Hi, I'm Alex Williams of SiliconANGLE here at the Node Summit, live with theCUBE, our world-class online new streaming service that we do at events like this here at Node Summit with James. James, Richard, how are you, sir? I'm doing great, man. It's so good to see you again. Good to see you.  But, you know, great venue, amazing crowd here at the show. And I'm really excited to be on theCUBE again. The last time I was on was a great time, so... What's up with Node.js and kind of your perspective of the world? Well, you know, one of the aspects of Node that's really interesting came up on the panel that I moderated this morning. We had Nojitsu and Heroku and Azure and Cloud Foundry represented. And we talked about Passle, but one of the things that really came out of it is, you know, in some ways, Node is just another language. And, you know, in the sense that there are things it's great at. There are things it's not so great at. But I think what's really exciting about Node in the cloud space is it's a venting model and it's JavaScript-based nature really makes it something that is quite portable and quite kind of re-assembleable and componentized by nature. In fact, you heard a lot of the talkers at the show talking a lot about how Node kind of gets you to break down to the smallest denominators as quickly as possible to make event management that much easier to deal with to get help with things like debugging and deployment and other things. And that's kind of the nature of where the cloud's taking applications in general in a lot of ways, in that because it's a very service-based environment, people are beginning to break down capabilities into smaller service units and then bring them together, compose them in different ways that may or may not have been expected up front. Node is a great representation, I think, of a language that takes this into account, not maybe not intentionally, but it does fit very nicely. And one of the things that are enticed at Heroku is that one of the places we're seeing the Node version of their environment use the heaviest is in machine-to-machine communication. They have a very high traffic level in machine-to-machine communication. And to me, that's really kind of the next frontier. We've done the Web 2.0 thing and it will continue to grow. There's a lot of room to grow in that space, Facebook apps, consumerism, but really a big growing area is going to be this machine-to-machine capability where now the automation environment that underpins a lot of, you know, the traditional automation will become much more cloud-like in that it integrates with third-party components that protects, takes information from some source that's not within the four walls of the company and begins to bring that together. And Node seems to be very well-suited to that. Yeah, it does. I mean, talking to people about how they're using Node.js, for instance, I was talking to a FlowDoc, I think that's the name of their company, but they take group messaging and activity streams, but they take activity streams from GitHub, they take it from Jira, they take it from email, and they're going to start adding Twitter into it. And so Node.js is really, really ideal for that, as they say. And it seems like it's, you know, we're hearing a lot of it, you know, a lot of people saying that it's great for that real-time communication, so that's what it's great at. What is it not so good at? Well, I think when you get into situations where thread control, where concurrency and managing what's happening from a concurrency perspective gets to be a little bit more detailed and a little bit more finesse-oriented, some of the kinds of things that an Erlang would do really well. I think that's the point at which Node's eventing model means it's much less predictable about what's going to happen when, or whether you're even going to have work that is stacked up, intended to be completed, but it's not completed yet. There's not that serial nature to it. It's much less, it's much more about sort of the flow of information through different things taking their part of it and then passing it on to the next thing. When you get into something where you're really getting into the need to really finally work at a high performance on a given processor or just in general on computing, I think that's the point where a lot of people would say there's some things that Node does that aren't the smartest things to do in those particular architectures. That's interesting. You know, that really then speaks to the need for really good tools, doesn't it? To really be able to see what's happening with the deployment, for instance. I mean, I think about joint in the data visualization tools that they have, really to kind of see what's happening inside the network. And it's a big reason for something like Instratis to exist as well, right? Tell me, let's talk about that. Yeah, so Instratis is the leading enterprise cloud management solution. And by cloud management in this situation, what we mean is the consumption of cloud. So as opposed to being something that delivers a cloud service, we're about how do you take your applications and consume cloud services in a way that is under control, allows you to do some governance around who can do what, potentially financial controls. You're making sure that people are only consuming as much budget as they're supposed to be consuming for something. And these are the problems that enterprises deal with when they look at cloud that are very, very, they're exemplified by the enterprise. A big difference being, in a Web 2.0 space, typically you have a few development teams, they have some number of processes, they're growing number, but they're still a well-managed number of processes. And the idea is they have to scale these things across hundreds or thousands of nodes. The enterprise problem is, they've got hundreds or thousands of applications. Each of which may scale on an average need of five to 10 nodes. Right. But the problem is each of those applications have different owners, they have different requirements, they have different budgets, they have different compliance constraints that they have to meet, policies they need to apply to the cloud environments that they run in. And so it's that bringing together the governance and the automation of the application from the application's perspective in a multi-team environment, in an enterprise environment that we really focus on. So we give you basically the one way to think about it is as a console for managing and operating applications in the clouds that you consume for those applications. So managing those applications inside the enterprise. And we're hearing a lot of popularity for Node.js in the enterprise. Is that one of the, that's one you just outlined, some real reasons why it has viability there. What are some other reasons that you're seeing that they're talking about? That enterprises are talking about nodes in particular? Yeah, you know, again, I think when you look at the types of applications in enterprises, they span the full gamut end to end. One of the things that's happening is the cloud has introduced the ability to build some applications that were economically unobtainable, frankly, in the past. So a lot of big data, a lot of the excitement about big data comes from the fact that you can now experiment with processing data in certain ways. And if it doesn't work out, you release the resources back into the public cloud or private cloud environment when you try something else. And so there's a lot of agility in experimentation, a lot of things. Node fits into that really well because it begins to give you a very componentized way of thinking about the world so that as you have components that are successful, you can continue to use them, even turn them into services themselves. And you can continuously begin to glue things together in different ways, a very agile way to find solutions that really work. But this really leads to some significant disruptions inside IT, doesn't it? Well, absolutely, but it's an interesting way of, it's an interesting balance. One of the big problems that's going on is we're shifting from a server-centric operations world in IT, where IT was, their number one thing was primarily operating servers to make sure that the applications got delivered and were available. We're shifting from that now to a world where, instead of getting the server putting the OS on, putting the applications on, assigning your identity to the server, hooking it up to the network and measuring server things like CPU utilization and memory utilization, we're beginning to shift the picture a little bit to an application-centric world with cloud. Where when I come to the cloud, I don't come with a server, I come with an application, I come with, and by application, I mean it's some combination of code, data, and or config, and or policy that makes up something that turns that cloud service into something that's useful for a specific purpose, a specific application for your business. And so from that perspective, one of the things that's happening is that there's still a need for a lot of the things that IT did, but with a different focus. You still need operations. You still need overall architectural advice in terms of how to put the pieces together into a system that's going to work and that's going to survive. Right, the data design, the data management. To a certain extent, you still need all those things, although I would say that trying to do one data model for the company is kind of a dead thing in the cloud world. Because if you integrate with one third-party service all of a sudden they're defining data that you don't have in the data model. And if you change that, then your data model's constantly changing. I think though the idea that of having an idea of what the components are, what the data is that's available overall in the organization, having most importantly an API layer that allows you to then bring together the pieces that you want in one way or another, and that API could be direct call APIs, REST APIs, it could be events. Could be any number of things. So how is this representative of this evolving DevOps culture that, I mean there's a lot of marrying here of developers and operations here. It seems to be quite representative. Well and again it depends on the company. I think the argument that we're making is for most enterprises it won't make sense to have your developers operate their own applications. For a lot of enterprises that your best developers, you need them to be able to bounce from project to project and do what they do best which is develop code. However, you may want them to be involved in the development of the automation logic around the applications that they deploy. But once you've done that and you deploy that into the environment, you now need to be able to monitor and make sure that that is working correctly and be able to tweak the automation of the environment so that when you run into situations where the application either is hit performance wise or is unavailable, that you're able to adjust to those situations and make the application that much stronger. So where that really comes in, the DevOps part comes into play is we have great tools for development. We have great tools for operating a data center. We don't have great tools or until now don't have great tools for operating the applications that were developed in any arbitrary data center. That hasn't been a focus and Cloud's forcing that focus right now. And so we think we have a really important solution that almost every enterprise is going to need from the perspective that you're all going to have an application running on multi-core. That's that solution, tell me about it. Well, I think again, I talked a little bit about what Enstradus is about, but really, we offer a SaaS version of the environment, on-premises version of the environment. It's basically that gives you the ability to sort of say define what your application looks like, define what the components of the application are, how that can be brought to bear into the Cloud. And what are the configuration scripts that need to be executed in different situations? How can I, what are the right configuration scripts for one Cloud environment versus another? And how can I make sure that those get triggered? All those nuances. And then do all of that in an environment where you can define, this is the team that should be allowed to launch servers for this application. This is the team that should be able to stop the application or start the application or start components of that. This is the budget they have to work with. So for this particular part of the application functionality, they were allowed to have up to 50 servers. And if they go higher than this, then we need to go address that and figure out what that means. It also has some feedback mechanisms to make sure you understand what the application is doing in the environment. And by the way, when I say environment, it could be one Cloud, it could be one of the 14 that we support, or it could be multiple Clouds so that we can help you deploy that same application to the part where on say, one tier with some of it running on Amazon and some of it running on Rackspace. So that you get that increased availability, even if one Cloud entirely goes down, or cross regions, or whatever it may be that you want to do. Are you seeing that more often now where companies aren't using multiple Clouds? Is that a trend that is establishing itself? You know, I would say that the truth of the matter is that at this point in time, the theory is established. The theory is established that the more regions, the more data centers you can use, the more you increase your resiliency. But on top of that, when you have dependencies within Cloud environments as well, if you have multiple Cloud environments that don't have dependencies with each other, that increases the possibility of availability more. A good example of an availability event that being in multiple regions and one Cloud wouldn't help you with is if that Cloud provider for some reason went out of business. Or if that Cloud provider for some reason was suddenly told to shut down by the government or in a data center you're using in some country. So what we want to do is make sure that for disaster recovery purposes, for just general availability purposes, perhaps even eventually for market purposes, that you get a better price over here. So maybe it's time to start up some more nodes over here where the price is better than over on the other one where the price isn't as good. Those kinds of things are things you can do when you have an environment that's independent of the Clouds that you're operating against. But they can actually operate an application against that Cloud. And again, right now the focus is a lot on infrastructure service, but we're really excited about the idea of platform as a service and of languages like Node and others that make sense for this to come in the play and to be able to operate your applications with all those same traits at pass and infrastructure service and so on. So pass is an interesting, kind of, you know, is a good segue here to talk about. We're seeing, you know, today we talked to .Cloud. We talked to, oh, Cloud Foundry.  Heroku is fully public. I don't think they have any hybrid capabilities. What are you seeing, you know, what are you seeing in that marketplace right now and that landscape and how you see it reflected here with the discussions about Node.js in particular? Yeah, I think that Orin Tike put it really well this morning when he said to call it nascent might actually be a little bit of an understatement. I heard that, yeah. And I think that doesn't mean that the technologies aren't mature and that you can't build production systems on that. What that means is the form that the past marketplace will take and the ways that you will consume it are still being discovered. Right, yeah. And so I think the answer is, you know, you look at something like Microsoft's strategy with Azure, what they're beginning to look at in terms of the private Cloud capabilities they're bringing to bear. You look at what VMware is doing with Cloud Foundry. You begin to look at what the possibilities are with someone like a giant or even potentially with Heroku, but knowing Salesforce, I'm not putting a lot of weight into the fact that they might come out with a private Cloud version anytime soon. But the, you know, you begin to look at that and you begin to say there's definitely an understanding of going to where the enterprise sees the requirement for the application components to exist. But right now for certain classes of applications, if you're going to try those types of applications, it makes a ton of sense to run them in the public Cloud anyway. So big data is one, I think you see a lot of Web 2.0, your consumer websites for marketing purposes, community sites, social sites that get developed in the public Cloud for the most part anyway because you can experiment with it. And again, if things go down, you don't own the equipment, if things don't work out. And I think you're starting to see, you know, I mean, even Google App Engine, which hasn't been mentioned a lot because it's here because it's not a node environment, but you look at the types of applications that are being built out there and there's still a huge demand for that. And I think now, whereas infrastructure service spread its wing from its core base two years ago, I think now passes at that beginning point where over the next year to a year and a half, you're going to see it, find the other classes of applications that does well and find the models that it needs in order to be able to address the enterprise, to address, you know, other types of applications. Machine-to-machine systems and those kinds of things that begin to come down the pike. And so, you know, I'm very excited about what's coming in the space because I think we haven't seen all of the aha moments in the past space by any means yet. Right. The issue that we hear about is, you know, these business critical apps and I mean, that's been discussed as something that enterprises aren't willing to do, but there is more movement, isn't there? Toward, you know, starting to use, maybe I'm not sure what the environment would be, you know, for it, but are you starting to see examples of business critical apps? I mean, there's SaaS applications that uses business critical apps, but like I'm thinking about like the 20 year old systems that companies have been using and they're thinking, wow, this infrastructure is just costing me a bundle. Yeah, I don't think you can look at it that way because I think when you look at core systems that are, they're core to the business but they're not differentiating, the decision to go grab a new environment to run something that you've already made the investment in is a lot harder to do that, right? Yeah, you can't work for a place. When you look at new applications that are becoming core to the business or they're becoming mission critical to the business, you know, I would say that pick any Facebook game developer and ask them, you know, is this a mission critical application for your business, right? And there's a ton of those that are running in platform as a service environments, infrastructure as a service in general. You look at the big data and how it's becoming increasingly important to business decision making, to financial services, to even government and you begin to say, you know, some of these systems are becoming mission critical. They're right now, they're not context, excuse me. They're core, these ones are the mission critical ones. The context ones that I was talking about earlier, I think I used the wrong word those applications are, you know, those other applications will be slower to move, although the SaaS world, I think will eat those up. So I don't think you're going to see a lot of people develop new non differentiated applications in the cloud. I think they're going to find people who built those for multiple tenants. Well, that makes sense that that does speak to a direction for platform as a service when you put it in those terms, in terms of the context of what is really mission critical. Right, and I think, you know, one of the things that I've argued, and I've backed off of this, but for a while there I was arguing that the only pass that'll really survive in the long term is pass on SaaS, meaning platforms that were built to extend SaaS environments, because that's what the data is, right? So the data that you gather, that's your core customer data, that's your core sales data, that's your core ERP resource planning data, that stuff ends up in a SaaS environment. You're going to want to write the applications that consume that to do your mission, your differentiated stuff. Against where that data resides. I think there's a little bit more to it when you look at different kinds of businesses. Some will actually use standalone pass for certain types of applications and it makes sense to do so. But I also still think that, you know, when you look at aforce.com, you have to really respect what Salesforce did early on there and understanding that they, I mean, there's a lot of businesses built onforce.com that are built on salesforce.com data and that are quite successful. And I think that that's something that will begin to expand out and you'll see a lot of, you know, it's why Cloud Foundry is somewhat interesting to me and Microsoft to a certain extent as well is not only are they multi-language, but in reality, they could take the exact same platform and have, you know, have somebody in a SaaS world spin up a Cloud Foundry pass to support their platform and have me have my local enterprise Cloud Foundry environment and I can then pick and choose how I distribute components across the. It just passes the data into the application where it's integrated. And you just put the code where you want it to go and it's consistent in theory, consistently operated and executed across the two different environments. That salesforce.com looks pretty smart then. I think salesforce.com is very smart. They're not the only smart company in the space, but you have to look at them. You have to look at them. When you look at SaaS and sort of the leadership in defining the space in the same way that Amazon really has defined infrastructure services and services as infrastructure, I think you've got to really give the salesforce credit for defining this is what a true software as a service environment really is and really operates. And there's still sort of the benchmark by which I personally, and I think a number of other people compare other SaaS environments against. Doesn't mean that some of the others don't hold up quite well against them. And it doesn't mean by any means that they're the only game in town when it comes to CRM or enterprise, or enterprise software in general. But boy, they, you know, at one point in time I said Microsoft and Google were the two companies I looked at that I would put money down at 10 years from now. They'll still be a major, major play. Now I would include Amazon in that picture. I'd probably push Google down a little bit. Although they're getting their legs back again, so they'll be back. But I put Salesforce in that place. I'd say Microsoft, Salesforce and Amazon, those are the three companies. At 10 years from now. You do have a lot of great technology. They obviously had a blowout quarter yesterday, right? So I could be wrong, and I may change my mind about this. But in reality right now, their business is still largely VMs. And I think they have yet really to prove themselves as sort of having defined a space in the cloud space that really makes them a marquee player. Do you think they can move up the stack? I mean, that's obvious. Well, they're going to do that with Cloud Foundry. I think Cloud Foundry. And socialcast. Cloud Foundry, in my opinion, will probably change that story. The one thing they have in their arsenal, in my opinion, that will really change the story for them in cloud is the success of Cloud Foundry and their ability to build a business around Cloud Foundry. I think it's a little early to declare victory there though. But it was a very phenomenally smart risk for them to do Cloud Foundry. Yeah, it's interesting about this discussion about platforms as a service and the SaaS integration and this rise of really these developers who have just become such a force in building ASPE. They're independent or folks who hack after work and stuff like that. That just, isn't that what's... That's the driver, isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah, I've got to say, this may be one of the first real movements where startup success with a new approach has put significant pressure on enterprise. If you look at a lot of what happened with web in the early days in client server, it was the success of enterprises and beginning to really identify how to use hyperlinking, how to use client server, right? Those things generally came out of the overall enterprise world trying to solve problems for the enterprise and then they bled out into, hey, wow, this creates a whole new marketplace for websites. In a lot of ways, I think this, when you look at cloud, the phenomenal success of startups in the cloud space has really opened the eyes of the enterprise world to what's possible outside of their own four walls and the enterprises are now struggling to get to the point where they understand how to address that and how to take advantage of the same things. You see it in big data already. I think there's been a lot of success in big data and a lot of enterprises beginning to understand that there's value there to be had. Infrastructure service to a certain extent for certain types of apps, but I think that we're seeing, we're going to see an explosion from enterprise of beginning to understand what it means to them, to be able to be very component-based in the approach to AT, very application-focused rather than server-focused in the way they do things. And yeah, it's all about the little developer, developers of the new king makers. I think Stephen O'Grady says that, right? Yeah, Stephen O'Grady says that, yeah. And I think that- I think it's right. I think that that's absolutely true in the cloud because cloud is an application-centric operations model like we were talking about earlier, not a server-centric operations model. So you made the move from Citrix to a startup. How are you enjoying it? Actually, I was Cisco. Cisco, excuse me. I mixed the Citrix and Cisco up, I'm sorry. Not really, I mix them up. But you know, Cisco, how is that transition? Well, I've worked for startups before. I like the somewhat established startup culture quite a bit. So I'm having a blast. This is a really good time. I'm doing what I want to do. I'm focusing on the problems I want to focus on. I have the opportunity to make this work by having some real strong say in terms of how things turn out. I'm excited about that. I think there are things about large companies, about the resources that are available, about the benefits and those kinds of things that certainly are very strong pros on their side. But the ability for me to go and make a couple of phone calls and sit down with the person who's going to make a decision about a key part of our user interface or whether or not we should integrate with a certain partner and being able to say, here's my argument for why we should or shouldn't do it. And have that be acted on is phenomenal. And at a company like Cisco, you have to spend some time setting up a major decision before it gets taken on. So this is the great thing about startup life that I'm really enjoying right now. And hopefully it won't be a startup life for long. And you're spending most your time in the valley then? No, I actually work from home quite a bit, which is really nice. What about your talking and spending most of your time in the region? But I spend most of my time in the Bay Area right now, although the company's based in Minneapolis, so I go there occasionally, going there tomorrow and it's going to freeze for a couple of days. And then, we're expanding worldwide. We've got the New Zealand development offices in place. We're going to open up some development offices in other countries soon. And we live online. We know how to do this as a company. Everybody is really enjoying the culture that we have. And so we intend to continue doing that. And the California office will grow as well. And eventually, we may do office buildings, who knows. But at this point in time, our offices. But at this time, we're very much being very agile and it's fun. It's a good time. Well, James, it's great to see you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure as always. You're going to keep blogging though, right? Oh yeah, I'm blogging on Gagum now. And so you can find me just about every other week on average on the Gagum Cloud coverage. And I'm going to start my own personal blog again here pretty soon so people can watch me on Twitter, James Zerkert on Twitter. And when that launches, I'll be talking a lot about the science of complex adaptive systems and how that applies to cloud computing, which is all about how things can survive in a changing environment and how developers can help them do that. And yeah, I love blogging. That won't stop anytime soon. It's how you learn, right? It's how you learn. Well, it's one way you learn, yeah. It's how you learn, yeah, exactly. Well, good. Thanks, man. We'll have a good trip. Thanks, I appreciate that. Talk to you soon.


So we played this game at review con called space cube. So this game is called sidereal confluence training and negotiation in the Elysian Quadrant. Now the story that was told to me about this game. I don't know if it's true or not, but I totally believe it is that someone was trying to make a big four five X game like you know master varian eclipse situation and they ended up making so much game. But then in the revision phase, they wisely trimmed away because that's what makes things good is remove all and remove all the cruft and so you get the pure magical essence and apparently they removed everything from the game, the combat, everything except for this one part of the game where you deal with space trading of cubes and machines and stuff and this free trading mechanic and removed all the other X parts of the game. So on the super, super high level, everyone has a unique asymmetric character with its own nonsense. Right.  I don't want to let me let this be a video game. I don't want to have to learn all this while you're reading it.   I can't play nerdy games like this anymore. I'm not in high school. The other I see is that the game starts getting unpacked. All these cards start coming out. There's like a million cards with a million symbols and in pile of cubes and I'm like, oh my God, and the fascinating thing about this game and before we move any further game wasn't bad. I had a good time with it. Like don't think that we're about to say this game is bad. No, I'm just telling you what I was feeling at the time as a chronology.  The graphic design has much to be desired and it makes it look like a scary game and I like the thing is a scary game but not nearly as scary as it appears to be. No, that's the thing I'm trying to get at is the game looks way scarier than it really is. If it had a graphic design makeover and shrunk those alien race cards to be a bit smaller because they don't need to be that big and remove some of its heritage of being a space game that was about 4x or whatever, you would actually be able to see what this game is. You know, you can't judge this game by the cover, right? If you made it so you could judge it by the cover, then all those feelings from the start of it would go away and you just have the reality of it, which is it's a lot like just a free trading game. You trade stuff for stuff and see who gets the most victory points at the end. That's it. That's really all there is to it. So thus the very fascinating things about this game was that once we learned the core mechanics, which took a while, I'm very much reminded of the concept of naive art when there is a known craft with its own sort of assumptions and best practices like knitting or whatever. So it is entirely possible for someone who has never studied knitting, never read a knitting book, but has simply enjoyed the knitting of others and just started on their own learning how to knit. They might make perfectly great things, but they might do things in ways that would seem weird to someone who has more like domain knowledge of the craft. Yeah, because they don't know they're not learning from the past. They're just trying to learn on their own and rediscovering everything that has already been learned. And I don't know if that's what happened with this game, but quote 90 or does any form of visual art that is created by a person who lacks the form of education training the professional undergoes blah, blah, blah, but it feels like that's what this game is in the sense that the mechanics it has are not that far from mechanics that I am well used to in just my general board gaming experience and anyone who plays Euro games has encountered time and time again, but the way they are presented the way they are explained the proper nouns all those things made them alien to me until it was explained though the things are not called what I expect them to be called mechanics that I would expect to be explained simply or explained in great depth but end up being the simple mechanic I didn't expect them to be things like that. The other fascinating thing is that this game, the individual cards like the player boards give very specific advice on how you should play that character. And it was very not right advice.  Oh, okay. That's an advice you could actually follow. So you know what I did? I did nothing but get the cubes to fuel that machine and make sure that I fueled it every single round no matter what. So basically almost one. So here's how the game works, right? Is you basically have these cards and each card is a machine and it has a cube that goes in and cubes that come out. So you have my I'm just going to make up a machine off my head because I can't see any right now. I'm looking for one. Yeah. Blue cube comes in and purple cube and a victory point come out. That's actually a way good machine. Yeah. It's like, you know, this victory point is rare. Yeah. Victory point is super rare.  And what you'd really like to do is use every machine every turn. That would be ideal, right? Because every machine outputs more than you put into it. Yeah. There's no machine that is not beneficial to run, right? So you want to run every machine you can to basically increase your economy, get more stuff. If you have more stuff, you can do more stuff. If you can do more stuff, you can get more victory points and win, right?  They just spit out cubes for nothing. Also, every round, there's this sequence where you... I think I had some planets that I had actually had to put a cube on. Really? I didn't. Yeah. Anyway. I think I did. Anyway. I kind of remember this game was, I got to look at my phone. I took pictures of my board. Anyway, there's also a phase every round where you secretly do a simultaneous reveal of stuff to try to win new planets with ships or something. Yeah. There was a moderate amount of drama there that I actually did enjoy too. Yeah. But in the end, the main part of the game is there's a phase in which you freely trade stuff with everybody. You can make deals for the future. You can do a completely free trading, even more than Traders of Genoa. You can just trade whatever. You can do like multiplayer trades. Like, I'll give you four cubes. You can lend... Each of you give me one of these cubes and then I'll do this. You can trade planets. You can lend someone a machine for a turn that you then get back. You can... There's a one character as wild cubes that no one else has. They can trade those. It's like, you can trade your ships. What's funny is no one wanted his wild cubes. Like, no one needed them ever. No. You can trade friggin anything for anything. So you basically, what you do is you assign all the cubes you have to your machines to say, aha, this is how many machines I can run. Then you look and you say, well, I can run that machine if I had one more blue cube. You look at the cubes you're not using. And you say, hey, who wants to trade me a blue cube for these cubes I'm not using. And maybe someone else has a blue cube they're not using. And now both of you end up running more machines if you make the trade and so on. So every turn you're trying to make trades to run as many machines as you can. And then you try to get stuff in the auctions in the buying phases. But what you're actually trying to get, the only thing you are judged on in the end are these purple victory points. And there are not many ways to get them. The main way to get them is to discover new sciences. And what are new sciences? They're really just machines, right? There's a stack of cards. There's some weird mechanics around them though. If I was going to design a game like this, I would probably get rid of that and let it just be the core machines and not this somewhat complicated science. But anyway, the way to get the most points is to basically discover these science cards, right? And when you discover a science, you get this new machine because you discovered some science and then you get to use it. And then the next turn, everyone else gets that machine too, right? So you get the exclusive right to use it for a turn and then everyone else gets to start using it the turn after. However, that might not seem like, well, why would I discover this science if everyone else gets to use it? I'll just one turn later.     You got a lot of points if you discover.  The other thing is that to discover these sciences, you need to have a lot of cubes that are all the same kind.  I was making a lot of green cubes. Yeah, but like to get at some of the sciences, it was like, you need 12 blue cubes. And I'm like, ah, I got a 10 and no one's going to trade me any. Like I was about to get someone to trade me one and they're like, wait a minute. And they didn't trade me because they saw that I would basically win the game if they did that and they were right. Yep. So thus the only real problem I have with this game, because again, the naive aspect doesn't really bother me. That's just sort of fascinating because the game was good. But when we played it, the machine management itself, the solo game of manage my machine, even if there was no trading is actually pretty complex and interesting in its own right. There are also the one interesting thing is that some machines, including your starting ones, could be upgraded, right? Oh yeah, that mechanic. You try it again. You can get victory points for doing that too. So like I don't like burn a science and upgrade in order to upgrade mine. I needed forest planets to like devour. And I was trying to give people to trade me forest. I had a ton of them, but you wouldn't give me enough cubes. I could didn't have enough cubes. Well, that was going to give you my forest planet that gave me free green cubes. Yeah. But you know, you see the idea here and this, the board, my starting suggestions seem to imply that people would totally trade me those and they totally wouldn't know the science upgrade pads are sort of interesting in that they, they give you another route to sort of optimize and build your own world and adjust to the semi randomness that might be coming at you from other players. The other thing is that when you start discovering lots of sciences or other players discover lots of sciences, some of those machine, the sciences, can be upgraded by discarding other ones. So it's like, it's like, I'll give up this machine I never use. And that allows me to flip over this machine and make it better. I upgraded all of my starting machines because I had these weird like double machines. I wanted to because I gave a ton of victory points, but I was only able to do like two out of four, I think, because people wouldn't trade me there. I upgraded mine because it basically like, I started spitting out more medium cubes. It was free medium cubes all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. My ability was that my, if I got a planet from the board, not from trading, but if I bought one in the auction, then basically I, it would be a double planet and spit out double the cubes. And that was crazy, ridiculously powerful, which is why I was trying to win a planet every single turn. Yup. However, my ships were like half power or something because I was the plant people. So I had to get tons of ships and trades with people and then spend them all. See the machine I kept cranking that it told me crank. It gave me a ton of ships every time I cranked it. So I always had a bunch of shifts and pretty much can get whatever I wanted. Anyway, so the other really interesting thing is remember how we said that the game gives very specific advice to the players? The game gives, I've never seen a game give this detail of helpful directional heuristics. It was like a strategy guide. So on every machine there'll be a ratio. It'll be like three to four or three to five or one to two or three and a half to four or three and three quarters to four. The game basically assigns an arbitrary value to everything that can be in the game like every kind of cube. And any machine, it'll give you this number that is a pretty good heuristic or representation of in general how much value add the machine is in an abstract sense. Also on your little player help card. Four to seven machine is definitely giving you more bang for your buck than a six to seven machine. Also on your player help card, there's a little chart that shows you what a fair trade generally is. It's like, oh yeah, trading three small cubes is about equal to a medium cube and like about two medium cubes is about equal. It's like the fanciest octagon cube that I never had to use for. And it's like, it takes, you know, it's like about this many things is worth one victory point. It's like, it tells you in this big long strip what's equal, how many of what is equal to what. And that is so nobody, if you pay attention to that you shouldn't be able to get ripped off because you know what values of things are instead of having to just guess. Like I've seen a lot of people that's good, I think, because first of all, I think you've got to avoid being trapped by that because there's times where it's like, well, I need to make this uneven trade because actually it pays out bigger for me because I can activate one more machine. But also a lot of people who play games with open trading have no idea how to value things at all when there's just free valuing. Now, if it's a relatively simple game, figuring that out is one of the skills of the game. I feel like if I had to figure that out, I just wouldn't have traded with anyone because this game's got so much going on. Yeah. But it's like, you know, people who play games with just like, where they have to value things on their own, a lot of people have trouble with that. Well, I think look at all those people what a fair trade is, protects them from sharky good players trying to rip them off. I think that the majority of games of modern art I've ever played have had at least one player bid more money for a painting than it could possibly be worth in the best possible circumstances. There's literally, I can think of almost no reason you should ever do that. It's like that painting, in a matter of what the draw is, if you get the perfect draw for the rest of the game, that painting will be worth 50. Why are you bidding 60? You're just losing $10. Why would you do this? Yep. You're giving me an extra $10 for nothing. Are you sure? And they're always sure. They always think they got a good plan. I never understood why. I don't, I don't get it. But I've never seen a game give this granular level of like base pricing or base heuristics embedded into the game and coupled with the player advice, which again is shockingly specific. I just don't know. I don't know how I feel about that in the long run. I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad idea. I don't know if it's a sign that maybe the game needs to be more elegant or if it's a way to take a messy game and make it playable with a smaller number of learning games. It's a complicated situation. All I can say is that the name of this game and the graphic design of this game and the heritage of this game make it seem like a scary, scary, complicated 4x space game when in reality it's just a game where you trade cubes, put them in a machine to get more cubes as efficiently as possible to get more cubes and hopefully you have the most victory cubes at the end of the game. And it's a really straightforward kind of game. If you like trading with people and bargaining, then this is the game for you, especially if you like wooden cubes and an outer space theme and asymmetry, a little bit of asymmetry. This game could be way fun for you. It's like, hey, it's not bad. But I think if they fix the graphic design and maybe reduce some of the text on the cards, it would actually be much more approachable. So if you're really in the mood for trading, trade to the Genoa or this. It's hard to say, though, because at the same time, a lot of the clutter on the cards is things like showing you what's on the back of a card that could be flipped or that heuristic, which I feel like without the heuristic, it would take a couple of plays before you could actually play the game.  So there wasn't that much trading.  And Matt gave some good feedback that by the time he had optimized his machine and knew what he wanted to do to trade, everyone else was done trading. It didn't care anymore. Why are you just slow? Matt, I feel like it's more that the machine and the trading are both equal cognitive loads. And unless everyone in the group sets the balance between the two in terms of how they spend their term and around the same place, either some people are never going to get to trade. I think his cognitive load was bigger because his cubes were wild. Whereas I mine was just like, Oh, I have I went basically went down each machine in order of efficiency and power and was like, can I power this one? Yes, I have the cubes for that assigned. And I just went down until, well, I can't possibly power any more machines and I can't possibly get more efficiency out of the machines. Let's look at what I have left and try to trade it to get ships and whatever I need. See, I would look from the perspective of here are things I want to do and here are things I'd like to do. And I would make a short note in my head of the kinds of cubes I need to do the things I'd like to do. And I wouldn't actively try to trade with people. I would listen. And if I heard anyone say the type of cube that I needed for the thing I'd like to do, I would look up and try to make a deal. But otherwise, I ignored what everyone else was doing.  And that was the only time I would actually go up and say, anyone got any green cubes? I need green cubes. Anyone? Any Bueller? Anyone? But I do. I do feel like a problem is if I were trying to play this game more seriously, there's another thing I'd have to take into account, which is the thing you take into account in every other game that allows trading, how close has Scott to winning? Yup. How many points does Scott have? It was very difficult to track the positional heuristic. I wanted to sort of spread my trades evenly, in the game, so that way I wouldn't benefit anyone else more. Because when you trade with someone and you're not getting ripped off, you're basically boosting the two of you ahead of all the other players. So if I trade with everyone evenly, I'm boosting myself, boost, boost four times because four other players But that's not enough. You gotta pay attention. And they're getting boosted once each. Is rim trading with Chris a lot? Because if that's true, you don't want to trade with Chris at all, probably. Because then if you spread evenly, Chris is still plus one. Yup. But there's almost, I don't think there's any way for a human to keep track of that. I could not keep track of who had what points really at all. It was too hard. And plus you keep, you get these victory point chips and keep them secret behind a shield. Yup. So yeah. So what I wonder is the people who are deeply into this game and really focus on the trading, I wonder if they just trade more without considering the true ramifications of their trading. Well, the victory points are behind a shield too. Yeah. Or are they perhaps the kinds of people who might be drawn to this kind of game or graphic design, the kinds of people who will let the game take six hours to ensure that they fully explore the trading and the machining on every turn. Because this feels like the kind of game to where there are people who will play it for six hours and enjoy every minute of those six hours. We played it much faster than that. I could not. If we played it again, knowing the rules now, we could play it much, much faster than it looks like. It looks like again, that will take six hours. We could play it in like one hour and maybe a little more. I think hour and a half, we could crank this game out if everyone already knew how to play. And I didn't have to remember anything and such and such. And everyone is willing to not try to track a true positional heuristic of all the other players because I don't think it's possible. I wonder if you could make the trading more interesting. You couldn't really fully structure it because then it'd be a very different game and it would probably take a lot longer.  Because I know if I could have looked up and seen advertised trades, that might have sped up my own turn. Instead of everyone yelling at each other all the time. But the one thing this game actually got me thinking about was not something I think this game should do, but maybe for a different game. You just talked about the knowing who you're trading with because you don't want to boost the person who's in first along with yourself. You want to trade with people below you or even with you to boost up and catch up to the people who are ahead of you if you're not in first already. Is a game where somehow you could trade but not know who you're trading with. You just see deals and you're going to make them or not make them based on their own merits not knowing who's on the other end and that just some kind of game. I'm sure there might be a game like that, but I've never played it. It would be cool if there was a game like that. Perhaps it could use some sort of market as a middleman to obfuscate who you're trading with or something.  But you still have all the fun of trading and making deals because you'd be like, all right, I'll trade three blue cubes for two greens. And it's no one knows it's you. And anyone who's willing to trade two greens for three blues is looking sees that and is like, hmm. But that also does remove what a lot of people like about these kinds of free form trading games, which is the negotiation negotiation. Well, I think here's the thing. I think if you did this, you could somehow keep the negotiation, right? But by making the recipient of the person offering the trade anonymous, I think you actually flip the negotiation to the other side, right? If I go to you in a game rim and I say, hey, rim, I see you got two greens. I'll trade you one blue for it. What do you do? You go, give me two blue. Yup. Because I'm the one asking and I'm asking you. Well, Yuki, you kept saying, hey, anyone got any forest colonies?  Exactly. As I look at my five forest colonies. Exactly. But now let's say, let's make it suddenly anonymous with this market aspect, right? With some sort of intermediary and all you see out is out on the board the opportunity to trade those two greens for a blue. And maybe someone else sees it too. So suddenly no longer is it, I'm going to give Scott as little as I can for that blue I need. It's now I need to get that blue because someone else is going to take that deal off the board. And now you're suddenly putting three greens or four greens because someone else is going to put in three greens, right? So you just by taking away knowing who the recipient is, you can suddenly it's now more of an eBay situation and less of a give Scott as little as possible situation. Thing is that'd be easy in a video game. That is very difficult to do in a physical game. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Obviously, but that's why I wonder if some sort of player aid, like not a rule, like I don't want to add structure to this. I don't want it to be like reds public. Oh, we're like, I have two blue cubes. Yeah. No. Oh, reds public. And that's right. I have two. I don't want. I don't want that. Yeah. That that was interesting though. But yeah, not that. Yeah. But I really wonder if you put some soft mechanic where there were player aids like a pool of cards or cardboard things where you could basically advertise trades without having to keep yelling at everyone like you have a common area in the middle and I can just put like three advertised trades like I'm willing to trade blue cubes and I like here's three blue cubes and we're willing to trade. There is some physical mechanism for creating a trade advertisement and then you could shuffle them. Yeah. Right.  Oh, I don't even want to shuffle. I don't even care about the anonymous part because even better. You know what? Maybe some of them are yours and you know what? You shuffle them up and you splay them out. Right.  I put down trade one blue for two green. Right. Yeah. Maybe I want to turn a blue into two green. So I put it out there and then I use it. No. I make the deal with myself. But I guess. Oh, but those are my two green. Yeah. Never mind. That's like buying your own stock through scotrade like you're just paying $14. Yeah. But because it is impossible to keep a reasonable positional heuristic in this game on all the other players and you have to just sort of ignore that aspect. I feel like you can avoid the politics situation by just letting it wash over you and focusing on making good machine. That's what I didn't. And focusing on good trades. That's what I did. But then to keep the spirit of the game instead of doing some structural change like you're talking about just having physical implements to be able to advertise trades without having to yell constantly. That would make this game cleaner to play. The only problem with that is that there is no table on earth that will have enough free space for said trade advertisement pieces. This game has got a lot of stuff. It takes up a lot of room. You need a big table. It's going to be cubes everywhere.  Granted it was two three player games and this was one five player game. I do not own or know of a game that I would be willing to play that takes up more table space than this game. I think eclipse takes up more space in this game. I think eclipse might not actually take up more space than this. I think it does. Definitely. Maybe with the science area. Yeah. Eclipse definitely takes up more than this. Of course. I remember the way we got around that is we put the science area on the other side of the room just like on it so you could walk on a second table because eclipse is so big. This game doesn't need a second table.  Yes it was big. But yeah I enjoyed this game despite not expecting to based on my initial impression looking at the rules or the graphics. Yep. I would play the art. The art that is there like not the graphic design but the art the drawings is way good. Also the art of the the proper nouns and the world. I'm not the kind of person who cares about that sort of thing. There is a lot of world building nonsense all over the place. Everything's got proper nouns everything. And the proper nouns are very proper nouny.  Yes because I've never played a free form trading game that has this scale of nonsense to deal with. Then go for this otherwise don't go for this but if you want to trade you can play bonanza or Traders of Genoa. Bust this game out if you've got friends who are a little bit bored of games like Traders of Genoa and have already played a lot of games. This is not a first baby's first board game. No. By any stretch. I am done. But I do want to play it again. I will play it again. I might play it again. I want to play it at least one more time. Sure I could go I could do. This has been Geek Nights with Rym and Scott special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music Cat Lee for web design and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news and more. Remember Geek Nights is not one but four different shows SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays Anime Comic Wednesdays and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows it's actually recorded at night.