The 2025 Main Story Awards 01: The Clockwork World Award Transcriber: Brigid (brighty2727) Introduction 1 Earthborne Rangers 2 Timestamp 10:39 6 Timestamp 20:35 10 [“Side Story” by Jack de Quidt begins playing] Introduction Austin: What’s good, internet? It is December 29th, 2025 and this is not a round table debate Game of the Year holiday special, although one day I would love to do one of those again, because actually they’re really fun, even though they can get heated sometimes and I understand that that can be a little off-putting, especially when people start digging in their heels, but I just love hearing people passionately exploring the hows and the whys of the games they love and sometimes debate can bring that out. Anyway, it’s not that, it’s the first annual Side Story Main Story of the Year Awards, a week of short episodes where we make up awards to give to the games and topics that really took centerstage for us this year and which we felt deserve a little more attention than they already got on the show so far this year. It is not a traditional Game of the Year award, but we did try to restrain ourselves to a single game or topic each, which means that there are definitely some things that are big for us that didn’t get included. Shoutouts to those things, we’ve generally already talked about them, so you’ve already heard us talk about them. We will have a short episode every day this week, and normally those will cover one topic or game suggested by a member of the cast, but a couple of days I think have a couple of topics in the same episode, and then not everyone either had a topic to suggest or were able to record in the leadup, or we’re waiting for other people to finish a game so we can talk about them later. So, you know, I think Ali has been really pushing for a Silent Hill F spoilercast, and so in a way that will be her topic, but that will be next year, that will be in January probably, once folks are able to record it. So unfortunately no Ali during these episodes, but everybody else is able to join us. And we’ll get that Ali Silent Hill cast sometime in the new year. For now, for today we are kicking off with a short episode featuring me and Jack talking about one of the first games that the two of us played this year and one that has not left my mind since then and which I am desperate to get back to. And for its unique attributes, which you’ll hear me talk about, I am giving it the Clockwork World Award of the year. All right. Enjoy. [Three notes of “Side Story” by Jack de Quidt play] Earthborne Rangers Jack: Okay Austin, what game would you like to talk about here at the end of 2025? Austin: I would like to talk about the first game I think I played this year and the one that has lived rent free in my mind ever since and which I have not gotten the opportunity to play again since then, despite it taking up a full - I’m turning - a full… Well, maybe not a full, but a big chunk of my board gaming - A whole shelf of my board gaming shelf. [Jack chuckles] Earthborne Rangers. Jack: Yeah! We’re talking about a board game. Austin: We are talking about a board game. We’re allowed. You know, one year I gave The Sprawl my Game of the Year at Giant Bomb or Waypoint. That must have been Waypoint, because we finished Counter/Weight the year I left Giant Bomb to go to Waypoint. Jack: Oh sure. Austin: And so I gave the Sprawl my Game of the Year that year which, you know, I’m allowed. It was my website, fuck it, you know? We’re allowed to give non -- Jack: Oh yeah. Austin: And this is our podcast, so we don’t need to give only video games, game awards. Jack: (cross) Don’t ever let them tell you what a game has to be. Austin: Fuckin’ A. Go listen to us talk about Blippo+ a few weeks ago. So yeah, Earthborne Rangers, a game by Earthborne Games. (spelling) E-A-R-T-H-B-O-R-N-E. There’s an E at the end of Borne, Earthborne, one word, space, Rangers. Which is a board game, a kind of cooperative exploration and adventure driven board game, that is driven by a bunch of really interesting little decks of cards. You play as a Ranger. Your Ranger has special abilities like helping to talk to creatures or use pieces of deep post-apocalyptic - Or it’s not even post-apocalyptic, right? What would you call this? Cause it’s like post-post-apocalyptic, a word we said way before any prestige-ass Sony game did. We didn’t invent that phrase either, but… Jack: It’s like an ecological… Austin: Yeah. Jack: It’s like an eco adventure, right? People bandy around the words solarpunk a lot, often kind of fairly indistinctly. Austin: Yeah. Jack: This is a world where an ecological disaster has happened a long, long time ago. The word is now like, green and verdant, and humans exist in this changed world, sort of in the overgrown ruins of what came before. But whereas, it’s not really like the Last of Us, it’s not even really like Horizon Zero Dawn, in the sense that there are like, the thing that caused the apocalypse still stalking the planet everywhere you go. It’s much more like something like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, in that like, that is about the sort of, quote-unquote “Return to nature following a pandemic.” But here it is with a sort of sci-fi/fantasy twist on top of it. Austin: Yeah, and you know, it is fundamentally an RPG in the sense that you have a character and your character is going out into the world. You are picking up quests and little mini-missions, and you’re doing them through the expenditure of tokens, which represent your capacities, your energy per turn, et cetera, and cards, which are a range of things like skills. You know, you might be able to -- A very, very simple one: move a creature from one part of the map to the next part of the map, you know? Or like from the top of the deck, or like from being out in the, sort of in the world, back into the deck, so that it won’t bother you anymore. Or you might be able to use a piece of technology to, you know, get an extra card in your hand, or to give someone else a token back, et cetera. And it all plays out on this really interesting, really big map that is -- I mean, I’ll say it this way, it’s one of the first times I’ve felt like I was playing an open world game in a board game. Jack: Yeah. Austin: And I mean that in the best possible sense, and not the worst possible sense. There’s a real sense of that feeling you get in an RPG -- in fact, I should say real quick, I think the thing I wrote down in our little document about our end of year podcast, the superlative, the award I’m giving this is like, The Clockwork World Award, you know? “They’ve made me a clockwork world out of cardboard” is what I’ve written down. Because there is a real sense of the thing in a video game RPG where you come to a new place, you come to learn its rhythms, and the people and creatures of the places there and how they intersect and interlock. And in some ways, I find it’s like an even more mature, or a more -- It’s able to be more macro than many open world video games are or are interested in being. The thing it makes me think of the most is Guild Wars 2. Jack: Oh, interesting. Austin: And some of the open world events that are in Guild Wars 2. Jack: Oh, okay. Austin: And this sort of thing has now moved into like, I think Destiny 2 has things like this, I think The Old Republic might even have this type of interlinked quest chain now, but in Guild Wars 2, there were these sort of quests that you could do where it’s like “Oh, I have --” You know, the farm has come under attack from the centaurs and you beat the centaurs at the farm. Or you fail, and so you lose to the centaurs at the farm, and then they like push closer to the city, and then they’re like, “Oh there’s a fire in the fields, because the centaurs came through and set the fields on fire. Go try to put out the fire in the fields.” And that sort of like, move -- Like, a single quest chain can move you across the map in this way that feels like it’s responding to player success or failure, except in Earthborne Rangers, that’s happening in these other ways that are even more uh… It’s not “I won a quest, so X happens.” It feels a lot like “Oh we over-hunted the deer here, and so now the lion is gonna fucking eat us, ” you know? Or it might move from here to a different place. You know, “Move the lion into -- from this mountain region into the nearest forest deck,” or whatever. And that stuff is really fascinating and hits a sort of ecological cycle thing that I have not really seen elsewhere, you know? Jack: Yeah, it’s fascinating that um… There are a few games that have been sort of playing in like, this large scale open world adventure. Open world sort of in the model of like, Breath of the Wild, [Austin: Right.] where in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and also the sort of Bethesda model of an open world game, you just sort of go bopping off in a direction and stumble into something. As opposed to the open world of something like Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which is still an open world populated with all sorts of stuff to do, but those aren’t really games that begin by saying “Kill Calamity Ganon” and then just sending you out like a little clockwork toy. Austin: (cross) Right, right. And you know -- Jack: And you know they say, you know, “Go kill the evil fella.” But I think that when you play an open world game, if you’ve played an open world video game, the idea of it as an open world is sort of very easy to grok, in the sense that you have like, you’ve been moving around a character inside a game for so long that the idea that like, it is a large 2 or 3D open space that you are moving through these different kind of levels within. There isn’t necessarily a hard separation from level to level. You can point at the mountain and go there or whatever. This is very straightforward. You know, even as simple as something like, you just put down a terrain in Unity and you drop a character controller into it. That feels very intuitive. But I think the idea of an open world board game is sort of a slippery idea. You know, how do you make something like this feel like a big open world? [TIMESTAMP 10:39] Austin: Totally. And I think part of that is the sort of mechanism of how stories and stuff go. You know, there’s a big campaign guide in the same way that something like, you know, two years ago or three years ago maybe, we played through all of Betrayal Legacy, which is fantastic, I love that game. You’re going from kind of haunt to haunt in this house, through time. Jack: Oh, through time, chronologically, yeah. Austin: Yeah, which is really fun, I really loved it. And so there’s something like that here, right? I think Arkham Horror also has a similar sort of -- Legacy, the Legacy version of that. Or maybe it is just the card game, I’m actually not sure. But one of them has that sort of similar format, of like, oh, I’m working through the -- You know, a series of stories. And this has that and the way that that works is really interesting, cause it’s like, you’re gonna go -- You’re becoming a ranger. Here’s like, your introduction. Go from point A to point B here. Try to make it from this city to that city or from this part of the world to this part of the world. But then sometimes you get things that are… Or you’ll get an objective, like the first real quest is about hunting down this mountain lynx that is like -- Or it’s not even a lynx, it’s like a future cat. Hunting down the future cat and dealing with it because it has been… It has been doing stuff it shouldn’t be doing, right? It has moved into places it isn’t supposed to be in, it’s hurting people, it’s harming the local ecology, something has gone wrong here. But along the way you might, for instance, pick up an annoying little child who starts asking you questions and draining your resources. And so you will then elect this round, I, of our four players, am going to try to deal with this little girl who has an endless amount of questions. Or you might draw a card that suggests that you could just give up on the current task all together and go to the mountain nearby where, you know, you can hunt down some sort of artifact tied to what came before, or a strange, you know, bio-mechanical, you know, cloud of insects or a plague or something, right? And you’re like, ooh, that sounds interesting. Let’s go nose around and see what we find there. And in fact, I think that’s part of the thing that ended up being really fun was the sort of divide. You know, it was four of us playing and it was a real like, oh we -- How often do we use our capacities on the main thing versus I think the three of you have this this round. Let me go sneak around over here, which is a really fun experience. And the way that all that works is like, every zone, every type of zone has a deck of cards that has creatures and events and locations in it. So like, the Riverlands or whatever is a particular type of deck. A mountain -- A certain type of mountain is -- Mountains, you know, The Mountainous Regions are a certain type of deck. Forests are a certain type of deck. And then there are kind of like major locations that can also add to those decks. So it’s like, if you’re going from the home base to The Grove, The Grove might add certain cards into your Forests deck, allowing you to hit those story beats also. And it’s -- The game that it ends up feeling to me like is like, a little bit like Caves of Qud in that it blends a sort of -- stuff that feels procedural and -- I mean, it’s all procedural, because that’s what procedures are, but something that feels scripted, with stuff that feels like it’s tied to some sort of procedural or random generation. In this case, it’s about cards being dealt, cause there are definitely times that we did not hit story beats that we could have hit, or story things opening -- or the opposite. We hit a certain sort of character that was completely lucky. I think at one point we ran into someone who could give us, like a quick, like a quick travel option to like, the other side of the lake. I think actually, maybe via a flyer, not via a -- Like some sort of, you know, a dragonfly helicopter in my mind, and not just be a boat, but maybe it was a boat. Jack: It was a dragonfly helicopter, no. Austin: I thought so. Jack: It was -- yes. So, you know, Austin’s saying that there are like, Path decks and Mountain decks, but there are also decks that you build for like, the town. Austin: Right, exactly. Yes. Jack: And those decks have like, the baker in, and the tower where they launch the little flyers from. And it’s such an amazing feeling to walk into a town and you know, you’ve assembled these -- The mechanisms for assembling the decks are like, on the one hand a little fiddly, cause you’re dealing with hundreds of cards, but also like, really cogent of the fact that you don’t want to be looking too closely at the cards, so they are laid out in such a way that you can very quickly and easily sort of sort them without necessarily spoiling yourself on what they are. But when you arrive in a town and you begin the same process of exploration that you do out on the path, out in the wild and you’re meeting like, the strange religious -- local religious leader, or you’re meeting the friends of the annoying child who you met on the path. That stuff feels really good. And so for example, when we found this flyer, I think he gave us like, a little mini quest that we were able to complete and he was like, all right, now you’ve got access to the flyer that takes you across the lake. Austin: Yeah, I can’t quite remember what it is we needed to do for them so that they would give us access to the flyer, but I was really happy about it and like, we very specifically put aside some of our time in order to like, make that happen, basically. And that, again, felt incredible and it felt like completing -- I mean, this is the other way that it feels like a video game RPG, is like, we came to town, we walked around town. And what that was, was like drawing cards and seeing who we bumped into, and then like, found an objective that we decided, oh I want this to go. And the thing that to me is like this is a clockwork world, is the stuff where it’s like, that then ticks off a certain sort of chain because now that we’ve met that person, not only can we get to another place, but like, they are now flying from point A to point B, you know? And that opens up the possibility that new cards will hook into that core… You know, now that that capacity means that that character could also show up in the other place, that maybe that wasn’t gonna happen because their flyer was broken. And I’m making this part up, this specific example up, but that’s the sort of thing that was happening in every one of our sessions that made us go like, oh they’re cooking. Jack: And the other way it feels like a clockwork world, and this is really what made the game start to sing for me, is that the ecology of the place is constantly responding to itself. Like for example, Austin said, you know, by picking up this quest, certain things get slotted into other decks, so you know, the quest kind of follows itself forward. But for example, you weren’t talking metaphorically earlier when you said like, we over-hunted that area. Austin: That is correct, yes. Jack: ‘Cause for example, the Sitka deer are the prey of a certain kind of wolf. Austin: (cross) Yep, the deer, yeah. Jack: And if a wolf and the deer are drawn kind of at the same time, the wolf is going to start targeting the deer instead of you. And the weather changes. There’s constantly a weather card in play, for example there’s like, a Perfect Day card and every turn you add a cloud token to it, and when there are enough clouds in the sky, you flip the card over and now it becomes a cloudy day. And that’s all very well, that’s you know, fun, interesting flavor, but then you find that certain plants only blossom under certain weather conditions, or certain animals go in shelter. Austin: Right. Jack: People - Animals come and drink at the river. And all of this starts ping-ponging together where, when you hear about the dangerous - the future cat that’s causing real trouble, the real trouble that the future cat is causing is meaningful to you, rather than just being like, well I don’t want these people here to be eaten by a cat, cause that sounds bad. You’re like, oh my god, this has completely screwed up the sort of like, patterns of wildlife in this area, it’s gonna make it really hard for us to move around. Austin: (cross) Uh-huh! Yeah. Jack: And a less interesting game would say “it’s going to make it really hard for you to move around because you might get jumped by the future cat.” Austin: Right. Jack: And that happens here too, but I feel like Earthborne Rangers is constantly going that one step further saying, okay, you might get jumped by the future cat, but also, predators might be - Sorry, you know, less dangerous predators might be fleeing the future cat and flee into your path, and now the path is, you know, all fucked up by the weird wolves, and the weird wolves are eating the weird deer that you shouldn’t’ve killed so many of, so now the weird wolves are attacking you. Austin: Yeah, and then you get the other half of it, which is like, it’s also a deck builder. You are a character -- You have your deck of cards that is your character, and you are getting new abilities and new equipment, and thinking about how they interact with the world in ways that are increasingly narrativized and narrativ-izable, which of course you may know is like, the secret to making my brain get scratched is like, oh wow there’s like -- I remember, I wanna say we were playing with KB, and KB had a card that was like, a falcon that could fly ahead and like, give everybody information, but it was also that could interact in such a way that like -- I’m trying to remember the exact interaction, but it effectively could like, scare things away or to you in a really unique way, that was not how it was written. It was -- Like, it was, it came alive in the interaction, in a way that was not just, oh, I got an extra card, but suddenly it made us realize like, there’s a story we could tell about this, you know? [TIMESTAMP 20:35] And that’s the other thing about this game, right? Is that every game I’ve played this year, part of me is going I wish I had spent this time playing Earthborne Rangers more, but it’s a board game and our -- You know, I have not come to hang out with you in a year, and so it’s like, do I start a new one? Like, I have my copy here. It’s hard to like -- Jack: We gotta -- We gotta fire it up in an online thing. Austin: We gotta fire it up. We simply have to fire it up again. There’s other stuff that I liked this year, you know, I don’t want to say that there was nothing. You know, I kind of spent, I spent all of yesterday being like, oh wait, did I like a game this year enough to want to talk about it more or again? I -- Obviously we talked a lot about Fantasy Life. There are games that came out this year that I really like, like Blue Prince and Despelote, but I played those last year for IGF, right? And so that was kind of like, oh I don’t really want to do that. I can’t -- If I have to talk another minute about KOTOR 2 into a microphone I think people might kill me. And there’s other stuff that I really liked and we didn’t get a chance to talk about this year. I really liked, uhh… Many -- Is it Many Nights a Whisper? Many Nights a Whisper, did you play this? Jack: The Deconstructeam game? Austin: The Deconstructeam game with… Jack: I haven’t played it. Austin: It’s really fantastic. My partner and I played it over the summer, it’s fantastic. It’s a game about ritual. and time, and shooting an arrow across -- Shooting, not an arrow, shooting a flame, a magical flame into the great distance with all the hopes of the world on that flame. It’s really fantastic, we should have a longer conversation about it at some point. And that hit, but it wasn’t the game I was thinking about all the time and that I was like, hoping something else would scratch that itch for me. That was Earthborne Rangers. And so I wanted to use this opportunity here to, you know, give that to myself because we didn’t talk about -- It was one of the games that we were playing while saying “We should be doing a games podcast.” Jack: Oh yeah. While trying to name Side Story. Austin: Literally. Yeah. A hundred percent. And so. Earthborne Rangers. Jack: Yeah, I think, two little things about Earthborne Rangers that I want to hit before we go. Austin: Yes. Jack: The scope of design on display in this game is breathtaking. There is, I think, a danger in saying “I’m going to make my board game as big as possible.” Austin: Sure. Yes. Jack: Very often scale and aspirations of scale can eclipse any other kind of sensation that you might have. Austin: Mm-hm. Jack: But, you know, we have essentially walked around in the Great Plateau of this game. Austin: That’s right. Yeah. Jack: And it took us like fifteen hours. (laughs) Austin: Yeah. Yeah. Jack: And you look at the map and you get a sense of the variety and breadth, and then you sort of telescope back into the way that all the little wheels of this game are spinning against each other and you are looking at something that is, you know, sort of like, glacial. It’s gigantic and fascinating. The other thing is it looks tremendous. You wanna talk a bit about what this game looks like before we go? Austin: I do, but first I want -- I found the interaction that I was thinking about. Jack: (cross) Oh yeah. Austin: Lemme actually read what the cards do, and then I will be able to explain it. Here we go. Okay, so there is a being, there is a companion that one character gets called Riri the Sparrow Hawk. It’s friendly, it’s persistent, and it’s unique. These are all keywords, if you’ve played any other type of card game, you might understand that a keyword is a thing that can be called on, like friendly, okay I have a card that says I can restore all friendly cards to max health or something, right? The thing that it does is, you can tap it, you can exhaust it to add a damage to a being in the same area as that companion. So you can be like, oh go attack that, you know, future cat for me. Then there’s another card called Healing Touch. Healing Touch says discard one damage from a being and then add three progress to it. And you can heal an injury from a ranger. And now I’ll just read you this post. (reading) “Riri and Healing Touch interaction never fails to make me chuckle. Whilst friendly cards can’t be affected by the weapon trait, Riri doesn’t have this trait. She’s a companion, right? A friendly wanderer is minding their own business, trekking through the valley. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, they are viciously attacked by a crazed sparrowhawk. The attack subsides, the sparrowhawk flies off to the underbrush, and they’re left tending to their minor injuries. Moments later, a ranger appears from the very same underbrush, brandishing a smile that would put a used stilt-horse salesman to shame. ‘Oh no, whatever happened? Let me help you, friend! I shall soothe you, calm you. Have some myrrh for your hot forehead. Find a perfect fishing spot you say? Why yes, I will happily help you. Do follow me. Is that bird following us? What bird? No, don’t be silly, now where is that lake guide?’” You can use the bird to hurt someone, because -- even someone friendly because of the way the bird is written, and then follow up to heal that person and -- Like, that is not an interaction -- That’s an interaction that emerges from the gameplay. The card, Riri the falcon does not have something written on it that says, I dunno, you can use this to scam someone into liking you. But because you could hurt them and then use Healing Touch to heal them and get progress with them; you know, progress is like filling up a clock in a tabletop game, right? And then if you get enough progress, they will lead you to a good fishing spot or trade with you or teach you something. That interaction is extremely funny and emerges from play and not just from… You know, it doesn’t cut to a cutscene in which this happens. A player figured this out and gamed it that way, and it’s really funny, you know? Jack: Yeah. It’s great. Austin: Anyway, how this game looks, you were saying… I mean, I just talked for a bunch, so do you wanna talk about how this game looks? Jack: The… This game is like green and jewel-toned and exceptionally detailed. The amount of unique art all over this game, kind of like, consistently blows me away. Austin: Yeah. Jack: There are beautiful landscapes, there are sort of iconographic, sort of like woodcut drawings of things like the weather cards or the mission cards. All of the equipment is, you know, if you have ever been the sort of person who likes playing an rpg and going into your inventory and finding that each item in your inventory has been lovingly illustrated, this is the perfect game for you. Austin: (cross) (laughs) That’s right. Jack: And I feel like they are constantly dodging the most obvious visual interpretation of a thing. The houses do not look like traditional fantasy houses. I’m just flipping through the rulebook here. I’m just gonna put this in our chat, Austin, so you can see what I’m talking about. Austin: Oh, I have it open, I had it already. Jack: This is a, it looks like an inn or something, but it is sort of a pyramid, it has these big, weird, triangular windows jutting out of it, and greenery growing on top of the windows. Austin: Yeah. Jack: It has strange wind turbines spinning. The sort of blending of science and fantasy and sometimes like a western is really striking, and so much care has gone into just every detail in here. Austin: It is… There is an angle here too that I -- It’s hard for me to talk about both emotionally and also legally, but I will say that when I was working at Possibility Space, we were working on a game that eventually, not always, but eventually had a setting that was not altogether too different from this game. And was very interested in some of the similar things here around what’s it mean to tell stories that - where the mechanical interactions help produce really interesting and fun outcomes, more than just, I have written a script, you know? And really truly, the near, not near-future, but post-apocalyptic science fantasy, the world has started to put itself together, the you know, not solarpunk, but this thing that is interested in community and interested in presence with nature that is not reduced down to a sort of, you know, ahistorical -- Jack: Transactional. Austin: Yeah, but also not this sort of like “Well nature is our friend,” you know. Jack: Oh sure. Austin: But like, nature is its own thing. The world - The environment - The world around you is moving and thinking and doing things. Not thinking, but is moving and doing things, and the things in it have preferences and desires and are working toward their own ends, you know, how do you move through that? All of that stuff. And even like the higher level genre stuff, there’s a ton of overlap to what I was working on and so there was a real… You know, it had been eight months since I’d gotten laid off when we started playing this, and it was like a real getting to see someone pick up the banner and run with it. You know, who knows if the game we were making would have been successful, but it was a real like… I dunno, it felt like I had part of a melody in my head and then I had to put that song away and I wasn’t allowed to play it anymore, and then I got to like, see someone else play a version of that melody to completion and it felt really great to hear the song, you know? And so it was such a rewarding thing to play, I’m really excited to play more of it. I have, you know, expansions are coming out now, I’m buying the expansions, I’m… Jack: I know. I know. Austin: I need to like, figure out a way to make this part of my life in a way that is… where it fits in, in that way. Jack: (cross) Yeah. Austin: And so hopefully I’ll be able to do that next year. Jack: The first expansion is what you should always be thinking about when you’re in a big weird open world, and it’s what Tears of the Kingdom really nailed by asking, which is: “What’s going on in the weird caves underneath?” Austin: What’s going on in the weird caves? What’s going on down there? You know? Jack: I genuinely don’t know. Austin: God, when we, yeah, we -- One of the last things we did when we were playing was like, stumble onto -- In fact, that was part of the thing that we did, right? Remember, one of our last things was like, we found a bunker from the before times. And we were like, I guess we have to get into this bunker. We have to figure out how to get underground into this thing. And it teased us a future thing. You know, I think we ended up putting some stuff into our deck that was like, had language on it that was like, unlike anything we had hit so far. It was another one of those moments where, Jack, there’s a game that you and I are both desperate to talk about that we cannot talk about. (Jack laughs) ‘Cause it’s unannounced, it’s in the IGF. Jack: It’s secret. Austin: It’s secret. But you asked me how it was going the other day and I said that another person who’s been playing it, my partner who’s been playing it for IGF was like telling me stuff that was like, outrageous. And what I think I ended up telling you was like, Jack, it’s a little bit like if you had asked me how are things were going in New York, and what I said was “Yeah, everything’s pretty good, the wildebeest river is overflowing right now, but other than that, it’s normal. (Jack laughs) And like that’s the -- And that was kind of like what finding these cards about deep underground in Earthborne Rangers felt like. So yeah, I really wanna get back to it a lot, it’s the game I’ve been thinking about all year. [Side Story by Jack de Quidt plays] [END OF TRANSCRIPT]