Nostalgia: Board Games

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome
to Why we do what we do. I am your
dice chuckanist host this side of the Mississippi Abraham.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
And I'm your super competitive If you ain't first, your
last host Shane.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Are a psychology podcast. We talk about the things that
humans and non human animals do and try to understand
them a little bit more about those things. And we
talk about great things that have happened and bad things
that have happened, and silly things that have happened, and
things that are happening right now and all of that.
And sometimes we take a pause and we replay one

(00:50):
of our older episodes and then we expand on what
research has happened since that episode came out. We call
those nostalgia episodes, which is what we're doing today.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah, so just basically at the point we realized that,
you know, just like science, once you hit the five
year mark, it's maybe a little bit outdated. So we
want to make sure there's updates, and that's what we're
gonna do today. So we're gonna do that with board games,
one of Abraham's most favorite topics, if not the best
topic for him.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Absolutely. And yeah, it's been almost exactly five years since
this episode released. This was episode one sixty one. I
think it came out on June seventeenth, twenty twenty. So
there's quite a bit that's actually happened since then in
the world of science and research and all of that. Yeah,
and so we're gonna get into that today. But first
I would like to wish you a Balloons to Heaven.

(01:37):
Happy Balloons to Heaven Day.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yes, on this August sixth. It is also Corporate Baby
Named Day, so you know, if you're naming your baby,
you can go with like Enron or Taco Bell, Taco Bell,
Taco Bell, Spiker did would not fly. We couldn't get
that passed.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
I mean you could try. It is farm Worker Appreciation Day. Hey,
farms are very important and we want them to stick
around and not be destroyed by thingsley tariffs, Yeah, and
the ending of USAID.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly. It is also Hiroshima Day.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
It is National Fresh Breath Day.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
It is, which is lovely. It's National Gossip Day, so
you can gossip about somebody's not fresh breath if today
is the day to do that. Not a great thing
to celebrate.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Though, maybe just make sure your breath is fresh when
you gossip so that.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yes, don't be a hypocrite.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
You know, it is National Psychiatric Technician Appreciation Day.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Sure, yeah, it is National root Beer Float Day.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Hoorayday, cheers all around. Yes, while you're enjoying that root
beer float, you can also enjoy Wiggle your toes Day.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
I don't know if you did this, but I did this.
I wiggled my toes when you said that.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
In honor, in honor of the day.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
In honor of the day.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Yes, it is also Exercise with your Child Week. By
wiggling your toes. It is you gallop and International Tribal
Indian pow wow.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Wow, Yes it is.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
There's a lot of a lot of syllables in that.
It's International Assistance Dog Week. It is International clown Week.
Unless you have chlorophobia, yes, but if you're ICP you
are stoked. Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
It is International Lace Week.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
And maybe if you compete with that lace, then you
can participate in Weird Contest Week.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Kind of like that. Actually, they just announced the Florida
Man Competition here in Florida, which is like one of
the events is running from cops. So wow, okay, yeah,
yeh yeah, yeah. It's National dog Month. Love that so much.
Every month should be National dog month.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
National hair Loss Awareness Month.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
It's National Brownies at Brunch Month.

Speaker 1 (03:49):
It is Black Business Month. Very cool, yep.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
And it is National Immunization Awareness Month. Oh rip gosh, yeah,
I know, ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Oh downer, Okay, Well, anyway, let's talk about something fun.
As I said, we released this episode on Board Games
five years ago, and my habit has not decreased since then.
If anything, it has been augmented tremendously. Sure, it is
a very fun topic. We're excited to get back into it.
And if you're joining us for the first time, then welcome.

(04:21):
We are so happy to have you here, and I
hope that you enjoy what you hear in this episode today.
And if you're a returning person, then welcome back. Maybe
you're familiar with the nostalgia format, maybe this is your
first nostalgia I don't know, but we're glad to have
you listening with us in your ears for this discussion
that we're about to have. Definitely on the lighter side,
coming off the heels of some heavier episodes recently, yes,

(04:43):
which is definitely fun. And I think appreciated by everyone,
although I could be wrong for someone.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
Board games are very serious. Oh, Monopoly haunts my dreams.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
We will actually talk a little bit about that when
we get into it. But however, you you are joining us,
if you have not already taken the plunge in supporting us,
there are lots of ways you can do that. I'll
briefly list them here. You can like ends up, subscribe
to make sure you get all our episodes, Go tell
a friend. You can pick up some merchant or merchtore,
or join us on Patreon, and there's all kinds of
perks and benefits over there. I'll talk more about the

(05:16):
ways that you can support us at the end of
this discussion, but I also wanted to mention that with
these nostalgias, the way this will work is we're going
to play the original episode in its entirety, so the
whole thing, all the way through, and after that we're
going to come back and we're going to add in
at the end of that the new discussion that we have.
So what research has been done and what things have
changed in the last five years since we recorded this.

(05:38):
So yeah, that's my preamble to us getting into this.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
I like that. So are we ready to dive into
the wicked and wonderful world of board games.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
I do just want to let people know, like the
original one was pretty long, so we're to try and
keep the update at the end fairly quick. Talk about
what people have been saying with respect to board games.
And then in the original episode I gave some recommendations.
I'm going to update some recommendations somewhat.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Love that. I love that.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
But now we are ready to dive in. Enjoy this
past episode, this nostalgic look at our recording history in
this episode about board games that we did in twenty.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Twenty see in a bit.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
All right, welcome to Why we do what we do.
This will be your host Abraham and I'm Shane, and
today we get to talk about my absolute favorite thing.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
I think pizza.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Pizza. Yeah, it's up there with my favorite things. So
it's going to be more sort of discussion format than
expositional format, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, I think we're just going to have a nice
deep conversation about this because I guess my perspective on
when we start talking about why we do what we do.
One of the big things is having good definitions and
an understanding of what a concept is. And so in
order to ever do a deep dive on this thing,
or on leisure activities in general, we must understand the
depth of this thing. So what is the thing we're

(07:03):
talking about today?

Speaker 1 (07:04):
I was gonna say, so, this thing that keeps being
referred to is board games, more broadly speaking, and technically,
more accurately speaking, tabletop games, because many of these games
do not include a board and instead have just dice,
have cards, or have sometimes even just a book, and
it's more like someone guides a discussion where people take

(07:26):
on different roles, so it's a role playing game. There
are a lot of different ways they could look. And
therefore the nomenclature that has been adopted is tabletop games
to broadly refer to all of those things. And most
people think of them as board games, and I think
that that's perfectly fine. And what's great about this is
that the definition is also a little bit broad, especially

(07:46):
because board games have been around for so long. Most
of the what we think might be original board games
that date back thousands of years, we don't actually know
how they were played. There weren't really instructions that seem
to survive that and they didn't necessarily get passed from
culture to culture, you know, at some point that stopped.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
So as I started thinking about board games, one of
the things I started thinking about was the different types
of games that I've played, like tabletop things and even
just kind of traveling games and stuff being in vans
and touring and bands and stuff, and kind of the
different things that we would do as a result, and
kind of going to the idea of that maybe some
of the games aren't transferred over. I wonder how well
games like I Spy will be transferred down culturally, you know,

(08:28):
like We're in the car, or like the Alphabet game
where you're just like naming things, you know. I wonder
how that's going to be. I mean, I know those
don't really fit the description of a board game, but
I just always it's just an interesting thought to think of,
like what might have been lost to history.

Speaker 1 (08:42):
Yeah, great point. And that does speak to again that
what counts as a game, whether it would be counted
as a board game or a tabletop game or something else.
And it seems to be that it's really anything where
you're seeking some kind of stimulation that doesn't necessarily result
in a specific output, like it's you know, foraging for

(09:02):
food isn't necessarily a game just by virtue of the
fact that you're doing it. That being said, one interesting
thing about this concept of games or playfulness, and there
have been some research. I didn't dig into it particularly
deep dive for this episode, but I'm peripherally familiar with
research that shows that just saying that something is a
game can have people interact with it in a different

(09:24):
way that is a little more fun and a little
more lighthearted and more willingness to engage. But it's interesting
that our species, in particular, we seek out a lot
of this play that the play that we do, again,
it doesn't have a specific output. It seems to be
stimulation for the sake of stimulation, just because it's fun,
you know. Yeah, And there are other species that we've

(09:47):
observed that do this play thing that's not obviously not
as complex as board games or anything like that. But
it's hard because we always are in the position of
trying to superimpose or project our own thoughts about what
they're doing onto the behaviors that we observe. But we
do see these things that look like their non directed
product list activities that look like they're just seeking stimulation.

(10:11):
So you see animals that'll sort of attack each other,
but they're not growling or hissing or making any kind
of noise. That seems like they're just rolling around just
to roll around because it's fun to do. You'll see
animals in urban settings where what they'll do very interestingly
is they'll wait at the edge of a road until
a car's coming, and then they'll try and they'll dart
across the road right before the car's there, and it's

(10:33):
like it's almost like they're challenging themselves to like try
and beat the car, which is a terrible idea. So
for any of you squirrels listening.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
That doesn't say any squirrels don't do that. I've seen
too many of you fall in folks.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, and rabbits too, if you can understand what I'm
saying to you.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
For our squirrel demographic out there.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
That's right, lots of podcasts out there among the scugs.
Deep cut on that one. Anyway, This this whole concept
of play is really interesting and it's difficult to define
because a game isn't necessarily a game just because it
has rules, it doesn't even necessarily have to have material objects,
and so it's fairly broad and I just love this
whole concept of play playfulness and games. Now, part of

(11:16):
what I like about games is, in fact the sort
of structure of rules, and part of it is because
that creates a challenge. And that seems to be one
of the core elements of a game is that there's
some aspect of challenge. And there are plenty of examples
where there really isn't an aspect of challenge. It's just
like just do something. But it seems to be that
for most games or something that we would call a

(11:38):
game or playfulness around this concept of games, there's a
challenge to overcome in some capacity. That's sort of a
common theme throughout Now.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Something that I've noticed in a lot of games is,
I guess maybe there's a certain type of game that
I tend to think about more, but games that require
you to strategize and outsmart somebody, but to the degree
that like there might be a what we call signs
of damage to it, you know, Like I think about
the game Sorry, where it's like, like it's more fun

(12:07):
to get somebody out and go sorry than it is
to actually play the game or like Uno, right, Like
everybody loves that draw four card, not because it gives
you a one up on the game, but because you
get to make somebody else go, oh, come on to me,
Like that's I think maybe that just sticks out. Maybe
that's just why some games are fun for me, because
it's like a harmless like gotcha. But we started thinking

(12:30):
about this topic, I was just like, there's so many
different ways that we could go about this, right, And
I love that it is so broad and so vast,
and that probably most everybody that is listening here has
probably had some experience with something like this.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah. I've thought a good deal about what you see
in games, and I think you could broadly categorize them
on a spectrum between luck and strategy. And there is
sort of a third axis here that's neither of those
two things that we'll speak to in terms of sort
of categories of games. But for the most part, you
have games that sit along that spectrum of either being

(13:05):
primarily luck based, like Shoots and Ladders. There's no strategy
in that game. You don't do anything. You just roll.
Like if two robots sat down and played that game
and their only rule was roll dice, follow what dice do.
The outcome would be exactly the same as two humans.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
Right.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
Like the game, there's nothing to do, like you don't
choose anything, you don't do anything. It's completely luck. And
on the other hand, you can have something that's one
hundred percent strategy, like chess, and in that one there
is no luck whatsoever. It's just very very heavy. You
are trying to strategize the best move to make, which
is very dynamic. And the advantage to luck based games

(13:41):
is that they're easy. They're so easy, so you know
when you tend towards that you don't have to you
don't have to work very hard to do them, And
to me that that negates a lot of the challenge,
which for me makes it a little less fun. But
the problem when you get too heavy on strategy sometimes
is that as soon as somebody has a way to
expel blight the rules, find loopholes or get so so

(14:03):
good at it that it becomes really one sided, and
then the challenge becomes impossible, and it's not fun to
do something where you know you can't be successful. You know,
it's fun because there's the opportunity to potentially be successful,
although for me, I don't really care about winning all
that much. I really like the idea of just playing

(14:24):
the game. I really like working through the strategy and
figuring out the rules and that sort of thing. So
I think there is an element of it that doesn't
necessarily matter for many people. I'm just not very competitive,
and so I just I just like to play. Will
we keep you with us in the next part of
this discussion, Let's roll the dice and find out.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
And we're back with that being said, then, because there
are so many different types of games, like, can you
give us like a like a kind of a broad
overview of the different categories of games that do exist,
because you kind of mentioned luck, we talked about strategy
in all these different things, but I think we can
probably get more specific than that, right.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yeah, And I want to answer your question directly, and
I do want to come back to one thing that
I've struggled with is how to actually figure out why
I like games so much, and to try and dissect
what is going on psychologically, Why do people like games,
Why do I like games? Why do we want to
play games? And anyway, But let me answer your question first,

(15:30):
which is the categories of games, and so some that
I just made these up, but I play a lot,
and so this is how I tend to see most
games fall into this category. And I went through a
list of about three hundred random games to compare them
to the categories I came up with to make sure
that they fit, and I didn't find any non examples.

(15:50):
And so what I'm talking about categories has to do
with the objective of the game. Yeah, so it's like
how do you win or how does the game end? Okay, right,
because the objective informs the strategy or I guess the gameplay,
and that's why I came up with these categories. So
race to the end is essential. The first person to
accomplish a certain goal wins. So anyway, that's one of
the categories. Does that make sense? Is that clear?

Speaker 2 (16:12):
Yeah? That makes sense. Yeah, it's like candy Land.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yes, it's exactly it. It's a race to the end game.
Another one is a last person standing game, which is
that people for various conditions get eliminated as players until
there's only one player left. There's a very similar theme
on this, which is sometimes the game ends when one
person goes out and so it's like the first person

(16:34):
out loses, but then everyone else sort of compares their
points or their position in the game, and then they
determine a winner based on that.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, like battleship.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yeah, there you go. So, yeah, the last person standing
Battleship is an example of that. Thank you for throwing
your examples here.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
I'm just going back to when I was a kid,
and I'm like, yeah, I get that one.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
That's great. Another common one that you'll see is where
there's a set number of rounds. So basically people take
turns for a a number of rounds, and then once
those rounds are done, then you compare points and see
who won.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
That would be like scrabble.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
No, like Yazi Yatzi, and well there's not a I
guess there are a set number of rounds and Yasti
for the most part, it's a little bit flexible, so
it's not like there's always going to be ten or
twelve turns, but it's going to probably hover arounds that number.
I'm forgetting the exact Yati scorecard, but yeah, so yeah,
you're right, that's pretty close. There are other games too,

(17:26):
where it's like there's going to be exactly six rounds
and everybody gets one turn every round, and once those
six rounds are over, the game is done. You count
up your points and see who won. Okay, And that's
a common but yes, Yati, I think is a good
example of that. For the most part. There's another theme
of game that I have a couple of names for,
and the most diplomatic name I came up for was
an exhaustion And essentially what I mean by that is

(17:48):
you basically play until you don't want to play anymore.
These are games that I also uncharitably call them pointless games.
These are games where you just play until you're done playing,
and then you could compare points if you want to,
but it doesn't that's not really the reason that you
played for most people, and examples of this include things
like catchphrase taboo, cards against Humanity, Yeah, apples to apples.

(18:14):
So those are games where the point of the game
is to be engaged with your group. And sure, some
people get competitive and they'll count on how many cards
they got or or whatever it is they got in
the end of the game, and they'll try and determine
a winner. But for the most part, the point is
just to play, and there is no actual objective.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Yeah, like in Cards Against Humanity there is a point,
but like that's kind of like a secondary or tertiary
like objective. It is definitely more to like make everybody
laugh and just have fun exactly right.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
Loaded Questions is another example of this. Yeah, and I'm
not actually bagging on them by calling them pointless. A
lot of these I really like. Actually, Taboo is one
of my favorite games. I think Taboo is amazing. It's
just a category where there's not necessarily a clear objective.
For the most part. You kind of just play until
you are exhausted and don't want to play anymore.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Right.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
You could maybe even put Risk and Monopoly in those categories,
although they do technically have an end. It just feels
like you play until you don't want to play anymore,
because I feel like that's how most of those games go.

Speaker 2 (19:13):
Listen, you can only buy them so much property before
you're just done well, and like.

Speaker 1 (19:17):
How many times are you like borrowing money and mortgaging
your stuff And it's like it gets super one sided
really fast, and then it just goes downhill for twelve
or thirteen hours if you make it that long. You
don't actually know that I've ever finished a game of Monopoly.
I think I've played for eight to ten hours over
the course of a few days. And finally we're just
like moving on to other things in life because this

(19:40):
game doesn't have an end.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Right, and also late age capitalism isn't fun.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Unbridled. There can be only one.

Speaker 2 (19:50):
I would play, a Highlylander board game.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
I bet you anything that one exists. I don't know
of one explicitly, but I'm sure it does.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Listeners if you're out there, If you find a high
Lander board game, let us know.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
And then the final one. And I'm curious if you've
heard of these. Have you heard of cooperative or co
op board games?

Speaker 2 (20:08):
I don't know. I mean, I'm sure that I probably
have once you describe them, but I'm not quite sure
off the top of my head.

Speaker 1 (20:14):
Okay. I also think of these as sort of survival games,
and the point is that everybody who's playing is trying
to beat the game itself, and the game is set
up to try and put in enough conditions that the
game ends before you can beat it, and so everybody
is working together to try and beat the game. And

(20:37):
one of the most popular games that exist in this
category ironically enough, is called Pandemic, and the whole idea
I know, right, good timing, yep, the whole idea of
this game. Have you heard of this one before?

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Oh, I've played it.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
It's great, Okay. Yeah. So that's an example of a
cooperative game where the idea is everybody are these various
scientists who have special roles, and every turn you try
and take some action to stop diseases from spreading. By
the end of the turn, you have to draw from
a deck that causes the disease to spread, and so

(21:13):
you're sort of fighting the game the whole time to
meet an endgame condition before the game itself meets one
of the m game conditions that causes you to lose.
And so in this one, in Pandemic, all the players
are trying to find a cure for the various diseases
and eradicate them as much as possible.

Speaker 2 (21:32):
It's been a long time since I've played Clue, but
I feel like that's one of the things too, is
like you've got a group of people that are trying
to find the murderer. Like there's like a cooperative like
even though everybody's kind of playing against each other. The
same goal is like they're all still like gathering clues
together and gathering information together to figure out who the
murderer is.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
I actually never thought of Clue that way. You're right
that it does definitely have that element. I think of
Clue more of as a race to the end game
because you're trying to be the first one to get
the information, and you're right that everyone is sort of
they'll have a common goal if you will. There are
also games that fall into this cooperative category called semi

(22:10):
co op, which usually means that although for the most part,
people are working together, there are conditions under which one
or multiple players will turn against the group. A common
example of this, for those people who are familiar with it,
is a game called Betrayal House on the Hill, and
the game starts out cooperative where everyone's working together, but
at some point they'll trigger an event. You're basically pulling

(22:34):
tiles from a stack of shuffled tiles to create the board,
and you place down a tile next to an existing tile,
and every time you place one down something will happen.
Almost every single tile and a lot of them, will
trigger these events, and once you've triggered enough events, depending
on a dice roll. Then it will result in somebody
having to turn against the group, and then they get

(22:56):
like a separate set of instructions for what their new
objective is, and then it's that person or a couple
of people versus the group. And so it's a good game.
I'd recommend it. And another example of this is Dead
of Winter, if you've heard of that one. This is
a zombie survival game where for the most part, everybody's
working together against the zombies, and at the beginning of

(23:19):
the game, everybody is de secret objectives and those do
contain some betrayal conditions where you technically only win if
you meet this other criteria that involves sort of screwing
over the other players. So in that one, you don't
even necessarily know who, if at all, someone's going to
betray the group.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
It's like if Aliens were a game, like there's somebody
in the group that's definitely going to betray everybody.

Speaker 1 (23:45):
Fair I also think that that is a game that exists,
but I could be.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
It's got to be. It's gotta be.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Yeah. I was looking at before we recorded the number
of games that have been published, and because the timeline
on this is really interesting, and so there were somewhere
between I want to say, like twenty and thirty new
games being published every year for the bulk of the century.
And then in the nineties something happened which was well

(24:14):
as actually in the seventies they started really increasing and
a bunch of new board games were invented and that
sort of thing. But for the most part, you sort
of had your classics. You had Pictionary, Chess, Checkers, backgam
and those existed. Monopoly Life has been around for a
long time, and there were new games sort of coming
on the scene and they'd maybe get a little traction
and that sort of thing. And then in the nineties
a game called Settlers of Katan was published. Have you

(24:36):
heard of this one? Well, I'm not, okay. Settlers of
Katan was published, and this game spawned a huge growth
in the game industry. I want to say it was
published in nineteen ninety five. The essential theme of the
game is that it's a board game where you create
the board before you start out of a bunch of
X tiles and sort of creates this sort of hive

(24:57):
looking map that's an island, and you set up a
couple of places on the island where you control these
hexes or well, you can share control of the hexes,
but the hexes produced resources. You use those resources to
build more things or to try and buy things that
equate to points, and then the first person to get
ten points wins. Is essentially the theme of the game. Okay,

(25:18):
and it's a really fun game. I really like it,
and it's one of the more well known ones. Because
that game was published and that spawned a new generation
of publishers developing games, it's hard to say that there
was a cause effect relationship. What we do know is
that Settlers of Catan happened, and the rate of games
being published about tripled.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
That's wild.

Speaker 1 (25:39):
So we were getting hundreds of new games being published
per year.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Do not pass ads, do not collect two hundred dollars,
and we're back. You know what's really interesting about that
is because in the nineties you saw this really big
video game boom, Like you saw these huge advances in
video games. So you would I mean by just like

(26:06):
a gut reaction. There's no science behind this. I would
assume that as video games increased, and as those became
more popular, board games would become less popular. But it
sounds like both of those things happened at the same time.
So maybe leisure play like leisure activities, just became more
popular than the nineties for some reason.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Thanks to the Clinton administration. Probably just kidding, totally kidding,
Hot Diggs. Settlers of Catan was a European game that
made its way over here. But also in the late
nineties is when the first edition of Pandemic was published,
and following that publication, we saw the rate about quadruple
from its new rate. So now we were getting upwards

(26:44):
of one thousand new games a year, and that trend
has just continued. We are getting thousands of new board
games a year or tabletop games. I should say, that's wild.
I know, it's hard to imagine because it's like, how
how many different ideas could there be for games? And
that's actually how you start to see as I came
up with these categories, is like you are starting to

(27:05):
see variations on similar themes. But I mean they just
keep coming out with these creative, awesome, new inventive ideas,
and some of these co op games they've actually really
started to integrate heavily with other things like apps, and
so one of my favorite games I'll speak to a
little bit later uses a physical board and physical pieces,
but you also have an app set up. You can

(27:26):
use it on a laptop or a computer or an
iPad or some other tablet device whatever, and the app
will tell you how to arrange the board, game pieces
and the boards itself, and then you make decisions, and
then you tell the app what decision you made, and
it'll tell you what to do next. And it sort
of functions for anybody who's played Dungeons and Dragons, the

(27:46):
app itself functions as like a dungeon master so or
a game master. It sort of directs the game of play,
but you still make all the choices. You still roll
the dice for luck, physical dice that you hold, you know.
But it's a really cool way to integrate these so
that you get more variety of play. It makes it
a little easier for several components of the game, and

(28:06):
that they just be increasingly more creative with how to
develop these new ideas for games. It's awesome.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
I guess this is just a really great area to
start looking at human innovation and creativity. Like it's a
really great space to start kind of taking taking a
moment to analyze storytelling and planning and all in this
problem solving people. There's so much that goes into board
games that or tabletop games. I should say, there's so
much that goes into it's just really an interesting study

(28:35):
on human and human behavior.

Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, and once you have played enough of them, you
start to notice common themes in terms of how they
try and structure things like acquiring points and stuff, and
that to me in no way takes away from the
quality of the game. If you think about like popular music,
for instance, or even songs that are maybe not popular
by the things that you like, you also will probably

(28:57):
once you've listened to enough of them, be able to
identify things about them that you like. That when you
hear a new song that has that component, you're like, oh,
I like this. This is a thing that appeals to me. Right,
And so you know, I think major chords and basic
simple harmonies are something not to sound offensive or anything,
but most people would hear that in their music and think, oh,
I like this. This is this is familiar and therefore

(29:19):
if it's different from what you know, but it has
those familiar elements, you're more likely to enjoy it right away, right,
And that's I think something similar here, although I do
think that there's still a lot of room for creativity
in these games. So actually, I'm curious Shane to hear
I want to come back to this conversation we were having
because I still don't fully understand what's going on psychologically

(29:41):
with why this is for me and other people such
a huge like why do we do this?

Speaker 2 (29:48):
And I think that is such a tough question to
unpack here. I mean, like, you know, my gut reaction
to all this would be, you know, maybe the first
thing would be, you know, people like the challenge, right,
there's something reinforcing about the child challenge and kind of
overcoming a problem. You know, I would think there's probably
there's got to be some genetic links somewhere to some
kind of survival thing, right, and survival would probably have

(30:09):
to do with overcoming some major problem. So maybe there's
something there. I don't know. I you know, I think
maybe it's just something that's a distraction, you know, when
you start looking at like maybe people like to play
because there's other stuff going on in the world. Maybe
people like the problem solve. I mean, there's just there's
to me, I don't know that I have a good
answer because I think that there are so many different elements,

(30:33):
especially because you just kind of gave it an example,
like there are so many exemplars of board games and
tabletop games that I don't know that you would be
able to pin down a singular thing.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, you're right. I think there's probably what's difficult about
it is that it's different for a lot of people
in a lot of different contexts. And you raised a
good point, which is something that I've heard talked about
in the acceptance and commitment training and acceptance and commitment therapy, literatureilosophy,
that sort of thing that we historically as a species

(31:04):
have had to be problem solving machines like that is
part of what has made us so successful, is that
we are constantly faced with and overcome challenges. And so
I think that there is something about being able to
complete or escape or otherwise solve some kind of challenge

(31:25):
that carries with it some relatively inherent rewarding properties. And
that what a game does, any kind of playfulness really
is it takes the challenge and it makes the stakes
really low. So like if you're fighting for survival, that's
not really fun for most people. I suppose that certainly
could be, but at least in the.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Long grills is bear grills loves that.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
I mean, you know, maybe an example like hang gliding
might maybe is something that's sort of like this, or
skydiving or doing anything that's particularly dangerous, but you know,
when you're those are situations where you go and expecting safety.
If you find yourself in a situation where it was
unexpected and you were actually you know, might die, that's
probably not something that feels like a lot of fun

(32:13):
in the moment at least, right. But with a game,
it's super low stakes for most people, Like unless you
have a ton of money writing on it, you're in
a tournament or something, most of the time you sit
down and play games and it's just you get to
do the challenge overcoming part of it without having anything
really important at stake, and that's fun. So I think
that that's part of what's going on.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Yeah, And I was reading something not too long ago
too about like pro social behavior and just kind of
the social behavior of humans in general and storytelling related
to that, and how there might be some kind of
like artifact of that within tabletop games. You think about
like people gathering around the common thing, something that is leisurely,
you know. Like I was reading a story about how

(32:53):
some people would believe that early humans would gather around
camp buyers at night and tell stories. During the day,
they would gather on campfires to discuss strategy for the
day and planning for the day and survival things. But
at night, as everything was winding down and the needs
of the day were met and the goals of the
day we're met, the nighttime campfire would be spent more
discussing stories and kind of sharing language and sharing those

(33:16):
tales down the you know, as part of like a
cultural selection piece. Cool. So I'm wondering if there might
be something like that within within this kind of space too,
Like there is an element of storytelling in a lot
of these games, Like a lot of the more complex games,
there is like this cool storytelling, not like Battleship, which
is they tried to tell the story using Rihanna it
did not work, But like more complex games have a

(33:40):
really deep, rich story. I mean, I liken it to
comic books, like people will kind of make fun of
people for reading comic books, or they kind of write
it off as like this, like goofy thing. But the
truth is that some of the best stories I've ever
read were in comic book form and they could not
have been portrayed any other way. And so maybe there's
something that has to do with storytelling and pro social
behavior within that table top game element that maybe we're

(34:01):
not accounting for. Well.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
I think you have to be right, at least in
some capacity, because almost every single game that exists has
some kind of theme in some way, even if it's
just a little gimmick or a little piece of art.
You don't just get a bunch of blank pieces with
some straightforward rules and then play. They usually have some
art done on them, and most of them have some

(34:23):
kind of story or theme, or you might call even
fluff where it's not in any way critical to the game,
but it makes it way more engaging, right because you
have a story, because you have characters, because there's like
a background in which it's set. And I'll speak to
some examples of that when we talk about some of
the games them and I recommend coming up where you

(34:44):
one of the big selling points is the theme. And
I think that sometimes the theme is actually the biggest
selling point of some of the games that exists.

Speaker 2 (34:52):
So yeah, and I think when people talk about games,
they don't talk about like, oh, I loved Guess Who
because of the way that the boards worked. There was
like I loved playing this game because it had this element,
this discussion, Like this part of it was funny. This
artwork was really interesting. Like, you know, nobody talks about
Clue because they're like, I really like the way the

(35:14):
board is set up. It's like, I like Clue because
there is a fun story to tell, there's a murder
to solve, like, and there may be people that just
that's like they are just like art fanatics for games,
and I'm certainly not trying to dismiss that. But for
the most part, there's a reason why we like books,
and there's a reason why we like movies or like
songs with a story. I mean, like, there's just so
much storytelling in our experience as human beings that tabletop

(35:36):
games are just another layer of that.

Speaker 1 (35:37):
To me, our corporate overlords insist we put in ads
here and we must obey. So here's some meds.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
And it wasn't has Bro, it was not.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
It was Mattel. We are back. And another thing that
you said that I definitely want to speak to. For
myself is board games are highly social. To me, this
is one of the best ways that I have for
really interacting with people, especially new people, where I get
to be social with them, because I've never been overly
fond of these super abstract gatherings where you're expected to

(36:17):
make small talk and sort of introduce yourself to someone
new and have a very perfunctory conversation about the weather
and your job and the current news and that sort
of thing. And that's fine, like I get it, and
I can do it. But when you just show up
to a gathering of people and that's all you do
for like four hours, to me, I'm just like, oh God,

(36:37):
I can't wait till this is over. Yeah. But when
you have a directed activity where it's like you guys,
like I don't know who you are, but we are
in this together. Like we're gonna take on the role.
I'm gonna be the sheriff person, You're gonna be a zombie.
You're over there, gonna be a I don't know, pilot
or something, yeah, and like we're going to fight, Like
that's what's happening right now, and we know exactly what

(36:57):
we're doing and why we're here, and that to me
is way more fun and to the point where I
can do it just endlessly.

Speaker 2 (37:04):
It's like a social lubricant.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Yes, yeah, one that does not involve you having to
get super stupid with inebriation.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Yeah, or even touch anybody really if you really plan
it true, and that makes sense, Like you know, now
you're turning like a situation that is abstract into like
there's an objective within an objective, right, Like we're here
to play this game, but now there's this other objective
where like now I can network, Now I can connect
with people, Now I can make these social interactions more
meaningful based on this shared experience and this shared objective.

(37:34):
Now we're tying everybody together. Now we're bringing the tribe together,
and we're making it happen, right.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Yeah. So I did want to solicit as much as
possible some ideas from people for recommendations they had for
some of their favorite games, and so just speaking to
the the why we do what we do crewe I had,
Alan suggested. He said he likes a lot of the classics.
He said, Monopoly and Clue. Amber pitched in. She said

(37:58):
that some of her favorites included boo and catchphrase. Justin.
Our audio engineer said that his favorites included Pictionary and
Cards against Humanity and Shane, what were your picks?

Speaker 2 (38:09):
So? I actually picked Mousetrap and ker Plunk because I
mean those were ones that I remember really loving when
I was a kid. But man, Mousetrap, I love Rube
Goldberg machines. I think that stuff is so interesting.

Speaker 1 (38:20):
Yeah, yeah, fair. There's one that I just remembered as
you were talking about that I think called Don't Break
the Ice and it's almost like Jenga but horizontally. Used
to play that one.

Speaker 2 (38:30):
Uh huh yeah, yeah, so like so that one was
a blast. I mean that there's like a series of
games around that, like at that time that came out
from that company that were a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
There's another one I never played, but I was aware
of where it's like you have to get your piece
up to this bridge and then cross the bridge, but
there's a there's a mechanical button you hit that shakes
the bridge and if your piece falls off, you have
to go wherever it lands. You have to start back
over there.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, and you carry a jewel. You're carrying a jewel.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
Yes, yeah, like in a backpack or something.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah, that game is great.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
I can remember what it's called now. But we did
have a couple of listeners chime in Miranda and was
that our Miranda? Was it someone else?

Speaker 2 (39:06):
I think so? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (39:07):
Oh sweet. She said that one of her favorites was Wingspan,
which is awesome, great recommendation there. A friend of mine
I worked with Courtney, said that her three favorite games
are Cuthulhu Wars, Mystic Veil, and The Classic of Cribbage. Awesome,
some cool ones there.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
Anything Cthulhu related I am. I am fully in for.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
There are so many Cthulhu related games. Actually, one of
the ones I mentioned earlier and I'll be talking about
as my one of my favorites is a Cthulhu based HB.
Lovecraft themed game.

Speaker 2 (39:38):
Is it one of those weird ones where he's like,
not just a product of his times, but super racist. No.

Speaker 1 (39:43):
They actually did a really good job of just cutting
all that stuff out of it for the most part.

Speaker 2 (39:47):
Okay, good, yeah, good.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah, there's a little bit of it in sort of
subtext that's uncomfortable, but they actually did a pretty good
job extracting the characters and story from his personal views,
I guess yeah, what for him would have been contemporary
positions on race that were just wildly inappropriate in a

(40:09):
modern setting.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yeah, yep, yep, oh HP, what were you doing?

Speaker 1 (40:13):
Yeah, it's unfortunate because I like a lot of the ideas,
but the execution can be rough.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
So yeah, I hear that, all right. So the bulk of.

Speaker 1 (40:22):
This episode is like a giant recommendation section, I think,
So I would just like to pitch some ideas for games.
And part of my thought on this was that I
would make recommendations for people who are looking at games
but coming for maybe different reasons. Yeah, looking at games,
And I just think we are in this amazing board

(40:45):
games renaissance right now. And I mean it's been going
on for quite some time, but jeez, the last like
ten to fifteen years has just been incredible boom in innovation,
in creativity, in not applications of old rules, Like it
has just been phenomenal, and like there is no better

(41:05):
time to start getting involved in this and like find
find a game that works for you, right, and more
coming out all the time. As I said, one of
my go tos is Kickstarter, and I'm sure that there
are other sources and sites like that that help people
set up games, but Kickstarter I have backed I think
thirty two games.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
I'm Kickstarter awesome, awesome.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Like so many and it's just like they they're so cool.
And the idea what they do on Kickstarter that I
love so much is if you back at a certain level,
then you often get this like exclusive Kickstarter content and
there's like bonus deluxe stuff that they'll throw in, right,
that's so cool that it's like you can only get
at this one place, and I'm like, ah, I already

(41:48):
want to have this game, and like having a game
with the little extra whipped cream on top is is
even better, so delightful exactly, like y'all pay a few
extra dollars for that. Well, then oftentimes they actually will
specifically a market on Kickstarter to be below the MSRP
I think, to entice people to help them invest. And
so it's basically sort of a crowdsourced investment in building

(42:11):
board games and you can sort of decide if you
want to be involved in that game, and they'll like
send you updates. They'll pull the backers a lot of times.
So for example, there's a game I've backed that's going
on right now where they're saying, hey, we want to
create this one character for the game that because we
met all these funding goals that we weren't even expecting

(42:31):
we'd be able to hit, we want any of our
backers to chime in with suggestions for what they think
they would like this character to be. And so they're,
you know, like, that's a cool thing to participate in.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
Yeah, it's like it's nice to kind of, you know,
within a circle where there are some social skills going
on and there are the social interactions that you had
the space to be creative too. Like that's a really
nice community to be able to build.

Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah, it's It's just one of the coolest things and
I just love it. So, Okay, my first set of
recommens is for what I would call the casual gamer,
someone who doesn't necessarily want to be really involved in
board games and they don't want to learn a set
of super complex rules of games. And I was specifically

(43:14):
was trying to think of games that a lot of
people maybe haven't tried or maybe even haven't heard of,
but are really easy to pick up and play and
oftentimes work for kind of most demographics in terms of
age and ability and that sort of thing, and it
seems like most of the people on this team sort
of fall into that category. You know, it seems like

(43:35):
you yourself much more as a casual gamer than an
expert gamer. Is that correct?

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Oh? Absolutely, yeah I am. If you saw my list
of board games, you would be like, oh, honey.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
Shane, what are you doing? Man?

Speaker 2 (43:49):
You'd be like, oh, bless your buttons.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yeah, next time, just drop a little coin on something different.
And these are no particular order. I didn't rank them.
I just was thinking of and I try to come
up with about ten for each. And I'm curious. So
if you've heard of these, have you heard of Ticket
to Ride? I've not, Okay, Ticket to Ride is very
easy game to sit down and pick up. The idea

(44:11):
essentially sounds super boring, but it's amazingly fun. And what
it is is you're creating these railroad tracks across various countries.
I believe the original one was a map of the US,
but there I think most major countries there's I know
India there's one. I believe that Europe has one. I
believe that China there's one. I'm not one hundred percent sure.

(44:33):
But essentially you draw these objective cards for maps that
you or for train routes that you could create, and
the longer it is, the more points it's worth. But
the problem is there's limited route space, so you are
competing with your teammates essentially place trains to connect these
different cities and stuff like that. And again it sounds boring,

(44:53):
it's actually really really fun, and that one would fall
into the race to the end category. It's basically the
first person to get of all their trains. But at
that point then you still total up all your points,
and whoever's the most points wins, so being first does
not mean that you win, right, That's awesome. Next one
is code Names? Have you heard of that one?

Speaker 2 (45:09):
I have not. I'm going to give you a heads up.
I am looking at this list. I have heard of
literally one game on this Which one?

Speaker 1 (45:15):
Have you heard of?

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Banana grams?

Speaker 1 (45:16):
Okay? And pandemic and pandemic so too. Okay, well that's
on a different set of the list, but okay, code
names is I like to take responsibility for this making
it to Reno, although that's probably not in any way accurate,
but I definitely introduced it to a lot of people
who loved it and immediately picked it up. This game
is very easy and it is so fun, and the

(45:37):
idea is essentially that you have teams and each team
has a person who knows the correct answer, and you
have a bunch of tiles on the board that have
names on it, and you can give your team one
word to guess as many tiles as they can that
are the correct tiles. And all the tiles have words
on them, well for most of them, a lot of
them have pictures now, and so you have to be

(45:59):
really create and know your team. You don't necessarily have
to know your team, and actually a really fun way
of playing this is that you don't know your team
and that's a way to get to know them. So
you if you know them, you can sort of capitalize
on you what you know about what they know. But
if you don't, then you might have to sort of
make some inferences or do your best. But like you
can't say anything else. You just say something like clouds

(46:21):
three and that I mean there's three cards related to that, right,
and then they try and guess all the cards that
would be related, and if they guess an incorrect card,
there could be different consequences like you either gave the
other team a point or you just can't guess any
more for that turn, or you lose the game entirely, right,
So it's it's really you have to be really creative.
But the game is also fast, like you can play

(46:41):
it in just twenty minutes if your team doesn't take
a thousand hours to make up their mind about what
they think you met. But that's the game actually comes
at the timer, so you can make them hurry up.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Oh good.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
Another game on here is called Suspicion is kind of
like Clue, but it actually requires a little more deduction
than that. And essentially it's because you get this board
that is a map of like a house, and what
you do is in a single room, you can ask
based on where people are in this You don't know
who are are what players on the board. You just

(47:15):
there's a bunch of pieces and then you basically try
to figure out, Okay, there's some information that you know
and some information that other people know, and you can
ask the question can this piece observe these things that
are in the room around it? And you get like
yes or no answers from the people they're like, I
think they hand you cards if I'm remembering correctly, and
so you have to deduce who is which character, and

(47:36):
I think there's maybe an object that they're associated with.
It's been a while since I've played, but that's the
idea is you like have to deduce that by getting
you by asking questions for which you get yes or
no answers to based on like where things are out
on the board, what they should be able to see, right,
and so really interesting, super deduction based game. That's kind
of fun. That sounds fun. That's I mean, actually sounds
really cool. So yeah, and that's like that. It's easy,

(47:58):
it's available at targets, you can get anywhere. Okay, we
need to go faster than we're going, So I'm just
gonna sort of list them off and they'll try and
I'll speak to something I think are particularly good. Telestrations
is a group for about four people. I think. Banana
Grams is a word game. Point Salad is a set
collecting game with just a card game. Felicity is a
card game that involves bets and bluffing someone's fun. Anomia

(48:21):
a lot of people describe as a point and Yale game.
It's very loud, but also a word association. Five Minute
Dungeon is a co op game and every round of
the game last five minutes.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
That sounds awesome.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, it's really fun. It's a match to sample. You're
going really fast. It's like you're just throwing cards as
fast as you can. Good game. Okay, if you are
interested in breaking into some games that are a little
more complex, and they are not necessarily expert level, but
they're not super simple. They're not super simple, they're not
super difficult. But it's sort of like, this is a

(48:53):
good gateway to start looking at and exploring other games
that are out there. Here's a list of games that
I came up with. Flux is a card game. Reef
is this really fun game where you are building choral
reefs out of plastic pieces.

Speaker 2 (49:07):
That sounds amazing.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
It's super fun. You have like this little reef pad
and you just stack them up. It's really cool. Dice
Forge amazing. It has modular dice, so you get to
pop the sides off of your dice and they're like
little lego pieces almost, and you put on new sides
to make your dice even better. Awesome game. That's Wild
Forbidden Desert is a co op game that's really cool.
Mystic Veil is called a deck building game. It's a

(49:29):
card game and the cards are transparent except for a
little piece of art, and so you can layer them
on top of each other to make them better and
so it's cool game. Segrata is a dice drafting game,
super mellow. If you were like into if you wanted
to get into a game where it's just really chill, slow,
you just sort of work at your own pace, Segrada

(49:50):
is a good game for them. Castle Panic is another
co op game. It's so fun because essentially what happens
is there's a whole theme of these panic games like
Dead Panic and other, but Castle Panic is the one
I'm the most familiar with. Essentially, there are orcs that
are invading a castle and you're trying to play cards
to stop them from doing that, and it's really difficult

(50:11):
because there's lots of them.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Well, I was gonna say, it sounds like my house.

Speaker 1 (50:14):
There you go, Castle Castle. It's basically oh for video gamers,
this is this is a tower defense game but in
like a board game format, so nice.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
You know what the worst card to draw is and Uno,
I don't ads and we're back.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
A Zool is sort of a tile set collecting game.
It's a lot of fun, it's super easy. Really it's
high strategy, but the game is also relatively quick. Supports
I think four players. Sushigo Party is a set collecting
card drafting game. So basically, you get a hand of cards,
you get to choose one and then pass it, and
you do that until the cards are gone.

Speaker 2 (50:54):
That also sounds like my House.

Speaker 1 (50:57):
Sushigo is one of the that's one of the ones
I use most frequently to help people break into games. Okay,
I also think it supports about ten people, so pretty
good for larger groups. And the last one on this
list is Pandemic. As I mentioned, that's that co op
card game where you are trying to defeat COVID nineteen.
So all right for expert gamers. These are people at

(51:17):
whatever level you're at, you want to dive into some
super high strategy, expert level, complex but amazingly fun games.
My recommendations are Dinosaur Island. This is exactly Jurassic Park.
They just didn't want to I think pay for copyright
on that. I mean, also bad idea like down to
the letter. The game takes up like an entire dining
room table and it is so much fun. I absolutely

(51:40):
love it. Mansions of Madness I usually puts my favorite
game ever that is the Kathulhu based game, where it's
a co op game where you use the app. Game
is gigantic. It has a bunch of different scenarios. They
come out with regular expansions all the time, just amazing.
Reavers of Midguard is a dice game essentially, and what

(52:01):
it is you're all sort of playing in a way
sort of Viking ships and you just go around a
board taking actions to get the most points.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
So my favorite thing so far about these three in
the icepert gamers is that it sounds like you're reading
chapter titles out of Lord of the Rings.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
It does maybe not Mansions of Madness, but it still
feels good though.

Speaker 2 (52:24):
Castle still feels like it's like, yeah, Castle Panic, Reavers
of mid.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
Guard, Yeah, that's fair. The next one is kind of
a cheat, and there's a whole series of games called
Tiny Epic. There's Tiny Epic Zombies, Tiny Epic Tactics, Tiny
Epic Mechs Machs, Tiny Epic Western and the game play
is actually very unique for each of them, and they're
tiny the portable so they they're almost small enough to

(52:47):
fit in your pocket. Maybe too fat for that though,
but they're these games that spread out to be really large,
but they're in super compact boxes. Love them. A game
called Vindication, a very large board game. Essentially you're exploring
an island, but it's really high strategy in terms of
the different ways that you can win. One called Endogenesis.
This one's difficult because it only exists on Kickstarter right

(53:08):
now and I don't think it ever made it to
widescale publication, but it is a really awesome game that
you are essentially playing as gods is the theme.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
I remember telling me about that one. Yeah, that one
sounded really really cool. Actually it's neat.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
Yeah, I like it. Another one that's kind of a cheat.
There's a publisher I really like called Genius Games, and
these are all super super sciencey themed games, and it's
like they do a really good job of making accessible
topics like the periodic table of elements and how cells
and a body work and things like that, and how
to create middle alloys is another one of the games.

(53:42):
My favorite on that one would be Periodic specifically but
there's probably twelve or fifteen games at least sithe. This
is an alternate history cyberpunk nineteen twenties game where you're
playing these factions trying to collect the most resources and
get the most point. It's basically really cool game and

(54:02):
just amazingly well designed, like really really well designed in
terms of overall game flow and everything. Yeah, Terraforming Mars
is kind of exactly what it sounds like. The board
itself is Mars, and then you not the whole planet,
but you know it looks like Mars.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
And Elon Muskett loves that game.

Speaker 1 (54:20):
Yeah, And essentially you're trying to just make Mars habitable
by playing certain things that create, like trees and water
and that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (54:28):
That also sounds like Aliens.

Speaker 1 (54:29):
Fair yes, Prometheus, Prometheus, Oh please do not go to
terraform a planet.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
It's bad news for all of us.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
And the last one is galactic contract. This one essentially
is you're just a cargo ship going around trying to
complete as many contracts as you can to get points,
and so Futurama. Yes, actually this is very much like Futurama.
Fewer jokes, but super.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Fun, awesome. I love it.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
I thought i'd recommend some two player only games. A
lot of people are in that category. Lost Cities is
a card game. Jaipur is also a card game. Morel's
is a card game based on collecting mushrooms. Fox in
the Forest is a trick ticking card game. It sort
of plays in some similar things to other card games
like Hearts and Spades, because it's a trick ticking game,
but it has these cool sort of cards have special
abilities in them that make the strategy elevated Onitoma is

(55:16):
a board game that looks like chess, but the way
the pieces move changes game to game based on cards
that you draw. Oh yeah, and it's super fun. It
also plays in like fifteen minutes actually fast. Patchwork is
kind of a set collecting game. In Between. In Between
is like if Stranger Things was a board game. Essentially,
one person plays as the like the regular world, and

(55:38):
the other person plays is the upside down sort of yeah,
and you're essentially trying to drag as many people into
your different realms, so half of them start in the
upside down and half of them start in the real world,
and then you're competing to bring in people.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Tiered Thing so that sounds very biblical too.

Speaker 1 (55:54):
It's really cool and the art on that is pretty neat,
little cartoony, but but really good. Rose King is a
game that is sort of Othello in a way. You
know what that one is?

Speaker 2 (56:02):
No, I don't know what that means. Okay, Oh with Othello,
I think you said it's kind of like a fellow.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
And I was like just a random fellow on the street.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
A Rose King does sound like a fellow.

Speaker 1 (56:12):
Yeah, Othello, I'll say that. Yeah. Essentially you are placing
pieces Mastermind. This is a game that's it's been around
for a long time, but essentially you have it feels
like a cooperative game in a way, although you are
competing with the other person and that you're trying to
guess a code that they've selected and they are telling

(56:33):
you whether you got any of it right. It's just
a really cool game. So there's some guessing involved, but
there's a lot of deduction involved in that one. And
then the last one I'll recommend is micro Brew. This
one can actually go up to four players if you
have enough, if you have multiple copies of the game.
The idea here is that you're brewing beer and you're
competing with the other people to brew the best beer
and to like attract customers.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
I feel like either Austin, Texas or Denver, Colorado will
really love that game.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
And the other thing. It comes in a tin about
the size of an altoid tin, so that the game
itself is really really small, and the idea is that
it's portable. Nice, you need a decent amount of space
to play it on, but it's it's small, so it's
not you know, it is a little bit complex, but
it's a it's a cool theme and the is well executed.
I think, Yeah, all right, the final set of games
I was going to recommend here are for large groups,

(57:21):
and so this is where you're trying to have a
large gathering. I get people all the time asking me like, oh,
we have forty five people coming, what's the game for that.
I'm like, what is one activity at all that you
can think of that caters to that? Like? Let alone
the games? Yeah, I'm like, there aren't things that people
do in that large of a group, really, not even orgy.

(57:42):
So are that large so that I'm aware of anyway,
not speaking from speriens anyway, most of these games you
get up to ten or more players. There is one
that goes up to about twenty five, but the first
one is Spyfall. It takes eight minutes to play. You
have to set a timer when you start, and you're
trying to deduce who's the spy. The spy is trying

(58:03):
to deduce what the location is. Bang is a card
game where you are trying to kill everybody. This is
the last person standing. Deception is a cool, deductive semi
co op game where one person is the murderer and
everyone else is trying to figure out who it is
and one person knows but they can't. They can't give
it away. Oh so really cool that way, Happy Salmon.
This game is insane. It takes about one minute to

(58:26):
play maybe, and it is loud and fast, and you
need a lot of space to stand and throw cards
because it is just madness. Like you don't want a
table for this, Actually you want an open room. Nice. Yeah,
you're just gonna be throwing cards. And actually they make
the cards like out of plastic basically so that because
they're going to be stomped on and thrown and all
kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2 (58:43):
It is.

Speaker 1 (58:43):
It is a crazy game. It's basically there's like four
actions that you do, and you have to find someone
else's the same action as you, and then you do
the action together, and then you throw your card on
the ground and go on to the next one. And
you're just trying to get throw all your cards and
the first one done wins and it goes really fast
and it's just loud and crazy. Mafia is a hidden
ident game, so you don't know who There's some couple
of people who are on the bad guys and you're

(59:05):
trying to figure out who it is. There are really
no pieces, honestly, it's just someone leads they know what's
going on.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
My daughter said that she played that in school.

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Yeah, they actually do Mafia and one night Wear Wolf
or just wear Wolf are games that people often play
in settings like schools and groups. Team building exercises is
another one. Yeah, and it's because the game is really
interesting and the social dynamics that it plays on, and
there are a lot of variations on it. It's been
around for a while and I think it actually started

(59:32):
maybe as an internet game. Some people have claimed that
they started it for a classroom actually, like a college professor.
Interesting idea for a game, So yeah, there's a lot
of bluffing involved in that one and deduction as well.
What else anomia I mentioned earlier, that's the one where
you just it's word association game. But it works for
a large group, so I wouldn't recommend more than ten people,

(59:52):
just because it starts to get real obnoxious. Allowed Also,
it's hard to see when you get that many people
because everyone has their cards in front of them. Exploding
Kittens if you that with the expansion, and it's a
funny name. This is the last person's standing game. Essentially
you're trying not to blow up because the kittens explode.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
So my favorite thing about this is that on the
notes it just says exploding kittens with expansion.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if we mentioned this earlier,
but a lot of games have what they're called expansions,
and I mean it is extentially what it applies, which
is just it is an add on to the game
to add new rules, new pieces, more players, different themes,
all kinds of stuff that you can do with expansions
that usually just keep the game fresh or increase the

(01:00:32):
number of options that you have in the game. The
expansion I'm talking about adds an adult only version, although
you can just buy multiple copies of the game and
combine them.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:40):
One called Martian Dice. I think the limit on this
is about twenty ish people. Maybe it's like fifteen. Honestly,
there's no real reason to have a limit. The problem
is that it's everyone takes turns, so if you have
like twenty people, it's going to be a while before
it's your turn again. But this is just trying to
collect the most number of points. The first person reach
I want to say, twenty one points or something wins
and then ion It goes up to seven players. But

(01:01:01):
this is one of those genius games games, and essentially
you're just collecting sets of metals to make different alloys
and whatnot. And the last one is Zombie Dice, and
this is a push your luck dice game where you're
just trying to get as many points as you can
on your turn unless you roll certain things that would
cause you to lose your points for that turn. All right,
So you sort of roll until you either can't or
you don't want to anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
This is brought to you by an obscure little board
game called ads. All right, back from the AD Break
let's get back into it, all right. So I just
listed like, what, sixty games.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Yeah, there are a lot of games, which is awesome
because these are all games that maybe people haven't been
exposed to, or maybe it's giving people ideas or even
just giving people to like maybe a spark to start
researching some stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
I mean, I'm gonna put all of these in the
show notes. If you want to learn more about them,
I'll put links to them as well, and various range
of prices, various range of timelinks, depending on what you're
looking for. I hear people all the time tell me
to like, I just want like a simple game that is,
it doesn't take very long, and like, to me, that's
like saying I would like food with the least amount
of flavor you can put in it. Its bland and texture

(01:02:11):
list as you can make it. That's that's the kind
of food I'm looking for. I'm like, Okay, weirdo, No
to me, I love complex rule based games that have
a lot of thought strategy put into them and there's
you know, a big theme and all that. I could
talk about this for so long. I'm one thing I
pride myself on my ability to teach people how to

(01:02:31):
play games, I will sit down and read the rules
dozens of times and watch videos on the games and
make sure I understand it. I'll play it by myself
as different people so that I feel like I understand it,
so that when I sit down to teach it to people,
I know it so well that I can easily communicate
the rules and get them playing right away, and then
can answer any questions that they have, And that allows

(01:02:53):
me to be more successful because a lot of people
some of the rule books for these are twenty five
pages long or more. There is one Cthula Wars. The
rule book I believe, is like eighty pages. It's a book.
You actually pull out a full book.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
You have to read a book.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
Yeah, about sixty of those pages are like fluff and
expansions and like rule clarification. But still twenty pages is
a lot. But it's it's also fairly intimidating. I can
imagine as a casual game, you're like, oh, look, Cthulia.
That looks cool, and then you pull out those box
that's the size of a television and a rule book
that looks like a dictionary, and you're like, never mind.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Yeah, what did I get myself into.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
Yeah, And honestly, they don't usually have to be that complicated,
and so I can sort of I pride myself on
the ability to sit down and dissemine it rules in
a way that get people playing and understanding and having fun,
because most of the games just aren't that hard. They
look hard and it like there are a lot of rules,
but they aren't. They aren't that complex, right, you know,

(01:03:49):
once you've got the gist of it, you can sort
of sit down and understand how to navigate most of
the scenarios in a game pretty easily.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
For somebody who is a casual gamer. Like, it's really
great to hear that there is kind of this really
cool culture and social network and just ultimately this tribe, right,
Like it's like, you know, we always talk about finding
your tribe and getting in with your people, and like
this is one of those things where it's like maybe
now you have maybe you didn't have one before, but
maybe now you have a group of people that you
can connect with and really bond over over this new

(01:04:18):
thing that is really an entire culture in itself.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
Yeah, exactly. And I think I've only met a couple
of people who even when they got exposed to games,
they got to play a few of them, they got
to be successful and felt like they understood. They still
were just like, nah, not really. In my scene, most
people can find at least a couple of games that
they really like and latch onto and that sort of
becomes their go to for how they'll spend the time.
And you just don't have to be stuck playing games

(01:04:43):
like Monopoly, right, and sorry for those people who like
that game, I don't. You don't have to be like
resigned to like, oh, those are the options for games.
There are some amazing games out there. It'd be like
if someone was like, oh, I don't really watch TV
because I'm not really a fan of the car Dashians.
I'm like, there are better television shows out there, you guys, Yeah,

(01:05:04):
like yeah, all of them, basically most.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Of them exactly. Well yeah, I would say literally all
of them.

Speaker 1 (01:05:10):
Yeah. And it's like, you don't have to get stuck
just watching the Kardashians. There's like so many good shows
out there. And that's true of games that people are like, well, yeah,
I'm not really into it. I'm like, believe me, there's something.
Let's find something that's sort of your speed and you'll
find at least a game or two that you want
to play.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
You're like that really great bartender that like really works
with you on finding the beer that you like. That absolutely,
and that's what it's like if you can't relate to
like tabletop games. If you've ever gotten to a bar
and somebody it's like, well, what do you like to
drink and they're and you're like, I don't know, I
kind of like this, and that bartender works with you
and creates these drinks and kind of gives you sample
and like does all that. That's that's what Abraham does.
So if you're interested in board games, he's your go to.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Board game bartender. It's actually it's funny you say that
because you're people. That's how a lot of my friends
are with me is they'll say, hey, I'm looking for
a game that has these elements for those number of people,
and I say, oh, how about these five games?

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Thanks?

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
You know, And so that's I've become a lot of
people's go to because that's that's the thing that I do,
and I like doing it, Like I just this is
a world I want to spend all of my time
in and I just am so passionate about it. I
love it. It's great. I don't use any illicit substances.
I don't drink alcohol, I don't smoke, I don't do anything.
So my way of having fun is by learning and strategizing.

Speaker 2 (01:06:25):
I love it so all right.

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
I would love to talk about this more, but we
should probably let everyone go. If you even made it
this far awesome, I'll probably just keep recommending some of
these games and explaining them a little more as part
of the recommendation sections of upcoming episodes. But you know,
it is what it is.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
Yeah, No, I think that sounds great. I mean, I'm
sure that I you know, I can't speak for everybody,
but I appreciate you exposing us to this thing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Thanks man. Yeah, do you have any themes in particular
that stand out for you?

Speaker 3 (01:06:52):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:06:52):
I think the thing is is just it's one of
those things where it's low stakes for the most part,
high reward in terms of of social interactions. And I
think if you're one of those people that just has
a hard time with social interactions, I think this is
a good place to start. It give you a place
to kind of facilitate and really work in a space
where there's an objective and you don't really have to

(01:07:15):
focus on anything more than the objective and kind of
interacting with people within that space.

Speaker 1 (01:07:18):
Yes, yeah, I think that's absolutely that's great. I kind
of wanted to recommend one for you, but I wasn't sure.
Are you competitive or not so much?

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Oh I'm so competitive. It's so dumb. I used to play.
I played like competitive, like state level sports when I
was in school. So I'm like, yeah, I'm like super competitive.
It's scary.

Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
Okay, do you like direct combat with other players, like
if you're playing a game where like, I'm sorry that
sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:07:44):
Okay, I think Bang is really your speed. I would
check out BANG if I were you.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
Okay, I'm gonna add Bang to my list.

Speaker 1 (01:07:51):
Okay, Bang is cool. Like the whole thing is you
are just like you're shooting at people, You're trying to
block their shots at you. There's a hidden ide any elements,
so there's a been of deduction in it. And it's
a super competitive Last person Standing style game. So I'm
gonna recommend that it is three or more players, just
so you know, you can't do a two player game with.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
It all right, I could do that. I can make
that work cool.

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
That was a fun discussion. Thank you for listening. I
hope that you enjoyed that. And we've got some updated
things to talk about. So the first thing I want
to get into is there's actually been quite a bit
of research exploring possible psychological benefits as as you might
think of them, related to playing board games, and psychologists

(01:08:41):
have been noting these and research has actually been capturing
some data on these. So one of the first things
here is that board games are a social activity, and
so this can be a way for people to find
reasons to come together. And I think we are in
an increasingly secular world, and maybe more importantly to that,
the thing that is driving us all apart is that
we are in a social media based environment, and so

(01:09:05):
anything that helps us find ways to bring people together,
I think is increasingly important and is very beneficial. So
board games can serve that purpose. Just help get people
in a room where they're interacting with one another and
having some kind of relationship either built or continue to
develop in that space.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
Yeah, and also board games offer us a kind of
a unique opportunity for skill building, a building strategy as
well and mastery, so they can provide an opportunity to
benefit us from a feeling of like, you know, different
things like senses of achievement, a sense of failure and
loss where the stakes are very low. There's also you know,
there's lots of like cooperation inside of that. There are

(01:09:46):
clear rules and objectives that allow people to work towards
a specific outcome, either together or independently. Right, And there's
you know, maybe some specific specific outcomes or points along
the way to measure their progress unambiguously. And people also
just kind of like to do things that are not
related to their day to day lives.

Speaker 1 (01:10:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
There's a little bit of escapism there where they can
kind of like immerse themselves in an activity where they
don't have to think about their current problems or the
state of the world and stuff like that. So there's
a lot of kind of unique opportunities inside of board
game specifically.

Speaker 1 (01:10:15):
Yeah, and so we'll dig into the research right now
that shows like what the objective benefits are. But those
are some aspects of games that psychologists have just noticed
that makes sense in how they would foster like a
sense of community, a sense of accomplishment, and having ways
to orient and organize your behavior around those types of things,

(01:10:39):
and like the aspect of that includes like just as
clear rules and objectives and that sort of thing. So
there's a lot of what we're going to focus on
or talk about comes from a few different sources where
I found articles reviewing other articles, and so that's always
a really efficient way to get information, is that they
can summarize research that's been done. So twenty twenty one

(01:11:00):
paper by bar and Otter bring in the Journal of
Retailing and Consumer Services, which what a frightening thing that
must be, yes and anyway, in this paper are they
reported that board games provide a safe, low stakes environment
to practice social behaviors such as competition, teamwork, negotiation, and

(01:11:21):
winning and losing gracefully. Like it's so low stakes, and
it's so like when you're in the throes of like
a big sporting event, which can have lots of benefits too.
There's lots of great things about sports as they relate
to things like playing in games and teamwork. But you
are working physically really hard, and like you are kind

(01:11:41):
of sometimes tired and exhausted. You've got a lot of
endorphins running through your body that have you maybe react
more strongly to sports going well or going poorly, and
in the board game setting, it's it's just such a
dialed down version of the physical and density of that.
Then it's easier to experience a loss having tried really

(01:12:04):
hard and be able to be okay with.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
That right absolutely now. Further, board games create opportunities to
practice ways to gently tease and trash talk in a
way that can be shaped by the social group. I've
actually worked on programs for this specific thing with clients
that I've worked with. That's great because you know, like
I would work with a child who love to trash
talk but would be kind of mean and like hurt

(01:12:27):
friends feelings, and so we had to kind of teach like, hell,
here's how you do this, Like you don't comment on
the way somebody looks. You, maybe comment on the way
they're playing, and like, you know, like and also realize
that they may not take this very well, so like,
you know, maybe it's not a partner that you play
games with. But we had to kind of work on
a different a bunch of different kind of aspects of it,
which is a lot of fun. Yeah, but if we
teach really well we can help build relationships with understandable

(01:12:50):
boundaries somebody saying like, hey, you know, I don't like
the way that you're talking to me like this or
that's not fun or something like that. And this also
allows people to build comfort and trust when they both
understand where the other and it's coming from. Like so
there's a particular context in which this occurs. There's gentle
ribbing that goes along, and you know, and it can
actually strengthen relationships quite quite a bit.

Speaker 1 (01:13:09):
And that's exactly it. It might be difficult to feel
like you know how to tease someone without it sounding
mean spirited, and when in a game, you have lots
of repeated opportunities for that and you get to give
it back, so you get some modeling, you can get
some feedback where it's like if it's being mean, then
your group is going to hopefully have an opportunity to

(01:13:29):
respond to that and be like, dude, that's not cool.
Like it's like when someone when you when you take
something away from someone and you beat them in something
and be like, aha, got you good, and like you
learn a way that does it in such a way
that it's not cruel. And so I think it can
create that that opportunity which they had highlighted in here.

Speaker 2 (01:13:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Barn otter Bring also discussed that repeated engagement with social
decision making can help shape and develop such things as
moral reasoning, as well as other important skills like and cooperation.
There are actually quite a few games that involve teamwork
where you might be on a team with someone and
so you're working together with them. And there are also
games that are fully cooperative where everyone who's playing is

(01:14:12):
working together, usually to accomplish some objective or to beat
the game itself. And I mentioned last time Pandemic is
a really good example of that. That's the one that
people know a lot. Mansions of Madness is one. There
are a lot of cooperative games now.

Speaker 2 (01:14:26):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:26):
Basically the way the game works, if you're not familiar is,
like I said, you're all working together to accomplish some objective.
And usually it's like just you might be trying to
get as many points as possible as a group, and
they are like certain thresholds that the game outlines, is
like how successful you were based on how many points
you got, yeah, or you might be trying to if
there is an end game condition where I would end

(01:14:47):
the game. You're trying to accomplish an objective before the
end game condition hits. So right in the game The Grizzled,
for example, you're playing a bunch of soldiers and there's
all of the sort of wartime threats coming out, and
you're working together, but you can't tell each other what
cards you have to overcome those, and so you are
doing your best to help each other out when you

(01:15:09):
can't necessarily communicate, and you're just trying to get all
the way through all of the threat cards. And if
you get to the very bottom of the deck by
having worked together to overcome all of those threats, then
you all win.

Speaker 2 (01:15:23):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:23):
Yeah, so there are there there are lots of versions
of that that are out. So anyway, thinking about this
idea of like building moral reasoning, empathy and cooperation, I
think we desperately need to start making politicians just play
thousands and thousands of board games, see if we can
turn them human.

Speaker 2 (01:15:38):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, one day, one day. That should
be a barrier to entry. Like if you can't play
cooperative board games, then you shouldn't be a politician.

Speaker 1 (01:15:46):
Oh I like that. This is a nice objective. Criteria
for like whether or not you can get can get
elected to the things?

Speaker 2 (01:15:52):
Yeah, yeah, before you can even get on a ballot. Okay,
can you even can you play nicely with others?

Speaker 1 (01:15:56):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
Okay, well then you can't. You can't do this, yeah
like ads.

Speaker 3 (01:16:00):
Oh all right, let's come back pick up where we're
talking about these board game things.

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
Yeah. So board games have been found to be very
helpful for general brain development, including in children and stroke patients,
which I think is really valuable. So some studies actually
showed improved cognitive functioning, social development, problem solving vocabulary, improved mood,
and reduced anxiety in children playing games, which is actually
really fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:16:31):
Yeah, so I'm gonna tell a quick sort of I
got to be a part of a little case study
where we were playing games with a kid who was
struggling with spatial tasks, and so we played that. We
had many specific like curriculum sort of things that we
were working on, but we had one of the crickhum

(01:16:51):
things as was set aside time for spatial games where
they were all sort of puzzles where they had to
organize their pieces. Is in sort of two D and
three D space. If you will. So if you can
think of like Tetris is kind of a spatial game
in a way, right, and so there are some games
that have that. One game that we played with the
student was called Patchwork. Essentially you're building a little quilt,

(01:17:15):
but all the pieces of the quilt a look almost
like Tetris pieces like tetrono polyanomos, and you want to
arrange them in patterns based on what's available for you
to choose from and your little quilt, and so being
able to see how they like mentally, see how they
fit together, how you would rotate them to fit certain spaces,
was one thing we did. Another one is a game
called Boop, and that's a two player game, so it's patchwork.

(01:17:38):
And then that one you're playing cats jumping on a bed,
but every time a cat lands on the bed, it boops,
which means knocks aside other cats that are nearby, but
you want to strategically knock them so you can line
up three in a row. So again there's a spatial
component of thinking about where you place them and where
they go as an outcome before you place them. So
those are just a couple of examples of things that

(01:17:58):
we did. To work on.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
I love that. And you know D and D for
those of you who are on initiate, Dungeons of Dragons
is a really great opportunity for social skills because you
have to either collaborate or sabotage each other and these
and it's completely narrative based, so you have this opportunity
to kind of like make up your story as you go.
And if you're in with a really great group or
you get along with everybody, then it's much more fun.

(01:18:22):
If you are contentious and fight with everybody, it is
not fun and it's very difficult to build skills in
those spaces. So like a lot of D and D
campaigns require you to collaborate with your party to make
it so that you can achieve that goal or that
next step. My brother not at all the collaborative type.
He is completely I mean he is in general he

(01:18:42):
is like sarcastically collaborative, if that makes sense. But he's
just chaos walking. So he's always kind of like the
like they say, it's always done in the wild card
in these games. And so like our social skill, our
social group is really good and we're usually pretty good
because we unify against my brother's mechanations in these games.

Speaker 1 (01:19:00):
But yeah, I mean, and it's opportunities to like again,
how to talk to one another, how to ask for
things from one another. On the Behavioral Observations podcast, they
had a guest on at some point in the last
few years who talked about how he specifically teaches social
skills by having them play D and D and there's
all these aspects of communication, teamwork, perspective taking involved in

(01:19:25):
that that helps develop those skills for people who had
not developed them up to that point and who benefit
from doing so.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:19:33):
There was another sort of case report here, although this
one was more clearly documented. There was a fifty three
year old multiple stroke patient who had, as part of
his recovery, was playing some board games and recreit. He
credited a lot of his improvements to playing board games.
And you might hear that and be like, Okay, so
this is just a guy who wanted to justify playing

(01:19:54):
board games, and so he said that, you know, that's
what helped, And that could be the case, but there
was some somewhat empirical data that supported this, that showed that
his recovery actually slowed down when he played fewer or
no games, but his recovery increased and sped up when
he was playing multiple games per day, and so there

(01:20:16):
is then some reason to believe that if you can
increase and decrease the progress he's making, that there is
some independent variable that seems to be important there. There
was also a study in the New England Journal of
Medicine that found by that playing daily crosswords was associated
with sharper memories and people seventy one and older who
had mild cognitive impairments. And so although that's not a

(01:20:38):
board game, the whole idea of basically playing some kind
of game, in this case a word game, was helpful
for over their cognitive functioning and people who were basically
in the category of and at risk of cognitive decline.

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
Yeah, it's important stuff. Now. A French study aggregated twenty
years of data and showed that people who played board
games had a fifteen percent lower risk of developing dementia.
There's also less depression and less cognitive decline among participants,
which I think is pretty valuable information.

Speaker 1 (01:21:08):
Yeah, all of that, I mean that if you're someone
who would be in that category, if you have a
fifteen percent chance, even though it's not a huge chance,
like that'd probably be a chance you would want to take.

Speaker 2 (01:21:18):
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, it's like no harm at all.

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
Now, all this being said, while we're extolling the virtues
of board games, sources noted it's important how you play,
and one article cited examples in which hyper competitive people
really did not get the same benefit out of playing
board games. And I want to stress that like being
competitive is fine, and even developing competitiveness and people who

(01:21:43):
sort of demonstrate otherwise low competitives may be beneficial. It's
when competitiveness becomes aggressive and they're they're showing anger and
they're like not really having fun. It's becoming like socially
toxic situation that really diminishes the benefits both for the
person who's experiencing the anger, the player, as well as

(01:22:05):
the people they're playing with. And so that hyper competitiveness
can start to tick down what benefits there are. So
it's possible, like it's this is not a panacea. This
is not going to work for everything. It's not going
to cure all diseases. And one one thing that if
you have someone who can't play games without getting upset,
probably not the way to go for them, right, And

(01:22:26):
I definitely like to urge when I teach people games
and when I'm sharing about games, like the important thing
to remember is it's just a game. Like be competitive
if it calls for it, but like the point is
to have fun. Like the point is that you're doing
something with a group of people and that you're doing
it socially. So like remember, like we're here to like
have fun.

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And speaking of fun, since we recorded last,
there have been roughly thirty six thousand new games developed
at this time. So like, and I was reading this
bullet point the Abraham I putt, and I wasn't sure
if this was new games that were developed or new
games that Abraham has played, which also could be the same.

(01:23:06):
Like the Venn diagram of those is just a complete circle,
I think. So.

Speaker 1 (01:23:11):
So we're talking about like seven thousand board games a year, roughly, yeah,
have come out since we recorded last, which would be
me having to play what is that several at least,
let's see ten twenty board games a day, every day,
every day without break between now and then. That's basically

(01:23:33):
how many have come out. It's about twenty board games
a day since we recorded last have come out. That
is a lot. So a lot of people ask, so, like,
I have a lot of board games. I've talked about
this and they're like, how do you not have every
board game ever made? I'm like, I have like less
than one percent of every board game ever made.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
Yeah, close, close.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
There are thousands and thousands that come out every year.
They are new ones, and I do think that there
are some drawbacks to that that are definitely important, but
just a lot has happened since then. I think there's
kind of been There's an ever evolving sort of shift
in how games are written and developed, and I will say, like,
of those thirty six thousand, there is a not insignificant

(01:24:13):
chunk that are like remakes of existing games, and so
they basically take a concept and repackage it and they
deliver that same concept but in a different skin, if
you will. Was in the video game Linggo. So anyway,
I'm not sure if there's more to say about that,
but just that there have been a lot of games
since we talked last. Yeah, new games.

Speaker 2 (01:24:32):
That covers it, yeah new Yeah, new games. So just
so everybody's aware, all that means is that you have
to play twenty board games a day and you'll be
caught up.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
That's right. Board game publishers will be so happy, Yes,
of course, all right, I do want to update some
of the things that we talked about last time as well.
Last time I had a discussion where I classified games
in terms of their ending criteria in our original discussion,
And what I mean by that is, like, when I'm
teaching people games, one of the first things I want
to tell them is how the game ends, so that

(01:25:01):
they're well aware of that. Honestly, it's one of the
first things people want to know anyway. Yeah, it's not
because they're looking forward to the game being over they
sat down to play. It's because you want to figure out,
like when, what is the condition under which I get
to stop playing? All right, I'm going to have to
stop playing. I'm gonna stop making choices because the decisions
you make might change based on that. And so, like

(01:25:23):
I had games where I call them race to the
end games where it's like you want to be the
first one to accomplish some goal that triggers the end
of the game, you win, right. There are games that
go a fixed number of rounds, so everyone has a
set number of turns, they take those turns, and then
when the last round has ended, the game is over.
And like in games where there is like a set
ending thing that happens once you're getting to that point,

(01:25:45):
it's a lot of times like don't worry about this
strategy or that strategy. Just get as many points as
you can toward the end of the game. Like that,
that's a common experience and sort of the arc of
the experience of the game. And so that is a
way to categorize them is to think about like this
of how does this game end? But potentially a more
useful way to think of them, and that a lot
of people think of when asked about like types of

(01:26:09):
games is instead their theme and their rule types. And
by rule types, you might also call mechanics, and that
is like ways that the game is played essentially. Does
that make sense?

Speaker 2 (01:26:21):
Sure? Yeah, yeah, absolutely so, I'm just.

Speaker 1 (01:26:23):
Gonna list through, We'll take turns listening through a few
of the different mechanic types that exist. I might have
to explain a little bit of all of these. Let's
have you start and then ask me about any that
you feel like you're unclear. Since I know that you
play fewer games than I do.

Speaker 2 (01:26:37):
Okay, so these are the mechanics, right, These are type
of mechanics that you're talking about. Yeah, all right, so
some of them are worker placement, tableau building, drafting, engine building,
deck building, and card shedding, to name a few. I
feel like deck building is very similar to like magic
the gathering, like you have to build a deck and
then play. There's like maybe a second mechanic to that,

(01:26:59):
but you have to build a deck to compete you.

Speaker 1 (01:27:01):
You might call it a deck building game. A lot
of deck building games when people are talking about that,
you throughout the course of a game will be building
your deck rather than building the deck and then playing.
And so commonly the way this will work is you'll
start with a certain deck of cards, and then as
the game plays, you'll acquire better cards to your deck,

(01:27:24):
and then you'll also potentially be discarding weaker cards out
of your deck, so that every time you get to play,
you're getting better and better cards. Sure, so that's a
really common way that that one's set up. Okay, what
others of those? Do you feel like you would not
know what they meant?

Speaker 2 (01:27:37):
Let's talk about maybe worker placement.

Speaker 1 (01:27:39):
Okay, A lot of people hear this, and they hear
work replacement. It's worker space placement. Yeah, yeah, this is
actually one of my favorite mechanics. If there's a workerplacement game,
I'm probably gonna enjoy it. The way that this works
is there are action spaces on usually in some kind
of board, and you have these little characters they'll call meeples.

(01:28:02):
Sometimes they can look at any number of ways, but
you've got some piece that belongs to you that you'll
put it on an action space, and that's how you
get to choose what thing you're going to do on
your turn. Sure, and sometimes those spaces are competitive, meaning
only one or a limited number of people can be there.
Sometimes they are cooperative, meaning any number of people can

(01:28:22):
be there. It's just sort of a way to organize
your options for choices that you can make. Sometimes one
person going there knocks out another person who was there,
So there are different ways that that works. But work
replacement is absolutely one of my favorite mechanics in a
board game.

Speaker 2 (01:28:38):
Nice, all right, I like that. So continuing down this list,
there is also bidding, social deduction, trick taking, area control,
tile placement, and resource management. I would assume that area
control would be for because I just want to be clear.
I'm a novice at this stuff, right, So I would

(01:28:58):
assume area control would be something like Risk basically.

Speaker 1 (01:29:01):
Yep, Risk is a good example of this.

Speaker 2 (01:29:02):
Look at that.

Speaker 1 (01:29:03):
There are yeah, see good job claps.

Speaker 2 (01:29:07):
I understand, I understand words. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:29:09):
There are lots of games that essentially they'll use some
aspect of a map and in there you you want
to either hold an area or gain more area, or
push someone out of their area. But yeah, that's exactly
it is. Risk is an example of area control.

Speaker 2 (01:29:22):
Okay, cool? What is uh? Trick taking?

Speaker 1 (01:29:25):
Trick ticking is like the game of Hearts, So essentially
that is you place cards and then somebody will take
those cards based on whether or not they win or
lose the trick. And sometimes you want to take cards,
sometimes you don't. As a fantastic two player game that
I would say is among the top five best two
player games called The Fox in the Forest. Okay, there's

(01:29:46):
a trick taking game. There's a beautiful cooperative trick taking
game called The Crew. There's two versions of that. One
is like Deep Space nine and ones in Ocean theme.
I don't know whatever the point of that one is.
You have have specific objectives you're trying to accomplish. You
can't communicate with your team, but you want the right
people to take the right tricks. But that's essentially it is.

(01:30:07):
You're gonna play down cards and then some criteria will
have somebody take those cards, and that's called a trick
taking game.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
Ah okay, cool, I like that. Okay. And then to
wrap up this list, there's also set collecting, abstract, rpg
push your Luck, tile ling, dungeon crawling, tower defense, and
dice rolling. So I do know dungeon crawling and tower defense.
I feel good about those in RPGs, Like I feel
like as somebody who's played Dungeons and Dragons and Morkborg

(01:30:35):
and stuff like that, where like, you know, you're doing
a dungeon crawl. Tower defense is like plants versus zombies. Yeah,
really is a clear one's that's a tower defense game.
And then RPGs like I think a video games specifically,
so I think of like Paper Mario or you know,
like Final Fantasy vin and stuff like that. So I
guess a question like maybe people would have is like
you're talking about board games with rules, So what does

(01:30:57):
abstract mean? Because that makes it feel like there's not rules, right.

Speaker 1 (01:31:01):
Oh, there are the Yeah, there are rules. It's like
how you go about scoring is not necessarily tied to
a particular theme, but they're usually these are very puzzly
typed games. It's like you want to arrange pieces in
a particular way that will score you more points than
other people. Yeah, sometimes pieces come from a limited pool.

(01:31:21):
So a common example, I think of an abstract puzzle game.
It's called a zool And in this there are these
patterned tiles and then you're essentially trying to just arrange
them according to the best you can in a little
area that you have where you would put those those
patterned tiles. And so there is a theme to this game,
like you're essentially trying to make these patterns, but the

(01:31:42):
idea is essentially an abstract one where you're just trying
to arrange the pattern that will score you the most points. Okay,
and those are both individual goals as well as public goals,
Like you you're if you're the person who has the
most of a particular pattern, you get a thing a
certain amount of points. Sure, Unable to complete the pattern
means you lose points. So yeah, there's quite a few

(01:32:04):
really great abstract puzzle games. Those are actually the ones
that I think a lot of people can sit down
and just play and enjoy because you're it's not super immersive,
it's just very strategic, right, so you're just really trying
to do your best to create a high point scoring thing.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
Sure that makes sense. Cool?

Speaker 1 (01:32:25):
All right? Another one of the ones you mentioned before,
but I forgot to mention deck building was one of
my other favorite mechanisms in there.

Speaker 2 (01:32:32):
Yeah, that's always fun.

Speaker 1 (01:32:33):
I'm not a huge fan though, of like ad games.

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
Yeah, no, those are ye Jet. Thanks John Watson.

Speaker 1 (01:32:46):
All Right, we're back, and I know we're already deep
into this in terms of time, so I'm gonna try
and go quick. So last time I recommended a bunch
of games. I recommended some like Gateway Games, which I
might revise that list, but I'm not gonna worry about
that today, some two player games instead. I'm gonna do
this two ways here. Basically, I'm going to call these
short slash easy games. And these are games that are
like pretty easy to teach, and they don't take very

(01:33:07):
long to learn or play. Like, these are games you
could sit down and get through in around an hour
or less depending on the game. And then the other
ones I'm gonna do are heavy games, and heavy games
are both physically heavy as well as they tend to
have a lot of rules and depth and strategy to them.
And so those are the sort of two lists that
will go through a little bit. Okay, so I'm going

(01:33:29):
to list about half of this list. I'm gonna let
you do the other half, and then I want you
to ask me about one of those games that, just
based on the name alone, you're curious about.

Speaker 2 (01:33:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:33:37):
So we have Mountain Goats, Dandy Lyons, finn Span, Splendor,
and king Domino are five games that you could pick
up and play. Of those, finn Span might be the longest,
but you can do that. I've done that like on
a lunch break, so particularly once you know it, you
can do it pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:33:56):
Yeah, very cool. And there's also Cascadia, Sunset over Water,
stamp Swap and Innovation. You've talked about Finncepan and Mountain
Goats on here, Okay, and I think Cascadia too. So
tell us about Dandelions.

Speaker 1 (01:34:10):
Ah, Okay. Dandellions is a very cute little game. It
comes in a small box. It's pretty portable and essentially
you have cards that are like dandelion pedals, okay, and
you are kind of playing like one of those floaty
dandelion like when a dandy lion turns white and little
floating parts. Yea, you're kind of playing you have like
a huge pile of dice and you're sort of floating

(01:34:31):
around these little pedals, just depositing dice almost man calla style,
but not quite. But in doing so you might kick
people off of their pedals. And so at the end
of the game, you want to be the person who
has the most on the highest scoring pedals, and you
want to have also like a pretty good distribution of
your dice as much as possible so that you can
have like just a lot of scoring opportunities.

Speaker 2 (01:34:51):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:34:51):
But yeah, it's a very cute game. A little mathy,
so like if it's gonna be a good game to practice,
like a lot of sort of just counting and planning,
but it's really really like it.

Speaker 2 (01:35:01):
That's fun. I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:35:02):
Cool all Right. Some heavy games that I very much
enjoy and love. I checked and I did not mention
these last time, as far as I know. Tapestry, Wing Span,
Endless Winter, Paleo Americans, which when people ask me what
my favorite game is anymore, that's the one I say
is Endless Wintery, Arborea and Earth are five big heavy games.

(01:35:24):
I'll do it one more time. Tapestry Zone Game, Wingspan,
Endless Winter, Arborea, and Earth.

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
Nice. There's also the Fox Experiment, Expeditions, Apiary, Terminus, Vita Culture, Viticulture, Viticulture, Viticulture,
Gold West, and Castles of Burgundy.

Speaker 1 (01:35:43):
Yes, some of these are yeah, some of these are older.
They've been around for a long time. Some of these
are newer. But all right, let's do one or two
of those that stood out to you.

Speaker 2 (01:35:52):
I think Castles of Burgundy stands out because I think
of Ron Burgundy.

Speaker 1 (01:35:55):
So that's actually one of the probably the oldest game
on this list. It's a fantastic This is a dice game.
You are collecting different tile types that you're gonna put
in what they call your duchy, which has three castles,
and then you've got some pastures and some lake slash
river things, and you're using dice to collect tiles to

(01:36:17):
put them in there. You're usually not going to be
able to fill in your entire duchy, and then all
the tiles have different abilities or scoring that they do,
and it's just it's a I really really enjoy that one.
It's a classic, really nice game. Yeah, okay, yeah, one
more for fun. Let's do Earth Earth Okay, beautiful game.

(01:36:38):
This is what is called an engine building game, also
a tableau building game. A lot of those mechanics overlap.
By the way that I mentioned. You can have games
that like Endless Winter is a deck building worker placement game,
which also has some area control as well. Anyway, Earth
is an engine building game. Unlike most games where all
the sort of eikonog graphy and pictures are art done

(01:37:02):
for the game, Earth is like a lot of I'm
pretty sure real pictures, Like almost all of them are
real pictures of like locations around the Earth. And in
this one, you're essentially collecting plants. They are ranging into
a four by four grid and they have all these
different abilities. What's cool about this game is this has
an aspect to it that is very rare, not very rare,

(01:37:22):
but there are only handful of games that do this
relatively speaking. And it's called simultaneous play, and that means
when it's any player's turn, all other players are also
doing something okay. And so in this game, like you
choose from one of four actions and then everybody else
gets to do a lesser version of that action while
you're doing that okay, and it still can affect other players,

(01:37:44):
like I might do a thing that affects all these
other players and all that, but most of it happens.
We'll get to your turn, You're like, I'm doing this,
and then everybody starts doing the lesser version of that
thing and working on it. And so it can be
like there's just a lot going on every turn that's
happening because everybody's doing stuff like oh you do you
do this thing, and I'm doing this thing and that,
and there's a little it's not shouting necessarily, but it's

(01:38:05):
just like because you don't really need to shout, but
you're just sort of announcing to people what are happening
or pointing people out and saying like, this is the
thing that's that's going to affect you. Earth is really
really good. I really enjoy that one.

Speaker 2 (01:38:16):
That's fun. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 (01:38:18):
I'm gonna quickly mention Apiary because the theme of that
one is bees in space and so this is a
bees going around colonizing other planets, and that's essentially the game.
It's fantastic.

Speaker 2 (01:38:31):
I love that. I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:38:32):
All right, Well, that's so much about board games, probably
way more than you were hoping to hear. But I
hope that you enjoyed what you heard today and maybe
have some new games to go check out. I strongly
think that there's a board game out there for you,
no matter who you are, Like, you can find something.
There are games that are designed for a single player. Yeah,
like they're just one player solitaire games. There are lots
of them, Go check those out. There are great two

(01:38:53):
player games. There are great social games. A new one
I picked up is called so Clover. It's actually not new,
it's been around for you and years, but it's a
great word game that accommodates I want to say, six
or eight people. Yeah, and it's as very cute, very
short as another one you can play in like twenty minutes,
but really really well done games. So anyway, go check
them out. Sort Of I've said like I'm like the

(01:39:15):
bartender of board games. People say like, well I like this,
I like this. Now I'll try and help narrow down something. Yeah,
I got you, baby, that's right. Yeah, even though my
repertoire is limited because there are tens of thousands of
games that I haven't played, but I do my best
with the ones i'm familiar with.

Speaker 2 (01:39:31):
Nice. I love that. I Yeah, it's one of those
things that you always recommend games and I try to
get into some and I have, I just haven't been
able to so I have to like find the ones.
So I always love these recommendations because I can be like, oh,
I'm gonna take this one. I'm gonna try this one.

Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
Nice. You would probably like French Toast and so clover
and probably just one as well.

Speaker 2 (01:39:51):
Love that I'm picking those up now.

Speaker 1 (01:39:53):
Although all of those are cooperative, and I know that
you do like competitive games.

Speaker 2 (01:39:57):
I like cooperative too.

Speaker 1 (01:39:58):
Okay, anyway, let's go ahead and wrap up this conversation. Then,
I hope that you everyone here enjoyed what I heard today.
We've got a couple more things to get to, which
is our recommendations, and we have a very fun listener
mail that I'd like to read, and so I know
that we're going very long on this episode, So thank
you for sticking with us. As I said, if you
enjoy what you hear and you like to support us,
you can leave us a rating, a review, like and

(01:40:18):
subscribe and like. Whatever way you found us, try and
replicate that for someone else. Like if you got a review,
then like maybe leave a review, or if you read
one or something. If this just showed up in your
feed as a recommendation, that's because somebody else left a rating,
So go leave a rating or something. If someone told
you about it, then go tell someone else about it.
Those are all things that you can do, and we
appreciate all of those. You can also, if you're really interested,

(01:40:40):
take the plunge and you can join us on Patreon
and there you get ad free content, early episodes, bonus content,
all that sort of thing. And importantly, I think the
reason they're all really here is that at the end
of each discussion, I'm going to read out the names
of people who have joined us on Patreon as paid
members to help support what we do, and that is Mike,
m Megan, Mike t Just and Kim Brad, Stephanie, Brian, Ashley,

(01:41:02):
Kiara and Charlie. Thank you all so much for being here.

Speaker 2 (01:41:06):
You're the best. You're the best ever.

Speaker 1 (01:41:07):
Yes, Okay, And then I did want to always shout
out my team, without whom I could not make this
podcast happen. Writing in fact checking from Shane and myself.
Our social media coordinator is Emma Wilson, and our audio
engineer who does the sounds and makes them good is Justin.
Thank you, justin ah the best. All right? So is
there anything that I forgot her that you would like
to add before we drove to our listener mail?

Speaker 2 (01:41:28):
No, I think we're I think we're good, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:41:33):
All right. This comes from a listener who I believe
has written in before I forgot to go back and check.
I hope that she's cool with us using her name.
I asked if we could read her listener mail and
she said yes, I'll just give her first name is Letitia. Anyways,
she writes in Aloha, I'm reading Michael Maloney's nineteen ninety
eight book Teach Your Children Well, and I came across
to section that reminded me of your replacement theory episode,

(01:41:54):
taking it a bit further and relating it to literacy
or illiteracy. I just wanted to share. Thank you guys
so much for doing an amazing job at disseminating our science.
Keep up the spectacular work. Thank you so much. That
was a very kind email, and I wrote back, I mentioned, like,
I have read this book and completely forgot about this
when we were doing our episode on replacement theory, which
is unfortunate. And so I'm going to read a couple

(01:42:15):
of excerpts really quick from this book that I think
really highlight this point. This is from as she said,
Michael Maloney. So I'm going to pull out a couple
of specific passages I liked. He says, quote the existing
paranoia that such an eventuality could occur. This is relating
to like replacement theory is undoubtedly a factor in the
rise of the white supremacy movement in the eighties and
nineties and of its recent anti government activities. The vast

(01:42:37):
majority of the membership of the supremacist groups are not
known for their extensive reading of the classics, except perhaps
Mindkomf in the simplified abridged version on audio tape. They
are themselves the residue of a school system which failed
to teach them critical thinking skills. Much of their fear
is that they can no longer compete economically in a
country which is ever so slowly expanding opportunity for its

(01:42:59):
visible mind noughties, thereby threatening their current jobs and their
future prospects. The resulting siege mentality is expressed in organizations
like the Michigan Militia with its automatic weapons, battle fatigues,
and fertilizer based bombs. He goes on separate paragraph here,
I know right, heavy, heavy, and also written in the nineties,
basically predicting now. He goes on, every politician clearly understands

(01:43:22):
the information is power. Exclusion from readily available information due
to illiteracy creates a class of followers with the capacity
to directly impact the health of any democracy skip ahead
of it. Their grasp of serious societal problems in the
formulation of policies to address them is limited by the
lack of information available to them. Such paucity opens the

(01:43:44):
door to simplistic, jingoistic political solutions favored by demagogues and
other practitioners of the big Lie. If a dynamic, persuasive
leader organized the political power of these ill informed individuals
got them registered and into the voting booth, democracy as
we know it could be seriously compromised. End quote wow wow,

(01:44:04):
devastatingly prescient.

Speaker 2 (01:44:06):
That was yeah wow, So such.

Speaker 1 (01:44:10):
A great share. Thank you so much for writing in.
Really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm glad. I wish that I
had thought about that when we were recording, but I'm
glad that it made it into a listener mail segment.

Speaker 2 (01:44:18):
Yes, yes, agreed.

Speaker 1 (01:44:20):
If you would like to write into us, as Letitia
did and tell us your thoughts on board games or
of a past episode and give us information that we miss,
we love that sort of thing and we enjoy hearing
from you. You can reach us directly by emailing us
at info at WWDWWD podcast dot com, or on the
various social media platforms. Our last listener mail was from
a social media post several of them in fact that
we got, which was also great. So please let us

(01:44:41):
know what you're thinking, and we may just share that
with others if we feel like it's a contribution, And
if you don't want us to share, that's fine too.
We just like talking to people, so happy to have
you reach out that way. I think that's all I
have about that. Are we're ready to recommend some things?

Speaker 2 (01:44:55):
I think we are all right.

Speaker 1 (01:44:56):
We'll try and go fast, but let's transition to ads
and then recom mandas oh, no, all right, we're back,
So cue the recommendation music, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:45:19):
Recommendations. All right, So I'm gonna recommend a new movie
that just came out on Netflix. It is Happy Gilmore Too.
I'm not even going to try to like lead up
to it.

Speaker 1 (01:45:28):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (01:45:29):
It is a sequel to Happy Gilmore Adam Sandler. It's
a Happy Madison production, and it was surprisingly heartfelt and
very funny. Like it was actually done really well, and
I think done with respect, and you know, it's very
careful to honor the original movie and not just be
like a cash grab sequel. Love that it tackles some
pretty heavy the themes like grief and alcoholism and you know,

(01:45:54):
like aging and what that looks like. But it does
it in a way that I think is like lighthearted
enough that you can kind of like understand the themes
and continue to move through the movie without it being
too heavy.

Speaker 1 (01:46:03):
So nice.

Speaker 2 (01:46:04):
It's a lot of fun, a lot of great character
acting in it. I think they did a really good job.
I think that this is the way that you do
a legacy sequel.

Speaker 1 (01:46:12):
That's awesome. Yeah, crazy that it's been thirty years since
the original, Yeah yeah, yeah, And this is available on Netflix.
So I believe this is a Netflix and I think
I think Adam Sandler's got some like lifetime sweetheart deal
in Netflix from now until forever.

Speaker 2 (01:46:27):
Yeah, it's something that will keep his kids rich forever.

Speaker 1 (01:46:29):
That's exactly it. But yeah, that's where you'll find it.
And I'm really looking forward to it. As soon as
I saw that was out, I was like, Ooh, let's
watch that.

Speaker 2 (01:46:35):
Yeah. The cast is great, a lot of oldies, a
lot of new folks like it's it's really great, fantastic.

Speaker 1 (01:46:41):
Yeah, someone born in the movie came out would be
almost thirty years old.

Speaker 2 (01:46:45):
Yeah, I think there are people that are in the
movie that were not born when the first movie came out.

Speaker 1 (01:46:49):
Yeah that tracks, that tracks.

Speaker 2 (01:46:51):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 1 (01:46:52):
I'm recommending a brand new, brand new, brand spank, a
new movie that just came out. It is the newest
of the Marvel Cinematic universe. This is fantastic four First Steps. Now,
I recommended a lot of these movies on here over
the years, and I feel like I can stand by
those recommendations and feel good about this. But this this
one really does it. It really does Man. It was

(01:47:15):
so great to see the fantastic four really realized in
a way that feels like it honors those characters in
that story and it's just a good movie. Like they
figured it out, they finally got the formula. The world
they built is fantastic. The decisions they made about how
to introduce them and where they're at already in their
story was fantastic. Yeah, the villain as the antagonist, who

(01:47:36):
is in most of these movies, it results of just
like punch them in the face. Whoever punches in the
face the most wins. This instead is more like that's
not gonna work with your villain here, right, and so
they have to figure out sort of ways to outsmart
and have it work. And so anyway, I really enjoyed it.
I thought it was great. I would honestly go see
it again in theaters. I liked it so much. But

(01:47:57):
it's definitely worth checking out if you haven't already. It's
nice to feel like Marvel's sort of finding their footing
again after a few sort of wobbly steps in there
over the last few years. This feels like a really
solid entry and a very solid superhero movie. And I
will say, for those of you who are concerned basically
know of reference to any other Marvel properties in this, Like,

(01:48:17):
if this is the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie you
ever saw, you would not be missing anything from the
past to understand the story and get the references that
are in it. And if you're a comic book nerd,
I think you'll find a millionaiset eggs that you'll enjoy.
So yeah, all right, Well, this nostalgia is going to
be like two episodes long, so we should leave it there.
Thank you everyone for listening. I think we'll head out.

(01:48:39):
Is there anything you wanted to add before we wrap up?

Speaker 2 (01:48:42):
Nothing other than play well? Yes, play well, play games,
and be excellent to each other when you play games.

Speaker 1 (01:48:46):
Absolutely yes, all right, thank you for listening to this.
Abraham and this is Shane. We're out.

Speaker 2 (01:48:51):
See ye you've been listening to Why We Do what
We Do. You can learn more about this and other
episodes by going to WWD w w D podcast dot com.
Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.

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