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Episode 39 - KantCon 2017

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 32m·analyzed·Jul 16, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

KantCon 2017 debrief with Dutch Pinball updates, Star Wars pinball impressions, and Pinball Done Quick sweepstakes/donation refund controversy analysis.

Summary

This episode from the Eclectic Gamers Podcast (July 16, 2017) covers KantCon 2017 tabletop gaming and three pinball topics: Dutch Pinball manufacturing progress (parts ordered, 9-week lead times), initial impressions of Stern's Star Wars pinball game based on Deadflip gameplay footage (fast, flow-heavy, bonus-heavy, with character selection and complex missions), and a detailed discussion of Pinball Done Quick's sweepstakes controversy involving donation transparency and conflicting rules structure.

Key Claims

  • Dutch Pinball has ordered parts from a new contract manufacturer (unnamed, in Netherlands) with 9-week lead times as of July 14, 2017

    high confidence · Tony discussing Dutch Pinball news updates; parts ordered for prototype construction

  • Star Wars by Stern features character selection (like choose-your-house in Game of Thrones) that determines available missions and gameplay

    high confidence · Dennis describing gameplay footage from Deadflip stream (July 5); saw 15-20 minutes of footage

  • Star Wars is designed by Steve Ritchie and plays very fast, comparable to No Fear in some aspects but among the fastest Ritchie games

    high confidence · Dennis reviewing Deadflip gameplay footage; draws comparisons to No Fear and F-14 Tomcat

  • Pinball Done Quick donations were misrepresented: messaging said 'all donations go to MSF' but actually gross donations minus ~$5,000 Stern Pro machine cost went to charity

    high confidence · Tony discussing the sweepstakes refund announcement (July 15, 2017); he personally donated $25 and requested refund via PayPal

  • The Stern Pro pinball machine represented over 25% of gross donations raised during Summer Games Done Quick 2017

    high confidence · Tony calculating the impact of the machine cost on total charitable proceeds

  • Pinball Done Quick officials refunded all donations due to conflict between official sweepstakes rules and planned drawing approach

    high confidence · Announcement posted July 15, 2017 by Pinball EDU/Major League Pinball; email sent to donors

  • Star Wars pinball was unexpectedly shipped to a Kansas City location (Pizza West via KCPen) the day before a tournament

    high confidence · Dennis mentioning Facebook post; early order by local owner, placed on route through Casey Pins

  • Star Wars features a TIE fighter attack video mode (button mashing to shoot) where the ball is locked, similar in skill requirement to Jurassic Park but mechanically different

Notable Quotes

  • “The rules, though... give me way more of an almost overwhelming Game of Thrones vibe. Because you choose a character when you start, kind of like choose your house, but now it's choose your Luke or any other of the characters you can choose from.”

    Dennis @ ~01:18:00 — Describes core gameplay mechanic and design philosophy of Star Wars, drawing explicit parallel to Game of Thrones

  • “to me it's not F-14 fast but short of that this to me looked like the fastest Steve Ritchie game i've seen”

    Dennis @ ~01:28:00 — Assessment of Star Wars' speed and flow compared to other Ritchie designs; indicates it may reshape expectations for modern Ritchie games

  • “While saying that we're giving all of it... When you say all donations, people are thinking, oh, you're going to send – if you raised $14,000, you're sending $14,000 over, not $9,000.”

    Tony @ ~02:15:00 — Captures the core issue with Pinball Done Quick messaging: 'net proceeds' vs 'gross donations' transparency problem

  • “I thought all of my all of my money was going to go to msf and when i found out it wasn't i was kind of annoyed because i thought all of everything they were saying had indicated to me that it was 100 going to them”

    Tony @ ~02:10:00 — Donor perspective on the donation transparency issue; motivated his personal refund request

  • “They'd always acknowledge that it wasn't meant to be a raffle... There is no raffle being run for Pinball Done Quick.”

    Tony @ ~02:35:00 — Clarifies the sweepstakes vs raffle distinction, which becomes central to the rules conflict

Entities

Dutch PinballcompanyStern PinballcompanyStar Wars (Pinball)gameSteve RitchiepersonDeadflippersonPinball Done QuickeventGames Done QuickorganizationPinball EDUorganizationMajor League Pinballorganization

Signals

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Dutch Pinball parts on order with 9-week lead times from unnamed Netherlands contract manufacturer; prototype stage indicates multi-month delay before machine availability

    high · Tony: 'they've ordered parts to build a new prototype under this new manufacturer... time estimate for some of the parts is as far as nine weeks out and this was as of friday'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Star Wars implements character selection affecting mission availability and gameplay paths, similar to Game of Thrones house selection, adding RPG-like depth

    high · Dennis: 'you choose a character when you start, kind of like choose your house... seems based off of the character you choose also determines what missions are available'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Star Wars plays exceptionally fast with flow-heavy design; described as fastest Steve Ritchie game seen (apart from F-14 Tomcat); minimal pop bumper interaction compared to Star Trek/Game of Thrones

    high · Dennis: 'to me it's not F-14 fast but short of that this to me looked like the fastest Steve Ritchie game i've seen... this does not look like it will disappoint' for fast game preference

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Star Wars scoring is heavily bonus-dependent; concerns raised about bonus being too high, though appears to have been toned down during development iterations

    high · Dennis: 'I saw that the bonus is too high from what I did see of the game... it seemed like the game was just way too bonus heavy' but also notes 'through its iteration Star Wars is not as extreme as it was'

  • ?

    product_concern: Pinball Done Quick misrepresented donation allocation in messaging ('all donations' vs 'net proceeds'); Stern Pro machine cost (~$5,000+) not clearly deducted from charitable proceeds upfront

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.276

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, July 16th. It's episode 39. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And today we're going to be talking to you about pinball video games and the much lamented, never seen very much anymore, tabletop gaming. But tabletop's going to be a huge section this time because we just got done with CantCon. CantCon's actually still running right now, but our role in this adventure has come to an end. It has. But I guess first we should probably go ahead and do intros. Tony, I guess, what's been going on since our last episode? Well, I have finished a primary playthrough of Shadow of Mordor, which we've talked about a lot lately because Shadow of War is coming out. I never actually finished the game. I played it. I love the game, but I never finished it. So I actually just finished it the other day. And I'm starting on some of the DLC.
1:11
And other than that, I haven't been doing a whole lot, actually. Yeah, I never played the DLC for Shadow of Mordor. I just did the main game. I did a little bit more of Dishonored 2, but I didn't even get through another chapter, so not enough to talk about. I've been playing around with some of the shmups I got on the Steam sale. Shmup. Yep. So I've been doing a little bit of that. I picked up a couple more games, like Crypt of the Necrodancer was one I was watching for, and it was cheap on Steam, but I haven't started it yet. And so really gaming-wise. That's kind of the roguelike dance thing, the one where it uses the music and everything. It's kind of like a roguelike rhythm game. I don't really. All I know is, look, this shows you how great I do research. All I knew is that it was really popular. So I'm like, that I heard people are really liking it. And it's like, I haven't really, other than Risk of Rain, until I upgraded my computer and started getting more stuff through Steam, namely Binding of Isaac, I haven't really played any roguelikes. So I saw that that was one that was very well received broadly. So it was just, I threw it on the wish list. So I don't know. I would recommend, yeah, if you haven't seen it and you want to try some, I'd recommend FTL also. Oh, yes. I have heard quite a bit about FTL. And if you want something that's really, really hard, enter the Gungeon.

high confidence · Dennis analyzing Deadflip footage; discussion clarifies ball is not in play during this mode

Doctors Without Borders (MSF)
organization
KCPencompany
Pizza Westvenue
KantCon 2017event
Casey Pinscompany
Tonyperson
Dennisperson

high · Tony: 'all of the branding, all of the messaging... would say all donations, all subscriptions, all Twitch bits... all going to MSF. The problem was that it wasn't really all going to MSF... the net amount was going to MSF'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Done Quick sweepstakes and donation structure sparked community concerns; organizers issued full refunds due to conflict between official rules and announced drawing procedures

    high · Tony: 'there was a conflict between the official rules for the sweepstakes... and the planned approach on how they were going to do the drawing... and what they told people was that planned approach. Those two items did not agree.'

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Pinball Done Quick faced legal/regulatory complexity around sweepstakes design; rules required free entry option (postcard entry) to be equitable with paid entries; distinctions between sweepstakes, raffles, and other promotional structures

    high · Tony lengthy explanation of sweepstakes requirements: 'sweepstakes must have a provision where you can have basically a free option to be in for all the drawings... everyone has to have the same chance of winning'

  • ?

    content_signal: Deadflip Twitch stream (July 5, 2017) provided first public Star Wars gameplay footage; hours-long stream became reference point for community analysis; multiple locations received machines shortly after

    high · Dennis: 'Deadflip, as usual, got the first gameplay glimpse on July 5th... a couple hours long... people have actually been able to get their hands on it because I believe it was at one, I think actually two different pinball shows since then'

  • ?

    venue_signal: Star Wars placed at Pizza West (Kansas City) within days of manufacturing; route operator placing on location; early adoption by local owner

    high · Dennis: 'Pizza West location that KCPen services in our area in Kansas City just put in the Star Wars... a local owner who owns this machine... ordered it early enough that he got it already'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Donor trust in Pinball Done Quick damaged by transparency issues; multiple donors requested refunds after discovering donation allocation discrepancy; community discussion ongoing about messaging clarity

    high · Tony: 'when I had donated I thought oh all of my all of my money was going to go to msf and when I found out it wasn't I was kind of annoyed... I submitted a refund request through paypal'

  • $

    market_signal: Stern Pro pinball machine cost (~$5,000+) represented over 25% of gross donations for Summer Games Done Quick 2017; significant impact on net charitable proceeds; raises questions about prize sustainability for future events

    high · Tony: 'that pinball machine's very significant chunk... it was I believe over 25 percent of the gross donation amount raised during this most recent summer games done quick'

    • 2:38
    I don't know if I want something really hard. Yeah, I don't think it's as good as Binding of Isaac, but it is still a lot of fun. But it is, I think, harder than Isaac. Okay. Well, I guess that's it for intros, so let's get going. Yay! Okay. Pinball. Three topics I have down in our notes here that I see we're going to talk about. I think the first one's here on me, and it's very brief. Dutch pinball, which we've talked about extensively quite a bit this year.
    3:12
    There's not a whole lot to say other than they have continued to provide news updates. their new quotes from their new contract manufacturer which they liked they they say they're pursuing and that they're at the stage now where they've ordered parts to build a new prototype under this new manufacturer they still haven't named who the manufacturer is but the time estimate for some of the parts is as far as nine weeks out and this was as of friday so it's basically nine weeks out from when we're recording this uh so it will be a couple of months before we'll hit a time period where they would even possibly have a new machine built as just a prototype. But anyway, that's the status of that. So they're, I guess, in the process of trying to figure out how the new manufacturer would actually, what they need to do to actually build it. Yeah, so basically they're moving ahead with everything they said they would be moving ahead with, and it's just a matter of what and where they are is what it amounts to. Yeah, and still know nothing about the – I know nothing about the financing or the actual ability to fund the construction to actual users. There's this gap, and I know we've covered it before about whether – we haven't talked about it extensively, but sort of the issue of what does Aura own, what's sort of proprietary to them because they were involved in the development of some aspects of it, probably board sets. and if those have to be totally re-engineered now, I mean, I assume they must be if Aura actually owns the rights to them. Even if Aura doesn't own the rights to them, if the plans on the boards aren't in possession, you know, that may just be easier to reconstruct. But regardless, since the new contract manufacturer, I'm assuming, given that it's also in the Netherlands, has no background in pinball production, they have to figure out how to assemble something anyway. So they need a prototype. So yeah, well, no, that's completely understandable. even without the other edition would be a completely understandable need for them to prototype it. We'll just have to see how things end up going. And we'll have hope. That's all we can do is have hope. We'll continue to monitor the situation. But anyway, so that's progressing. So let's jump over to the second pinball topic, which is Star Wars. We talked about Star Wars when it was announced, but there's finally been gameplay. So thanks out to Deadflip, as usual, got the first gameplay glimpse on July 5th. And we will have a link in the show notes to the YouTube archive of that Twitch feed that he had showing the footage. So it's a couple hours long. So if you want to see how the game was playing at that point, a lot of people have actually been able to get their hands on it because I believe it was at one, I think actually two different pinball shows since then. But yeah, things have really moved fast. I heard that, actually read on Facebook that the Pizza West location that KCPen services in our area in Kansas City just put in the Star Wars at that location, which had the tournament yesterday. But Tony and I had to go to our 20th year anniversary high school reunion since we both went to the same high school and graduated the same year. And that was during the tournament, so we had to miss the tournament. And it would have been hard to make the tournament anyway because we were still at Can't Con when the tournament was starting. So basically, the tournament was out. That's true because we didn't leave Can't Con until… Yeah, our last game finished up a quarter till five, and the tournament starts at five, and there's no way I could have gotten over to Shawnee from Overland Park in that time period. So I don't have to throw the reunion under the bus. That day was booked. Yesterday was a mess. I'm amazed we're awake and recording this. Well, especially because by the time I got home last night, and then I talked to the wife for a while because she didn't go with us. and then I went to sleep, and then something woke me up at like just before four in the morning, and I could never go back to sleep. So I got like three and a half or four hours of sleep last night. And then I got up about six. It wasn't too bad for me. But anyway, unfortunately, they had Star Wars in the tournament, but unfortunately we weren't there, so we didn't get to play it. I had someone tell me they found it interesting, and I haven't been able to follow up with them yet. What does interesting mean? I have no idea. Well, they did complain that their hand hurt from having to smack that button to attack the TIE fighters. So I assume interesting meant it looks really interesting, but they didn't want it to inflict pain. I think we might have to tell them to smack the button a little less hard. That might be the solution. I don't know.
    8:03
    But anyway, so our knowledge of the machine was from the dead flip stream. I know there's been a code update since then. but uh tony did you get a chance to see any of the footage i i watched a a gameplay of it i probably watched 15 to 20 minutes maybe of the footage i utterly failed i i didn't watch any of it i meant to it was on my list of things to do but i've been so busy with other things that i completely forgot about it until i sat down and started going through our episode notes today and it's like i was supposed to watch that hmm hmm oh well uh anyway it was uh yeah interesting it's not a bad word uh for it uh the sound package coupled with the light effects and this was a pro model uh i thought it looked really good the integration i don't know what the sound effect was on the pop bumpers i know i speculated that it should be things like lightsaber crackles i don't think they went with that uh had a really cool spinner sound though kind of a not like a star wars sound it was more i believe a more what i think of as an old school spinner sound it was But anyway, the whole audio package sounded great. The light show looked good. The screen integration, I think, is a step up from what we've seen with Aerosmith and Batman, which obviously were early forays into the technology for Stern Pinball. Lots of clips from the show.
    9:22
    The rules, though. The rules, from what I saw, give me way more of an almost overwhelming Game of Thrones vibe. because you choose a character when you start, kind of like choose your house, but now it's choose your Luke or any other of the characters you can choose from. And then it seems based off of the character you choose also determines like what missions are available and there are missions to choose also. So it seems very complicated. And that was sort of my issue with Game of Thrones is I never really understood how to play it. In a home environment, I think Game of Thrones would be a great game. But on location, it was always like, okay, well, I guess I'm supposed to play House Martell because add-a-balls or something. Or here are two other sort of lesser options that maybe make more sense since I'm not a very good player. I don't know yet enough about Star Wars to be able to say, do we know? Like, is there one character which, oh yeah, well, this is the character you need to do if you want to blow this machine up. And the only way to get on the high scoreboard will be to blow the machine up. But it's definitely got more of that RPG-esque style to it, like Game of Thrones has with that choice option. And I don't know what the different characters bring you other than the different missions.
    10:38
    So that was an interesting feature. The video mode, as we kind of attested to a little bit ago, is just they have that action button that so many of the Sterns have in the middle of the lock bar. It seems just to be, I heard it compared to like using the gun in Jurassic Park where the raptors will sometimes come across on that Daddy East game and you have to grab the gun handle and you try and pull off. Shoot all the raptors. Yeah. That this is sort of akin to that, but you're just trying to blow up as many TIE fighters as possible. So it's not, it's a video mode, but other than just having to be really quick, it's not like a weird, you know, like twitch to avoid obstacles while driving your car on the DMD. So as far as video modes go, I like that style better, where it's really just spam and not, oh, yeah, you actually have to play asteroids on your DMD sort of thing and lose because you don't know how to do it.
    11:27
    And I saw that in the footage also. My only issue is with those things is I'm one of those players who I don't always notice that's up there until it's too late. And then in my haste to try and grab it, I drain.
    11:40
    That's just my poor play style. And that's why I'll have to ask, but from what I remember seeing, that is not – I don't think the ball is still in play like Jurassic Park. So I'm not sure – the guy who sent us that message yesterday, I wasn't sure that was the best analogy because this is actually you activate video mode. There's an insert for it. Oh. I believe the ball is not in play. It actually operates like a traditional video mode, except the nature of the video mode is akin to blasting the Stormtroopers in Daddy Star Wars or blasting the Velociraptor.
    12:15
    But in those two instances, those still had the ball in play. But in this case, I believe the ball is actually locked. So it's more like a traditional video mode, but with the skill required of a while ball is in play video mode. Right. Okay. I think. Otherwise, you're going to have to get used to using your chin, just like using photon torpedoes during Star Trek. That's what all the good players use, incidentally, is they'll trap up on both flippers and then they use their chin.
    12:44
    That's what I've heard. That would be why I'm a failure. I slammed my chin too hard and it was sore and it made me sad. But we're not here to talk about my chin. So I saw that. I think the bonus is too high from what I did see of the game. uh it wasn't like batman 66 which was just totally ridiculous high levels of bonus but the it seemed and they may have already toned it down some but it did seem like the game was just way too bonus heavy and and you know i know that's a balance uh i have i'm trying to think of of my games i i guess the only game i really have that's really heavy and bonus is probably firepower but I don't know. Superman's kind of like that. My newer games, though, are not bonus-heavy games. And so it's always weird for me to see it. I have a little more trouble. I don't like bonus games as much, I would say, overall, because generally I don't have a sense as to how much bonus I actually have. So if you're trying to figure out if you have enough to win or not, if you don't know it well enough, you don't know. And in some games like Ghostbusters, that bonus is just huge. Yeah, well they've toned that down in Ghostbusters, bonus isn't as big of a thing as it was originally in Ghostbusters And I've heard that this is, through its iteration Star Wars is not as extreme as it was and I don't think Star Wars started even as extreme as Batman 66 did but anyway, it is a bonus heavy game as it stands, and I don't imagine that will change, so just FYI to people, apparently that's a big deal in terms of the scoring on this so it's something to be aware of but that's really all I had to say on it. It just, it looked really cool. I, I want to try it. I I'll have a chance to now, obviously like everyone else, I'm curious about how the premium will, will play. I mean, it's got that different, it's got that hyper ramp. I think that's going to look really cool. I'm not sure that's going to change the gameplay very much. I wonder if the ball lock mechanism and stuff with the death star works a little bit differently with the break open death star, but, but yeah, I, I can see why some people might look at this pro and think, wow, this looks pretty stripped down. I thought it integrated really well, but the only real toy on there is your non-moving Death Star, and then there's the little jiggly TIE Fighter, which is kind of like the jiggly Vengeance on Star Trek, except obviously much, much smaller.
    15:11
    But I'm not a big toy person. So, I mean, toys are great, but I don't care so much if a game has a lot of toys or just a few toys. But some people care.
    15:22
    You're not a huge – toys aren't a huge make-break for you? No, and it can depend on the theme. I mean, I think Ghostbusters, even the pro, looks really populated. It's just, you know, the little cityscape they got going on. You got the little Staypuff in the back. And while Slimer's not big, he does move around, so he's pretty interesting to see. and even the lame little pop-up Scolari brothers because no one likes them. And they are just drop targets. But the way they kind of pop up like little trolls, that one's kind of more toy heavy than something else. Or Walking Dead with the well locker and the barn and stuff. It looks like it's full of toys. This looks like it's full of ramps.
    16:03
    Oh, and the one thing from what I saw, and I've heard others already obviously discussing right about this, oh this is wicked fast holy cow uh this is the fastest you know god i'm trying to think uh to me it's not f14 fast but short of that this to me looked like the fastest steve richie game i've seen i've heard some people really compare it to no fear a lot in terms of how it actually played uh it does have no fear has no pop bumpers so that's not a great analogy but some have claimed that you don't really interact all that much with the pop bumpers and how he's got it laid out here, whereas in Star Trek or Game of Thrones, you're in the pops a lot.
    16:46
    So, yeah. But no, I mean, yeah, if you want, I mean, as I assumed, especially once we knew the name who was on it, that it would be flow heavy, but wow, yeah, it seemed to play really fast. So if you want fast games, I don't know what the average ball time is going to end up being, but if you like that ball to just be whipping around all the time, this does not look like it will disappoint. Well, hopefully we'll get a chance to get up there real soon and have an actual experience with it. Yeah.
    17:15
    We knew this month was going to be, with GantCon and everything, it was just going to be not viable. Everything's just busy this month. Yeah. So we've known for months that we wouldn't be able to make the tournament here. I just didn't know that Star Wars would show up the day before. Yeah. Womp womp. I don't think that was expected. I don't think it was planned. Yeah. No, it was because, you know, who knows when you're going to get it, get, you know, it was going to come in. I knew they were shipping, but obviously it depends on the order when people purchase them. And I think it's it's another local owner who owns this machine. He just wanted to put it on route initially through Casey Pins. So he apparently ordered it early enough that he got it already. OK, well, that's really all I had to say for Star Wars. We only have one more pinball topic, Tony. Oh, yeah. And it's tiny. yeah it's the it's the tiniest tiniest if we just shorten it down to pdq but unfortunately it's also going to be our longest one it's not well it's been an ever-evolving saga and this one i'm trying to think of the best way to tackle it because it's fairly confusing and there's a high risk of drama with something like this but i guess we we just need to need to dive in i think we'll start it with what we most recently know and then try and sort of fill out some background. So what this has to do is PDQ for Pinball Done Quick. This is an event that has been happening twice a year where pinball goes for about a week, live streamed 24-7, raising money for charity. The charity that's involved depends on whether it's the winter event called Awesome Games Done Quick or the summer event called Summer Games Done Quick. And those two events are run by Games Done Quick, which is a fundraising group that does video game speed runs for the week. And what happens is the pinball folks show up at the same place that the video game folks are at. And there are two streams that are running simultaneously, one on pinball and one on video games. So what's happened is there was an announcement yesterday, July 15th, 2017, that the people who donated to Pinball Done Quick – and this was the – there were several ways you could contribute, but this was for actually submitting what I would consider a true donation, which would put you in for a drawing to win a new Stern Pro pinball machine. that they were that pinball done quick any of the contributions that came in through that they are all getting refunded so anyone who donated is getting that donation refunded back to them and the reason that they are doing that is because there is a conflict between the official rules for the sweepstakes that they listed involving that pinball machine and the planned approach on how they were going to do the drawing and what they told people was that planned approach. Those two items did not agree. I have a link to that announcement on Facebook in the show notes because I received an email because I did donate during the Pinball Done Quick stream,
    20:20
    but they have announced it in a public, and it's the same message, so anyone can go and read it. It's a public post. Does that make sense so far? Yeah, basically they were setting it up one way and they announced it one way, but when they were actually going through and doing it, they were not following their own rules and causing minor issues. Yeah, it's sort of the story. And I didn't know that this refund thing and the cancellation of the drawing was going to happen until just a few hours ago. So I was having to plan this segment to be quite a bit different because there was a lot of confusion still out there. basically the scenario with pinball done quick and it's kind of the pinball uh pinball edu is the non-profit that is coordinating pinball done quick the charity that in this current one the one with the drawing canceled with summer's game games games done quick was doctors without borders which i think most people are familiar with so if you were to go to the games done quick stream, the video game stream, and donate, it went right to Doctors Without Borders. You got a donation receipt, you were put into a sweepstakes automatically, depending on the volume of money, and the payment went right to MFSF. MFSF is the acronym for Doctors Don't Quit, because it's actually a French phrase, and I always mispronounce it, so I'm just going to say MSF for Doctors Without Borders at this point.
    21:49
    If you donated for MSF on the pinball stream, actually you got a receipt that you donated to Pinball EDU. And they would take the funds and ultimately transfer them to MSF. And I remember that from Awesome Games Done Quick, which was for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. But because I donated during that stream also, because actually I donated on both sides because I like to encourage the pinball stream because I think it's a really good idea. I really like the idea of approaching pinball from speed running thing. And I also, as we've talked about extensively on this podcast, I think that video gamers in particular are highly susceptible for indoctrination into pinball. So it makes sense to try and expose them to pinball. So I really like the idea. I really do. But the twofold problem here was, one, how the – well, let me reverse the order. We've talked about number two, which is the nature of the sweepstakes. The initial issue which caught my attention was regarding the amount of money that was actually going to MSF. And this was I guess you could probably categorize it more as an issue with how they were describing the donation process So on the stream all the various hosts they had all sorts of hosts a lot of pinball Twitch personalities doing it And the Moobot, the automated kind of tool that is going on in the Twitch stream, constantly reminding people, here's how you can contribute. Here's what's going on. All that sort of stuff. All of the branding, all of the messaging, the Twitter stuff, it all would say, all donations, all subscriptions, all Twitch bits, which are a form of kind of currency, that this was all going to MSF. The problem was that it wasn't really all going to MSF. Ultimately, the net amount was going to MSF. But there was one expense associated with this project, and that was the Stern Pro pinball machine. That wasn't donated. They were going to have to buy that. So while the Twitch subscriptions and Twitch bits were going 100% to MSF, the donation amount to enter into the sweepstakes was going to be sent to MSF less the cost of a Stern Pro machine. so roughly five thousand dollars so that was a source of confusion and given the the branding on it when i had donated i thought oh all of my all of my money was going to go to msf and when i found out it wasn't i was kind of annoyed because i thought all of everything they were saying had indicated to me that it was 100 going to them and so uh others had raised this point publicly and that's how i that's when i found out uh that that was the case so i i asked for a refund uh before they before the pinball done quick people said anything i submitted a a refund request through paypal and i said i i didn't think it was represented accurately and i would rather have my 25 back so i can you know redonate it or do what i what what i want to do i only gave them 25 i get i because it went to the pinball edu when i did the donation i sent the rest of the money i was giving msf through the gamestone quick stream because i knew for sure then so i was already red flagged on it it was just i i was just like that's that's not what i wanted to sign up for so and they they had they had agreed that that was going to go forward and that was pending process per the before this latest announcement so that was that was the one side and they came out towards i guess the end of the event on twitter and clarified that it was net proceeds not gross so that sort of messaging thing i assumed was going to be fixed in the future no matter what but but that was the that was the easy that was the easy lift that was the the one problem but you know when you look back at some of these amounts that were raised it was it's that pinball machine's very significant chunk is the thing i it was i believe over 25 percent of the gross donation amount raised during this most recent summer games done quick and that's a pretty big That's a pretty big ask to say, well, we're only giving 75 cents on the dollar to MSF. While saying that we're giving all of it. Right, right. When you say all donations, people are thinking, oh, you're going to send – if you raised $14,000, you're sending $14,000 over, not $9,000. So yeah, it's – so that was kind of a mess. But they got out in front of that, and they had posted a message early last week saying – this was after I did my donation request – or my refund request. But they said anyone who felt like – that didn't understand and was upset could ask for a refund, and they'd get their donation back. So they got – I thought they managed that one pretty quickly. The thing was the number two that we brought up originally about the sweepstakes situation. And so I'm going to try and explain it a little bit without getting hopefully too deep into the weeds. But when you're a charity and you want to raise money, you have a variety of options where prizes are available. Or there are a variety of categories of things you might think you can do, but not all of them are legal. Or you need special permits and stuff to do them. So they officially were saying they were doing a sweepstakes. And in a sweepstakes, and this is what Games Done Quick on the video game side does. They do a sweepstakes. In a sweepstakes, you can have a bunch of prizes and you can say that you can have automatic entry at certain dollar levels. So like the grand prize for the Games Done Quick folks was a computer, but you had to donate $150 to be put in automatically. That's important. Automatically. into the drawing for the computer. And at $5, you got put in a drawing for a t-shirt or whatever, or nothing. It just doesn't really matter. It's an automatic entry. But sweepstakes must have a provision where you can have basically a free option to be in for all the drawings. It can't be behind a pay barrier. Everyone has to have an equal opportunity. So the normal way that sweepstakes do this is they have an address where you can send a postcard and you'll be put into the drawings for all the items. The other condition on sweepstakes is that has to be equitable. Everyone has to have the same chance of winning. So whether you paid $150 and got your automatic entry or you paid $1,000 or you paid nothing and you sent in the postcard to be in the drawing for the computer, you only get in once. You can't stuff the ballot box with your name multiple times. So you can't run through it herb style where you just keep punching in until you've got an overwhelming ability to get it done. Right, right. It's like one person, one household. However, the rules are going to be structured, but you have one entry. That's a standard sweepstakes approach. All right, so let's take that and we'll put that aside. Just noting that this is what, through Major League Pinball, which was sort of the official or overseeing organization involving Pinball EDU. They were the one major league pinball was the ones broadcasting this. They're also the ones that initially posted the refund announcement yesterday that I mentioned earlier.
    29:26
    That's what the official rules were for four sweepstakes, just like Game Done Game Send Quick does. So we got that pot. Then there's the raffle pot. This is what we see a lot with the or when the organization we sponsor, Project Pinball Charity. Pinball EDU also runs a number of raffles. And this is very normal for charities to do as an option. to do raffles. In raffles, there's a set number of tickets. You don't get any free entries. They're not allowed to give them away. In fact, that would be a violation of law. You have to buy, you buy the tickets and then you draw and there's a guaranteed winner. A ticket will be drawn and all of the tickets are, you know, you don't have to sell all the tickets. That's how I believe both of the pinball organizations I mentioned earlier do it. I know pinball EDU does it that way. There's a provision that everyone will get refunded if they don't sell out. But you can also do things where you'll just draw out of the winning pool. Maybe the prize is, you know, you may not care. You can set it up a variety of ways. But under a raffle, you can increase your odds as long as you keep acquiring tickets. But you know how much your odds are for each entry because you know the maximum number of tickets that can be sold. So that's a raffle. And charities do raffles all the time as well. So that's a section. There is no raffle being run for Pinball Done Quick. They'd always acknowledge that it wasn't meant to be a raffle. So let's put that in our little box. Then there's the third box where if you wanted to do something that might sound like a sweepstakes, but you wanted to allow people to buy multiple entries in, and you wouldn't have to guarantee a winner. You could, but you wouldn't have to guarantee a winner. But basically that you could contribute more money and have more chances, but you weren't going to have a set number of tickets sold. That's a lottery. And most of the time, charities cannot run lotteries.
    31:28
    It's gambling without an exception for charity, whereas raffles are often exempt. There are some states that are very strict on raffles as well, but that's the third part. So going back to Pinball Then Quick in this long-winded explanation, hopefully simplified at this point, the problem was the official rules said they were running a sweepstakes. However, during the stream, the hosts and the auto announcements and even after the stream under that post last week, which clarified about the refunds if you felt like you were upset that not all of your donation was going to MSF, they did indicate the plan was to draw from the sweepstakes and the way it worked is every $25 you gave got you an additional entry and they use the example under the last week post of if you gave $25 you have an entry if you gave $50 you have two entries and they had a postcard option like a sweepstakes would warrant but that there was a limit of one postcard entry per household So you can only ever get one entry for free.
    32:34
    That's not sweepstakes. That's a lottery. This was pointed out to them, and they didn't respond to anyone who was pointing it out.
    32:43
    And that became a problem. And that's what I thought I was going to have to spend most of my time talking about because it wasn't – nowhere did I see the folks behind Pinball Done Quick explain why they thought that was a legitimate sweepstakes. It was especially confusing because last week's announcement mentioned that thing about the postcard and that it was only limited to once per household. But if you loaded up the sweepstakes rules, it said one entry per household, regardless of method of entry. And it's under the how to intersection of the rules, which explains the payout model of the $25 auto entry. That also said, incidentally, that $25 or more got you one entry into the contest, not multiple entries. And at the very top of their official sweepstakes rules, it also clarified that the way the contest was structured was no purchase necessary to enter or win. And then noted right after that, a purchase or payment will not increase an entrant's chances of winning. That's an exact quote from those rules.
    33:53
    So what they said they were going to do did not match what their own official rules said. And while I'm not an attorney, there are plenty of guides on how to set up charity draws and the limits of what you can and just cannot do. And I thought in less than 30 minutes of work, it looked really obvious to me that what they were running was an illegal lottery if they went forward with the drawing. and so I was very confused why they in their announcement sort of doubled down on that that was the plan especially because it just went against the official written rules which were I mean very legally structured it just I can't say they're identical the game's done quick but it sure felt that way so I it was just it was really weird I didn't see any public comments on that aspect but apparently I don't know if someone Maybe they talked with their lawyer behind the scenes and they just weren't saying anything public, but they're at the point where they've realized that what they wanted to do for the draw, drawing the name didn't comply with the sweepstakes rules. And so that's why they've explained that they're refunding everyone who donated, which was a sizable amount of money. And they've provided a link that you'll be able to access in our link to their explanation where you can go and donate direct to MSF, kind of through them in a way. So that if you want to – when you get that money back and you want to push it right back out and give it to the charity, you can. And they're providing a tool for that. so uh my thought is this was probably the uh the best solution they could have come up with because i get it they were totally in a bind they went forward they had told everyone all week that if you paid more money you'd get more drawings they almost assuredly would have raised significantly less money if people hadn't been under the impression that they were buying more chances to win a pinball machine but if they went forward with that they could have put themselves in a lot a legal jeopardy, which could have put Pinball EDU, which was going to run the drawing, at a lot of risk of liability for having violated the law regarding charities and lotteries. So I think this really was the only course of action they could do. Yeah, I think that's what it sounds like, is that this whole retraction is their best position for the situation they painted themselves into. I mean, they painted themselves into a corner. They laid out the rules. They provided the rules. The rules were sound like they were very clear for what they were supposed to be. And then they just ran things like they're used to running things with seeing as they do raffles all the time. And then they were stuck because they'd already violated their own rules. So everything they'd done up to that point was wrong. And this is the only way to keep them from having that legal issue and having the ability for people to bring up suits or anything else against them because of violation. Yeah, I think it was the only sane course of action.
    36:59
    And, I mean, they still – this didn't affect the subscriptions and the Twitch bits. They still gave – I think their estimate was $2,200 over. So they still were able to send on or Twitch to send on directly to MSF a set number of money. So, you know, there's still some I'm sure it was, I imagine, devastating for them to have to go back and cancel out this. Basically, I think they had six thousand dollars that were going to go on to Doctors Without Borders based off of what they reported. And that would have been, I guess, the net amount post drawing. But so it's unfortunate to have spent, you know, coordinate that 24-7 thing for a whole week. And then all you did was push on $2,200. That's I mean, that's kind of lame. Yeah, that's kind of that is kind of an issue. And I mean, it seems like it's I'm not I don't think that there was anything where this seems to have been an intentional thing. I just normally when you see something like this, it is the games are donated that are being given away. Thus, everything can go to the charity.
    38:12
    And since that wasn't ever made clear and then running things completely against the rules. Yeah, they were in a point. They had to do something. They had to. Yeah. Now, I don't I don't know if there are any repercussions for AGDQ's Pinball Done Quick earlier this year. and then the Summer Games Done Quick corresponding Pinball Done Quick from 2016, which had the drawings under these lottery-esque styles, even though they should have been done as sweepstakes. I have no idea if they were contacted or anything's involved with that. My own interest was about the most immediate one. But I know, because someone had indicated, who was kind of bringing this to light in these public discussions, which surprisingly have not, to my knowledge, been going on on the pinball forums has mostly been going on on social media uh one one individual uh had indicated that they had contacted the charity pinball edu twice back with the last summer and back when agdq was going on about their concerns with the sweepstakes actually being run as a lottery and action wasn't taken then so you know i don't know i don't know why it wasn't. It definitely, again, I'm not giving legal advice. I'm not an attorney, but all the charity guides said this, that I looked at said this was a complete clear violation of how you can do a sweepstakes. And so I'm a, I'm a little surprised that it wasn't taken seriously sooner. I'm hoping that they're able to pivot, get this fixed and be able to move forward in a, in a, in a way that's going to be legally compliant. Cause as I noted before, I really think this is a good idea for increasing pinball exposure and using pinball to do some good.
    39:55
    The one other thing I did want to say before we move away from the topic, however, is, again, in these discussions on social media, there were just a couple. But there were a couple of instances where I saw people coming in and commenting who were pretty annoyed or angry that this was being brought to light. and that was being brought to light in a way that they thought was embarrassing to the organization or it just may be overly rude. I don't know. In a way, I get it. No one, I mean, you know, it's pinball. A lot of people know each other in this hobby. And so there's going to be this defensiveness when you feel like your friend's getting attacked.
    40:37
    And I know in some of my own posts, because I was pretty public with some of my concerns, I felt I needed to be, otherwise I'd be the one standing on the sidelines not having done something when I thought something wrong was going on. I tried to be polite but direct about these things. But the bottom line is that you're not helping anything when you get defensive and you're in the wrong like this. I don't really know any other way to phrase it. But had this gone forward and then the New York Attorney General's Office got involved, which had oversight over that sweepstakes, as I understood it from the official rules, the fines and penalties, that's the sort of stuff that could destroy a charity like Pinball EDU. It's better to get it fixed and right and move forward, even if it's a little embarrassing, than it is to operate illicitly and possibly face destruction. so it's you know this stuff is to try and help the hobby out when people point these things out they're not trying to be mean they're trying to get it right because as this becomes more and more of a popular thing more and more eyes are going to notice this stuff and you can't just shrug your head and and say oh well quit being internet lawyers you guys i don't really care about the legal stuff let's we need to be we need to focus in and just you know we're doing just keep doing good work. It's like, no, no, you got to do. It's great that you're doing good work, but you got to do it right. You know, there are rules. Pinball doesn't get to be exempt from the rules just because you want it to be. And good intentions don't matter. The bottom line to always remember is ignorance of the law is no excuse. So it doesn't matter if you have a good reason. The AG's office isn't going to care. They're just going to say you ran an illegal lottery and we must break you so it's better for the community to figure it out and let you know now so that you don't have that happen it's just for that you know it's it's it's to help the whole point is to help we don't want people to feel cheated who are donating and we want the money to go where it's supposed to go and we want the organizations that want to do good work to be able to exist and continue to do the good work but they got to play by the rules that's just that's all it ever for me at least it's all it ever was about so uh regarding this particular fundraising drive i'm satisfied with where it has ended and i'm hoping that it's a good learning experience from everyone and we can go forward in a productive positive manner uh when agdq 2018 rolls around yeah i'm hoping that this is just a bump in the road and they can get back on track i mean that's that you You have to follow the rules, like you said. And especially when you laid out the rules and you published the rules, you can't just go do something else entirely. That's not how the system works if you want everything to work and you don't want people to think horrible things about you and what you're doing. But I think the causes are good. I really like the addition of pinball at the Games Done Quick, and I like the extra view that it brings to the hobby and the more people it brings to the hobby. I think it's a wonderful thing. I want to see them continue. I just want to see them make sure that they're doing things exactly how they laid out and said that they're doing things, and I would like to see them actually get any sweepstakes, giveaways, or anything like that that they're doing be donated so they are actually giving the charity 100% of what they say they're giving the charity. Or if they're not going to do it, at least they have to be sure to say, well, we'll give the charity everything we have left after we buy the prizes. That needs to be made very clear. Right. And my sense is they understand that at this point. I have no idea what sort of changes they're going to do. I could offer up a whole lot. I won't hear. But I mean, if they ever want to reach out, they can. They have our email address. I emailed them about this before all the public announcements happened and they didn't respond to that. They've been responding publicly, so I'm not surprised. But, you know, I'll make myself available, you know, if they want suggestions. They might they might not want to talk to me for a little while as it is. But but, you know, I needed it. The changes needed to happen. they have happen. So let's just hope that that's enough to get things right and productive. We want it to be productive. We want to see those dollar amounts grow that they can generate. I mean, there's no way they're going to match what GDQ is generating on the video game side, but pinball can make a significant difference. So I want to see it progress. Okay, that's it for pinball. We're done. Yes, we got video games. We got video games now. We only really have one video game topic. and that's Overwatch's edition of Doomfist. I have talked way too much, so I want you to please tell us about Doomfist. Doomfist, who they've hinted at for a long time, who almost everything, all the little animated shorts and everything, has almost always revolved around Doomfist in some way, from the very first one, where they were seeing Doomfist's fist, to in games when you stealing or protecting Doomfist fist all that stuff and it finally here Doomfist is here and he not voiced by Terry Crews I a bit sad about that I'm sad about that, too. Only because I wanted him to use a whole bunch of Old Spice commercial lines. Yeah. Because he used to do the web ones. That's basically what I wanted at the same time. I was very happy with the abilities he does have. He seems to be a very interesting and different style of hero because he's got a lot of mobility, which is really good for somebody who's a primary melee striker.
    46:37
    But I'll start out with just a quick rundown of his abilities. His first ability is he's got a hand cannon, which lets him fire a short-range burst from the knuckles of his fist. And it's got an automatic slow regeneration, so there's no reload to it. And he's got a seismic slam where he leaps forward and smashes into the ground, knocking nearby enemies towards him so he can pull people in. He's got the shore yuken so he can do a big old uppercut and jump up high in the air, which I seem to have seen more often used as literally just for mobility reasons to get higher in the air. He's got the rocket punch, which everybody with a big fist needs a rocket punch. and he charges it up and it shoots him forward and you can hit enemies and knock them flying or use it in combination with the uppercut to get you into some really weird places and jump over stuff and do some high mobility stuff he generates some of his own personal defensive shields and his ultimate is a thing where he leaps up into the sky and then falls to the targets and then falls to the ground and causes a bunch of damage I don't play on the PTR I've not played him yet I've watched a lot of videos of him being played including some very fun silly videos but I have to say that I think he'll be an interesting addition to the Overwatch cast like a lot of the new people until we really see what the meta is going to break down into I don't know how huge he's going to be I don't know if it's going to turn into like, uh, Anna when Anna came out and suddenly all the metas rotated around Anna and Anna was the meta. Everything was based around Anna for the meta. And then when Sombra came out, not so much. So I think it's going to be definitely interesting to see where they go from here. And unlike Anna or Orisa, with Doomfist, they released an animation short at his announcement. And we didn't have to do some horrible, somber, freaking long-winded ARG thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that one was a bit much. Yeah, that was a bit over. And for people who are not huge fans of Tracer, like me, you'll like the Doomfist video. It's fun.
    49:12
    Yep. Do you have any thoughts on if and what ways he might impact meta? My initial inclination, I've watched some footage of him, I also have not played him yet, is he seems, obviously, he's up close, so he's going to be weaker against most ranged characters. He seems pretty, because of his defensive shield, he's pretty good on, if you wanted to use him in a somewhat defensive fashion, protecting the back line. And I think he melts Winston pretty well, so I think this might have a good potential, even though you might think you just add to it, to actually shake up the dive comp, which dive comp seems to be high level meta at this point. Everyone's running Winston and doing the dive comp.
    49:59
    And I'd like to see that change up because I actually, as someone who's typically playing support, I hate dive comp because they just get into the back line and just tear it all up. And so it's almost like who dives in first and is more successful first is what the dive comp meta is to me. So I think he might shake up the dive comp meta. I don't think he's so much, I don't think he'll destroy it. because in a way he can complement it because he himself can dive in. But I think it might actually result in some people going, you know what, let's not run dive comp. They're using Doomfist in a defensive fashion. Let's maybe go and use some Reinhardts again and do maybe more of a shield approach. But that's my speculation initially. Yeah, I could see that. I definitely think there's going to be some adjustments to the dive comp because of it. my only real question is he's an offense hero and who are you going to who are you going to pull out i mean what what out of your comp i mean are you going to pull out a genji or a reaper or somebody i mean who's he going to take the place of in the standard comps and i think that's going to be the question because it's going to be about utility and who you use i mean things are a bit more flexible than they were because like back during the triple tank metas there was pretty much like two builds and that was it yeah yeah and i i don't i don't think he's going to box us in i don't think he narrows options i think he he may widen them some i think it's probably going to be more map specific and uh sombra is listed as an offensive hero also isn't she yeah she is listed as an offensive hero she seems to be a pretty hard counter to doomfist actually yeah from what i've seen he's so ability driven yeah that that makes a lot of sense but but what i was going to bring up was the fact that, again, mostly on the higher level play stuff, Sombra seems to be most often chosen. She's not chosen a lot. There are a few maps, though, mostly used on defense. She's used on the defensive team. She may be an offensive character, but she can operate. Some people think she should be reclassed as support because she can hack health kits and replace a healer if it's a map where the big health kits are around where you're going to bottleneck and such. But given that sort of thing, I could maybe see Doomfist's okay yeah on defense maybe you say you know what i i don't need they're doing a dive they're not running a pharaoh i don't need a soldier i'll use doomfist instead because he can jump back to the back line and protect them from the dive and then jump back he's so mobile he could then go back and get back back in front is pretty close together on the defensive teams on some maps so that's kind of i'm really tea leafing it here trying trying to read what it might be but that's what i'm kind I'm wondering, he might be an offensive hero that we only see on a few maps in defensive scenarios, for instance. I think he's got more potential than Sombra does. Sombra is, there are only, there are like two maps I ever see her on, other than when I play. Then everyone thinks that they know how to play Sombra, and all they do is hide the whole time and make me lose. I think Sombra is one of those characters who I think is a very interesting character lore-wise, but actual play style wise is not nearly as big of a addition as they probably hoped it would be. And again, they opened up. The first new character added was Anna and she changed everything. She changed the whole game and she's still, even after multiple rounds of nerfing, still a massively popular character who is very, very good in all of her use situations. yeah uh somber was a weird one in a way because the cloaking some people think that that sort of stuff goes against the spirit of a shooter like this where you can actually hide and and get behind people because you just can't be seen sort of things and different than reaper with his teleport it was just yeah some people just don't like the concept of a of a character that relies totally on on hiding and warping away automatically you know tracer at least you can predict her movements. She can't just warp anywhere from where she left her beacon.
    54:11
    Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing him in action. I know for three weeks I won't ever be able to choose him, because whoever's first in the game is always going to choose Doomfist. I'll get a chance eventually. Same was with Sombra, and I got a chance eventually. Well, eventually. I mean, I was the same way with Orisa. I can't remember how long it took before I finally got a chance to... I think, actually, the first time I got Orisa was when I was playing a random game, and it popped up, and I died like 37 seconds later. I didn't have as hard of a time being able to get Arisa because no one wants to play tank.
    54:42
    Yeah. That's my theory. I like playing tank sometimes. Yeah, yeah. I like it all right. Okay. That was it for video games. So now we go into our tabletop segment, which is all about CantCon 2017. We went on Friday and Saturday, as we noted earlier. CantCon's actually still going on as we're recording it. but uh recording this but we were able to play four games these games play long folks so we played two on friday and two on saturday and i thought it might be best to just go through them chronologically the first game we went and played was a miniatures game and i believe it was just called world war ii yeah it was just a it was kind of a homebrew using bits from this system and that system kind of set up to be very quick, easy. It was very much designed to be a con game where you play at a con with a large number of people. So it was designed to be very easy to understand, not super deep, and let you go through the game pretty quickly and easily.
    55:47
    And it was a lot of fun. Part of the... Now, we did... We should point out here that some of our games this year was pretty much nothing really planned out because last year when we went, the online sign-ups, nobody used the online sign-ups, so everything had available spots. So last year we just went and did, we just went and could have done whatever. So this year we didn't use the online sign-up and everybody did the online sign-up. So it was a little harder to find, to get into some of the stuff we'd hoped to get into. And this was one of those situations where we got into this miniatures game and what the game was set up for was it was two sides, the Axis and the Allies, because it's World War II, and what you were doing was you were playing in towards the end of the war. I'm trying to remember the exact, I don't remember the exact operation it was, but what it amounted to was the Germans were fleeing back across the Rhine and as the game went on more germans and more germans and more germans and more germans would come onto the map and their whole goal was to get all the way across the map and over the bridges and to safety while the allied players kept getting more people they funneled in with the whole purpose of taking out as many germans as possible and closing down the gap so they didn't escape and i ended up being allies and dennis ended up being on the axis so we we we were we were enemies enemies from the beginning yeah uh it was uh it was i had i had a lot of fun this is first time i ever played a miniatures game uh and it was it was made very easy to understand so the you know we'd lose a vehicle i'd get a new vehicle that would be randomly assigned based off of a die roll uh movement uh speed and attack and all that was defined based off of the vehicle you had so what you could do every turn was very straightforward the summaries were really really good um and so and the concept was simple but it of course as long as this was i mean it's like a conference table freaking map so oh yeah it was it was huge it was huge huge wide at that so it It got to the point when there was stuff in the middle. We were pacing around the table to get to all our miniatures on both sides of the table and everywhere. Yeah, my legs got really sore. I was like, what sort of game is this? I'm sore. But, yeah, no, it was really neat. And the GM running it explained. It was Bob Roby was the GM, and it was called The Great Escape. And, yeah, it was a custom system. Okay. I have links to all the games in the show notes from Can't Con except this one because I didn't find a website because of its homebrew nature. But anyway, yeah, it was really neat. And I guess technically, my side barely won. Called it a technical victory because you only had to get – like every vehicle we got across was the equivalent of three German vehicles that were destroyed. Yeah. We got across like enough to, I think we got across eight. Yeah, we got across eight, and we lost 23 vehicles, so they were worth 24. And we went all the way until one, which was the hard cutoff time. Yeah, it was a straight four-hour run. Because who knows, in five more minutes, we might have been down to like 27 vehicles. We had a terrible start, and it was just a mess. It was real bad. And the Allies were getting some really good rolls there at the beginning, and there were some bad rolls coming up on the German side where all your tanks kept coming into the same place, and there were a couple tanks there just smashing them as soon as they came onto the field. So, yeah, you took a lot of damage right at the beginning. Yeah, and it was really hard. The Allies refused to ever go in our artillery range. We only ever got in if they spawned there. Yes, but every time anything that spawned there died, You had so much artillery that it was just a death zone down there. Yeah, so eventually we went from initially trying to do a whole lot of combat to our German strategy became just run. Just run, and we would generally, if we could cross the boundaries and get into artillery range, other than their long-range shooters, we – actually, we never lost a vehicle once it got into artillery range. There were some that still could be shot at. Okay, there might have been one. There might have been one. There's a baby vehicle. We don't count it. Yeah, it was one of the observers because it was a very edge of long range shot from out of artillery range into artillery range and took him out. So anyway, so that was the first game. And yeah, I liked it because it was sometimes with these games, I spend a great deal of the time not understanding what I'm doing. And that's to be expected. I try a lot of new things when I've been. This is my second CanCon. And a lot of the stuff I've done, I've never played before, and I like that. But it was nice that this one, within 10 minutes, I felt like I fully understood how to do everything. And so I was like, okay, now I need to learn to be tactical, better tactical than I was. Of course, sometimes you can be as tactical as you want, and your die roll won't save you. So you're just stuck, but that's games.
    61:33
    So that was our first Friday game. The second one was in an RPG that I had never played before, called in the Call of Cthulhu, or you can pronounce it several ways. I went and looked it up, though, and this is the most common way it's said for the RPG. So I'm going to call it Cthulhu, which is the Lovecraftian world of cosmic horror. For those of you who are fans of such things, he was a pretty popular writer who kind of pioneered cosmic horror as an idea. Tony, had you ever played a Call of Cthulhu game? I've played many Cthulhu games, but not Call of Cthulhu itself. I've played a lot of other Cthulhu-based games. I've played a fairly large amount of Arkham Horror.
    62:16
    But this was, I haven't actually just sat down and played this before, so it was a first for me. And so this one, it was really neat because the concept in the Call of Cthulhu gameplay is, in a lot of ways, it feels mechanically pretty similar to how Dungeons & Dragons works, except it's much more about the mystery and the investigation, not about combat. and the idea is to give you a sense of foreboding and dread and you know it's a great sign when your gm tells you at the start understand that because it was a beginner when they had you know they were explaining to us understand that this is called cthulhu chances are everyone will die you're not supposed to expect to live it's just a question of how you die so that's not it's not that's impossible for you to live it's just uh no you're you're not going to live that's what was said and it was wonderful i mean it was happy nobody went insane there's absolutely no insanity in that game no characters pooped themselves that didn't happen either it was naturally this is a can't con episode we got we got we got going in the meat on these things i have to sit through who knows how many podcasts where people are trying to tell me about every game and what they did in pinball in a tournament and i'm like i don't care so now you guys are going to sit through this so so we're exploring a pyramid and initially there were three of us um and then a fourth player joined in which was good because it really helped the dynamic a lot because we were very limited that technically the game could run with two people but no you definitely wanted as big of a group as you could get because it helps spread things out and it's a very, unlike some games where it's like everybody can do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and you guys can kind of work together, this and that. This one was very much a, Bob is a fork. John is a spoon. They do totally different things. This guy's a knife. This guy is a serving platter. Everybody is very locked into one niche that is their primary thing. So When you needed something done with that niche, you really needed that specific person. Yeah. It's all very specialist.
    64:35
    The four-character spread was we had a language expert who was an anthropologist type. Tony's role was the archaeologist, which I always handy. I did terribly. I failed all but one archaeology role, even though my archaeology was amazingly high. Your role played him well, though, so that was good. He was the rival to some Dr. Jones. He hated Dr. Jones. Yeah. I was the most ridiculous one. I took the Dilettante, which I kid you not, his highest stat was in an ability called credit rating.
    65:13
    And I never got to do a saving throw versus Visa. So I'm pretty disappointed. That was my biggest disappointment about that game is I never got to try and use my charge card to get out of the horror. but that was his specialty and I had high knowledge of the occult so I had that going for me and then the person who joined us a little bit after we started took the role of the ex-soldier so that was our muscle and you're going and you're exploring this pyramid so this crypt essentially and we were trapped in it because we went in and the path to get in a door shut and we were trapped inside this necropolis slight place. And so, almost the entire game is just exploration and doing save checks to see if you can figure out stuff, of which most of which we kept failing. So we're not figuring anything out. We're bumbling along in the tomb. And you have to constantly be making sanity checks, because that's the big addition mechanic that Call of Cthulhu had versus the game platform, which I read about. It wasn't built on Dungeons & Dragons. It was built on a different model. But the sanity thing was the main add-on. in the original version from what I read this morning because I did some background research.
    66:28
    And so you constantly are making these sanity throws as you go along and see horrific or scary things. And even when you succeed, you lose sanity. It's just, it ticks down less. I failed every sanity throw, which was not great. So there came a point, actually the exact same point where we encountered something fairly horrific where Tony's character and my character both lost control of our sanity. Not that we ran out of sanity and were reduced to a drooling slob on the floor, but if you lose too much within a short period of time, you have the chance to basically go temporarily insane. Have a mild psychotic break. Yes. Now mine, because of my roles, was actually a very mild psychotic break and I got to pull a Breaking Bad and enter a fugue state, in my case fantasizing about pigtails. But Tony's character...
    67:23
    I rolled bad in this game, period. Every roll was bad and I was, when I was rolling for my little psychotic break, it was just about as bad as it could be because basically what it amounted to is I was locked completely into terror. I no longer saw anything all I saw around me was monsters everything I heard was a monster I defecated myself and my only goal was to either attack or run away from all these monsters I saw around me and seeing as the only people around me were my friends I threw a lot of stuff and I attacked some people it definitely was probably the second funniest part in the game. The funniest part was when the anthropologist was examining a wall and needed Tony's archaeologist to help sweep the debris away. And the debris sweeping roll was so bad that he hit her with the brush and actually did damage to her. And blinded her for a couple turns. And so it became the battle brush. Because you knew you were going to a combat brush. So there was that.
    68:43
    My own highlight, I'm going to take the highlight. My highlight of a good thing happening was very early on in it, I actually did a roll. I had no innate ability in understanding archaeology or anthropology I had a 1 chance I actually rolled the 1 The GM had to let us progress with my knowledge, which made no sense. I had a 70% chance and I failed it. I failed all those rolls. That saved us having to have some creative shenanigans to figure out how we were going to get further. The GM was just kind of like, you just kind of pulled that out somewhere and figured it out. It's what Dilettante does.
    69:29
    Now, the most epic thing was the ending, which went really quick. We never saw a monster. Not once. My character never saw a monster. The way the game kind of ended was our soldier was doing all these roles. He found a piece of dynamite, and he tied it to his knife and embedded it in an area where the monster was going to break through.
    69:55
    And so when it did, it blew up the dynamite. That killed Tony's character, because Tony's character had just come out of his insanity phase and was trailing behind us. It's like, where did everybody go? Explosion. We all took shrapnel damage in the next room, because we were still really close to the blast. So that happened to us. And then, in an attempt to get out, our soldier who had found a battle axe at some point don't ask i decided he would try and break his way through the slab and he had this super awesome role and he got to i mean it's totally dark he actually lands the hit dead and then axe shatters shards in bed in his eyes doesn't matter the room what we knew from the very beginning was unstable and the disruption collapsed the roof and killed the rest of us so that's how cthulhu ends rocks fall everybody dies yes yeah So, but I actually, I thought it was really fun. I really liked it. It was a lot of fun because it was so role play heavy. It was the most voice work I got to do all can't con because it's just not about combat. It's just about this exploration and being that character. And the characters were just so different that it just worked out. So that one was, again, it was one, oh, this is open. Let's go ahead and try it out. and I'm glad I got to do that one because it was definitely... Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I like the whole investigative angle of it. I think I would have liked it more if I'd succeeded a role here or there sometime. Yeah, probably. But, yeah, the whole being instead of the normal, I mean, like D&D, Pathfinder, this and that, where the investigation is role, okay, yeah, you figured it out, and then here's all the exposition of what you figured out, is they were actually, well, okay, you succeeded on the role here. Here's some of the stuff you, here's what you have figured out from knowing this. But that wasn't, didn't have the exact answer to whatever you were looking for. You still had to piece stuff together and try and figure out what was going on and what was the greater mystery, which we utterly failed to do. but the fact that there was no combat other than me blindly in an insane rage uh trying to protect myself by throwing gold and gems and and trowels and and anything i found at people uh there was no combat i i mean even the soldier never saw the bad guy i mean it was a we knew he was there because he was punching through a solid stone wall, but we ended it all before that actually became a problem. Other than the dynamite stick's damage, the fatal damage to Tony's character and shrapnel damage to the rest of us, the only other hit point subtraction that ever happened was Combat Brush. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun. I mean, you would think, especially with a con game, it's like, well, con games tend to be combat heavy and RPG light, but it wasn't, and it worked really well. It's a system that I don't think I'd have any problems playing again, honestly. Yeah. No, I thought it was pretty keen. And so, next day was another role-playing game. We finally got to do our D&D Dungeons & Dragons 5e edition.
    73:18
    Barely. Oh, gosh. It was... It was iffy. Yeah. I mean, they were all full. We learned during the setup for that. last year's Can't Con, they placed a lot more GMs or Game Masters in as available, so they were able to open up a lot more tables when the demand was there. So that's why it was so easy for Tony and me to get any game we wanted. That was not the case this time. It was run by a different person, and they were running a much tighter kind of ship on how many GMs they were going to use. So because of that, everything was pretty much full up so tony found a game a dnd game which was a seven player max and he was able to put us down as players seven and eight and one of the one of the other players was there but had joined a different game so we actually were able to both get in and and do that with a full team of seven so that worked out because for those of you that might not recall tony and i had characters right We were going to do a D&D game. That was the plan. I pre-made a character the week before, and Tony had his character that he's talked about extensively around last Can't Con time from the prior year. So we really wanted to run those characters, had our backstories all figured out. It was awesome. So, Tony, you want to explain a bit what this campaign was about? Because it was different than last year's. We ran a different set. I didn't like this one as much, actually. It was a little more piecemeal, but it's like a five-module thing. Right, because what we did was we did a starter because Dennis' character was level one and my character was only level two. So we did a starter adventure.
    75:12
    And what it turned into was it was actually a series of little adventures. It started out with our group was put together and hired to go find some treasures that was stuff being left over from a major event that happened in a previous Adventure League season.
    75:38
    Adventure thing. Not the one we did last year, but another one. And there were treasures left over from this cult that was destroyed. And the goal was this person that had hired us had tracked down where all these treasures were, but they needed the muscle to go in and get them. So we were meeting with them, and when we went to meet her, she was dead. Somebody had killed her and stolen her little Holy Grail diary of all the information. but luckily she had some other notes that we were able to piece together the locations of the five treasures and so what we ended up doing was jumping straight it was using those to let us do the five individual little modules of which we only got three done but to go in and check out the to try and get the treasures from before the people who killed her and made off with the notebook. Tony and I were the only ones who brought characters. Everyone else used a pre-gen, which is to be expected in those intro ones. Yep. It was good that Tony actually got in because we had essentially no tank before that. There was one guy who had... There was a monk. There was a monk, and he had pretty high armor. Yeah, he had high armor. We had no cleric. No clerics, no druids. Everyone wanted to be a ranger or a thief. And you know what? I'm sick of playing RPGs with thieves.
    77:16
    They annoy me. Yeah, they do. Depending upon how they're played, they can be annoying. This one wasn't as terrible as some I've played. But we had a monk, a rogue, a wizard, two rangers, Thuggish the Barbarian, and your warlock. Yes. So we actually had good DPS. Oh, yeah. We just didn't have meat shields other than me and the monk was able to do meat shield-y stuff because he had fairly high AC, but he had very low health. So it was like a blade of meat shield. Yeah.
    78:01
    Yeah. And I don't know. I went down twice in this campaign. And he did too. Some of the combat fights I think took longer than the GM thought they ever would.
    78:42
    I got enough to get to level two, and I'll need to allocate out and upgrade Snotwin. I didn't get to roleplay him very much because Snotwin's all geared for me to basically voice. It's an anagram of Winston from Overwatch. So I try and voice him like Winston, but the character is a half-orc, hence the stupid name.
    79:02
    He's driven by wanting to be the best warlock that he can be, but he was a hermit. So he has no street smarts. He's intelligent, but he has no wisdom. So I have this really elaborate kind of style of role play I want to do with him. But this was, as Tony noted, a very combat-oriented set of adventures that we went on. And not unusual for a con to be combat-oriented. But there was not a whole lot of role playing going on. And with seven people, it takes a long time to decide much of anything. It's like ints talking to each other. It just takes a long time. Yeah, and that's... D&D, I think the sweet spot with D&D is actually five characters, is my personal thought from everything I've played. Four or five characters is the sweet spot. Seven is as big as you can really go, and it starts getting a little slow and a little chunky.
    79:56
    But it wasn't bad. It was fun. We had some stuff. It wasn't nearly as RP-heavy as... Well, definitely call us Thulub, or as RPA heavy as the games we played of 5E last year.
    80:12
    But it wasn't bad. It was fun. I liked how the characters worked out. I'm still keeping the gosh, he's awesome. He's too much fun. I literally referred to every other person as a puppy. That's the only reference. No, I never said anybody's name. Everybody was pup because of his background. That's why you got player of the game. because you were able to work in the most roleplay elements, not to mention you also saved everyone's life pretty much. So I think those two things kind of worked in your favor. That also helped that you were all level one and I was level two. So I have literally more than twice the health of everybody because none of you guys had any health. I already had a lot of health because I was a barbarian, and I was a level ahead of you, so I had a ton of health compared to you guys. And I took a lot of damage, but I never got knocked down to the levels you guys did. Should have raged. Oh, I know. I forgot to rage so many times. Oh, it was terrible. Yeah. I forgot that when I fall to zero hit points, I actually go back to one. So I shouldn't have been down the first time I went down. But I forgot about that racial trait on my sheet. Oops. But, yeah. No, I had fun with it. Okay. Well, let's go ahead and hop to the last game we did at Can't Con, which was a card game. So we really mixed it up this time. Miniatures, two RPGs, one combat-oriented and one exploratory RPG-heavy oriented, and now a card game called Z-Gate Crashers. Which, I don't, Tony, you've played a lot of card games. Is there any other sort of card game you would maybe most compare it to that's like a big known card game?
    81:53
    No. No, I really, I really, it's got, it's got like a couple mechanics that, that are similar lightly to some other games, but nothing that is just like, oh, this is a refined version of that. Yeah, no. No, it seemed really unique to me, but I have a lot less experience, so that's why I wondered. But the premise is very straightforward.
    82:24
    You're playing, so you're around a table, and you have cards, which a variety of sort of spooks and, you know, zombies and wraiths and all that get drawn up and are coming out of emergence holes. Think Gears of War style. And you're, in a way, doing a tower defense where you have a gate, and you're trying to protect that gate. And you get a variety of weapon cards and bonus cards to start with, and as turns progress, you may acquire more, either through purchase or just certain amounts are doled out in terms of weapons as rounds progress. you have a certain amount of life which kind of represented and i believe they call them soul bits yeah you earn more as you damage and defeat enemies you have less when they serve as hit points so as your gate takes damage you have to give those up you also use them as your currency to make purchases um and you have a certain number of zombies in front of every person's gates uh so you have your own sort of i shouldn't say zombies just say monsters and yet but you can also attack the monsters around the other people they're all you're trying to guard all the gates so it was a really interesting idea the weapons had this chaining property so you'd have certain weapons that you'd need that could only start a chain and certain weapons that could be in the middle of a chain and continue the chain and then there were closing chains and the bonuses worked the same way so you'd have to try and figure out how you'd want to build out these sort of elaborate attacks and what those could reach in terms of damage varied uh there was a lot of complexity to it i was afraid i was going to go through the whole game and not understand what i was doing but the gm did a really good job explaining it so anytime i had a question i just asked and he'd summarize it because i needed a few things repeated to me so that i could once i was actually was playing it i could see it in action so that i could remember it better because it sticks with me better visually uh and it was brutal i don't know the game is always this brutal it's not like pandemic you have no chance of winning so he said he even said it was the most brutal, worst card draws he'd ever seen, and he's the guy who made the game.
    84:29
    It was a challenge, I'll say that. Because when they put together, based upon the number of players, they put together stacks of the monster cards that each card brings out so many random monsters.
    84:43
    And they have green, yellow, and orange as you start. The first couple are greens, or the first rounds are greens, then yellows, and then oranges. Well, apparently our greens were normal, and our yellows were nothing but the hardest yellows, and the oranges were nothing but the hardest oranges. So we literally just got smashed with all of the hardest cards. So by the time the oranges were out and dropping huge numbers of the most powerful monsters on us, we were still trying to work our way through the yellows, because there were so many and they were so strong. And it's a game where, with the right card, you can help each other out and you can trade and you can use your abilities to hurt monsters on the other guys we had no chance because we were all so overwhelmed because we had such terrible draws that we were just completely overwhelmed trying to keep ourselves alive I mean I had this one run where I chained together all but one card in my hand and I'd spent almost all of my health buying extra cards and it was about the only thing and I had several cards that had been saved from the previous round because they could be used twice if I spent some money on them so I had this enormous chain of cards and that pretty much kept me alive through the second round when I should have taken a ton of damage it mitigated a lot and killed a lot of stuff and then the next round dropped and there was even more larger heavier worse things it was oh it was bad I mean not bad like we didn't I didn't I enjoyed the game. I thought the game was kind of fun, and I wouldn't have an issue playing the game again, especially once I get a better chance to know it.
    86:28
    And I know it's still in like a playtesting phase, but it was bad as in we were getting smashed. Yeah. Tony was in the best position when the game was wrapping up. And one of the mechanics is when the monsters defeat someone, they all shift over to one I mean it is a rotation style so you knew if I died I knew who would get the next they get them all they get all my monsters and when that person dies it then falls towards this next it's like the opposite rotation of the turns so it's like we were going around the table clockwise so that means the monsters if they win move counterclockwise to the nearest person so it just became this cascading mess so we lost a person and so his characters shifted over and then that person that they shifted to survived but then I died so he then got my stuff after the next round which I chained everything I had together and it just barely made a dent in anything. You had so many of the largest, meanest monsters. Yeah. I barely could hurt them because I was dying to the little stuff that was good but I had to start focusing on the little stuff because like the little zombie cards, they don't even roll they're guaranteed to hurt your gate so i had like 10 of them i had to fight them but meanwhile these things that get to have a chance to do 10 of your health damage every time they move even before they're at the gate are getting to march with impunity and every single one is a chance so every single one is a roll to see if it can do it it was yeah it was brutal uh i yeah i like the idea that i actually uh think that i'd probably enjoy you know i make fun of pandemic a I think I'd actually enjoy it in that vein more than I do Pandemic, just because I think it paces better in a way. In some ways, it makes more sense to me. I like the idea of the combat and the trading and stuff. It's not all about just trying to navigate a map and stuff. The hardest part for me was keeping track of, like, all right, these weapons can't be used at the gate, and these weapons only reach this far, and where is everything currently? and it is fairly challenging if you want to help others to really be aware of where everything it takes some time to actually be able to look at all the monsters and be like how much health does this all still have and uh the monster types are pretty unified so you have these cards and you can kind of look at your own to know what they all do they've simplified it where they can so but uh it was enjoyable even though i was the second one to die tony got player of the game on that as well because he lasted the longest and that was just because i was the last one in line as they marched as the monsters were marched back around us to i died i would have died too but it was just like okay well the game time's over and yeah we're all we're we've all lost the gm acknowledged i mean uh tony and the gm were in pretty good shape i think you know they could have probably lasted more rounds if they weren't about to get the other three of our character cards dumped on them but the the volume was such uh that tony had defensive cards early on that let him have this quite significant health build up. The GM knew the game the best because I guess he created the game. He knew how to do the card combos and I traded a weapon over to him which he made a really effective use of and he had done a lot of damage to his stuff but he was going to get my remaining monsters, the first guy who went out's remaining monsters, and the guy who had just then gone out's remaining monsters. There was just no way he could do enough damage. He was taking so much already because he didn't have really any defenses that even though he'd start the monster turn with like close to 40 health he lost over half of it just to his own stuff so yeah it was rough it was real rough but yeah i could have been yeah i could have seen it being pretty awesome uh maybe with a few minor tweaks maybe uh part of that might have been helped with we'd been on a table that wasn't quite so large because that table was way bigger than we needed. And that's probably where a lot of the side issues, in terms especially knowing how I could help other people, which other than trades, I never attacked anyone else's monsters. I didn't either, but I mean, I always had such a huge pile of monsters in front of me. At no point could I go, well, I've got enough spare damage here. I can help somebody out over there because it was taking everything I had to not get smashed in the first couple rounds. Yeah, yeah. I always had plenty of stuff to deal with and fail at dealing with. But that was our CanCon experience. It was fun. It was. I enjoyed it quite a lot. When I started seeing how full things were, I was really afraid we weren't going to get a chance to play anything good. We will sign up online next year. Yeah, next year we're definitely going to have to be smart about it.
    91:29
    Well, I think we made it to the end of the podcast Tony. I think so A reminder to the listeners if you want to reach out and ask us questions you can email us eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com We're also on a variety of social media I'd say most active on Facebook which would be facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast We're also on Twitter and Instagram both places where eclectic underscore gamers Until two weeks from now I'll say goodbye everyone Take it easy and have fun