JP: 0:30

Welcome to Whose turn is it anyway, your board game and tabletop podcast where we put you in the heart of our gaming group. In this special expansion pack episode, we catch up with Oliver Kiley, the designer of the upcoming new packs, game Pax Illuminatem from Ion Game design. So let's waste no time and jump into the show and meet Oliver.

Davey: 1:00

We're here with Oliver Kiley designer of Pax. Thank you for joining us, Oliver. JP is also with me. If you'd like to just tell us a little bit about yourself, Oliver. Couple of things that we like to get out of our guests early on is kind of what their favourite game is outside of the one they've developed. And also kind of how do you get into boardgaming?

Oliver Kiley: 1:22

Sure. Thank you very much for having me here. It's awesome to be on the show. So appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about Pax Illuminatem, and everything else design related kind of leading up to this for me, so I guess one thing to mention, you know, I'm a landscape architect and urban designer, and manage a lot of kind of exciting projects in the mobility space. That's kind of my day job and then spent, you know, a lot of time over the past many years kind of practising game design as a hobby. But I guess before we get too much into that you asked maybe about a favourite game or two, I could rattle off a couple of those. Yeah, I think one that was a big sort of watershed moment for me that's really actually inspired a lot of my different games that I've designed over the years and maybe we'll get into this a little bit later. But Reiner Knizia's Tigris and Euphrates, just like a major one was like, oh my god, this is amazing. Look at what you know, this game can do. And happy to dive into that more. So I think you know, that's that's one game that stands out. Another one that's a little bit more of an off the beaten path game too is A Study in Emerald, which I don't know if you all have heard of it or played it?

Davey: 2:45

I've never heard of it.

Oliver Kiley: 2:48

Okay, well, so the very short pitch for that game is and you gotta get the first edition specifically. Supposedly, there's another revised edition coming out. But this was a Martin Wallace game. And it was based on a Neil Gaiman short story of the same name, which was okay. Yeah, in turn based on a Sherlock Holmes story, which was, I think, A Study in Pink, right. Except it was crossed with a Cthulhu Mythos thing, as Neil Gaiman wrote. So anyway, it's wild and weird board game

Davey: 3:22

As he likes to do, but I do love Neil Gaiman as well. So I'm gonna check that out.

Oliver Kiley: 3:27

Yeah, it's, it's an interesting one. So, you know, I think some of my design sensibilities and the kinds of games I like are ones that create, you know, a lot of interaction between players and that really brings players together into kind of a shared space where they're interacting in a shared board environment, you know, that has a lot of spatial elements to it oftentimes. And that sort of thing.

JP: 3:54

You mentioned the Tigris and Euphrates. That's one Yeah, we love a bit of a Reiner Knizia don't we Davey? we played Babylonia, which is a game that we need to play again, like, I don't know, three years ago, when we played like five games back to back in an evening, and I love this.

Davey: 4:12

It's just It's so crunchy for very simple, easy to pick up game. It's got a very nice, like, puzzle, Mystic nature, which he's really good at. And obviously, when we were when I was playing Pax, I could obviously see some influence of that, like kind of slight puzzle, you have to kind of work out and interconnect. Nice. So you were about to say, kind of what got you into the industry as well, for sure steps to change from obviously, landscape design to to doing some, you know, board games on the side.

Oliver Kiley: 4:45

Sure thing, and, you know, it's I guess the question, how far back Are we going? It's funny. You mentioned, you know, growing up in the 80s, same situation, you mentioned HeroQuest earlier, same situation, I still have it down on the shelf, you know, not the reprint, but the original one from the 80s that I managed to hold on to and subjected my kids to various years of that, you know, me taking on the role of Zargon or whoever he was right.

JP: 5:16

But yeah, listen Uh

Oliver Kiley: 5:18

Yeah, so I, you know, I grew up, I think, you know, playing a lot of games like that, you know, mainstream stuff too. But it's sort of stumbled into games like HeroQuest dabbled a little bit with some role playing games back in the day, I think both of those things lend themselves to some creativity, you know, like, you know, I'm a kid in the 80s. And like, oh, like, we got, we went through all the missions in the HeroQuest, like, I can design my own missions and like, so there was that sort of creative energy happening pretty early on all the way back then. That was also that game was a little bit of a gateway into Games Workshop, because that was actually there was a collaborative aspect between HeroQuest and Games Workshop related products back then. So ended up you know, actually playing, you know, what a lot of middle school and high school was playing Warhammer 40k. And things like that. played a lot of Eldar, and a lot of space wolves was, you know, everybody had their, their marine army and then they're not a hermit yet. In the day, it's actually during the pandemic, a friend of mine, and I got back into the game playing it over Tabletop Simulator, but we haven't played any of it or kept up with it, and 15 or 20 years, so it was like, let's just, we're just pick up where we left off. Third and fourth edition, we didn't bother getting anything new. But we had a great time with it. So. So I think there was a you know, those kinds of games always lend themselves to be dabbling in sort of creative side of it, and tinkering with rules and tweaking things to kind of make it your own way. And then, you know, later on, I guess, when I was in college, undergraduate, met my now wife, her family played a lot of games, as well kind of growing up. And that sort of like rekindled an interest and like, oh, yeah, board games, like we used to play a lot more of these so I started buying a few games, you know, back then. So this is probably 2002 ish. 2003 Something like that. Somewhere in there played Catan for the first time, you know, started to get hooked into that one that was maybe a bit preceding what was to come with Pax Illuminaten, is that I bought Steve Jackson's Illuminati Deluxe game, which I don't know if you ever if either of you have ever played that. It's it's it's it's an interesting one. But very much on the like, conspiracy theory side of it, like, you know, it was set in modern times, and it's about the

Davey: 7:57

one that's got quite cartoony. Yeah, yeah, I've seen it. I've never played it.

Oliver Kiley: 8:04

Yeah, he made I think Steve Jackson Games I think they made like a collectible card game Illuminati game at one point, I think that was New World Order. But this was just like a standalone box game. Anyway, it was a very, very interesting game really heavy on kind of negotiation, but it was also had this kind of number crunchy aspect to it to it that was very much like a product of the 80s. And like, even like role playing games, that era, you know, the back of the rulebook was like a tables table with like, 20 different modifiers plus this and minus that. And

Davey: 8:37

a lot of spreadsheets to the side just to document everything as well. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Oliver Kiley: 8:43

But it was a fun, it was a fun game, and still one I think back on very fondly. And despite the game not being the most modern thing, by today's standards,

Davey: 8:55

some some of them still hold up. Even if it's partly nostalgia is like revisiting games we know are just absolutely busted. And we'll still go play them anyway. Game of Thrones as an example for us. But yeah, so yeah, I understand that.

JP: 9:11

You know, it's old. We don't care. We know it's janky it's fine. It's fun. Yeah,

Davey: 9:14

Exactly. We all get annoyed at it at one point during the game, but that's part of the fun of it.

JP: 9:19

That's part of Thrones.

Davey: 9:21

So Pax Illuminaten not is not your first game, though? No, no.

Oliver Kiley: 9:26

So yeah, somewhere along the lines, I started designing games and I have a you know, a pretty tall pile of prototypes and all kinds of different things. My first game that was published was Hegemonic. And that was published by Minion games. I want to say 2012 I'm probably wrong, but I think that was the listed publication year. And that was, you know, mentioned Tigris and Euphrates earlier. It wasn't in hindsight, I'm noticing that it's even more more this way, kind of reinterpreting some of the spirit of Tigris and Euphrates into like a 4X dials base game. So for maybe for listeners that don't know 4X is the kind of genre of like Civilization style games, you're expanding your empire exploiting risks. versus exploring things and, you know, exterminating or competing with your opponents and through or various other channels. And so, you know that Hegemonic was kind of an attempt to pour it over some of the idea of Tigris and Euphrates a little bit into kind of a different space setting. And I think the old ultimately that game ended up being probably more abstract in a way and how it played than a lot of the kind of typical audience for like a big space Empire game might be running.

Davey: 10:51

It had a lot of unique mechanics for 4X. But then the way that they kind of interact with each other is not seen from a 4x and it was also quite short for 4x, which is quite nice as well. And yeah, and respected.

JP: 11:06

Yeah, especially some of the ones we play where you're like, right, let's sit down for eight hours and that's Yeah,

Oliver Kiley: 11:12

yeah, Twilight Imperium or something or even Eclipse Well, eclipse can go pretty quick. But that's that's still a pretty big bear to

Davey: 11:19

Depending on the Tech with eclipses and people looking at the tech these tech things for a long time thinking, Oh, how am I gonna build my ship?

JP: 11:27

Yeah, that's where the game drags on a little bit. Is that that tech tray, isn't it? It's still a little look at the tech tray, and no one can memorise what's in that tech tray.

Davey: 11:37

So from Hegemonic, Pax, seems to have also taken some evolution from that, and developed but obviously, it has its own style. What we were really impressed with when we were playing is how much of the 4x it kind of felt like even though it was a card game, and how the mechanics all melded together. And you actually it was very involved game for such a tiny box. Was that like a design choice?

Oliver Kiley: 12:01

Definitely. So you know, a couple couple interesting things about, I guess, the origin of Pax Illuminaten, and how it got there. And I don't know if you caught this and anything else that had been written about the game or not, but the original design of it started. Basically not too long after I'd published Hegemonic, there was a design competition on Board Game Geek. And I think it was to design either an express version of a bigger game or design something that fits inside of a tin that was kind of like an express version. And I thought, You know what, that guy just published Hegemonic, can I make a 4x game out of basically a deck of cards. And at the time, the other thing to point out was, I was tinkering around a lot with the Decktet, which I don't know if you've heard of that or not. So it is a very cool deck of cards. That is there, all the cards are dual suited. So and there are six different suits in the deck. And it's kind of in a slightly symmetric arrangement of how the suits are all put together. But it works a bit like a traditional deck of cards, right? So there's two suits when there's a rank two through nine, and then all the cards. And the person who did all the who designed this thing has a whole book that they've made with, you know, kind of variations of games, you know, taking a lot of traditional card games and twisting them to fit this Decktet format. Anyway, as a designer, it's something that's fun to tinker around with, because they're like, oh, I can take this traditional card game and see if I can get it to work in this game. So I started playing around with, you know, can I use this Decktet to actually recreate sort of a 4x game like Hegemonic, but, you know, obviously a lot more abstract, because I'm just using this simple deck of cards. And so that it was one of those cases where the design kind of grew out from there, there's Pax lluminaten that original design and like the basic menu of actions that you can do in Pax Illuminaten. And maybe we can get into that a little bit more. But the basic menu of actions that you can do is largely the same, like the resource economy and the game with generating favour. And everything is kind of largely the same. And it was one of those things where just sort of fell together as a core kind of gameplay dynamic really quickly, which was exciting. It's always kind of one of those these like eureka moments, right? Oh, this is really, this is really great. The game kind of grew out of there. And I think, you know, that was almost 10 years ago at this point that that little first kind of iteration of this game came to be, and I just kept kind of coming back to it. I'd be working on other game designs or other projects, and I'd come back to it and tinker with it for a little while and try it out. And eventually, it got to the point where it's like, you know, I'd like to actually do something with this. And I kept trying on different themes for it. There was a whole like Mars colonisation theme that it was going into, you know, Woodland theme, there was a whole bunch of other things that I was kept tinkering with and nothing really ever had gelled with it in a way. You know, part of me is getting was also at the same time. You know, I've been playing a lot of 4X video games like Civilization style games on the computers and just getting actually really disillusioned with them. Because I was like, each one of these is like just a retelling of like, a colonisation theme over and over and over again am I suppose yeah, I was like, I kind of want to move away from that a little bit. And but here, I've created this game that, like you said, sort of feels like a 4X game in terms of how it evolves. So I kept thinking, what, you know, what else can I start to, like, build this around? Like, what do the dynamics in the game represent, if not sort of 4X. And that eventually led me to just kind of stumbling almost into this Illuminati idea with like secret societies, I was started to go down like a secret agent, rabbit hole. You know, maybe it was a political game, or you're trying to send your different, like political agents or emissaries to different countries to try to compete with each other for rival influence. And so you know, almost by chance, I was digging through my game shelf, and I actually came across the Illuminati, Steve Jackson, Illuminati game box. I'm like, wonder, yeah, it could there be something here. And like, obviously, this is very much like the Illuminati conspiracy theory side of it was, you know, what the Steve Jackson game was all about? I started to look at it from the standpoint of you know, is there an actual history, conversation or real historical narrative that I can try to hook this into? And obviously, I don't know, kind of what games you all have been gravitating towards. But there does seem to be, you know, an effort to kind of dig into more historically structured games, I think the whole pack series is very much emblematic of that

Davey: 17:13

These things that kind of drew me into your game. And before when we went to Essen, because there was not a lot of information about it outside of that was just, obviously the Pax name. And the fact that the theme, the fact is about Illuminati and all of that, is it? Definitely.

JP: 17:35

So yeah, sure, you can concept by itself, because it's the Illuminati and you just think, Oh, I wonder what that one's about. That sounds cool. And yeah, I don't I don't there's not

Davey: 17:43

a lot of games that I've done that theme. Obviously, you mentioned the Steve Jackson one. But there's there's not a lot.

JP: 17:50

I think that's what appeals though, isn't it? Because it's not a saturated theme. And like you say that because you've gone down the historical route with it. And I think that's, that's really good, because it might encourage people to read up more about the history of the Illuminati, what they were involved in, you know, are they? Are they bad? Are they good? Are they secretly they actually have great intentions and all that kind of stuff? It's just an interesting area of history, in general. And yeah, definitely thing is an intriguing concept. Yeah, and I'm

Oliver Kiley: 18:21

definitely not a I would not say that I'm a historian on this subject, or at all anywhere close to being an expert.

JP: 18:29

That's alright, we're not either.

Oliver Kiley: 18:32

Sorry, listeners. But, you know, you know, the research that I did go through and kind of trying to get a handle on the history of what the group was, you know, it was a very short lived enterprise really only about 25 years, even, not even really that long. And, of course, it led to a whole bunch of, you know, conspiracy theories that got kicked out now. I know, well, who knows? But I thought, you know, I thought it was really fascinating, because I think when people hear about the Illuminati, you know, they jump to the conspiracy theories, or like, you know, the secret levers of power that are ruling the world and like this whole thing, and, you know, least what the Bavarian Illuminati was about at the time was almost the exact opposite, right? They were trying to bring enlightenment thinking and enlightenment drives social reforms, and things like that, to their corner, the Holy Roman Empire, which is, of course, at that time, you know, totally under the authority of the Church and the nobility that they empowered, right. So, you know, and it was right, of course, on the eve of, you know, the United States becoming a country and their independence right on the eve of the French Revolution, that all of these things were starting. So it was, it was kind of interesting to dig into that period of history a little bit more and kind of understanding how these different dots started to connect. Yeah.

JP: 20:03

Cool. I've got a question though, and this is probably more for my naivety more than anything. So as we said at the beginning, I've heard of the Pax kind of genre of games. But what makes a Pax game a Pax game? Like, what? What is it that has the Pax badge on it? Because that's the fight. I genuinely don't know that the answer? Yeah,

Oliver Kiley: 20:26

I'm happy to share what I can through my experience. And I should say, I've only played a handful of them. So I've played Pax renaissance and Pax Pamier, a number of times, I have Pax Transhumanity on my shelf, haven't really managed to crack through that one yet. Also lived through some of the other games vicariously through a lot of my geek buddies and things. But, you know, my understanding, I think there's a few kind of key things that maybe tie a lot of the games in this series together. One is that they tend to be you know, these historically structured games, where they're trying to take a specific point in history, dig into that topic. And, you know, create kind of a game structured around some of that historical narrative or historical trauma terminology. I think another kind of key part of them is that they tend to be very player driven. Meaning that, you know, over the course of the game, the players are all collaboratively kind of building some things, you know, assets in a shared space, or in a shared environment, that everybody kind of has an ownership or a stake in. So control of stuff that's sitting on the map isn't like exclusively yours to control and own, you might have joint ownerships and things. And so when you start playing with, you know, three or four players, you know, the, it gets really interesting and dynamic, because you know, your might be doing something, it's helping out one or two other people and it there's a level of kind of mutualism, that kind of comes through some of the some of the play. I think there's some kind of hallmarks mechanically, for a lot of the games in the series, most of them all have a market of some kind. So there's, you know, that row of face up cards, and there's different ways that you can draw cards out of that. So I think a lot of them, try to minimise the amount of kind of risk or not risk but minimise, yeah, the kind of randomness and luck of the draw side of things and give players a little bit more agency and sort of figuring out like, Okay, here's all the options, everybody has access to these options right now, like which one am I going to go for? How am I going to kind of construct my strategy around that. And I think another part of it, too, is most other Pax games, and this is where Pax elimination is a little different. In addition to having that big shared space that you're sort of interacting through, you're also building up your own little tableau of cards, usually not a huge number of cards. And so you're very judicious and strategic about what you're putting in your tableau. And those all have some synergies or connections between each other. And those are sort of the assets that you control more directly as a player, and you're using those to kind of affect this map that has a lot of shared elements in it. And through you know, I think through all of that, too, you know, many of the packs games have lots and lots of cards that are all unique packs eliminated, it's definitely a little bit more on the streamlined. And there. And so there's just a lot of variability and kind of potential volatility to I would say, that can come out of the games, like you can have some games that just live literally fly by really quickly. Because a certain combination of cards that came in was, you know, really strong or let somebody quickly get towards a goal. And other games have a very different feel and different pacing to them. So there's a lot of variability in that way, just in terms of how it shakes out. So yeah, there's enough that helps, usually,

Davey: 24:14

yes, from what I've read, there's always usually a lot of player interaction be be that through like politics, or like some kind of control or, you know, does seem to have a high interaction, though even.

JP: 24:27

It's kind of like it's putting you as the player into the the kind of eyes and ears of somebody of historical significance playing that role. That kind of part in history, even though obviously, it's abstracted out into a game. But but but it kind of just draws you into the moment draws you into the theme, doesn't it? And that's kind of what I... listening to you speak. It's what I'm kind of getting from. From that. So yeah, and that sounds really great. Thanks for that. I've always wondered if I need to ask someone. So yeah, there's an opportunity.

Davey: 24:58

So now we kind of know what a Pax game like kind of entails. Do you want to give us kind of a basic rundown of Pax Illuminaten and kind of how it plays and we can, obviously we've played it as well, we can kind of discuss from there.

Oliver Kiley: 25:15

Yeah, and Please feel free to cut me off, it's going to interject with a question. So I'm not monologuing too much here. So, you know, the basic premise of the game is that, you know, for again, just coming out of the historical note here, the idea for why the Illuminati was formed was that basically, in Bavaria at the time, they weren't allowed to talk about enlightenment texts and share any of that. So in a certain way, like the joke, it was almost like the Illuminati started as a book club. And like, you're one of the founding members of the book club that are like getting together to talk about all of these nefarious tech texts that aren't supposed to be discussed and shared. And so in game terms, what that means is that you are one of the Aeropagus, which is one of the founding members of the Illuminati, Adam Weishaupt, was the was a professor at the University of Ingolstadt who started it. And so the goal of the game is that as one of the founding members, you're all going out trying to recruit additional members into the Illuminati, they're referred to as luminaries in the game. So most of the game is based around using this deck of cards that features a historical figure on it. And these cards are all arranged onto a map on the board. And, you know, I like to think about it again, like from a conspiracy theory angle, like this map is sort of like your network, right? You could almost imagine that having little red string lines connecting everything. Yeah. It's, you know, it's like a social network or social map, essentially, of connections. And so the goal of the game is, you're trying to go out and spread your influence on to these different luminary cards in a particular way in order to achieve two of the three available plot cards. And so these plot cards are intended to represent, you know, different kind of ambitions that Adam Weishaupt has for growing the Illuminati, like, Hey, we've got to get, you know, a bunch of magistrates together, or a bunch of highly influential people together to be able to kind of corner the market and maybe influence policy across the region. So let's get these people recruited. And so if you're able to be the person to have influence over those people, as you're bringing them in, into the organisation that helps, you know, it's kind of the goal to be able to elevate yourself and kind of stay, you know, number two, in terms of your rank within the Illuminati. That's kind of the general idea.

Davey: 27:55

Yeah. So mechanically, is basically you've kind of kind of like have a deck of cards, right? And then you're playing them for awhile, for multiple things, join and go over some of that.

Oliver Kiley: 28:10

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So how it'll work. Like I mentioned, there's this map of cards that gets put out on the board. And that map does kind of scale and size based on the number of players that are in the game. And then you each have a hand of cards, hand limits pretty small for cards. And the basic structure is that during your turn, you can take kind of two different main actions. And there's a list of different actions that are available to you, is do all track, kind of basically back to the 4x style of thing that we were talking about. So the beginning of the game, the cards in this map are all facedown. And so one of the actions is you can actually go and kind of explore a card, it's called scout in the game, you can draw a card next to your start position, and then put one from your hand back on the map face up, right. And so now, you have this Illuminati figure there. And you know, you're trying to put cards into the map and in particular arrangement to meet some of the plot cards that you're working towards. And I should mention that two of the plot cards are publicly available. So everybody's kind of competing for those. But then everybody also has their own hidden plot that they're working towards, too. So there's always a little bit of a calculation you have to make, what does

Davey: 29:24

It kind of has a little puzzly feel on top of the kind of the 4x actions you had with the also were very card mechanics, which I'm sure you go into in a sec, but actually trying to get that plot down. It was it was a puzzle, in essence, and that was quite unique.

JP: 29:41

Yes, trying to get the shapes of the lodges is what you call it, right? And so right that that kind of connection in that area, then something over there. And obviously you're going to contest with other players because they're trying to do their own thing. And, yes, that tussle between everybody trying to get their plots off and it's yeah, it's fun

Oliver Kiley: 29:58

Yeah. And sometimes two people are kind of working together a little bit on one. You know, we're, we're next to each other and we can both go in here, but you know, but you got your secret one that you can kind of be plodding around. So yeah, so there's an action that Scout action for you know, kind of revealing new cards and adding new cards to the map. There's a influence action that lets you actually expand your influence, or expand your influence out on the new cards that have been revealed. There's an action called extort that lets you generate the game's resource, which is favour which you can generate off of cards where you have influence. And this was an area to just to kind of dig into the kind of backstory that was a kind of drove me towards trying to do this, like secret agent secret societies like influence based game design, because I was trying to think like, what is the thing where if you have influence over it, you can use your influence to kind of get leverage and to generate more of the same kind of thing that you might have used to get leverage over it in the first place. Like it was kind of a weird, mental kind of mind Twister, trying to think about, like, what that logic was. And it kind of got me to this idea of like favour being, you know, just kind of handshake agreements, and hey, like, you're my buddy, like, let's work together on this, like, I'll help you out. Now. Maybe you helped me out in the future.

Davey: 31:29

Like a political whip. Yeah.

JP: 31:33

But it fits though, doesn't it? Yeah.

Oliver Kiley: 31:36

Yeah, exactly. So that, you know, so that was a, you know, anyway, so there's that action that lets you generate favour, there's another action, once you kind of redeploy some of your influence around on two other cards, kind of making network connections, there's one that actually lets you basically kick somebody out of the Illuminati and move somebody else into their seat. That was the expel action, which can be really powerful late in the game to kind of switch things around, either pull the rug out from somebody, or slided on your own feet. And then there's an action called out that basically lets you challenge one of your fellow kind of rival Aeropagus members for influence, and kind of push their influence off of a particular card, so that you can step in and have influence over that one. So those are kind of the core actions in the game, and you only have two actions that you can take a turn. And I think, you know, in my experience, and feeling where the real kind of interest in the game is, and where it starts to come alive is with what's called the scheme action. Yeah, and so this is where you how it's set up is, you know, all of the cards have a action at the bottom of them that you can do as part of a scheme, which basically means you're gonna play the card facedown in front of you and get whatever that benefit is, sometimes it's a passive benefit that will affect you know, any of your other actions that you take that turn. Sometimes it's a bonus action of a particular type, usually with a little added benefit to how it works. But the real power of it is that you can chain multiple cards together, as long as they share at least one faction suit as you kind of move along the scheme. So kind of combining that with this card market of being able to decide what cards you want to draw, you can kind of be building your hand up or setting yourself up for a really powerful turn where you're going to do your two main actions, but you may end up taking, you know, the equivalent of another two or three actions over the course of your turn. On top of that, just depending upon how you scheme things together. So anyway,

Davey: 33:46

yeah, I have a lot to think about with the scout action, you're not only thinking about kind of, oh, well, I want this colour going over here. You're also thinking about oh, what's what's on this card action wise, like for the scheme action, you're then also thinking, Oh, well, so I had a card, I think that allowed me to swap a card with another card. I was like, well, I could place this one down. And that's going to screw over my neighbour because they're now not going to be able to build into that I can build into this it takes the larger way. For such a small game and car game. It had so much depth and like its complexity, but it wasn't it wasn't hard to pick up you know, it was definitely seemed to have a lot of crunch for such a small box. It's crazy.

JP: 34:33

Yeah, it's one of the that's the bit I took away from the demo. And let's face it, I've We've only played a demo of the game, rather than a kind of full blown, full blown game, but the just I love games that has multipurpose cards anyway, like the fact that you've got 100 cards and you're trying to sequence How do I play this? Do I play this onto the board? Or am I playing that for the scheme and the fact that you have that chain mechanic is just fun? Because you just want to go I'm going to do that and I'm gonna link it to this and I'm gonna do this and

Davey: 35:02

Or do I need to extort it because I need these resources. Yeah. But when

JP: 35:05

You play the scheme as well, that's the other thing. It's not the fact you can play this game is when you play Do you play at the beginning before you actually do you play it in between you play it at the certain time. So even just on you Your turns a lot of decision space, in essentially the four cards that you have in your hand, which is brilliant. It's just so much going on for what you probably would expect by just looking at a picture or some cards on on the table faced and just a lot of crunch in there.

Davey: 35:32

I keep mentioning it, because I saw the size of it. And part of me when course, you know, it seems strange for a Pax game to be kind of that size. I know, they're not massive boxes anyway. But I was thinking, oh, you know, maybe maybe it's not going to be as involved as you know, I thought it was going to be and then I played it. And I thought no, it's actually somehow more involved. It's I don't know how you've done this. But it's, it was crazy. And I kept thinking about it as well afterwards. And it was definitely a brainburn. But we didn't even get to finish the game. But I've just I'm kind of left wanting more.

JP: 36:07

That's what you want, isn't it? Yeah, what you want from a game is, you know, it's got you, you like, can we not stay, Robin, can we not have another hour and it's like, I need to

Oliver Kiley: 36:17

And it's interesting to like my my group demo. that I've been playing with a lot over the last couple of years. I mean, we all know the rules by heart, obviously. And so you know, we can sit down. And it's amazing, actually how quick sometimes we even play through it too. And you know, I mentioned that earlier on the you know, a lot of other Pax games, there's a little bit of this volatility, where things can swing really quickly in a game might end early, or, in other cases, that may get them to a weird sort of pattern where it actually lasts kind of a long time, which I like that because you never quite know what you're gonna get. It's not always a perfectly even experience. There's a little bit of roughness to that, which, you know, as a designer, I really appreciate and I think, you know, I appreciate that Ion games kind of recognises that as well. And they're like, Yeah, you know, we know that, you know, there's going to have to be some rough edges on this for this game to be kind of what it is. And to offer these really varied experiences. I'll share one anecdote This is a month or so ago was played just a two player game. And I think my friend won on the third turn. And we tried to calculate the odds of like, what he had like the card combination that came together to do it, it was something with the the Rosicrucian event card, coupled with just what he happened to have in his hand. And then he played a card, let him draw like two more cards from the deck. And he got two more things. And it was this just absolutely insane. Combination of cards into like a one in a million chance of things working out will never happen again. Probably never happened again. But but it was one of those things where, you know, there's there could be a, you know, some folks might approach that like, well, like that was kind of broken, maybe we should design that so that it can't happen or like design it out. And we kind of stood back and we're like, that was amazing. That was incredible. Like, I'll never forget that game.

Davey: 38:18

So it makes it kind of a bit of an event in itself. And I know you just mentioned the event cards, but it's kind of an event game, which is what you get with a lot more like 4X's and stuff like that. Because you sometimes do that in a 4x Sometimes someone gets this combination, or they get this card and it happens in Twilight Imperium and stuff like that. And you think, Oh, well, that's, that's, you know, that's kind of over. But it's fun, and it has that event side to it. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

JP: 38:47

I think it's the time though, like you say, this Pax Illuminaten item isn't isn't an eight hour game. You know, it's a fairly quick play through. So the fact that those those kinds of scenarios can happen is like you say, Oh, well, you know, well done. Let's go again. Yeah, there's not, there's not many games that you can, especially 4X games where you've played them for three hours ago, right? Oh, well, let's go again. out of bed right now. I loved it. But let's do it tomorrow, maybe next week?

Davey: 39:19

Yeah. So you mentioned event cards and Pax. And I don't think we've actually mentioned what those are along with. We keep saying lodges, but I don't think we've actually explained those over you like to explain those for us as well.

Oliver Kiley: 39:32

Yeah, so the idea in the game is one you have basically a block of cards that are all adjacent that share at least one faction and common once you have three cards that are in this kind of arrangement that forms a lodge. And so in, you know, historical terms, how the Illuminati membership actually did a lot of their recruitment was through the Freemason Lodges at the time. And so the lodge is a term for basically, you know, a group of people that were in a particular branch of Freemasonry in a particular region or in a particular city. And so this idea in the game is, you know, there's lots of things that are connected to lodges. So a lot of the goal cards are The plot cards are tied to being able to control and having control of a certain lodge that's in a particular location on the board or is in some particular arrangement. There's also each of the six different factions in the game also has a faction card that if you control the biggest lodge associated with that faction, you can claim that faction the card, which again, kind of gives you a passive ability and like an extra kind of activated ability to turn. So those are, those are gonna be pretty important to play in strategy. So that's the lodge piece of it that's kind of interconnected nature of the cards. And then the other element in the game, there's a pretty slim deck of event cards that gets set up in a particular way. And the there's two kinds of event cards, there's either a standard kind of special event, that's like a one off thing. And then there's also these edict events. And so the edicts act a little bit as the game timer. And so again, from a historical standpoint, what had started to happen, you know, his word spread across Bavaria that you know, this Illuminati group is forming, and we're trying to influence policy and influence, nobility and all of this stuff. The elector which is basically the ruler of this particular of province within the Holy Roman Empire, the Elector in Bavaria started issuing this sequentially more severe set of edicts basically outlawing participation and secret societies. Which is ironic because he was a, you know, a Freemason member himself, and which is technically a secret society. But anyway, ah, double standards, right. So, the, the idea then is kind of a game timer is, you know, after the fifth edict gets resolved, that would essentially correspond to like the final kind of edict that basically got all the way up to like punishable by death if you're found out to be in one of these groups, and that sort of forced the membership to kind of dissolve and, you know, really curtailed all the Illuminati is official movements at the time. So that kind of acts as a timer. And in game terms, what that means is, when an edict comes out in play, the edict sucks up all of the favour of a particular faction that's listed on an Edict card and locks most of it down on that card. And each turn when it comes back to the player who played that edict, some of that favour will go back into the pool and be available for others. But it really sort of ties down a particular faction for a while. Which is, I think, fun. And, you know, one of the other elements that that ties to is that the favour pool is limited. So you only have and say, a two player game or six of each kind of favour, eight in a three player 10, six 8, and 10 in a four player game. And so if you're ever in a position where you know, one player has this huge pile of favour, and somebody else generates a bunch of it'll actually steal the favour kind of from your colleague or from your rival, which again, is kind of adds a layer to be thinking about. Yeah, and you know, the edicts can definitely, you know, slam some people more than others. So you've got to kind of watch out for those which, which I like

Davey: 43:37

Means you don't want to be stockpiling resources as well. You don't want to kind of hold up the game in that sense, because then someone could put out an edict and then there will go, your favour gone. Yeah.

Oliver Kiley: 43:50

Yeah, it's been stockpiling this stuff. And now I've got nothing to show for.

JP: 43:56

That happened in our demo, right? Because we had an edict that was pulled with the white favours the cleric clergy. Yeah. Yeah, the clergy resources came off, one of the people that was demoing with us and he had had no vote for five and they just went by. Yeah, it was no moments, little moments. Good, fun,

Davey: 44:19

Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of interaction as well, which is, which is really good. And I'll just say,

Oliver Kiley: 44:24

you know, as my kind of nod back way, way, way back to the Tigris and Euphrates side of things, you know, and that's also ties into the other Pax games, but that idea of sort of Co ownership or commingling of, you know, empires or influence or whatever it is that the game is modelling. So, you know, depending on the rank of luminary card that you're trying to influence on the map, you know, you could have one or two or three players with influence on a particular card, depending on the rank of that card. And so I like that idea, right of you know, nothing is necessarily exclusively or is although some cards may be but

Davey: 45:03

anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. And the fact that you then when someone else can, if somebody exploits and you're on there, you get some some resources as well so you can kind of start piggybacking on to their empire, or on to their influence members. Yeah, it was

JP: 45:22

Fuel your own strategies. Yeah. So

Davey: 45:25

You can kind of see a bit of thoughts of your previous game, Hegemonic. So any other influences that you kind of took from obviously, the theme was from Steve Jackson, but is there anything that kind of helps you develop these mechanics? Because they are quite unique within the space that they're being played?

Oliver Kiley: 45:43

Yeah I think certainly, you know, just nod back to the deck 10 games to that sort of formed the basis of this card deck. So you know, I mentioned earlier how the deck that was this deck with, you know, all the cards have two factions generally on them, which is same as in Pax Illuminaten, and most of the luminary cards, you know, have two factions on them. And, you know, there was one game in particular that if you ever get a Decktet, definitely worth looking up. It's called Magnanti or magnate, I don't know, depending on how, how you want to pronounce that kind of a battle line, last cities type of game a little bit. But there's some resource generation that happens in that. And the way that that worked, you know, that was a game I was playing a lot with my wife at the time, when I started putting the bones of this Pax Illuminaten game together, you know, 10 years or so ago. So there was definitely that influence is kind of like an abstract game. Speaking of abstract games, I do really enjoy a lot of the kind of newer era abstracts, if you will, I don't know if you've played or heard of the game called Taluva before, just kind of like a tiling game a little bit like Carcassone, except you're actually stacking tiles up on top of themselves to and, you know, these are games where there's just, you know, pretty simple menu or matrix of choices that you can take on your turn as you go. But you end up building out something that's got a lot of layers to it, you know, on the board that you're all sort of interacting in. So yeah, I think those are a couple of maybe other areas of influence, that are kind of feeding into just kinds of games I like and then by extension, the kinds of games that I've been designing.

Davey: 47:37

Nice, yeah, cuz the, also, the mechanic of changing the cards off down to the colour of the factions. So you have to, like lead off. And obviously, you've got the wild ones, which I think were aces or. Yeah, and then you can lead this chain off is strange, because it's the mechanic for The Witcher recently used for a lot of their combo for their playing of cards. But obviously, it wasn't, this is something that you developed a while back. I didn't know whether you'd got influenced off of The Witcher for that then bringing that forward, but obviously not

Oliver Kiley: 48:15

Nope, and, yeah, I have not played The Witcher game at all. That's interesting. I'm not sure entirely where that idea came from. I used to play Magic Magic the Gathering way back in the day. Now it's not, doesn't quite have the same combo chaining

Davey: 48:34

It's but I couldn't remember from any other game and then Witcher obviously done it and I thought oh, it's just you know, just it's a similar mechanic to that works a lot differently. I mean, you're just doing it to just do flat damage. In this you're doing it so you can do a lot of combos stop, do you ever actions and then maybe chain it off again. But it works really well it works within that environment as well. Because sometimes you're thinking oh, do I keep I really want to put this card down and scout this card into my influence. But it's got a nice ability on it Do I keep it in my hand for next go? Or do I play it into my into my scheme so I'm there's just some

Oliver Kiley: 49:14

Other fun levels that come up with it too because you know, we didn't mention that when you do the house or the kind of challenges between players for influence. I don't know if those came up in your demo. You know, what ends up basically happening is if I want to try to kick you off have a card we both figure out you know, kind of where the engagements happening. Tally up our respective influence that's adjacent to that card. Then we each pick a card from our hand, put them down on the table and flip them over at the same time and there's that power number that's on the cards, too. So that's like you were talking earlier about the kind of multi faceted nature of the cards well you can play it for a scheme you might be playing it to the map for your plot you're also looking at it for its kind of strength in resolving keep it for you oh

Davey: 50:03

Yeah yeah exactly. Thank you know that we're gonna try announce be soon I need this one for my defence. Yeah, yeah.

JP: 50:09

Interesting. So many dimensions to it. Isn't that so? Yeah, love that. Love that.

Davey: 50:14

It's kind of game where say We're all going away somewhere and I want to take a game with me to play. It's the game I'd pick up, because it's not a travel game, but but it's the game that's going to just be able to come with me doesn't take long to set up, put on the table, and you've got so much depth there, you've got the crunchiness to it, and it plays quite quickly. So is it seems to check all the boxes from

JP: 50:38

Yeah. Ironically, we've just come back from Essen. And it's the game that you'd put in your, in your, your luggage. Yeah, you know, you want something crunchy, you want something that's, you know, it's really gonna, like, tick the boxes. And the fact that the box is small and is, like you say, is a deck of cards with some tokens in and it's really rich in play and rich in ruleset. And enjoyment. It's just like, yeah, so fancy again, absolutely as go,

Davey: 51:09

be some good stories that will come out of it as well, I can see.

Oliver Kiley: 51:14

I've really been, you know, as I've been in the hobby longer and longer, my insidious realisation is that, you know, I've limited myself to a certain amount of shelf space. Yeah, I can get more games by buying smaller ones. So and part my, you know, this is a selfish reason for why I wanted to keep the game box small. But I'm right there with you. I mean, I really like it when you can find a game that's got something in a small box that packs a lot of punch. And, you know, even for much lighter games, you know, there's I'm always amazed by you know, the games that are coming out, that are in a small package, very simple rule set and like it's, they're just a blast to play, you can throw in your bag or your pocket and go to the pub or wherever.

JP: 52:01

It's great to say it's great to see that you know, kind of designers and publishers are kind of not shying away from from the smaller box and thinking that's a negative because I think in the industry so much what we see is it's big box games, heavy games, you know, get the the deluxe edition which takes up a whole Kallax cube and you're like how seriously how many of these can I have in in my home before I start to say that the shelf space is you know a commodity in its own right.

Davey: 52:32

setup time sometimes is yeah, you

JP: 52:34

I love like Voidfall right which is a new one that has come out from Mindclash games. Love it. Absolutely love it. Will I take that somewhere away on a trip. No, because it's huge.

Davey: 52:49

Setup setup can be a bit of a nightmare. It's worth it. But it's one of those where you're like well setting this up and it can be a bit of a turn off sometimes whereas Yeah, Pax Illuminaten was just like boom boom boom boom. There we go. Done. Here we go off we got to

JP: 53:06

He skipped away from that demo, Oliver. I'm not gonna lie. He's skipped away from the table. The whole Yeah.

Davey: 53:14

I tried. It was so busy. I didn't have much room but yeah.

JP: 53:20

So how, how do people get ahold of it? Then? Like, what's what's the... if people are interested Oh, this sounds up my street. How do we get a copy?

Oliver Kiley: 53:32

Yeah, so um, game has not fully produced and released yet. It is going live on Kickstarter, I believe October 24 is the start date. And I think it's going to be a fairly brisk campaign will be running for a couple of weeks.

JP: 53:50

By the time this episode is released, and people are listening to it, I think the Kickstarter will be live. Yeah. So so the best thing to say is we'll have the the Kickstarter page in our show notes, go and check it out. And if

Oliver Kiley: 54:00

And if people want to get a an early sensor, play it at all on their own Ion put together a great official Pax

JP: 54:07

I know the hard work though, isn't it the you as the kind of Illuminaten and Tabletop Simulator, mod two, if you're using that at all, it's all fully scripted for the setup and everything else I know. They're getting, you know, kind of an official draft of the rules formatted to lab examples and all the other kinds of stuff. We're putting together some tutorial videos that'll be rolled out alongside the campaign too, so people can get a little bit more of a hands on sense for how it plays and some of the nuances of it. So yeah, it's exciting that that's that it's moving forward. Everybody who's been working on it with me over at Ion has just been awesome to work with. Great so that's it's really exciting. Everybody seems to be pretty enthusiastic about it. So a games designer been putting in and like you said, this idea has been kind of flying around for 10 years. Yeah. So to get to this position where you know, by the time this episode is released, it's it's launched its crowdfunding campaign. And then you kind of sat wait and going, what's gonna happen? quite nervous, but also very exciting and to finally have that product that you can see the artwork is probably you know largely there or there abouts And sure there might be some tweaks here or tweaks there as always are with with games to kind of at this stage. But yeah, like I just I kind of get a little jealous going I wonder if I wish I could do something like that, I'll just play them and I'll just play the game

Oliver Kiley: 55:42

Well, it starts anywhere you know, there's there's a lot of resources if you want to jump into the design world, it's I don't know, it does become a hobby in and of itself, though almost separate from the playing of games. So

JP: 55:53

this is where Davey gets very interested because Davey his his mind, he I know you've got some little design ideas,

Davey: 56:00

I've got two game designs sitting in the back burner that I've sat there since because I did get into design as an open university course in like my midlife and then kind of realised that the hard coding side of it wasn't for me, and then I've kind of slowly converted some of them into board games, but I've not actually gotten any further with it other than the theory, some mechanics I know I need to and talking to people such as yourself Oliver's always reignites a passion here. So I do like seeing how the games are formulated and how they've come together. And obviously, there's no like, true or true original idea when you cut but you kind of like start putting together all the previous mechanics that you've learned and put them together and formulate them into this in its own idea. It's just so interesting. Thank you very much for like giving us your time. And talking to us about Pax. Absolutely. Awesome. Yeah. So we there's a couple of Sure. There's a couple of like, niche number ones we call them, which is saying due towards kind of the end of the podcast is

Oliver Kiley: 57:15

like the lightning speed dating round, right? Like yeah,

Davey: 57:18

kind of Yeah. Basically, there's there'll be if you don't like the, the one I'll give you you can always choose another but what's the favourite game that you don't own? What's your favourite game you don't own? Is there a game that you play with your friends that you always think? Like this? Yeah. But it's either too big. You're not going to put it anywhere or or it's okay. Never made it to your shelf.

Oliver Kiley: 57:50

I'll throw out a strangely throwback one. Because I've never actually owned Catan. Okay, I literally just played it last night at a friend's house. Never never owned it. And I never really got oversaturated on it and my board game journey. So I still enjoy playing that one. And that was kind of funny. Because just thinking about it. I was like, oh, you know, that's a great game. We were having some beers. We were trading we were trash talking each other time. You know, it hits a lot of buttons that I think is fun, but I don't own it.

Davey: 58:24

There's a reason they've made so many versions of it, isn't it? Yeah,

JP: 58:29

It's still around today. And there's good reason. It's is great guys. Yeah, I think I'm the same. I don't think I'm saturated on Catan as well because I think I've played it three times in my life. So there's plenty of mileage left I think in okay. Yeah, for sure.

Oliver Kiley: 58:46

Yeah.

Davey: 58:46

Yeah. And this one nevermind people get out. So yeah, forgot that this is actually a good game because the market there's so many games now, no time to play them all. And then when you get some of the classics out, it's actually a little bit nostalgic and good feeling about it. You're like, oh, yeah, there's a reason this is a classic.

JP: 59:05

Going to do the next one, Davey? Yeah, sure. Cool. Okay, so what's your favourite game Oliver that everyone else hates?

Oliver Kiley: 59:14

Oh Man,that everybody else hates.

JP: 59:23

Maybe not everyone, but you know, where are you?

Oliver Kiley: 59:25

There's a lot of eye rolling involved on my car. Yeah, remember that? Well, strangely, actually, probably. Peter (steve)Jackson the Illuminati game. That one. Although I think if push came to shove, people wouldn't complain about it too much. It's been a long time since we've played that one, probably seven or eight years. But yeah, you know that because that game can drag on stupefyingly long amount of time, like you know, well past its expiration date. But, you know, anyway, it's kind of a holds a special place in my heart. So yeah, that's, that's what comes to mind

Davey: 1:00:15

So, I'll ask What is the favourite game to lure non gamers into the hobby? Or game? Can you get out and then people who aren't necessarily gamers don't go? What is that? What you know, when you start reading the rulebook people just start switching off

Oliver Kiley: 1:00:34

yeah, I you know I'm I'm really I don't know if there's going to be necessarily one but I can rattle off a couple one game that jumps immediately to mind is Scout. I don't know if you've played you know,

JP: 1:00:49

yeah, Oink games

Oliver Kiley: 1:00:52

yep and you know there's that one there's also Llama another Reiner Knizia game that was a spiel, the RS runner up maybe couple years ago. Again like really small card games, there's nothing like dramatically odd or strange about their mechanics. So they're again other things that are pretty quick and easy to explain. But again, there's like a level of maybe depth that's hidden in some of the gameplay that makes you scratch your head and kind of gives you pause and say, Oh, maybe and quite thought about that this way. You know, we've also just, you know, through experience have ended up recommending Wingspan to a lot of people, my wife and I played, we've probably played 500 games of that just the two of us. It's kind of insane. We've gotten to actually two score book sheets. In each scorebook sheet we use like for three games or however it works.

Davey: 1:01:52

Yeah.

Oliver Kiley: 1:01:55

Which is, you know, I think that's a game that and others lately that have been going into that trend towards just themes that aren't sort of the typical themes from the years gone by, in the board game industry. I think that sort of started to open up a bigger range of games to different audiences that might be willing to put up with the complexity of the game, because it's got this theme, it's coming at them from a different place, or that's hitting some different heartstrings. So

Davey: 1:02:25

Ark Nova is a big one. Yes, actually, it's actually quite a deep and complex game in some aspects, but because it's Yeah, but I don't I'm saying it's one of those that because of course of this, no, because of the theme of the zoo. A lot of people who wouldn't normally play that game will play that

JP: 1:02:44

Yeah. Yeah. So that touches the heartstrings, because it's game. like an elephant, I've played an elephant

Davey: 1:02:53

I've put an elephant to my zoo. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

JP: 1:02:56

But underneath it, it's like, Oh, my God does. There's a lot going on. Because we love it. I glad you you mentioned Scout Scout's a, a cracking little game. And I always find when you're trying to, you know, play games with non gamers or people who are kind of maybe outside of the tabletop hobby sphere. Sometimes you end up playing a game and it's not rich enough, you need just think uuuugh, like doesn't satisfy the, the age. But you know, you play the game for your family. And long as you're having fun, it doesn't matter. But scout is one that I have, I find it has a lot of depth to what it's doing. And I think when it clicked with me, and obviously because you have that hand of cards that you can't really change new, right? You kind of have to sequence the plays in order to smush the cards together to make the hands work that that alone is just fantastic. Yeah. Everyone thinks that everyone thinks that

Oliver Kiley: 1:03:51

yeah, they that kind of tension ratchets up right. Like you're trying to eliminate cards and like it's Oh, somebody's gonna go out before I can pull this thing off. Like you get that whole little kind of arc of tension coming through.

JP: 1:04:03

But yeah, we had we had a game at Essen and on our first night that was the game that we literally just travelled, we drove

Davey: 1:04:09

I couldn't believe this. I could not believe this. I was winning up to this point.

JP: 1:04:13

And Adrian played a seven card kind of flop. 7 card

Davey: 1:04:19

Wasn't even that deep into the round, was it and then that was my downfall from then I just couldn't do anything. I was just minus points. Like minus 12 points are saying like why the

JP: 1:04:32

Yeah, we do.

Davey: 1:04:33

Yes, yeah. That's always a game I'm happy to play as well. Nice little filler game or just crack out whenever really so. Yep. Yeah. Bringing us to pretty much the last question on of, of our podcast is what kind of what games and events are you looking forward to or coming up? So are there any new games coming out that you're really looking forward to?

Oliver Kiley: 1:04:57

I have to say my my wish list these days is growing smaller it seems every year but

Davey: 1:05:04

As this makes the space gets smaller on the shelf

Oliver Kiley: 1:05:09

Somewhat and you know, I think, you know, I'm in a point to where I you know, literally have a lifetime worth of games on my shelf. And so, you know, I think, you know, looking ahead and thinking about games, what I probably look forward to the most is just like having a chance to replay stuff that I like and enjoy more which is always a bit kind of paradoxical to say as a designer right because I'm like now producing like more stuff that you know I would want people to buy there's there's a little bit of that guilt. There. I am, you know, I am looking forward to Pax Illuminaten coming out hoping to make it to Essen myself again next year. I haven't been before so jealous. All made the trek over there. So hoping to get that worked out for, fingers crossed, a launch in advance of Essen, of Essen next year. So I think that'd be a great chance. And just to make some more connections, meet more people play games. Yes. Fun, fun going to conventions and just the person with

Davey: 1:06:21

us. Yeah, exactly. We will we will definitely try and get some games together. Yeah,

JP: 1:06:26

absolutely. You can teach us how to be good at good at the game.

Oliver Kiley: 1:06:30

Yeah, there's some things to learn. There's Yeah. So I feel bad whenever I play because I have to kind of rein myself in to not like, crush the people. I'm testing in demo.

JP: 1:06:46

Sometimes you do.

Oliver Kiley: 1:06:48

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes like, Okay, this one's for me. All right.

JP: 1:06:51

Yeah. I've had a hard day at work. Nice, nice.

Oliver Kiley: 1:06:59

Well thank you so much for having me on. This was this great to have a chance to talk about it and hear a little bit about your interest in the game and beyond as well.

JP: 1:07:07

So I'll say likewise, we, we love talking to designers and just getting that passion. And just you don't get that peek behind the curtain and trying to understand how these games come to be where the ideas seed from where the mechanics come from, and like I say, we have demoed Pax Illuminaten, and it was definitely one of our highlights of Spiel. And we can't wait to see kind of how your campaign goes and how the product comes out to the market. And I'm sure I think Davey's already in line to grab a copy of this for the group so we'll have one

Davey: 1:07:43

I've got the date pencilled in so I'll be one of your first backers.

Oliver Kiley: 1:07:48

Well, that'll be the game that your friend owns that you really liked that you don't own right?

JP: 1:07:54

Absolutely. But no, it's been it's been brilliant to speak to you. Thank you for yours. Yeah,

Davey: 1:07:59

that's it. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you for that, Oliver.

JP: 1:08:09

Thank you very much for listening to our expansion pack episode. It's great to be able to get some time with some designers and get a peek behind that curtain. If you've really enjoyed the show, then all we ask is that you share this episode with one of your gaming group so we can make sure we can get the podcast out there. But if you want to get in touch with us, you can find out all the details in our show notes. We can get a hold of us via email and social media accounts. And you'll hear back from me and the rest of the team on our next episode. So see you then