Invention Playlist 3: Board Games, Part 2

Board games have only grown in variety and complexity in recent decades, but just how far back in time do these curious physical simulations go? In this episode of Invention, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick consider the meeples of ancient history.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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(01:27):
welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and I'm
Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our
discussion of the invention of board games. Now. In the
last episode, we talked a lot about the i the
idea of what play is and what games are and
how they emerge from our biology, and the fact that
this is still an open question. We talked about a

(01:49):
lot of the evidence in the theories about why why
play exists in animals, what purpose it serves, if it
might be biologically adaptive in one way or another, the
idea of that maybe it trains us for future skills,
that maybe it signals fitness, that maybe it makes us
more versatile and able to deal with unexpected events, and
all kinds of things like that. We also talked about

(02:11):
theories about why abstracted versions of play like board games emerged.
That maybe it was in order to sublimate a competitive
instinct that could be violent if not given an outlet
like games, Yeah, don't punch each other in the face,
play Little rockham Stock and robots instead, uh yeah. And
and then also the idea that there is a deep

(02:32):
inherent link between board games the earliest known board games
and the practice of divination or sort of ledge, where
you might do things like cast lots to figure out
the will of the gods, or answer a question by
consulting some type of pseudo random object or event. You know,
you throw knucklebones and see what the gods are telling you,
or consult the each ing, and that these kinds of

(02:55):
things could have given way to board games that also
involved casting of lots or rolling of knucklebones to see
how many spaces you get to move on the board, right,
and we see that legacy continue in modern games. The
Mystery Day, the Game of Life that we already mentioned,
and though this is not technically a game, it is
still kind of lumped into the same similar category. Certainly

(03:15):
something you can buy at a toy store, but the
magic eight ball. The magic eight ball is a toy
that is obviously just overtly a divination tool, but one
that as uh I would say, usually uh I don't know.
I would say that even as a kid when I
used to magic eight ball, there was a sense of
wanting it to be real, like there was a you

(03:36):
leaned into the magic, into the the sort of the
divine aspect of the practice, even though you knew that
this was was not actually a you know, a hotline
to the fates, or that God had anything to do
with what was happening in the ball Robert, do you
hear that? Yeah? Whoa? What is that? Something kind of

(03:58):
cutting in cuttle Cat's cuttlefish to the second oil age
and he's kingdom with wir of darkness. I don't dispute
the eurostata, but if he's down here, not blood but darkness,
the earth's black riches. No, I could taste it on

(04:20):
my lips. Today, I want to talk to you about
the science of transgenesis, trims, genesis, dot show. No, I
guess it's gone now. Maybe it wasn't anything. Yeah, yeah,
I just heard like a high pitched, like like glitchy noise. Robert,

(04:45):
you've got a bit of blood in the owner of
your eye. Oh my goodness. I yeah, I'm I'm bleeding
from roma. I want to get cleaned up here and
we can keep going. I'm good, I'm good. Well, if
I can get off topic for just a second here.
Of course, I do think that there actually is that
the eight Hall and other divination methods like the Wigia
board and all that you know, we we can laugh
at like the strict religious authorities and adults who say,

(05:08):
don't fool around with the wage board. You know you're
inviting demons in. Or they might say the same thing
about the magic eight ball. On one hand, that's kind
of funny. But on the other hand, of course, I'm
not suggesting like real spiritual demons actually come in and
possess you if you play with the Wegi board. I
do think playing with a Wigia board can be kind
of dangerous because it suggests a divinatory frame of mind,

(05:31):
even if you don't go in believing in it. I
bet you've had this experience of playing around with something
like this not believing it has any real magical power.
But then once you've played the game, you kind of
start to wonder, and it tempts you, attempts you to
think in terms of fate, in terms of like the
intervention of of other otherworldly forces in your life. If

(05:53):
you play with it enough, I can see how it
could really suck your mind into that cast of thinking,
which can be harmful. Well even just um just you know,
marginal exposure to something to that kind of thinking can
have an effect. I think back to the episode of
Stuff to Blow your mind. We did on the Chinese
zodiac and uh, you know, with the lunar calendar, the

(06:13):
different zodiac animals associated with each year, and the sort
of the the the loose too complicated characteristics that are
aligned with individuals born in each year, and how you
saw you when you look at the birth statistics, you
see this this bump uh during the years of the Dragon,
the most auspicious year. And and one of the things

(06:35):
that we found is that this didn't you didn't see
this occurring because necessarily people were just like hardcore Chinese
astrology believers, but that they were there were other things,
probably more important things of impacting their their choices, But
then this thing was in the background, like a casual
understanding of the zodiac, and then that ended up perhaps

(06:58):
the argument is um uh influencing their choices. So just
having something like the the eight ball or the Luigi board,
or astrology or whatever supernatural model you want to lean on,
just having it there in the background can conceivably be
enough to to tweak your choices, you know. And I
wonder if this can be extended into partially explaining why

(07:19):
games of chance have sometimes historically and even sometimes by
by a few people today, been considered dangerous because if
there is this kind of danger, you know, even if
there aren't really spirits that are gonna come mess with you,
there is a kind of danger in setting your mind
to the cast of thinking that is encouraged by divination methods,
and that rolling dice to play a game of chance

(07:42):
is in a way a form of divination. It is
kind of a slightly abstracted sortilage practice. Now, I also
want to remind everybody, since it, you know, may have
been a week since you listen to the last episode,
we're going to talk a little bit as we continue
about sort of the what I'm thinking of the three
corners of gaming. So you're gonna have themchanics of the game.
That's the rules, the system of rules that dictate how

(08:03):
it's played, the skeleton, the skeleton yah, who wins, how
they win, etcetera. Then you have the fluff, which, especially
in modern games, this is the story, the characters, the setting,
the illustration, illustrations. And then you have the material aspect
of it, which could be as simple as a board
and some sort of you know, a dice, or it

(08:24):
is something more elaborate like it requires a poplematic bubble,
or you know, the battleships set requires this whole plastic interface, etcetera.
The Omega virus robots that talks to you, and or
the videotape you put in with the you the one
who is moving now right, Or there are a lot
of games you know nowadays, or there are a lot
of games that have just required timers. You need that hourglass, right,

(08:47):
But a lot of games now that either have a
timing element or something more complicated than that will require
you to use an app which which can also be
used to great effect. Well, I think we should then
try to turn our attention to what is the earliest
known evidence of physical apparatus for for these types of
abstract games like board games. What's the earliest evidence we

(09:09):
have that somebody was playing something like a board game. Well,
when you start diving back through history, you find that
some of the what is considered the earliest archaeological evidence
for board games pops up in the Neolithic Middle East
around seven thousand BC. Wow, board games nine thousand years ago.
But this would have been the time in which individuals

(09:33):
living in this region. We're beginning to find social leisure
and security on a regular basis for the first time.
So they were feeling safe enough, they were feeling secure
enough in you know, how much food they had available
that they had, say, you know, a few minutes in
the afternoon to scratch some a grid into the dirt
and maybe move a few pebbles around. Now, I would

(09:55):
think a grid scratched into the dirt would not survive
nine thousand years. So what is the physical evidence we
have that people were playing games like this at the time. Well,
that is one of the key the key challenges because
we tend to find what might be the boards or
the pieces, and sometimes it can be difficult to figure
out exactly what we're looking at. You know. Indeed, if

(10:15):
it's something as simple as pegs and stones or little
holes drilled in stones, or some sort of a grid
and stones, there was a fair amount of interpretation figuring
out why people made these marks. Um And certainly we're
not going to find anything like the rules for ancient game.
If if you have a game that is predating written language,
there is no rule book to go by. It would

(10:38):
have just been an oral tradition. So it's not always
easy to say yes this was probably part of a game.
This was something that served litteral or no purpose outside
of leisure. For instance, there's the Neolithic Beta site, which
dates back to somewhere between seventy two hundred and sixty
b C. And it's near Petra, Jordan's Uh and this

(10:59):
is one of many ancient sites where we have we
find stone slabs with three parallel rows of regular holes,
and this might have been an early precursor to Mancala okay,
which is of course one of the world's most ancient
games and one that we still find versions of throughout
the world. You can usually buy it at a store

(11:20):
or even I remember a version of Mancola got popular
at my school. I think when I was in I
don't know, something like sixth grade. Does that sound about right, Yeah,
I think that it has comebacks occasionally. Yeah. Yeah, it's
one of these you just see. I don't think I've
ever owned a copy, but you you see it around
like it's for something with such ancient origins, it's still

(11:40):
very much alive. Basically, it involves like you get to
go along a series of holes or impressions, dropping in
seeds or stones one at a time, and like counting
out the number of places you get to go. Right,
it's generally the colored beads nowadays, but but the older
model would have probably used seeds or beans, and this
might reveal its origins as a fertility ritual for early

(12:04):
agricultural societies. Again getting into a little bit into the
divination and a little get into the magical perhaps origins
of games. That's really interesting the idea. Yeah, so seeds, agriculture,
and fertility, but also having perhaps some kind of divinatory
role exactly. Yeah, and uh, these were pretty wide widespread,
to the point that men calla games are are even

(12:26):
a whole category of ancient games in some classifications. Now
there are different classifications for for games and board games
that you'll find depending on who the scholar is that's
doing the analysis. But for instance, Harold James Ruthan Murray
is one of the individuals who categorized games, and he said, okay,
well we have men calla games, that's a category. But

(12:48):
then he had other games, for instance, alignment and configuration games.
The most obvious example of this is tic tac toe
Connect four Connect four I think would probably count basic
principles the same. You have war games of course, the
classic example there is chess, But you can throw in
your warhammer games, you can throw in your risk games.

(13:11):
I mean, these are all essentially games that simulate warfare.
Then they're hunting games. I don't think I've played one
of these, or at least I don't think I have.
But Fox and Geese is an example that pops up
in different cultures. This was the hardest category for me
to understand. I think maybe it involves sort of like
collecting pieces, like you compete to collect them or something. Yeah,

(13:31):
it kind of makes more sense if you if you
look at a picture of it. So if you do
a search for fox and Geese games, you'll see some
some images. Then there are race games, and the prime
example here is backgammon. I don't think I've ever played backgammon,
so I don't actually know how you do it. Well,
it's it's a pretty ancient game that but is also
apparently a descendant of the two row Roman dice game

(13:53):
twelve lines, which itself was based on older forms of
the same mechanic. This is something you see with a
lot of these games. It's just this continual evolution of form.
Games are passed on almost virally from culture to culture,
and new spins are put on them because for a
certain to a certain extent, especially when they're when it's
just oral tradition. Uh, you know, it's going it's like

(14:14):
a game of telephone, but with the game rules levels
of complexity and simplification altering across the centuries. Yeah. I
think that's one of the key insights of the study
of games is that games that just are not fixed,
they always change. Yeah, Like even something like Monopoly, which
we'll we'll get into more later, but it's easy for me,
especially to think, Okay, Monopoly, is this awful game that

(14:37):
never changes. Oh yeah, we learned that last time you
hate Monopoly. Hate Monopoly. Yeah, you go to the store
and there's some new version of Monopoly and it's the
same version of Monopoly, different pictures. They just tweaked the
fluff like that. You can even get Warhammer Monopoly, Star
Wars Monopoly. Yeah. But but even but I say that,
but deuced Bigelow Monopoly. I say this, but I was

(14:59):
just talking to Scott Benjamin, who helped us research this episode,
and he pointed out that actually, you do see evolution
in Monopoly. There's a millennial Monopoly that came out where
they've altered the rules, not only the fluff, but the
rules itself to indicate that you're not you're not buying things,
you're renting things. And then of course there there's also
like a card game based of Monopoly, there are other

(15:21):
games with the same franchise and similar fluff. Wait a minute,
if you're renting them, how do you how do you
what do your sublease when people land on your tiles
on the board. I don't know. Uh, community chest is
replaced with like take a puff of the jewel. Well,
as long as the as long as the game ends
the same way all Monopoly games, and and that is

(15:42):
with friends mad at each other, that's all that counts.
That's not my experience. That's my experience with risk because
that risk makes people hate each other. Okay, I never
played risk. I had friends who are really into it.
But that's one that also goes really long, right it can,
and risk risk is like the number one offender for
for outing to table flippers, for you know, letting you

(16:02):
know which are your friends is actually a really bad
sport to find out through risk? Yeah, you know, thinking
back to Monopoly, and then I think, you know, friends
who were playing risk too. Is that part of it
is like a really long game that's played at night
in many cases, and so you've just been doing it
for so long, you're tired, you need to go home,
you need to go to sleep, You're still stuck in

(16:23):
this low stakes um b s and then yeah, eventually
you just gotta flip the table. Elements make it worse
most often, i'd say, played for a long time at
night by adult men who have maybe been consuming alcohol.
So yeah, it's a bad scene and will let the
demons in for sure. All right, well, let's take a break,
and when we come back, we're going to roll into

(16:45):
some some specific examples, some more specific examples of ancient
games and and really we can learn a lot about
just the nature of board games in general by looking
at what we know and what we don't know about
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All right, we're back now. Earlier we talked about the
idea that there is perhaps physical evidence of some type
of unidentified Neolithic board game that's been found in like
near Petra in Jordan's that was perhaps the form of
the moncola game type, but we don't know for sure,

(19:00):
and that that was maybe like seven thousand b C
or nine thousand years ago. The oldest game that we
definitely really know about on are sure it's a game
we have direct archaeological evidence of is a game from
ancient Egypt called senate. That's right, also known as the
game of thirty squares, also known as the game of passing,

(19:20):
which will be back to later. I think that's what
senate actually means, is passing. So the dates range on this,
So I've seen dates that that say Senate goes back
to roughly three thousand BC. Yeah, I've seen that there's
evidence trace toc or basically roughly the fourth millennium BC.
Either way, it was played in pre dynastic times, and

(19:42):
we can even turn to tomb paintings that that actually
depict ancient Egyptians playing this game during this time period. Yeah.
One famous one is an ancient Egyptian painting of Queen Nefertari,
one of the wives of Ramsey Is the Great, and
this painting of Nefertari playing senate is within the queen's
own tomb, So in her tomb in the Valley of

(20:03):
Queens and Thebes, there's a painting of her playing a
board game. That's dedication. I mean, she was probably nationally ranked. Well, yeah,
probably so. Now when you look at this illustration, I've
actually seen this illustration wrongfully identified as her playing chess.
That's not correct. Chess wouldn't come about for another four
thousand years in India, and I think that's worth remembering too.

(20:29):
By the time chess was invented, games like this were
more ancient than chess is now. Yeah, that's unbelievable. I
love putting ancient history in that kind of perspective, like
thinking about the things, the things in ancient Egypt that
we're older to the ancient Romans than ancient Rome is
to us. That's always something I'd like to keep in perspective. Um,

(20:53):
but so, what do we know about this game? Senet.
We know it was played with multiple game pieces, so
the released things that look kind of like ponds that
were sometimes made of like a blue type ceramic material,
and it was played on a grid of thirty squares.
There were three rows of ten squares, and several of
the squares had symbolic hieroglyphs on them, seemingly symbolizing game imagery,

(21:17):
such as the water trap, like there'd be a water square.
And while our evidence of Synate is often in the
form of elaborate game boxes used by the wealthy, it
speculated that the game could also have been played by
the poor simply by drawing a grid in the sand,
or by like making scratches on a rock or a board,
And this is something we we see with some of
the later games we're going to discuss, where you had

(21:39):
the ornate version with a little box underneath it to
keep the pieces in. But then you also see evidence
of graffiti versions where someone just scrawled it on on
stone and played it exactly. Now, the exact rules for Senate, though,
are ultimately just a matter of conjecture. Yeah, we know
something sort of, but we don't fully know how the

(22:00):
game was originally played, right, and you can just imagine
this exercise taking various modern games and imagine, you know,
opening them and having absolutely no instructions, no written language
about how they were played. In some cases you can
pretty much piece it together. Fireball Island, Candy Candy Land,
especially Snakes and Ladders or shoots and ladders. These are

(22:20):
games that you know, you can you can figure it
out pretty quickly. Other games with more you know, ambiguity,
harder to tell. Right if you took a box of
Arkham Horror, And it's hard enough to tell what you're
supposed to do in Arkham Horror when you have the rules,
but if you have no rules, I can imagine there
would be different models based on it. Well, we think
it was played this way, We think these tiles were

(22:42):
possibly used in this way shape or form. Future archaeologists
five thousand years from now are definitely going to be
able to figure out how to play cross fire, because
that's just obvious. You can't miss it. Yeah, hungry hungry hippos. Yeah,
that's another one though. Of course, you can determine some things,
as we're saying, just by looking at what the what
we've been talking about is the materials of the game
are what are the things you have to work with.

(23:03):
It's believed that this game Senate was played by casting
of some equivalent of dice, maybe casting knucklebones or throwing sticks,
and this would help determine what kind of moves you
could make. Knucklebones, by the way, often these would be
a knuckle bones from say a sheep or goat, so
something that was regularly slaughtered and and used for to

(23:24):
manufacture items. And it would be something more like a
four sided dice, like a D four in modern gaming terms.
I don't know for sure, but I would have to
guess that that would mean it's it's the biological shape
would mean it's not quite perfectly random which number you get,
like there is actually a bias towards some of the
faces of the dice, since it's not, you know, perfectly

(23:46):
machined to be equal. That's a good point, but I
don't know that. That just seems likely to me. One
of the really interesting things about Senate is how this
game held sacred connotations for the ancient Egyptians. Like doesn't
seem to be a coincidence that Nefertari has shown playing
the game in a painting within her own tomb uh.

(24:06):
The pharaoh Tutton Common was also buried with Senate game
boxes among his grave goods to be taken into the
next life. And we mentioned earlier that the name of
the game means passing. It's the game of passing, and
this probably has significance on the board itself because it's
believed that you played the game by sort of advancing
past your opponent along the squares, and you could like

(24:28):
pass your opponent, you could block your opponent. So it
is in some ways literally a game of passing in
terms of its mechanics. But Senate also seems to hold
this strong religious significance associated with death, which for the
ancient Egyptians meant passing on into the afterlife through this
cosmic journey. I know, Robert, you've talked about that on

(24:48):
stuff to blow your mind before, you know, the beliefs
about the journey of the dead among the ancient Egyptians,
where you'd adventure through the nether world. Yeah, it's not
just a matter of your going off to something we
would think of as sort of a modern paradise. There's
like trials, their trials and could you know, continued adventures
and adversaries in the in the Egyptian afterlife, and that's

(25:10):
one of the reasons that the departed has to bring
all this stuff with them. Like some of it, they're
bringing things they like, but they're also bringing things they
will need exactly, and so it may serve some purpose
to like, uh, I mean, I'm thinking about passing time
in the afterlife. They're all these Uh. I don't know
if this is just a curious feature of English and

(25:30):
in how these ironies are stacking up. But so this
is a game which, like the idea of a game
in ancient India often meant you know that they literally
meant time passing, like the passing of time in a game.
Uh So games are for in a way passing time.
The mechanics of the game involved passing players is the
game of passing, and the meaning of the game spiritually
has to do with passing into immortality. Huh. Interesting, boy,

(25:54):
There's probably a lot you could do, was just looking
at how different board games interpret linear, encyclical time, um
or both to some extent, you know, of taking taking
our existence and piecing them out into step by step. Well, yeah,
I mean this is so if this game in some
way is presented as a model of something that these

(26:16):
people believed actually happened to them. We still have games
like that today. I mean we were talking earlier about
the Game of Life. I mean the Game of Life
in many ways you could think of as a kind
of um like normative model formation engine. For like, this
is what a life looks like. You, you know, go
to college, you get a job, and you start a family,

(26:36):
and the Game of Life kind of enforces that by
having you go through these motions over and over again.
It's all there in the fluff, like all the normative
things that are being suggested about what life should be like.
Perhaps Senator is the same way. I mean, when thinking
about the religious details of the game, I started to
wonder about if some part of the purpose of the
game was not necessarily to have the negative connotations of

(26:59):
this word, but propagandistic to spread particular ideas through a
catchy and inherently fun medium. It wouldn't be the only
game that did this right. We just mentioned the Game
of Life, but think about Monopoly. Even though it's one
of the most popular board games in modern history. Monopoly
has its roots like thoroughly in pushing a particular point
of view specifically. It was created in the early nineteen

(27:21):
hundreds by a writer, inventor and progressive activist named Lizzie
Maghee or Maggie m A. G. I. E. And Maghee
invented it specifically to illustrate the dangers and evils of monopolies,
of wealth accumulation, and of these like rent seeking barons
that you become in the game. It's ironic because monopoly
has in a very simple way, it kind of glorifies

(27:44):
this idea of the of the mustachioed rich man. That's
the funny thing that originally wasn't supposed to was supposed
to do the opposite. The original title of her game
was The Landlord's Game, and Maggie summed it up summed
up her goal to a reporter in nineteen o six
by saying, quote, in a short time, I hope a
very short time men and women will discover that they

(28:04):
are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller maybe have more than
they know what to do with. Yeah. Again, that is
directly the opposite of the message. If you want to
say that modern monopoly has is directly the opposite of
the message of monopoly, well, I think it would depend
on how you frame it. But yeah, I mean people
don't tend to take that away do that. Well, well,

(28:25):
what's the monopoly guy's name? He has a name, right,
these Mr money Bags? Right? Mr money Bags looks too
cute and adorable, Like he needs to he needs to
have more of this gnaar Old Ebenezer Scrooge like vibe
to him, you know, wearing like a necklace of bones
and yeah all that. Yeah, it needs to be less this.
Uh yeah, he needs to be less cute and needs
to be grotesque in some fashion, like like the real

(28:48):
ultra rich are. Well, they had to make the game
friendly to children. That's where they went wrong. But a
funny thing also about the game is that she was
apparently interested in using it to promote Georgian economics, the
set of ideas stemming from the economist Henry George. Did
you did you know about this? ROBC? Yeah? So, basically
George suggested that people should not be taxed. I think

(29:08):
this is the basic form. People shouldn't be taxed on
the income from the work they do, but instead should
be taxed so that the spoils of land ownership and
subsequently like natural resources and rent and everything are distributed
equally among everyone. So you can't make money just by
owning land or by owning a mine or something like that. Instead,
you can only make money on the work you do.

(29:31):
But Monopoly is a game in which that's what you do.
You just acquired things, and just money comes in because
so you're playing as the bad guy and monopoly. But again,
it gets you know, it gets kind of you start
thinking about it backwards. But anyway, of course, the game
became wildly popular, especially in these derivative forms, for for
which other game designers apparently claimed credit. But it didn't

(29:52):
necessarily teach the players, as we're saying, all the things
that Maggie hoped it would. And so this is something
else to consider that it's widely agreed, as we were
saying earlier, that the rules of games change over time.
You know, games don't stay fixed, they evolve. And I
want to pair that with the fact that you don't
often have to put much effort at all into a

(30:12):
task to make it feel like a game. Just framing
it as a game can be effective and making it
feel fun and like a game, and this has been
demonstrated by empirical research. You know, the whole Tom sawyer
painting the fence trick. You know, this is a great
game where you paint the fence, uh, and everybody wants
to get in on it. Apparently there's some research that
shows this is true. I was looking at a study
from in the journal Games and Culture by Andreas liber

(30:36):
Off that is called shallow gamification, testing psychological effects of
framing and activity as a game, and I found, you know,
you don't really have to do much work to make
something into a game. You just sort of call it
a game and get the basic basically frame it as
a game, and people will enjoy it as if it
is a game. So anyway, my my crazy series of

(30:57):
thoughts here is I wonder if games, maybe sent it
as an example, could be created to teach or model
or advocate a particular view of the world, a political
view of the world, a religious view of the world,
creating some kind of normative model of how people should
see things or how people should behavior act, but later
end up spreading and remaining popular simply because the game

(31:20):
mechanics are fun. And then the fluff loses meaning or
gets shed or gets changed over time, sort of like
happened with Monopoly. Yeah, yeah, well, This would be a
discussion for another time, But like you do wonder what
does a particular country or regions popular game forms? What
does that say about them? Like what does monopoly say
about the US? And I think it's unfair to have

(31:42):
that be our game, but what what what does monopolies
popularity to say about the United States? What does say uh,
settlers of Catan and other German and European design games,
what do they say about mainland Europe? What does the
popularity of Warhammer forty thou say about the United Kingdom?
Is that where it comes from? Um? And And again

(32:05):
these are Perhaps this would be an attempt to read
too much into a game's popularity, but but at the
same time I do agree that I think there there
is some sort of influence taking place. Like you to
engage in a in a game, to engage in a
system of a game's rules, uh, you're really putting your
head in and you're putting your taking your thought process

(32:27):
and forcing it to mimic the the systematic layout of
the game. Yes, but as we're seeing it seems like
if the game is fun, it's possible that the the
layout of the game, you know, the thing that maybe
even it was intended to teach or put you in
the frame of mind of that can all be lost,
can all be changed. It's possible that sinet is something

(32:48):
that's created for a kind of normative cultural purpose in
ancient Egypt. It serves to teach something about their religion
and their society and all that. But because it's a
fun game, it spreads to other society, for which these
meanings don't really carry over, right, So they're just that
they're just stuck with the mechanics. Yeah, and uh, and
that's what they can continues to live on. I mean,

(33:08):
another way of thinking about this could be the original
forms of chess were you know what were Therefore, perhaps
they were for trying to like teach a military mindset
to young knights or something like that. But you know,
that's not necessarily what they're for now. It just turns
out that the mechanics of the game are too fun
to be contained, and they survive their original cultural context
or meaning. So now we're going to be talking about

(33:30):
the Royal Game of Her, another ancient game from thousands
of years ago. We last time we talked about the
Egyptian board game Senate that this is a um somewhat
similar game, though it's different, Senate was a game of
thirty squares that were lined up in three rows of
ten squares and you somehow advanced along the squares and
tried to pass your opponent. Or is somewhat different, But

(33:53):
it's also a game of squares, right, Yeah, it's it's
basically two square grids connected by uh this little bridge.
So you have a three by two grid, and then
you have a three by four grid, and then you
have a two square horizontal bridge connecting the two and um,
I we said the name of this is the Game
of Er. And I believe if anyone who's listened to

(34:15):
stuff to blow your mind, you might remember that we've
in the past mentioned the Great Ziggurat of Er. Well,
it's the same er so in what is now southern
Iraq Um And to be clear, evidence of the Game
of Er dates into the same time period is the
Great Pyramid of Giza. We're talking b C. I think

(34:35):
I've we've also seen undred BC as a date for
the game of Er. Okay, so almost as ancient a senate. Yeah, yeah,
pretty old. Now we're not again, this is another one
where we're not exactly sure how the game was played
with this curious board, but different scholars have weighed in
to suggest how the pieces moved might have moved, and
how they might have even battled in the narrow channel

(34:58):
between the smaller and greater grids. Game historian Andrea Becker
believes that the origins of the game might have been
a form of divination. Okay, so that again, yeah, with
the specific boards related to specific sorts of divination. What's more,
she argues that they might have also served as a
way to teach divination. So that's interation. So instead of teaching, um,

(35:19):
you know, some sort of economic model. Uh, it's about
teaching someone how to divine the future. Huh. Well, so
now I'm seeing three ways that you can have a
relationship between ancient board games and divination methods. So you
could have one one route that's just derivative. Right, You've
got divination methods where so you throw knucklebones to get
an answer from the gods, and then you also realize

(35:42):
that that can be used to determine outcomes in an
abstract scenario, which is like a game. So it's just
derivative of divination. Another router connection here would be that
it's used to teach divination. A third would be that
it is a form of divination, that the board game
itself is a method of consulting the gods. Yeah, I

(36:03):
mean it gets into the whole situation like, is any
battle game? Is it a battle? Is it a simulation
of a battle? Is it is it preparing you to
simulate or take part place in a battle? Yes, it
derivative from battle principles. Is it designed to teach you
battle or is it actually a form of battle that's
supposed to decide something exactly? Now, one of the cool
things about ARTH is that eventually we did get some

(36:25):
codified writings about how it is played. Uh, not so
clear apparently that there's not a lot of continued discussion
about exactly how it was played. And of course how
it was played probably changed over time. Right, but many
centuries after it's it's introduction, you did have a clay
tablet from one seventy seven BC that that raid in

(36:47):
on how to play it. And it's a rare exception
to the lost to history nature of of board game
designers because, uh, if accounts are true, uh, and of
course we have to sort of fly a grain of
salt when we're talking about individuals described as doing things
in ancient texts. But Um, the rules for for this
game were codified by the Babylonian scholar inscribe itty Mar,

(37:10):
Duke of Balatu in one seven b C. And he
even added new features which Brian fagan Um in his
book said, quote enliven it for the contemporary gambler. So
I'm assuming that means play mechanics and not mere fluff.
But there is a there is a lot of interesting
fluff to this game actually, and the fluff, I would say,

(37:30):
seems to coincide with the idea that the game was
used for divination related purposes, maybe to teach divination or
maybe actually as a form of divination associated with astrology. Right,
that's right. So a man by the name of Irving
Finkel with the British Museum, I believe he translated the
Cuneiform and believed that while there were strong astrological aspects

(37:51):
to or, he believed it was still primarily a game.
So that the so the astrology was fluff as opposed
to uh, it's it's primary purpose in society. But the
fluff is really interesting. Like I looked up some of
this writing and translation work by Irving Finkel on the
qune form of the the original board. And so what

(38:12):
the evidence shows is that the squares of the board
were often labeled in a way that caused the game
board to produce prediction statements as you played it. Uh,
And this is from Irving Finkel. And so you'd have
these ways that the game board could produce sort of
a sentence, but it would also be associated with an
astrological sign. So so you could have the game board
say one who sits in a tavern, or I will

(38:36):
pour out the dregs for you, or you will find
a friend, or you will stand in exalted places, or
you will be powerful like a lion, or you will
go up the path. Uh. There are a bunch of
interesting ones, like one who weighs up silver. I love
these there. They make the game feel very creepy and elemental.

(38:57):
Or the one that says you will cut meat, you
will cut me. That's a great one. What does that mean?
Does that mean is that good neat like I will
I will have a feast in my honor and I
will give you the one to cut it. Or is
it more like I will work at the butcher's shop.
I don't know, you will cut meat. Apparently it's associated
with the astrological sign of Aquarius uh. And there are
other similarities like that, like you will be powerful, like

(39:18):
a lion is associated with the sign of Leo. That
gets really interesting because you know, we we can think
about ourselves, we can think of modern humans and for us,
divination practices can be fun. Again going back to the
idea of the something like a fortune cookie at an
American Chinese restaurant, or magic eight ball, magic eight ball

(39:39):
or you know what's actually also at the intersection of
a game and a divination practice is you remember the
game MASH that that kids would play in elementary school
and stuff. Um are you talking about with the folding paper? Yeah,
it was, well, I think it was related to MASH.
I think stands for mansion, apartment shock house and so

(39:59):
be a thing where you'd have a number of options
for different things that could come out of it. So
you'd be like, who will you marry, and then you'd
give like four options, and then the thing that you'd
use some kind of pseudo random procedure to generate a
number that would like have you go through the list
counting a certain number of places to like rule out
answers until you got to the end, and the end

(40:21):
would give you some combination of possible answers. It would
be like you will live in a mansion and you'll
be married to Tim Curry and you you know, etcetera. Interesting.
So so, yeah, there's the fun side to divination. But
even today people people get taken in by by divination. Uh,
and it can be a very stressful, a very serious
situation that you can you know, people can lose a

(40:43):
lot of money investing in divination. But then likewise, gaming
is much the same. Games can be a lot of fun,
but if you're playing the wrong game, you're playing with
the wrong people, or you're playing with the wrong attitude,
games can be a seriously unpleasant experience. Yeah, okay, we
just got a Mash update from Tari outside the booth here.
Apparently Tari was a big Mash fan, and she says

(41:05):
one important part we left out is that you've got
to add bad options in your mash list. So it's like,
I guess the Shock and Mash you also, like, if
you have potential husbands, you'll marry one of them has
got to be a really like lame ugly guy uh,
so that you'll end up with funny combination, she says.
So maybe you're living in a mansion but you're married
to pee wee herman. You know, this reminds me a

(41:27):
little bit of of of a card game that I've
really enjoyed playing recently called Gloomy and uses these transparent
cards that actually have a mechanical purpose in the game.
But essentially, you have these cards that indicate different members
of your sort of Edward gory uh style family. And
then you want to have the most miserable family that

(41:47):
dies in horror. Oh you told me about this, and
and so and so what you try to do is
to make sure your family has the most horrible experience
possible and dies off meanwhile bestowing um, you know, happy
things upon the other. So, so you want your family
members to say, catch some awful plague and drown in
a well. But then you want members of the opposing

(42:11):
families to say, for alic with a kitten or something
like that. So mash is the mash is complex. It's
got to include both possible outcomes, right, It's part gloom
and it's part mirror mirror on the wall. It's like
part giving you all the stuff you want to hear,
and then also it's got to throw in some bad
news to make it real. All right, well, let's let's
bring it back to er here. Okay. Uh, there's at

(42:32):
least one theory that or eventually evolved into backgammon. So again,
when we see this time and time again with these
old games, like looking at the possible lines that connected them,
and then also kind of like like species, like like
actual organisms, you see examples where one game was kind
of killed off by another. You had like an invasive
game come from another culture, and everyone's like, whoa, why

(42:55):
aren't we playing this when we could be playing that?
And then a game dies. But another interesting thing that
Finkel brought up is that that probably likely used what
we're known as astro gals, and these would have been
those four sighted dice made from the knucklebones of sheep
or goats. Again, it's it's so fascinating to think of
many modern board and dice games as the tail end

(43:18):
of something that began and perhaps divination maps and rattled
animal bones. You know. Uh, In this sense, all games
are potentially occult exercises. By the way, Finkel apparently has
a couple of books about out about ancient board games
that feature rules and punch out boards and spinners, So,
you know, so younger players especially can can try out

(43:41):
at least versions of what some of these ancient games
could have consisted of. We gotta wonder, like, what are
the best games lost to history? You we know that
there must have been lots of games that we don't
even really know anything about, or maybe only have a
hint of. We don't know all the rules that could
be the most fun game ever. They could be so addictive,
and we do. We just don't what they are. Because
there's of course an endless possible combination of rules you

(44:04):
can come up with for moving pieces around on a board.
Maybe there's like the ultimate perfect game out there, and
it's totally unknown. What if they they basically had Space
Hulk Babylonian times, because again coming back to what I said,
there's no reason you couldn't have a game with the
exact same mechanics as Space Hulk take place in an
ancient setting. But I thought what was a major part

(44:27):
of the appeal of Space Hulk was the fluff, Like
you like the illustrations and the setting and all that, right,
I do. But then, but Space Hulk also has this
wonderful mechanic where you have to you have to force.
You have the humans who are superpowered and tough, but
then you have the Horde, and the Horde that so
the timing is different. So when the humans go, when
the human player goes, uh, they have a time limit. Uh.

(44:48):
They have a certain amount of time in which they
have to make all their moves and use all of
their movement points. But the player controlling the the alien
hordes of the gene Stealers, they have all the time
they need. So I do feel like there is something
primal and attractive in the mechanics of Space Hulk that
this feeling of of you know, it's like it's like

(45:09):
it's so grim dark. It's the most grim dark game
because it's like I am up against death. I am
up against this thing that is ever patient and ever lasting,
and it's probably in the game. I mean, it's probably
going to kill you. It's a very dangerous game to play.
Um and part of the fun is not in oh
did I win? But did I almost win? Now? If
I understand the Warhammer universe correctly, it would also be

(45:32):
the implication that the humans are not really good, right. No, no,
the humans are awful, but but they're the best choice
compared to all of the other awful things in the universe,
which does feel kind of like appropriately like like ancient
that it could have the mechanics like this could have
found their their way and say a Babylonian, Uh, mindset that.

(45:55):
All right, let's take one more break and we come back. Uh.
We're gonna just roll through a few more examples of
ancient board games and board games of note, and then
we're going to close out. Raffie is the voice of
some of the happiest songs of our generation, Babyga, So

(46:16):
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(46:40):
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(47:01):
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(47:24):
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(47:48):
One of the ancient games that seemed kind of interesting
to me is a game of If I understand correctly,
it's basically of unknown mechanics known as lubou, which is
an ancient Chinese board game. Right, the name means six sticks.
It's the game of six sticks. Uh, Lubo sounds a
lot better, rolls off the top, a lot lot easier.

(48:09):
Uh So the rules of this game, yeah, are still uncertain,
but we see figurines of men playing it from Han
dynasty tombs that would have been the area of two
thousand to b C two two twenty c. And it
was likely invented in the first millennium b C. But
the height of its popularity was definitely the Han dynasty.

(48:29):
So there would have been two players. There was a
board and sticks were thrown to determine the movement of pieces.
And one of the reasons we don't know a lot
about this game is this game died out because there
was an invasive There was another game. There was a competitor.
The game of Go entered the picture in the Joe
dynasty around somewhere in the region of ten six through
two b C E and eventually just overtook Lubo to

(48:55):
become the most important board game in Chinese culture, and
it remains so to this day. Now. We didn't uh
you know, we're talking about casting the sticks here. One
thing we didn't even really get into this into it
all in this was the long dice. You see these
referenced in um in some of the Hindu epics to
about casting the long dice in battle. You know, whether

(49:16):
just that they were a type of dice that were
that were long and more stick like, but they were
used as a as as a form of of generating
a random figure. Now, speaking of India, we do have
to at least touch on chess really quickly. Again, Chess
a much later game than anything else we've discussed here.
First millennium CE came out of India and it still

(49:40):
commands a global following today. And it's even though it's
not as as ancient as these other games, it's still
pretty old. And it's really impressive that chess remains such
a standard of strategic board games, you know, like it is,
I mean, it is kind of the gold standard. I mean,
I think it's one of those games that doesn't really
need much fluff because mechanics are so solid right that

(50:02):
it is, Ah, there is such a thing. I mean,
I think again we should acknowledge we've sort of been
hinting at this that it's pretty clear that some games
are just inherently better than others mechanically. I mean, there's
just such a thing as a much more balanced game
that's uh, that does better at allowing different types of
strategy and thus makes it more interesting because they are

(50:24):
more different ways you can achieve a win. There are
other games that are that are i think, just sort
of easier to hack. I think that's the thing that
that makes for a bad game. A game that's easy
to hack can break the yea or a game that
requires no skill at all, of course, but among games
that require a skill, if there's a way to hack
it so that if you just know a certain strategy

(50:45):
you can pretty much always win, that game becomes less interesting.
Tic Tac Toe is a good example of that. I mean,
if you know how to play and you go first,
you can always either win or be forced to a draw, right.
I think another similar example is Apples to Apples, which
can be a fun game. I'm not anti Apples to Apples,
but if one person does not want to play, if
one person wants to break the game, they will break it.

(51:07):
That's breaking in the opposite way. Yeah, breaking by like
not uh having a strategy that just always wins, but
breaking by ruining it for everybody, right though most games
that involve most games that involve any kind of like,
I don't know, intelligent input or verbal input by the player,
I feel like it can be like that. It seems
to me. I'm not I don't have as much experience

(51:28):
with D and D as you do, but it seems
to be Dungeons and Dragons is clearly a game where
one bad player can completely ruin the game. Well, yeah,
there's such a social context with Dungeons and Dragons. Um.
I was talking to this with with one of the
gamers I played with recently about the idea of competitive
Dungeons and Dragons and how there there have been some

(51:49):
efforts to create sort of the I wouldn't necessarily say
a limited rule set, but certainly a system in which
you could have competitive game playing between kirick ors. And
then you can also I guess there are some of
the older, like really fierce dungeons that can be used
as a competitive environment. But for the most part, you're

(52:10):
not going to see games of Dungeons and Dragons on
say ESPN six or whatever. But you will see games
of Magic the Gathering on there, because Magic the Gathering
is is more of a traditional game. It is a
traditional card game that has hard fast rules and uh
and does not have this social role playing element to it.
Another example, and this is when we have a whole
episode of stuff to blow your mind about, but a

(52:31):
Werewolf is a highly social game. And certainly if if
you if you were playing Werewolf with people that were
not on board with it uh And I don't even
like to imagine people of that caliber. But if you
were trying to play a game with people who are
not into it, um, you know it would it would
wreck the game. You just wouldn't be able to play
a Wearwolf. Absolutely, one obnoxious player will ruin the experience.

(52:53):
Now I mentioned earlier, you know what happens when an
invasive games game comes in and it's better than what
you have. One example of that is the Viking game
tablet uh. This is one of the North taffle games
from the fourth through twelveth centuries, probably based on the
earlier Roman game Lutus latron cool uma, and it was

(53:15):
replaced by chess in the twelfth century. So basically they
found chess and they're like, whoa, this is way better
than this thing. Let's just switch to chess and they did.
Now that makes it interesting also because that suggests that
certain games occupy certain almost like ecological niches within culture
if they can be displaced like that, because one game

(53:35):
obviously does not displace all other games, you know, a
new game doesn't come in and say, now this is
the only game people play and all other games are gone.
It can it can beat out certain games, and it's
it makes it suggest that, like there's an ecosystem of
play and that certain games feel so certain roles within that,

(53:56):
and that if another game comes in and feels that
particular role better than game will win out. But you
you wouldn't see chess replacing foot racing, you know, right, Yeah, Yeah,
there's a certain place in your culture, in your life,
maybe even daily or weekly life, that this game can occupy,
and if something fits that fits that that role better

(54:17):
than yeah, it's going to take over. It also suggests
that there are different kinds of fun, and that certain
games elicit one particular type of fun but not another one,
so they'll be in competition for that limited fun resource
that people have to give. As one consequence of thinking
like this, I've sometimes wondered, like, Okay, how much overlap

(54:37):
is there between the demand for board games and the
demand for video games. Will video games ever completely replace
board games? What's it's been interesting to to sort of
watch this play out, right, because today we have so
many amazing video games. Uh, just you know that the graphics,
the complexity, the different types of video games, and at

(54:58):
the same time, look at the board game renaissance that
we're living in, where there's living in a golden age
of you can go out and you can find so
many different types of competitive game, strategic games, cooperative games,
games that mix competition and cooperation games and with a
million different varieties of fluff to them, games for for
old people, young people, different levels of a rural complexity.

(55:21):
Games and you know that certainly have some basis in
video game design, Like there's certain communication between the two worlds,
for sure, but there's there's just there's just so much
out there. Like clearly board games fulfill something in our
lives that a video game cannot quite handle. Yeah. One

(55:41):
clear example is that board games have some kind of
social element that's um, I don't want to say more
mainstream because that's not necessarily it, but the social element
that's more acceptable among certain kinds of social uh settings
than video games do. Like I can see there are
people who would be into going over to a friend's
house for a board game night, but who would not

(56:03):
be going into going over to a friend's house for
a video game night. Well, right, I remember going over
to like people's places and they're playing rock Band, and
that's a that's a game where you work together. You
play it together with other people. But everybod where's everybody looking,
they're looking at the screen. It's just it was kind
of a sad site. But you go over and you
play a board game together, uh, and you're you're facing

(56:25):
each other. You end up hating each other depending on
the game, right, But but you have this interface between you.
It's this this thing that's bringing it together. And certainly
video games can be very social. There are some wonderful
online communities built up around these, but the board game
is a it facilitates a more of a physical in
person connection. You know. It is people who would otherwise

(56:49):
not gather around a table uh and have anything to
talk about can gather around the right game and and
they're good to go. After all this discussion, I'm kind
of interesting and coming back to the question we started with.
I don't know if we've answered this, but to think
a little bit more about now that we looked at
these games, what is the what is the role these

(57:11):
games are playing in the biological impulse toward play? Again,
we know that we haven't fully answered the question of
why play exists among animals like us, But they're all
these theories that maybe it signals reproductive fitness, that maybe
it helps teach us skills we need later in life,
maybe it helps and makes some make us more versatile,
you know, things like that. Where do board games fit

(57:32):
into these theories, if, if anywhere? Indeed, I hope this
is the question that people will take with them as
they go on to inevitably play board games with their friends,
with family, with co workers, with strangers. However you want
to do it, um and certainly if you weren't planning
to play a board game, maybe consider picking one up
or pulling one out of the closet. As we get

(57:54):
to close out here, we always want to thank Scott
Benjamin for helping us out with research on these episode.
Scott brought a number of cool board game facts and
uh and lists to our to our attention, including a
couple of world records that are interesting to look at
in the light of everything we've discussed. So one of
them is the largest collection of board games as of

(58:16):
two thousand and eleven, according to the Guinness Book of
World Records. It was one Uh Jeff Bossy's in the
United States with one thousand, five d and thirty one
different board games. You know that's too many board games.
That sounds sorry, I don't know. I don't want to
be judgmental, but like, can you really play all those? What?
It sounds doable? It's not improbable. Um. And then the

(58:38):
longest marathon playing a board game. Uh. This was from
two thousand seventeen eighty hours, achieved by four participants in
the Netherlands. Uh. And this was from January three through
the sixth seventeen. They played a total of four hundred
games of Guns and board game of the Goose during
the eighty hour marathon. That sounds like two many games

(59:00):
of gons and board Yeah, I mean you could have
fit like three games of Arkham Harror. So I'm sorry,
I'm getting old fingerwag. Um. I love go Home guys.
I kid Arkham Harr. I love Arkham Hart. But I've
also never completed a game of Arkham harr Um. So anyway,
just a couple of Guinness World records to help close

(59:22):
out these two episodes on games, I just had one
more thought about thinking about the role of board games
among the biological category of play and maybe a way
of approaching the question of what role they serve or
what they what the real essence is is to think
about what makes a board game not fun? Like that

(59:43):
that might help us come in on it. So one
thing that's definitely not fun is when board games are
too easy to win right when or when there's no
skill involved, like I mean, I guess little kids enjoy
playing candy Land, but just general like roll the dice
and move your piece is and have no skill involved,
that's not fun. Yeah, not for not for growing and

(01:00:04):
advanced players. Um. Likewise, I one frustration I've had with
certain games, and I won't name them, is is when
I've played a game where there were too many ways
to win, like it was there. I like having a
certain amount of complexity, Like it's neat when you have
like a doom counter and you know there are several
different things going on at once, but there was at

(01:00:25):
least one game I've played, and I just it was
like there were five different ways to win it, and
I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing,
like how I was supposed to uh, employee strategy. I
just felt kind of lost in this system, and I
felt like it needed to be It needed to be
somewhat simplified, at least for a first play. I know

(01:00:46):
exactly what you mean. At a game night here in
the office, I once what we played a game that
was some kind of like zombie outbreak setting type game.
I've never heard of it before, but it had so
many rules. The rule book was like a novel, and
there were just so many different things you could do
or had to do each turn. And we played this
game for like multiple hours and still and we had

(01:01:09):
never figured out how to play by the end by
the time we stopped. UM, and that is frustrating. That's like,
that's not fun. Maybe some people have fun doing that,
but I don't, and I think a lot of players don't.
So there's also a part of us that desires a
game to be concise, Like there's a certain kind of
elegance in games that have a small list of rules

(01:01:32):
from which great complexity of gameplay emerges. Right. I also
like it when a game organically gradually increases the the complexity.
So there's a there's a game I really like called
Fabled Fruit, and it's a It's basically a card game,
very kid friendly, and the cards change as you progress.
So when they start off, it's very simple. You're trying

(01:01:53):
to collect different fruits to make different essentially smoothies, and
each smoothie as a point. But you you quickly move
through the initial cards and you get in in. The
more you play the game, the more complex the mechanics
of the cards becomes. But but you're gonna work up
to that, Like, you just work up to that point
by virtue of playing the game, and I think that's

(01:02:15):
just a rather clever mechanic, even if you may never
even get to the later cards. You know. I certainly
haven't playing it with my son, but he loves playing
it at the level we're at, and it's comforting knowing
that we could keep playing it and it would just
get more complicated, but he would be able to roll
with it via the experience of playing with it at
lower levels. I love that. Yeah, the games with a

(01:02:37):
what do you call a slow learning curve or whatever.
The games that are easy to pick up and difficult
to master. That seems like the sweet spot of what
a game should be. If it's really great like that,
you know that there is a lot of skill and
strategy involved if you know what you're doing, but also
it's not impossible to just get going and understand how
the game works. All right, Well, we're gonna close it

(01:02:59):
off there. But obviously you've all played board games or
and or card games and various other games that fall
under this loose category, and we would love to hear
from you about them. What are your favorites, what are
your least favorites? Uh? Hey, have any of you played
some variation on the ancient games that we've discussed here.
The proposed rule systems are out there. You can find

(01:03:21):
proposed rules for er Uh and Senate online. So if
you've done that, let us know what you thought of them.
What was it like to to sit down and play
some variation of this this ancient leisure activity. Did it
make you feel like a pharaoh? Maybe? So? As always,
you can find the other episodes of Invention at at
invention pod dot com. Uh you'll find links to our

(01:03:44):
social media accounts. There. If you want to discuss the
show and discuss your favorite board games and on Facebook,
head on over to the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
discussion module. That's where listeners discuss our other shows Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, but also episodes of Invention. It's
a good place to interact with other listeners and also
with two of us. Thanks to our friends Scott Benjamin
for research assistance on this episode, and to our excellent

(01:04:07):
audio producer Tor Harrison. If you would like to get
in touch with us with feedback on this episode or
any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or
just to say hello, you can email us at contact
at invention pod dot com. Hello, Hello, Hi, Oh my god.

(01:04:39):
I want to come through the screen and hug you. Hey, everybody,
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I am so excited to share my new podcast with
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(01:05:00):
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(01:05:22):
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(01:05:42):
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(01:06:03):
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(01:06:51):
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