk about? And he mentioned building a gaming group and That can be a, you know, over the years of dads on a map, which has always kind of started its roots as a place for literally, it was a bunch of dads getting together who mostly we didn't have enough time to game or we didn't have the people to game with, or we didn't have the group to game with. How many times do you see people in the discord say, you know, I wish I had a group that I could play this with. And so it is a real struggle and problem. Even someone like me who has been lucky enough to have a devoted group. for most of my time in the hobby, you know, there's weeks at a time where I'm just like, I wish I had other people to try to play with when my people can't play. you know, John is living, breathing proof that you could put in the work to make this happen, I guess, right? So I thought we'd talk about that today and his experiences, my experiences, and hopefully it lends itself to those of you who are listening and can help you with your experiences as well. Yeah. Yeah. Before I kind of go into it, just, I do want to say like, I know not everybody's situation is the same. I'm, I feel very grateful for the opportunity to like be around people who want to play games with me. ⁓ And I know that not everyone may have access to that stuff. I live in the Northeast. I do live in New Hampshire, which is very sparse, but still there are, there's a population around here. ⁓ But one thing I do hear from people often is that they have no one to game with. And that may be true, but I hope to give some tips that maybe will be helpful to really start to attract some people to come play games. So kind of what put me on, and by the way, I have a local game group and it has nothing to do with heavy cardboard. They're completely separate. So that's a special, unique situation I'm also grateful for. My local game group is not involved in that at all. That's an hour away. This I get to host at my house, right? So ⁓ when I got into gaming, I was like Googling two player games to play with my wife. Like I had no interest in board games. I was looking for like gift ideas and I got a game called Morels. It's like a little mushroom card game. And I just like instantly got me, I was hooked. Like I just wanted to figure out everything that had to do with board games. ⁓ But you know, after some time, ⁓ started, I got into heavy games pretty quickly. I kind of skipped a lot of like the medium and light games ⁓ that you would think the Dice Tower specials, you know, those types of games. But I wanted to branch out and meet more people who are gaming. And we go to like local cafes or I go on meetup and go to other people's houses. And it just, I just wasn't having the experience that I wanted, right? They weren't playing the types of games that like were interesting to me. ⁓ So I really like dedicated ⁓ my time in the hobby to kind of cultivating or curating the experience that like I really wanted myself, right? I was not passive about it. I am still actively aggressive. And you'll see what I mean when I talk about that. ⁓ But the first thing I did was I made a meetup group, right? And that meetup is an app that you can, that's free to download. ⁓ You can post information in there, but It wasn't just like a board game meetup group. It was very specific type of game, right? At the time it was heavy games, right? I was really into like, like heavier games at the time, right? And I still am, but that's kind of where it started. And I put it out there. And the reason that's important is because those are the types of people that I want to play with. And it's not just like a generic game night. And people started to show up, right? ⁓ And I think that, I think that one is still kind of hanging out there, but that just brings me to ⁓ another point. So when ⁓ that started taking off, I have a discord, right? And I think what's really important about having like a discord to organize this on or Slack or whatever you prefer is that you're consistent, right? Like I'm constantly in there. I'm talking to people, the people that start to come. ⁓ I really start to kind of create a community the best I can. That way people know that like it's always available, right? I think like having a consistent ⁓ experience is really important to people because they're not going to be able to come every week. But if they know it's there, then ⁓ they're more likely to like engage in it, right? It's not like this fleeting kind of ⁓ superfluous thing that kind of disappears. fear of I have always in my time in the hobby, like started the same as you with my wife playing two player games, like we got to play something lucked into a player three, basically, my sister had a friend who she's like, I have a friend who really likes board games to brought him into the fold, right? And then found a player for through through work at the time that player disappeared. Luckily around the same time Scott found me through dads on a map, right? And that kind of made my group, my wife kind of dropped out. It was like, cool. I don't have to play games anymore. You have people to play with now, but I have always been fearful, I guess is the right word of like recruiting from the public. Um, not fearful for my safety and anything like that. Fearful of finding people that I am not going to jive with. Right? Like I, I don't know. Like I have a specific personality and I don't really want to adapt. This sounds very, very rude and greedy. I don't really want to adapt for a bunch of weirdos I've never met before, but I suppose if the option is don't play games, right. You have to be willing to have some concessions in that regard. Have you, I mean, I'm not looking for horror stories or anything, but you know, as What's the hit rate like of these like recruits? I guess if you want to call it that. It's pretty low, right? ⁓ And it's interesting how it's evolved over time. So I, some of them may listen to this and that's fine. But ⁓ it's my gaming group started out very broad for the reasons you said I wanted to be able to like, it was heavy games, obviously, but I wanted to be able to meet people and kind of form a little community. But over time, over the years, it's really, really refined to my taste. And I have lost some people as result of that, which is fine. You're like, I like, I don't think anybody should engage in a hobby that they're, that they're conceding to. It's like, I know that you may have to do that and I will do that ⁓ anytime. I'm not like a psychopath, you know, but I also think it's okay. if you're hosting, be very upfront about like what your expectations are. Right. So the other way I found gamers too, is as my tastes have kind of more. transition to historical war games and 18xx and cube rails and stuff like that. I have other meetup groups that are just always on. Right. So it says like a train game of the month club. I think I have one. I have a queen game one and they're essentially dead. Right. But every, every like couple of months someone joins. Right. And it's just like kind of having like a fishing line out and that's really helpful because I messaged them. On my meetup page, you'll see that we organize on discord, send me a DM and I'll get your information. And then once they're in the discord, they know exactly what they're getting into. Right. It's not like this. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's amorphous. Like maybe it's euros. Maybe we're playing obsession tonight. Maybe it's, you know, I don't know. Rates for the galaxy. Yeah. Like you said, you grab them, you pull them into discord where there's now a central meeting place. Like so often even doing my weekly like game group. text, we text, right? Send out this group text that half the people don't even respond to. And I'm like, what are we doing? Why does this even exist? to try to like, and we've all been there where you're trying to arrange a game night through four different mediums where you're like, well, I know this person in person, so I'm going to tell them, Hey, on Tuesday, we're at a game. I'll text this guy because he responds to text. know Scott responds to DMs, discord, right? At least you try to pull it all into one place. I think is a brilliant. brilliant idea. And if you're the one who creates it and just sends the link, it's like, this is where we're at. This is where we're at. You know, that's where it's centralized discord. Like you said, I do hash people quite a bit. Like I don't, if I haven't met you in person, I do do my own investigation, right? Because like there are security concerns too, obviously, you know? ⁓ but, this is where it gets a little weird, but I still think you can do this too. I, I'll cold call gamers too. Like it's not unlike I'm trying to find a used rare game. Like I'll do the same thing, but there's a function on BGG where you can look for people who are local to you. And I've just sent geek mail to random people, just like if they look at their, their game collection, if it looks like it might jive with what I'm doing, then I'll send them a message and I'll tell them like, you I host and are you interested? And out of 10, maybe one of them is good. But that's all you need. You only need a few people, right? So I have 50 people in my discord now and there's about 12 to 15 regulars, which is pretty sweet. ⁓ there's another way. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. John's over here like Joe Goldberg from you. He's like, he's like looking you up on VGG and he's like, Hey, I saw you go to the gym by my house. I thought I saw a copy of a, there was a copy of a carcassone in your back window of your car. You look at to play it sometime. Well, I know you're joking, but like I would do that. Like if it's another thing that I've done too is like if people are selling games around here, which, know, I'll look at local marketplaces or even on VGG. Uh, one of my regulars to play, I play war games with he had a game for sale. I've done that. He was in the town over. I met him. I told him about the game group and now he's in, you know, so it's just, it's like, I'm always just seeking those opportunities. Right. I'm so anti-social. I have bought games from people ⁓ on Facebook Marketplace and things like that and met up and they'll say things like, ⁓ yeah, it's a good game. Like, let me know if you want to play sometime. But I don't even give that a second thought. I think it's because I spent so much of my adult life working in service and hospitality surrounded by people. I have grown to hate people. Like I hate 99 % of the people walking around outside every day for a variety of reasons. And it has, it has made it so hard for me to like, to open myself to new people like, that. So I applaud you actually. Well, you're going to make me sound really bad. I hesitate to say this, but hopefully people understand this. I'm an introvert. I, I don't, I like the social aspect. My wife loves it a lot more. She likes to host. But I really just want to play games, right? Like, like I am transactional in that way. And again, I hope that doesn't sound terrible, but like everyone knows that everybody that I play with is the same way. Like we like each other and we care about each other, but like at the end of the day, we just want to play the games and we can't do that without each other. You know, so that kind of pushes me over the social awkwardness edge. Are are you like me where you're at a game night and people start in with like the, ⁓ what's going on at work? this, this week. And I'm like, bro, we're here to play games. Yes. I'm such a jerk. There's a, I don't know. ever watch curvy enthusiasm? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Larry, David talks about shy versus asshole, you know, and like, sound like an app. I'm just bad at small talk. just, I love you. I'm just not super interested. know, so we're going to along just fine. Yeah. Yeah. Not talking, right? Yeah. So, ⁓ But yeah, so I mean, and I think that's important. And as far as the consistency goes to the other thing I don't like to do, man, this is like just sounding bad now, but I don't like coming to a game night and everyone's like, what do you want to play? Right. And we do like the, what do you want to play for like 25 minutes? You know? So, ⁓ and I don't think other people like that either because everyone kind of has social anxiety. So we always pick the game prior to the Saturday. Everyone knows what's happening. We know it starts starting at four o'clock. I'm like the, you know, like the soup Nazi, right? It's like, it's right now we're starting right now, you know? Now you say we always pick the game. Does that mean you always pick the game? Now ⁓ I only mean that like half joking because people lack assertiveness when it comes to this. And if no one's going to step up and be assertive, I'm just going to do it because I want us to at least have a plan. Yeah. So part of the community building is I had a very democratic process for a long time. We would rotate who picks we would vote we would kind of talk about it but they've made it kind of clear to me that they just want to come and play and they've given me a lot of like Just authority I guess you could say to give options right and because they know what I like they know we're like this weekend We're playing 1894 for example like they just want to be kind of like suggested a couple things and play it because they there's trust there Which is nice, you know ⁓ yeah, so that's, that's been really good. I think the other thing too, to just, just kind of remember, cause I know it can get frustrating. Like you were talking about the hit rate. ⁓ you just got to keep reaching out to them and pinging to them, ⁓ pinging people. And if they stop showing up, that's totally fine. You know, it's, it's not personal. I try not to get frustrated about it. I do get insecure. You know, it's like, ⁓ man, maybe they didn't like what was going on at the house or maybe I said something wrong, but. ⁓ but that's okay. And I do let people know what's to expect. Like I have three kids. I have pets. It gets loud in here. It's not like a library all the time. And I'm pretty upfront about that. ⁓ so they don't get to complain, you know, if that's the environment. you mostly game at home other than like heavy cardboard, you know, trips and stuff. Yep. Yeah. I host here. ⁓ too. That's, mean, I, I say, do we we've actually less we've been playing at my house less, but always at somebody's house. am, I am like the most anti public meetup person ever. Mainly, mainly for the noise, like trying to have a successful game teach or even game session of a heavy game or a longer game or negotiation game is just so tough in the confines of like. a game cafe that's serving food and drinks and people are walking by and you have to fight for table space. And that is just not my scene at all. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's frustrating. That's, that's what kind of motivated me to do what I just talked about, right? ⁓ so yeah, so I think just like, just, yeah, just being honest and kind of going out your way to find people. Like, I know it sounds crazy to cold call gamers, but like, it's like Pokemon. Like I do try and catch them all. You know, I really do. Like there's a there's someone in dome named ⁓ St. Arcturus. He's a local and he knew I was playing cube rails and that's all he wants to do here and that's that's perfect. You know, so that's he comes for those those nights. your wife ever like think you're like a sociopath or something with your like black book of all these different like groups and people and or like first I'll start with that question. I'll start with that question. A little bit, but she plays too. So I am, I am happy about that. She, yeah. But she did get a man. You're pulling some stuff out of me. I probably shouldn't say, but like she likes to host a Christmas board game party every year. Um, or it's just Christmas board games. And if you've played those before their Christmas board, right. Um, and I like it. I, but when I said like, I'm transactional with the game, she was like, Oh my God. Like, you know, cause she wants to be social and party and stuff. So the other question. is like, yeah, I was gonna ask, there's like a sketch, you know, it's probably a common sketch on the internet, where like the wife will ask the husband like, be like, oh, actually, Mark broke up with his broke up with his fiance called off the engagement. And she's like, why? You're like, I don't know why. Like, you don't ask? Like, you don't know anything about your friends? Like, she ever give you one of those two, you don't know anything about these people other than Yeah. I know his number one game is brass. I could tell you that. Yeah. I think she's probably taken it back by my, by that for sure. Yeah. But I am lucky that she, she knows it's important to me. Right. So if it's important, I demonstrate it's important to me. I don't watch a lot of TV. It's my hobby. So I'm pretty involved. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. It's my hobby. Yeah. Yeah. That and disc golf, but in disc golf, disc golf, can play alone board games. I don't believe you can. No, you can. ⁓ another thing that's cool, I'll throw this into is we, think because of that community, we have a break off community in my discord where one of my members, Jesus, ⁓ one of the members, ⁓ he hosts a online Blood on the Clock Tower every month. ⁓ And he's been able to drum up interest for that over the past almost two years now, which is pretty cool. Cool. That's really interesting. It's really... You know, like I said, I've always existed from this place of frankly, privilege that like I got lucky enough to have a group right away. And I've been fortunate, I guess, through my work with dads on a map. If want to call it that to kind of keep recruits coming because I Scott joined my group and he's, you know, we play almost every week, every time we play generally, Scott is there. I had another guy joined the group, Seth, who played, he was at DomeCon a few years. He, he dropped out of the group. And he said, I am quitting board games. Okay. So either somebody here pissed him off and we didn't know it, or he Jen genuinely was just like, I'm not getting anything out of this anymore. He didn't have any more information to give. ⁓ I am the kind of person in life. And I have come to this point through probably through some personal traumas, honestly, that won't get unearthed here. But when someone doesn't want to be here, I am not the kind of person to make. to try to drag them back in, right? Right. ⁓ yeah, you shouldn't be. No, I want to be surrounded by people who want to do something and ⁓ I'm not gonna put myself out trying to pull people to do something. So like I said, when people don't respond to the group text, you're not gonna get an individual text from me too. It was going, hey, why aren't you coming? That's not me. That's not my life. You can only control one person in your life and it's you, right? ⁓ try to do what I can do to make this hobby happen for me and my, my group, but I can't drag people here and you, know that as well. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you're honest with your intentions, like what kind of games you like, what the environment's going to be like, it's going to, you know, we're going to be playing interactive games and it's competitive. You might piss people off and they may not come back, but when the people stay, that's like the best. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. You put in the work and I think hearing those. ideas, concepts, things you've done. Like that can really help people who just throw their hands up and say, there's no one for me to game with. Right. John just gave me like four things I've never even thought of doing that you can try to try to find people. Yeah. You know, just before you invite them in your house, make sure you know who they are at all. Cool. That's a good chat. Hopefully it's helpful. I think it will be. I think it will be. ⁓ hopefully I'm not going to be in a position where I have to start recruiting anytime soon, but, ⁓ you know, even me locally, like there are 18 X X groups that I try to get in and play 18 X X regularly with. ⁓ You know, I just haven't, I haven't put in the work so I could feel, you know, what a lot of people feel that it's like, if you put in the work, you can make it happen. But then it's like, you know how it is when you have two or three young kids, your gaming opportunities continue to shrink and shrink and shrink. And it's funny when you like first have a young kid, it's like, I can't do anything. Cause I don't have any time just cause I'm like trying to keep this little human from killing itself all the time, right. Around the house and whatever. But then like your kids hit like high school and it's like, I don't have any time because every day of the week I have a different thing to go. I've heard you say that a few times. my God. It's brutal. Mine are seven, three and one and a half. So I don't know about that yet. It is a different kind of world. like, yeah, but I love it. I love my life. I love my kids. I love my family. I love my game group. So I couldn't be happier. So all good here. And I love you dads on a map and I can't wait to see you in August at dome con John and everybody else. Yeah. That's some kind of segue to the end of the show. I Um, all right, John, it was a blast getting you here on the show, getting to talk with you. We can do it again for sure. Whenever, the mood strikes. Cause I'm always looking to fill this seat of a rotating co-host. So if anyone else wants to jump on the show and chat about something that's fresh on your mind, I'd love to hear from you and uh, Love to chat about it too. Hopefully John or I have not offended you through any of our group anecdotes today. I think he's talking about me. But it's going we go back to smashing 41. Yep. If you need me or John, we will be in our thread playing our 17th game of 1841 in the last two months. Pretty good. John just got his first win. I got my first win. growth. think growth is happening. I don't know. We got to ask Steve about that growth because he said the other day, I don't even know what I'm doing. I'm just pushing buttons. I'm like, bro, this is like game 16. I think we should be done with the pushing buttons phase here. Let's try. Let's try. All right, John. Well, thanks again for coming on everyone. Chubb on dads on a map.com for all information about the discord, Patreon, ⁓ find a link to Domecon information. Come see me and John. We'll have a great time playing with a giant plastic horses and other children's games from Germany. Well, you all play real board games. John, thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, James.