Episode 419 – Teaching Board Game Manners

0:00Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Family Gamers Podcast. This is episode 419. Hey, hello everybody. We are so glad to be with you doing another one of these things. As always, we are the Family Gamers. I'm your host Andrew, and I'm joined by my lovely and wonderful and I'm going to admit a little tired looking wife and each other. That's me. We keep recording later and later at night. I remember when we were just starting this podcast, we used to record at like 8 p.m. And now it's like 11 when we're getting started. I'm sorry. It was also the children. Yeah, it is. I'm going to blame everything on the children. This whole thing is because of the children. Anyway, what are you going to talk about this week, speaking of things that are problems because of children?

1:00This week episode 419, we're going to talk about board game manners. Yeah. What you can expect while teaching kids to play games nicely. And in some ways, it's going to be how to play games at all, right? A lot of our recommended games for the youngest ages are really around teaching just the mechanics of playing a board game, not even like a specific kind of board game mechanic or just how to take turns, how to do this, how to do that, that kind of thing. And so we're going to talk about a little bit of that too. But first, I bet you have a fact. I do have a fact. So this one is kind of interesting. So I was looking around for 419 stuff and I landed on 419 scams. Okay. Do you know what a 419 scam is in Etra? Not a clue. I bet you actually do. You've just never heard of them called by their air quote formal name. Okay. Okay. So here we go. The 19th scam is a type of advanced fee fraud, a classic online scam, where the victim has promised a large sum of money in exchange for paying up front fees, starting to sound familiar like Nigerian prince.

2:02The term comes from section 419 of the Nigerian criminal code, which addresses fraud. These scams are often called Nigerian 419 scams or Nigerian prince scams, but the tactics go far beyond royalty. 419 scams start with a message, often an email claiming you've been chosen for a lucrative opportunity. It might look something like this. A wealthy individual needs help moving millions out of their country. You've been selected for a secret business deal and inheritance is waiting and only you can claim it. And all you need to do is provide your bank account information and pay a small fee to get started. Mm-hmm. So I think we've all heard of these. I don't think there's anybody I'm here who's saying, wow, that's a scam that I've never known about. Thanks so much for telling us about that Andrew over the family game was podcast. I did think it was kind of interesting that they have a name and not just the Nigerian prince scam. They are 419 scams based on the Nigerian criminal code, specifically based on the Nigerian criminal code. That's why I started laughing. Yeah. No, I get it. I totally understand.

3:03So that's it. That's my whole fact. Just kind of an interesting little nugget. Yeah. And I bet you have a message from our sponsor. I do. Did you know there's a US law that allows every American to check their credit reports with each of the three major credit bureaus each year for free. You don't have to sign up for a service. You don't have to pay a monthly fee. Just go to annualcreditreport.com. It's important to check your credit reports so you know if someone has opened accounts in your name or if a creditor is misreporting an old debt and to see which accounts you forgot to close that might be hurting your credit score. First move has a blog post we'll link to in the show notes about how to read your credit reports. But overwhelmed by debt, hiring a financial advisor may not be right for you. But first move is still happy to have a 15 minute phone call to get you going in the right direction and point you towards some free resources. Go to firstmovefinancial.com slash family gamers and set up a time to chat today.

4:04Thanks so much for the team and first move financial response or another episode of the show. Well, all right. Anitra, it is well, it's the beginning of April. So we're going to talk a little bit about our monthly report. But first we're going to talk about some games that we've been playing. I've talked in the past a bunch of times about these work trips that we get to go on with. Yeah. And this past week was the work trip, which is actually why our podcast is a week late. So we've got a bunch of extra games that we've played there. But we've also got just a bunch of games to talk about. Sure. So let's do that. All right. Do you want to talk about scurry up? So scurry up is a really cute game from up games who published a forestry. And in scurry up three or more people, I think it's up to six are squirrels scurrying up a tree. It's sort of a worker placement, kind of game, except it also, to me, has an element of like hidden bidding. This is all making it sound much more complex than it actually is. You pick which of the available spaces your squirrel is going to land on.

5:07Everybody picks that than everyone reveals. Most of those tree spaces only accommodate one squirrel. And so if only one squirrel goes there, they get all the stuff. If more than one squirrel goes there, neither of them gets the stuff. There are some tree spaces that accommodate two squirrels, same idea, you know, if one is there, they're fine, if two is there, they're fine and they split it. If there's more, nobody gets anything. And some tree spaces must have two squirrels to release any stuff. These spots reminded me a lot of the grim forest. If you remember the grim forest, that game that we played a million years ago, where every turn, you're choosing a location to place your worker. And in that game, you would just split whatever was there. Right. That's kind of how that one worked out. But this is a little bit different. But the things that you split are basically just different kind of point tokens. The tokens score differently. So acorns, I think, are just one point to piece. Other things are, you know, forms of set collection, things like that. And the goal here, I mean, it's just basically a point salad game with this kind of worker

6:09placement, the mechanic to gather your points as you scurry up the tree. Yeah. When we played it, it went much faster than I expected. Yes, that is true. I mean, I think it says like 10 minutes on the box and we just didn't believe it. It took a little while to set up. And so we're like, I don't know, man, this looks more complicated than that. But after the first turn, we're like, oh, okay, this makes sense. And then it was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. With three players, it's a 10 turn game with any more than that. I think it's a six turn game. So it's just really, really fast. I am looking forward to trying this again, especially trying it with more than three players. Yeah. Look, it's great. It's nice. I don't think it's going to be a repeat of our game of the year in terms of, you know, how much we love this game. It looks great. It's got great art. The mechanics are pretty tight. It does move quickly. Like you said, it's not another floristry, right? Yeah. I mean, that game just hit us right in the perfect spot. Right. So yeah, that's screw up. We're going to talk more about it for sure. Let's see. Some other stuff that we've been playing.

7:10Since our last podcast, we played some more Verdant Arizona and publisher of you for it. Yeah, I think you beat me every time. Just about. Yeah. That's okay. I got my retribution this evening. We'll talk about that one in a minute. I'm still really enjoying Verdant Arizona. I still like it. I like playing it every time. And I lose that at every time. And I, you know, don't really care all that much. You're getting better. I'm definitely seeing improvement in how you put stuff together. Great. Different shades of suck. But it's also, it is one of those games where just the way to spatially align stuff makes more sense to my brain than yours, I think. Yeah. That's fun. And so I urge you to take a look at our review on the website. I have quite a few pictures in there, including a couple to kind of break down how the scoring works. Because in my opinion, that's the most complicated part of the game. You need to understand the scoring to figure out how you're going to put cards into the great as you go. Yep. It's also, this is one of those like, Altoid 10 games from Galen's games. It's super small, even though it kind of expands out.

8:11It's a great date game. It really is a recommend Verdant Arizona for sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know what else is a very, very small game that we reviewed, lands of amazement. This one is in the Simply Solo series published by Buttonshye and designed by Scott Alms. The rules were hard to really understand and the goal of the game was a little challenging. That didn't really shock me because some of that is wrapped up in the way Buttonshye games tend to work as you have very limited resources, including limited space for the rulebook. Sure. And I mentioned that in the review that we just published, but I think if you are in the market for a really challenging solo puzzle without a lot of overhead, this is going to be an interesting game for you. Cool. All right. Next, we have the game Aspons. So we've talked about Aspons on the show, but what we haven't talked about are some of the, I guess it's technically an expansion.

9:12Many expansion. It's like a mini expansion. It's these cards that provide variants to play. Yeah. The main variant is the one we tried, which instead of merely trying to end up with controlling the most spaces on the board, instead divides the board up into segments. I think there were six of them, maybe. And as soon as you control a segment, you take that card and get points for that card. Those are somewhat randomly distributed. So it can really influence like, oh, hey, this small segment over here is worth a lot of points. I need to go for that one right away. And this other segment is worth not as many points. So maybe I don't care. It definitely sped up the game, which I was not expecting. Usually an expansion is like, okay, we're going to do more with the game. And usually that means same or slower, right? But for this, every segment as soon as somebody had the majority, neither one of us cared

10:15about that segment anymore. So it actually made the game go quite a bit faster. Yeah. I actually liked this variant. I mean, first of all, because I wanted it. You did win. Yeah. But it wasn't that that was the reason why I liked it. I liked it more because I mean, it segmented the board, right? In the main game, it's an area control game, but it's the whole board is the area. And so you can block an area off and it kind of recognizes that by allowing you to fill it with trees. But everything is in play all of the time. And when you have these kind of defined sections like this, it made it easier to kind of chunk it out in my brain, does that make sense? So I could look at something and say, I need to have 13 trees in this area to have area majority and control this area. And then I can kind of forget about it and move on to the next thing. Or I can look like I'm working on something over here, but actually I'm slowly filling something else in and see if I could be a little bit devious about it. Or you got a little bit tricky and that will help you a lot or I would know like I only need one more tree to lock you out, but let you believe that it's worth it for you

11:19to put your trees in there so you're not putting them in other places, that kind of thing. But those sorts of strategies, I thought were really interesting because that's the kind of thing that makes it a little bit more unique. So I liked that about it. Sure. So I mean, plus it's really small expansion, it's a bunch of cards that basically just change how you organize a few things, fits in the main box. I almost would make the case that it should just be in the box from now on. Like if I release version two of the game, it should just be part of it. That was the other thing I found odd is this made the game faster, but made it take up just slightly more space because you have to have these cards. I was sure. It was only an issue because we were playing at our favorite diner. Sure. And Aspen's already barely fits on the half of the table that we want to devote to gaming because we still want to have room to eat our food and adding cards around the edges of the board. Made it took up just a little bit more space. Yeah. I understand.

12:19All right. So that's Aspen's. The next three games here are games that we played on our trip. So these are really easy things to get into. Yeah. Smores galore, Roast and Wright, Cabanga, Trio, Flip7, all games that we played on the trip. We played a little bit of person do thing on the trip as well. We did. It was so weird how people just couldn't grok that game a little bit. Most people were fine, but we had a couple of people who either just could not come up with words or could not make themselves not speaking completely sentences. Right. So funny. They couldn't manage to use the grammar of the game. Right. Which was, I don't know. So instead of saying person, person do bad or whatever, they'd be like, this is a person. This person does bad things or whatever. Yeah. And it was just like, you know, we rolled with it. Yeah. I don't want to be a big ogre about rules, right?

13:20Nobody wants a rules lawyer. So anyway, we had fun with that. I think the highlight of the trip was Flip7. Oh, sure. I mean, that's not a surprise. It went over really well with this crowd. It was funny because people would come by and be like, you know, what are you guys, you know, groaning or whatever about? We're like, oh, come here. We'll deal you in. And this was another one where there were a couple of people who it took like four or five rounds for them to understand how the game works, and it's funny because everybody else at the table is like, oh, no, no, you want to hit here. You want to hit like, that's what you want to do. We'll tell you. So the funny thing about that is like, I kind of wanted to move to different games, but also this happened in the back of my head, and I was almost ashamed of myself, but it's fine. There were a couple of tables of just different games going on that were not supplied by us. And one of the reasons why I felt like we should just stick with Flip7 for a while was because it was the game that made the most noise. And it made other people come over and see what was happening at our table. All right. You know what I mean?

14:21They're like, what's happening that everybody's all of the sudden saying, oh, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. And people are having fun with the other games, right? Like even Cabanga is a game where it just, it's not quite as loud as Flip7's. Right. Yeah. So that was one of the reasons why we kept it on the table a little bit longer than I kind of intended to, but that's fine. But we had a great time. We did. We did. So we just ran through a bunch. The other game that I played at this work trip was brand new to me. And it was adventurous, which is another solo game from Buncheye. Actually, excuse me, it is solo or cooperative. Okay. I was hoping that I could pull it out and learn it and then show one or two other people didn't get that opportunity. I mean, you kind of showed it to me, but my brain was not braining. Adventurous is sort of a path-finding kind of game in the best Buncheye tradition. All of the cards are double-sided and one side is goals and the other side are these paths. So every turn you are either laying down a goal card to cover symbols based on what

15:26the goal says, or you are drawing two path cards from the deck to lay them out. There are some interesting twists in how the drawing cards part works. But then once you have the cards in your hand, you literally just have to connect them to the one existing path, because the idea here is you're like recounting your adventure as you sailed across the sea, like I met sea monsters and blended on islands and whatnot. So you can't ever branch your path, you can't double back on it, it is only ever one path. So most of the restrictions come from that. The rest of the restrictions come from what you need to lay down the goal cards and the endgame scoring. Each segment of the path is worth a point and then each of the symbols that you leave uncovered are worth positive points, except for one that's worth negative points. But for the three kinds that are worth positive points, they're only worth positive points

16:29if you keep them below a specified threshold. If you go above that threshold, they're worth nothing. So you get this puzzle where you're creating a path and you are trying to cover up most of the symbols, but trying to leave just enough of them exposed to kind of boost your score by about 10 to 15 points at the end. I enjoyed it. I am definitely going to show you it at jump point. We'll get there. Yeah. All right. The next game on the list is the latest in the unmatched series, which is unmatched stars and stripes. Oh, I was so excited for this one. I mean, I'm still excited to play more of this one. So this is a set with, let's see, Rosie the Riveter, George Washington, John Henry and Wyatt Earp. And Wyatt Earp, thank you. I even played his Wyatt Earp and I couldn't remember. They could call this the Americana set. Yeah. I have played twice. I played as Rosie and I played as Wyatt Earp. I have also played twice. I played as Rosie the Riveter and George Washington.

17:31Every one of the characters in this set does something that is in line with their like cultural legend, but isn't really part of it. I think I would say. I think that's true. I mean, look, I think the one that's the most interesting to me is George Washington. The reason why he's the most interesting to me is because what they really, really doubled down on was more of his espionage type stuff, and less of general George Washington. I would say espionage and commander rather than the straight up soldier. George. Yeah. Again, I think we need to play more of it, you know, to really grok his character. I think while you played as George, yeah. And it was the first time we had cracked a box open and you were like, I don't really know what I'm doing. How do you totally destroyed me with Rosie? I obliterated you with Rosie, who is awesome. Rosie the Riveter is in a mex suit. Yeah. Yeah, she's pretty great. Yeah. Rosie's kind of special thing is, well, first of all, there's all this like mex suit and mex suit related stuff. She has four rotating upgrades.

18:33Yes. One upgrade happens at the beginning of every turn. And then at the end of the turn, where all four of them are upgraded, they all get deactivated. Yeah. Of course, because it's unmatched, various cards you can play will let you activate another one or deactivate one, which lets you shuffle the order around a little bit, which can be really, really helpful. Yep. Like the most powerful upgrade makes Rosie a ranged character. I'm just stupid. So deactivating a couple of times like individually moves those further in the order. And that brings that ranged character upgrade to become one that you're basically always going to have active, which I loved when I played with her. Yeah. It's really, really cool. It's really a neat way to do it wider, key and his sidekick who I've forgotten who it is. They are both ranged, which is kind of their special thing. That's an interesting thing. Yeah. He's got some other associated powers that didn't knock my socks off. John Henry is fascinating.

19:33John Henry at the beginning of his turn gets a track token like train track and can put it anywhere in his zone when he moves over or onto a track token that token that space doesn't count against his movement. So by the time you're like five or six turns into the game, you can just move basically anywhere on the map. He can move halfway across the board without breaking us wet. He also has several very powerful attacks because he's John Henry and he's swinging a giant hammer. Yes. Multiple times when I played against Asher, he hit me for ten or more points of damage. Like I obviously was defending until I defended some of that. But the fact that you could swing for ten is dope. It's kind of crazy. When I played against Asher, still using John Henry, he only managed to hit me for big damage once and the rest of the time he was kind of plinking at me. But that was still enough since I could not get away from him long enough to really recoup.

20:34Because those track tokens don't work for you. They work for him. They only work for him. So he could run away, recoup, and then come back and just destroy you and then disappear and then come, I mean, just brutal. But the set is great. I'm really, really enjoying it. I want to play it a lot more. And unlike a lot of the recent sets, it has two maps. They are totally different maps. Yes. I'm definitely liking that part, at least what I'm seeing so far. I have played on each map once. So on match stars of tribes, tentative thumbs up. Yeah. We finally got back to having date breakfast after we put you off. And we were both feeling kind of burnt out. So I grabbed Jekyll versus Hyde. So we didn't have to learn anything new. We could just stare each other down and do fantastic trick taking and you almost won. But then you didn't. I think the second to last trick, if I had won that trick, then I would have won the game.

21:34Something like that. I was doing really well until the third round, you did really, really well. And I managed to just barely snatch victory away. Yeah. Yeah. It was one of those two trick swing kind of things. Yeah. So yeah, that was fun. I still really, really love that and would highly recommend it to anyone who likes trick date. I agree. All right. So the last game we want to talk about is game that we opened up today. And we played it four times in a row. Four times. Yeah. And this game got five. So this is a title from Blue Orange. This is the cutest deduction game I've seen in a while. I really like this game. So we talk a lot about how oftentimes I need sure we'll pick up on a game quicker than I will. But over time, I will build up enough strategy that I can, you know, be competitive. Not with this one. I mean, I understand this game. I rocked it right away, but you are just better at the strategy required. And you also rocked it right away. Yeah.

22:35Yeah. The game is just not complicated. Yeah. So here's how the game works. There are tiles from one to 60 in five different colors. The numbers are separated by five. So like the first color is one, six, eleven, sixteen, et cetera. The next color is two, seven, twelve, et cetera. And the next color is three and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So sequential numbers are not the same color. This is important because every player gets one of each color. They don't know what their numbers are. They are in this little holder thing facing out. So other players know what their numbers are. They do not. They're put in sequence by the other players because, of course, the player who has those tiles doesn't know what they are. And then there's an additional set of the five colors that is revealed for everyone. So everybody can see the same set of five and everybody else's tiles. Yes. So you basically start off the game by crossing off on a little dry erase board.

23:35All of the numbers that you can see. Your goal is to be the first person to figure out your own five tiles. So in addition to the color, which is helpful, each tile also has a number of dots at the bottom, one, two or three. And those, if you look at the little board thing, those cycle, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, etc. So on your turn, you can do one of two things. You can either flip over one of the face down tiles from the middle of the board. I should say number down tiles from the middle of the area and handed to someone to say, please sort my tiles. The way the rules put it is you always flip over a tile. And then from the six face up tiles, you choose one. You choose one. With that tile you choose, you can make one of two requests. One is the request to sort, which is, please, Mr. Opponent, show me where this tile would go in order with the tiles I already have. Like which two does it go between? Yeah. Or you can hold it above a specific tile and ask, do the dots on these match.

24:35Those are two very different pieces of information, but they can be helpful at different times. The other important thing about this game is that once you ask that question, you have a place to put that tile, depending on what the answer was, and all of the numbers that are revealed this way and matched or sorted or whatever this way, stay face up, well, number up and visible to all of the players for the rest of the game. So this is a deduction game where yes, you're keeping track of things, but the only information hidden to you is the information you're trying to deduce. Like everybody else has all of the same information all of the time. So I think we're going to play this game more. I mean, it's super fun. It's very fast. Yeah. Asher was like, let's play it again. Let's play it again. I really do. You got to go to bed. Yeah. Going into our third game with Asher, I was like, this is enough. Like I don't even mind losing it over and over again, but like we got other things to do. And Claire didn't super complain when she played it, so she didn't love it.

25:37I don't think it's really her kind of game. Well, I mean, we basically strong armed her into playing it anyway, but I also think the cuteness factor, I underestimated the cuteness factor, like it's a game with numbers on tiles. That's all it is. But all of the tiles on the none number side have little eyes. And so they're like looking at you, because you can't see the numbers. They're looking at you as you try to figure out what's on their backs up. I wonder, did the eyes look the same on both sides? I have no idea. Maybe we'll talk about that next time. Okay. I think that pretty much wraps up the end of the games that we've been playing in last couple, three weeks, but it doesn't wrap up us talking about games that we've been playing this month. Yes. So it's April. So let's talk about the March monthly report. You know what's really depressing is I've played almost as many games in April already as I played in March. I would like to say that I am surprised, but I am not surprised. Your March was crazy busy. Even I did not play very many games the entire month until we went on that trip.

26:40And then I played a buttload of games and you played a few. Yeah. I'm just going to do it. All right. You're a month of March. My age index was two. I played 10 games. How many times? No, no. I played 10 games. I played eight games. 10 games. So what were the games that you played more than once, Andrew? Flip seven and aspens. That sounds about right. I had also a not great month for me. I only played 12 unit games. OK. However, in part because of that trip, I did play those 12 games 31 times. There you go. It also means my age index was three out of those 12 games. Seven of them I played three times or more. I mean, that's pretty good. So a lot of repeat plays. I also think my count is probably higher than that. I probably played like flip seven, like 10 times, only marked it down as one or two. It wasn't 10, but it was probably like four or yeah.

27:43My most played games of the month were aspens and lands of amusement. Sure. How many times do you play aspens? I played aspens four times. Really? Only twice with me. Probably twice with Asher. He also really, really liked that game. It's a great game. It is a good game. It is a good game. We definitely recommend aspens. Yeah. And we'll be reviewing that one soon. Ish. Ish. So I don't know if people know, but if you look at the FamilyGambers.com, we actually did something called March Madness where we reviewed two games a week instead of one game a week. So we got out like eight or nine. We had nine reviews in the month of March and normally we would have had five because there were five Monday. Sure. So we're going to need to recover from that to be perfectly transparent. Yeah. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that we do something in like June or July, probably. Summer slam, something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Summer Games Fest. There you go. I think I like Summer slam better. Well, whatever. I mean, both of them are borrowed brand names from something else. Sure.

28:44There's only so many ways to say we're doing a bunch of extra. Yeah. Yeah. So I know. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully you guys enjoyed all those extra reviews. Yeah. Let's talk about the community though. Why not? Let's jump right into our community and our new folks in the community. So we have quite a few new members because it's been three weeks. So let's welcome the new members to our community. Welcome to Chase. Welcome to Ben. Welcome to Paris. Welcome to Nicole. Welcome to Matthew. Welcome to Ingrid. Welcome to O'Wami. And Chouilly. And Skylar. Welcome to Dominic. And welcome to Dustin. We are very, very glad you're here. Can you remind me what this jiff is from? It's Hello Kitty. Hello. Okay. Is it really? I mean, it's a, I don't know. Maybe Hello Kitty. I don't know. It looks like it's Hello Kitty inspired, but whatever. It doesn't matter. We're very, very glad that you're here. Why don't you tell us about some games that you've been playing? We would love to hear it. Also in our community, we asked three weeks ago about your experiences with escape rooms.

29:46Yeah. We got lots and lots of thoughts and kind of comments about that whole escape room thing. I will get us started. I think from Facebook, Nick Martinelli, always commenting. We appreciate that says that he's done for them. One with family, three with groups of friends, he really enjoyed those experiences. They always divide up the work assigned people jobs. I talked about this. We were talking about it on the show, divide and conquer. They have failed one time, but they can be pricey, which is something, again, that we've talked about. Talked about as well. And he linked it to one of the ones in Aurora, Illinois that they have gone to a physical place. I also thought it was interesting. He said there's an at home option where you can basically rent the escape room to bring home for the day. It costs more than an escape room game, but less than taking a group of five or six people to an escape room. So sort of a mid-range option. Yeah. And you're not in a room that is all decorative. For me, I'm either doing one of the exit boxes or something like that, or I'm going.

30:47Taken at home to me, what's the point there? On the Discord, our resident Jen Alpha says he's done some escape rooms. For me and my dad really enjoy a chain called escape game. They have locations all around the United States. Jeremy told us that he and his wife have done a whole ton of in-person escape rooms. He said close to 50. That is insane. Yeah, that feels ridiculous. He says he went to a place with a friend for their birthday. They did two rooms back to back, and they finished the second one with so much time left that they let us do a third for free. That's commitment right there. That's impressive. Wow. He also recommends the escape game. So nationwide chain with recommendations from people in two very different locations. Yeah. I walked by the escape game store in Chicago when I was there in January, whatever that was. It sounds like he has done a couple that are kind of horror-esque.

31:48That would be a little much for me. Yeah, I'll pass on that. If you want a better description of that, you should go read the rest of his comment in the discord. It gets kind of long. Joseph on Facebook says he's lost count. Maybe they've done a dozen or so. Usually they do them once or twice a year because of the cost. The most fun was when they were visiting family in California. Olmyscape, a local San Francisco chain, had a food-themed escape room called undercooked. The challenge was to make as many recipes as you could in an hour. We'd solve puzzles to get recipes, to get access to ingredients, then type ingredients. They had three digit numbers on them, into a computer screen to make a dish. It worked really well to divide the labor. For example, someone would work on stuff by the spice cabinet and shout out ingredient numbers to another person at the computer. The room blends the typical puzzles with a non-threatening theme. The little kids weren't freaking out about stopping a runaway train or escaping a haunted house or preventing some horrible disease from breaking out. He's got the link to the Olmyscape place on here as well. That sounds really cool as a theme, honestly.

32:49I will say that I have found that for in-person escape rooms, sometimes a theme that you think would be more creepy just feels fun and a theme that you would think would feel more abstract can feel really threatening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I almost love the idea of an escape room that you actually have to do to get the ingredients to make the dinner, and it combined one of those dinner making things with the escape room. I love that as an idea that would be crazy fun. That would be fun. And then if you, you know, if you fail it in two hours, you get like pizza or something. Yeah, you know, there's a backup plan. The joyful Jedi on Discord says, no, we had a place at one point, but we didn't find the right group of people to go, scheduling a good time is also an issue. It didn't feel worth the effort to try to coordinate. I would go if the stars aligned. I enjoy a good puzzle. Not sure how well I do, but be worth a try. Well, if you ever come out to our neck of the woods, we will make it happen. Yeah. We'll make it happen. Look, it is a different kind of experience.

33:49Like, there's an escape room in a box kind of thing, and then there is going into a place that is thematically set up and designed to be a puzzle that you're inside of, and it just feels different. Yeah. Mm-hmm. 100%. All right. Courtney says on Facebook, we've done half a dozen or so at a crew of 10 before the pandemic, and we killed it every time. Since then, my kids have aged enough that we've done through your four with them, and we make an amazing team. All four of us have different strengths, and we work really well together. I need to give a shout out to a new one in our area, redacted escape rooms. They have a no-lock guarantee, not one single padlock in a 90-minute game. Everything was interactive and hands-on and completely on theme. It was an amazing experience, and I can't wait to try their forthcoming second room this summer. That sounds really cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Back on the Discord, SMS137355 says, I have been to one. My group had fun, but my wife and I weren't into it. There were 10 of us, and we ended up standing around not really solving anything.

34:50Just wasn't my jam. And that's possible, too. If you guys remember, I had said that something happens to my brain when I go into these, and I'm like, there are puzzles that I could clearly solve if I was sitting at a table with a pen and paper. And for some reason, when I'm in an escape room, the same exact puzzle will completely be funneled me sometimes. Yeah. So it's just a different experience, and there's no right or wrong to whether or not it's something that you do. Yeah. I do think our really good in-person experiences have been in part because of the groups we've been with. 100%. And some of that is being supportive of each other, some of it is splitting stuff up. But just like with a table game, honestly, not being married to, I have to be the one to do this thing, to mix it up a little bit. Well, yeah. I mean, there's a couple of comments to that effect on Discord. Nick says, you definitely need the right group. We go with gaming pals and folks that are generally into it. I don't like to do rooms with strangers. And so then Rob said, so that I've done a few with various group sizes. The number of people in the willingness of each member to openly communicate can make or break the experience.

35:51Just how it is. Yeah. Peter Schott describes several different in-person escape rooms that he and his family have done. One of them, he says, we would have gone faster, but my youngest insisted I was wasting time with a puzzle that she didn't think was a puzzle. But I like these when I can afford them, but they're pricey. So it's not something we can do often. And then he links to a video of Mark Rober talking about tips to make the escape room experience easier. If you've tried an escape room in the past and you didn't really like it, or it just felt off to you, I think it would definitely be worth watching this video. About 10, 15 minutes to give you some ideas of what you could do differently to have more fun in the future. The joyful Jedi asked if anybody tried the online escape room games. There was a period of time during the pandemic where those work trips that we mentioned couldn't happen. And so we did some kind of online programming stuff. And one of the things that I put together was a Stephen Bonacore, the podfather of gaming,

36:51actually co-owns an online escape room company. And so I was like, you know what? Let's give this a shot. And so we did a couple of those. The joyful Jedi asked specifically if I enjoyed it more than the in-person experience. And the answer is no. It's a different experience. It's just not the same. There's a kind of a pressure. I mentioned this before, a kind of a pressure to the in-person experience, the gravitas of being physically inside the puzzle that in some ways negatively impacts the experience for me. I mean, it's just a different experience. It's not profoundly negative. Like, I think they're still fun. It's just different. The immersion of an escape room is something that you simply can't replicate. And that part is super, super fun for me. So to answer Joyful Jedi, I said, I didn't enjoy it anymore. I felt like the puzzles were easier for me to solve because I was a little abstracted from it instead of being inside of it, right? But yeah. So they work. I will answer that question right now. I think the closest experience I've had to a in-person escape room has been that video game escape academy.

37:52Yeah. Obviously, you're still missing an element of the immersion because you're using a controller to move stuff on a screen. But your character in the game is, for example, trapped in a room and has to manipulate objects to solve puzzles. Sure. Yeah. So Peter Schott says something similar. He looked at a few of the online escape rooms when stuff was shut down. But I really enjoy the in-person tactile experience. Of course, at home, I do enjoy unlock and similar for that puzzle-y feeling. Back on Facebook, Aaron Sleby says, we love in-person escape rooms. I just wish they were more affordable. It would be nice if they had family prices. Yes. I totally agree. Agreed. He on the Discord says, my sister loves escape rooms. It's not something I would seek out on my own, but I'm happy to join in when she asks. We did a Mario theme to want a few years ago, and that was super neat. I would try that. That sounds super neat. Yeah. Alright, and just to wrap it up, Derek Brough, a few years ago, we were looking for something fun to do as a team at work. We had a very diverse group in terms of ages and interest, and we vetoed dozens of options

38:56before agreeing we would all enjoy an escape room. As we did, and our youngest coworker surprised us all by rocking it at the escape room. He had never told us he used to work at an escape room, and he had learned all of the strategies. It was nice to see the rookie shine at something. And that's a great reminder that different gaming experiences can bring out the best in people. Yeah, absolutely. Alright, well, we do have another backtalk question that we will bring up at the end of the show, but we have one more thing to talk about before our break, Anitra. We do, we have a four science, four science recipe, the four science, the new version of the four science. So this was something that we had committed to, and we actually received a recipe on Discord, and we actually cooked the, well, Anitra cooked the recipe, and we actually ate the recipe. So Anitra, talk about this. So the recipe is tacos in pasta shells, contributed by SMS 137355. To be fair, it looks like they got it from all recipes.

39:58That's okay. But that's okay. I mean, if they're saying, you know, this is a go-to, then it's perfectly okay. This is basically a cross between stuffed shells and nachos. I would say, I felt like it was almost like a taco casserole kind of thing. Yeah, I can see that too. This was the most nacho-like pasta I have ever had in my life, because it was basically meat and cheese, and more cheese in pasta. Yeah. Were there actually tortilla chips underneath it, or was that just crispy pasta? There were tortilla chips and cheese on top, when it got big. When you spoon it out onto your plate, it might not be on top anymore, it might be okay. Yeah. So I think the kids were kind of mid on this recipe to be entirely transparent. I thought it was pretty good. They were kind of mid on it. Some of it may have been the way that I made it. I literally have never made stuffed shells before, so some of this was a learning experience for me. Okay.

40:58And I think I undercooked the pasta a little bit. Not a lot, just a little bit. I also would have used more sauce in the future. I agree with you. It was pretty dry. I had to buy taco sauce, which I don't think I have ever bought before in my life. So I looked at the recipe and I said, okay, this is about how much I need. I'm going to buy the smaller bottle. I used the entire smaller bottle, and it wasn't really enough. So I need to buy a bigger bottle next time. That'll help, as well as cooking the shells for maybe like 30 to 45 seconds more. Like not a lot more, but just slightly less. Okay. I'll down to before they go in the oven. Okay. It was definitely worth doing. It was not as hard as I thought it was going to be to make. Sure. Wasn't super easy, but it wasn't challenging either. So yeah. So I will be honest. I didn't actually look at the recipe, so I don't know if it explicitly called for, have a bunch of toppings alongside that people could choose to put on. Was that a niche or a thing or was that? So it hinted at that. It didn't explicitly say it, but like the written recipe mentions on there like olives

42:03and onions and the literal picture that was on the all recipes site definitely showed it topped with things. Okay. So we had a series of toppings on the side that anybody could choose to put on salsa and set or cream and like you said, green onions and olives and stuff like that. So you really did kind of have the opportunity to sort of make it your own. Yeah. That way you also made some stuff peppers in the same way on the side as well for anybody who wanted less cars. Who was doing low-curly meat? But I did have some of the proper dish so that we could talk about on the show. I think it was good. I think it very much felt like a comfort food family meal around tacos, right? Like if we wanted to mix up taco Tuesday, you know, we could do something like this instead. If I wanted to jujube taco Tuesday, yeah, I love the word jujube. I don't know where it comes from, but you're not the only person who says it to me and it makes me laugh. The other thing I would say is although our kids were kind of mid on it, Asher took the leftovers and ate them the next day. Yeah. Like they got eaten. It wasn't like they were like, I'm not going to eat this. Yeah. And by the way, our youngest, if he's really, really unhappy about something, he just won't

43:07eat it and it like it wasn't like that. It's a fight man and he ate it. So, you know, even if he's, you know, making the faces that he likes to make, which drive us all crazy, he went over well enough that I will make it again. And not only because I still have half a box of gel pasta, but anyway, so there you go. So we're going to give it like a seven and a half, maybe an eight, something like that. Yeah. That's about the ballpark. That's so. Yeah. Thank you very much to SMS 137355. If you have a recipe that you would like a nature to cook and for me to eat, well for us to eat, please feel free to share it either in the Facebook community or on the Discord. And we'll talk about it on the show. Yeah. And if this recipe sounds interesting at all, you can find it on the Discord in the Four Science channel. Yep. Yep. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about board game manners. We'll be right back.

44:07All right. So we talked about, first half of the show, we're going to talk about board game manners. So different emphasis on a single child playing with adults versus children playing together. How do we teach our kids or expect our kids to act around the board game table? If you have ever sat down with a child who has never played a board game before, even if they're like eight or 10 or 12, some of these things are sort of common sense. But a lot of the time, they don't even really know what they're doing. Yeah. So let's actually start with the kinds of things you would expect an older kid to know even if they haven't played a board game before. Sure. You generally don't have to teach an older kid how to take turns. Because board games is not the only thing in life where we take turns with each other. Little kids though, that is one of the fundamental board game skills that they have to work.

45:10In fact, and we mentioned this also at the beginning of the show, when we talk about some of the games that we recommend for really young kids like under two, a lot of those are really just sort of proxy devices to teach some of these things. Right. Especially games that are basically rolling dice and doing what it says. So the other thing I think you can expect most older kids to know, but you have to teach younger kids is the general idea of following the rules. Right. Well, that's really going to depend, right? So I think there's a little bit of a presupposition here that these are kids that have some kind of normal authority structure. They're not as barrel. Well, just to say, you know, depending on the age you're talking about, right? So if you're talking about a six year old or a seven year old that doesn't go to any kind of formal education system, like education, they're not going to be barrel, but it's

46:11going to be a different kind of thing than a kid who is in kindergarten or first grade in a public school system where that's something that they do a lot. I mean, there's sort of those tongue and cheek references that, you know, sending kids to school is teaching them to be cogs in a machine. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But then there are skills that you will have to explicitly teach any kid as they learn to play board games, no matter what the age is. One that little kids especially struggle with is leaving pieces in place. This is so fundamental. We rarely think of it as a skill, but the idea of you put this piece down on the board and then you don't touch it again until the rules say you do. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of different things that go into that, right? So it's almost like proxy permanence is kind of the skill that's being taught, right? Where the idea is that there's an important fact that is represented by this piece being there. And that fact is not just for you, it's also for other people, right?

47:12So we talk about taking turns and it's like, okay, well, this is my piece and it is in this place. And I will remember that it's in this place. And until it's my turn again, I can pick up my pieces and play with them. And as long as I remember where they go before it becomes my turn again, it doesn't really matter. It's probably okay. Right. Yeah. That's the part that is different. Yeah. So this is one of the things that's the difference between playing pretend with a game and following the rules of the game, right? Is whether it's laying cards down on the table or you're playing memory and you're flipping stuff over, there's a certain like you need to leave set pieces and not mess with them until then it's your turn and you follow the rules of the game. Right. Like I said, that's one that especially little kids are going to struggle with, but sometimes older kids do. Like sometimes the pieces are just really cool and you want to pick them up and fiddle with them. In those cases, sometimes having a separate piece or fidget, even if it's from the game and it's just a piece not being used, can be really helpful. Yeah. That's actually something that like even adults will sometimes do is they'll just grab

48:13a piece out of the box to kind of play with in their hand so that they've got some kind of fixation from play with the piece. Yeah, I noticed this all the time when we used to play Ghost Fight and Treasure Hunters. The ghosts and the haunts or whatever they're called, the big baddies are really, really attractive and really cool to play with. The ghosts are kind of squishy and the haunt things are like these big crystals, but thankfully until you get really far into the game, there's a big enough supply that you can just pick some up out of the box and play with those. And so that's a helpful tool in teaching this skill is this set is okay to play with this set is not this set is representing information in the game. Right. This actually kind of gets a little bit into sort of the next thing that we want to talk about when we talk about board game manners, which is the concept of shared ownership over the pieces and the parts of the game, especially while you're playing like this might be a game you come to my house and we play my game. This is my game. I own this game, but when we are playing this game, there's this idea of shared ownership

49:15of the pieces, even though it's my game, it's not okay for me to just pick them up in the middle of playing. Right. Right. Right. So now I've kind of delegated some of the responsibility for the maintenance of the game on the board to everybody because we're all playing the game together. So there's shared ownership in that way, which also relates to respecting the components of the game because we all are trying to play it together. And before we go too far down this path of respecting the components, we are not the kind of people where our games need to be in pristine shape. Right. However, you do have to teach kids a certain amount of gentleness, I guess would be the right word here. So like, it's okay to flip a card and maybe it gets bent a little bit when you do that. And that's not a big deal, but you shouldn't be picking it up and folding it in half. I mean, I think actually a really good example is if you have a table that has any kind of drop leaves or something like sticking the cards in the gaps of the table, right? This is definitely something that an absent-minded person will do. It bugs you a lot. It does bug me a lot because it can physically damage things pretty easily without someone

50:19paying attention to it. I don't really care about somebody sticking a card in a gap, but it's going to like scrape the sides of the card or shave them off or whatever. And it's very easy to bend to the corner of the card. To accidentally bend it then. Yeah. This also extends to rolling dice. One of our children, who shall remain nameless, had a big struggle for many years with just always throwing dice too hard. Once them off the table onto the floor, roll them under the couch. And it did not matter for a while what we said, they just couldn't quite grasp the concept physically of how to roll dice gently without just placing them on the table. This was why we introduced our original dice tower. Yes, this is why we got a dice tower because this can be a really hard physical skill for some people and not just kids, but primarily kids. So giving tools for that, a dice tower or a dice tray, we gave this child their very own dice tray to say, hey, even if everybody else is rolling dice on the table, you roll dice into this little box and that will keep them contained and keep them from falling

51:23off the side of the table. Right. You can even use like a dice cup or something like just turn this over. Yeah, shake them up and then flip the cup over and now you've rolled it. Yeah, exactly. So these are all basic rules that people might be listening to us and be like, oh, right. Of course, you have to do these things and these are skills that need to be taught. There are two more that I think of as being also very important, but maybe slightly less obvious. Sure. Well, there's many things that we could talk about. There's two more in specific I can think of. One is how to keep your cards secret, even in a game like Go Fish or Uno or something like that. You have a hand of cards, you are not supposed to show them when kids are really little, you can play open handed, let them play cards out on the table and teach them the rules of the game, but eventually they're going to come to understand that it's more fun if you don't know what everybody has, right, to be able to play. Some games really, really require that. We used to play go nuts for donuts a lot when our kids were young, teaching a kid, no,

52:24you can't just say what the number is you're putting down. It needs to stay secret until everybody's ready. This is just a repetition thing, be like, now let's remember, don't say what you're putting down or don't show the card until it's your turn. Well, and I mean, I will say that sometimes with things like that, you can mitigate them by having them go last. If everybody else put their card down, it doesn't matter if they say what are those. Sure. If they have trouble physically holding the cards to keep them secret, there are lots of card holding trays and there was one game right used to make called little hands, which gave them like almost like a popsicle stick to hold. And turn into a giant lollipop of cards. This one, it's a combination of physical skill and mental readiness, I think. And then there's one more that everybody knows we need to teach even adults a lot of the time. But we sometimes forget about yeah, being a gracious loser or a gracious winner. There's two sides of the same coin here. I would argue that when you're playing in a group of your peers, so adults playing

53:27with adults or children playing with other children. This might be the most important skill, maybe taking turns is important, leaving the pieces in place is important. But those can be forgiven to some extent if everybody is being a good sport about it. Like, oh, I'm so sorry. I forgot. There wasn't my shirt. Yeah. Yeah. If somebody is whining and moaning and getting ready to flip the table or getting up in somebody else's face and be like, haha, you suck, gloating, yeah, gloating, either one of those ruins a game right away. Sure. Unfortunately, of all these skills, this might be the hardest one to teach, which is why we still see some adults who need to learn this skill. Yeah. And I think as we loop around and talk about maybe some strategies for teaching some or all of these skills. I mean, this is one that you literally wrote an article about. Yeah. Probably like eight years ago or so now, but it's really important and it requires a lot of repetition, a lot of repetition. It also is a great place, crucible, if you will, for learning this skill.

54:30Yeah. Games are a good place for this because in the end, it's a game. The result does not matter. Yep. It's about having fun. I mean, these same kinds of competitions will emerge. Like imagine, for example, a year-long project in school and your kid comes out on top in terms of grades or, you know, there's some voting thing and theirs is the least popular. How are they going to handle that, right? The stakes are a lot higher in something like that. Yeah. More long-lasting and so it's going to stick with them. Yeah. Yeah. But there's not a lot of opportunities in our lives to really practice this skill outside of things like board games or sports. Yeah. So in terms of strategies for teaching graciousness in playing the game, whether it's being a good winner, being a good loser, both because a lot of games you don't know until the end, which one you are, one part of this is encouraging empathy in your kids or in the people you're playing with.

55:30Like, when you say that, how do you think it makes other people feel? When other people say that, how do you feel? There's also preparing kids ahead of time when you know they already struggle with this, be like, hey, this might happen when it does, you know, what are we going to say? How are we going to handle this? But I will say, showing my cards here a little bit, a big thing for me is to just shut down poor sportsmanship right away, no matter who it's coming from. No. I mean, to that end, I actually think the most powerful thing that we can do is to model the behavior we expect. I think that is one element of it, and it is an important one. But I can say, as parents, who modeled this four years decade plus now, modeling is not enough by itself. No, but I absolutely think it's the foundational strategy to have. But if kids really want to be playing games, I think also the carrot and stick of, hey, this is what we do when we play a game. This is how we treat it. This is how we treat the other players. If you can't do that, you don't get to play the game.

56:31To the point of, if a kid is really struggling with this over and over again, it might get to the point that you make them aware if they start down that path, they're not going to get to finish the game. It's not just that you won't get to do this again in the future. It's, no, game's going to be over and you're done. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's a little bit tricky here is just wrapping this in all of the conversation that we've had before around kids and, you know, how do you teach a kid to like board games at all? And a big part of these manners are maybe you're asking a child or whomever to try out a game that they're not super thrilled about playing at all. Yeah. And how do you work through that? And, you know, look, you manifest your own success, right? So if a kid is miserable the whole time, they're playing and then they're losing because they're not even trying and like all the stuff. And then that's making them more miserable. Exactly. It's this kind of like cyclical thing. How do we deal with something like that? And, you know, the reality is that in a lot of ways playing a board game is a microcosm of many different real life scenarios.

57:32And we need to work through how we expect our kids to behave in those scenarios. Well, look, I ask you to try this game. I appreciate you putting forth the effort to try it with us and you're not having a great time. I understand that if you were going to school today and not really wanting to be at school, would this behavior be acceptable? Yeah. I think that's one good way to handle it. There have been a few times that we have been in that situation with a kid and we've looked at them and said, you know what? If you're really having this bad of a time with the game, would you like to walk away? And sometimes they take us up on it and sometimes they don't. And that's the key here is sometimes even if the game itself is not exactly what they want and they're whining about the game, as soon as they have a minute to think about it, they realize they'd rather be playing the game with people they care about than shut out from the game. That's true. I also think it's really important to acknowledge that the end of a game is an arbitrary end point. Yes. Sometimes it's just, you know, what we've played enough of this, we don't need to finish. Yes. It is not a fixed and required thing. Like there is no merit badge if the game actually gets finished.

58:34If it's not working, it's not working. Yeah. And we've talked about this before that if nobody's having fun, stop. You don't have to keep going to stop. It's okay. It does kind of feel weird the first time you do it. I'm going to admit, it's a little like, huh? Why I can just stop. Yeah. Yeah. You, in fact, can. Yeah. And it's not necessarily quitting or giving up. It's a, this was not the right time for this or this was not the right group for this or whatever. It is respecting yours and other people's time more than the game itself. Yes. Okay. Yes. That's a good skill for adults to learn. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So that was a kind of firehose of mannerist conversation. You do have some tips on this list that we should talk about. Yeah. I feel like with all the things we covered, we can really only give general guidelines because kids are different. They have different personalities. Like we said at the very beginning of this segment, how you handle this is very different if it's like one-on-one apparent with a kid versus a whole group of kids together. Basically, set your expectations a lot lower. If it's a whole group of kids together, part of that setting expectations lower is the

59:38bigger the group of kids and the younger the group of kids, the shorter the game needs to be. If anybody in the group is struggling with playing games correctly, having good manners around board games. Oh, and I do want to add one extra little thing that we actually don't have in our list, which is, I mentioned this before as well. Like, rules layering is not a great skill. Yeah. Actually takes a fair amount of nuance if people are strained from the rules to follow them or not. And especially if you have a firstborn that is trying to play a game, they have a natural predisposition to rules layering. And that is something to be careful about when playing a game. Well, you know what? This came up in the first half. We talked about our struggles with one or two people and playing person do thing. And remember, the goal is to have fun. If a slight change to the rules lets more people have fun, that's okay. Right. But this does reinforce that typically the younger your kids are, the more black and white they see things. Yes. And the harder it is for them to stray away from the rules or the harder it is for them

1:00:41to follow the rules at all. It tends to be one or the other and not somewhere in between. Sure. Along those lines, we've mentioned it before, but not in this podcast. Sometimes kids really do just want to make up their own game, play pretend with pieces, whatever. As long as you can set expectations and everyone agrees, that's okay too. So sometimes if one kid is super rules layering and another one is just off in La La Land wants to, you know, make the friends ride off into the sunset and go play house or whatever. You got to break it up a little bit and say, Hey, we're going to play this game this way right now. And then we can play the game that way. Next, another version of taking turns, but taking turns of who determines how the game is played. Yep. We only have one more tip here other than keeping it very short. And the younger the kids are the shorter, the better, like under 10 minutes, if you're talking about like five years older, less. My last tip is again with the very young children stay away from bluffing games.

1:01:42We made this mistake a couple of times when our kids were young. They're a lot of fun with big kids, especially when played with mom and dad. They can be like, Oh man, like I can pull one over on mom and dad. It's so awesome. I love you with kids under about five or six. It's just super confusing to them to understand, like, Oh, I don't tell you exactly what I'm giving you every time or exactly what's in my hand. It becomes unfun, even if they start to understand how it works. It can also feed into poor sportsmanship. I recommend just staying away from that whole genre of games for a while. Well, at its most fundamental, kids are still figuring out when it's appropriate to tell the truth or not or whatever. And I mean, the answer is, you know, they should always tell the truth. But figuring out what truth is really, they're just like, they're still putting together the building blocks of communication. Bluffing games are about tactically lying. That's essentially what they are. And doing so in a framework where it's okay to lie, which is very confusing for a five

1:02:44year old. Right. Someone in the discord months ago now mentioned that they actually like bluffing games with their kids because they treat it as training their kids to understand when someone is lying to them, sure, and looking for tells. And I think that's great, but you still need to get to the point where kids really have a distinct knowledge of this is the truth. This is a lie inside the world of the game. It is okay to lie. And that takes longer than you would think as it's a nuanced thing in communication to understand the layers that go into that. I will say, honestly, I think our kids started to understand that around age seven or eight and they still weren't very good at it. And it still led to a lot of poor sportsmanship attitudes around the whole thing. Yeah. Look, I think generally speaking, bluffing games are just not big in our family anyway. Right. But there's layers to that. Like now everybody is fine with them. Wouldn't be their first choice, but it's fine. When they were little, it just did not work well.

1:03:45And I would assume that's going to be true for most kids from what I've seen. Yep. All right. So there you have it. Kind of the fire hose, like you mentioned, of just lots of things to keep in mind when teaching board games, not just the rules of the game, but all of the other stuff that goes around being able to play a game in a group, which leads directly into our backtalk question. What I want you to do is put your little thinking cap on and think about these kinds of rules or any kinds of rules similar to this that we didn't mention that are related to board games. And my question is essentially, how do you teach these things or reinforce these things with the people in your lives who need to learn these things or have these things reinforced? And so for us, the example that I'm going to use is in order to help our kids be gracious losers or gracious winners, specifically one rule that we implemented in our home was that the winner had to clean up the game. Yeah. We held onto that for quite a while. We don't anymore. Correct. It's really not that I mean, and everyone's a while it comes up, but it's not the same

1:04:48kind of issue that it was previously correct. So this was, I don't want to call it a disincentive for winning, but it was an extra responsibility the winner had because they got to be the winner. So we would have them then turn around and clean up again, usually with mom or dad's help. Yeah. So what about you? What kinds of things have you implemented in your family life that are helping your kids or other people in your lives exhibit good board game matters? As always, you can respond to this question on the back talk channel on our discord community or in a post I will hopefully remember to make in our Facebook community. The Facebook community look for the family gamers community on Facebook or go to thefamilygamers.com slash community. And if you're not already in our discord server, which is actually the family tabletop discord server. It's us on a couple of other content creators. You can go to thefamilygamers.com for a slash discord to get an invite to to that server.

1:05:48You can of course find us all over the internet and social media at the handle family gamers AA. That's for Andrew and Anita. You can find us on X Instagram, TikTok, Blue Sky, threads, YouTube. I think that's it for now. Maybe they'll be more in the future. Man, I hope not. That's enough. You can also just email us if that's easier for you. Andrew at thefamilygamers.com. Anita at thefamilygamers.com. Please don't forget to subscribe to the show, tell your friend about the show, and leave us a review at Apple Podcast or whatever your podcast subscription source is. You can also find us on Amazon Music, Tune-In, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Shout out to you bread raptors who provides the music for the family gamers podcast. Finally, the family gamers is still sponsored by FirstMove Financial. Go to FirstMoveFinancial.com slash family gamers and learn how the team at FirstMove Financial can help you pile up the victory points. Thanks so much to the team at FirstMove for sponsoring another episode of the show. Well, I think that's going to be it for us this week. Yeah.

1:06:49So, the goal here is to not be sick and to play more games. Yes. So far, we are over too, but hopefully next week we'll be better. All right. So that's what we're going to do. Until next week, everybody, play games with your kids.