Here it is, most diligent of readers, the last segment in my day-long euro game rap with designer Jonny Pac Cantin. I think in this interview, I brought up more games, more mechanisms and ate more food than any of my other interviews. Maybe combined. Stay tuned for end game bonuses, time travel and camels. So many camels.

JPC: TMG [Tasty Minstrel Games]has a new one [Chrono Corsairs] I don’t know too much about. But I know John Brieger and his friend, Vince. I can’t remember Vince’s last name [Hirtzel]. They’re Sacramento, Bay Area guys. It’s some sort of a, I want to say El Grande-ish kind of thing, where you do a dudes-on-a-map, area control thing. And then time travels, or blips into another phase, and there’s temporal remnants of what had gone on there in a different period of time that are affecting playing the game state. Like three times over.

DTD: Like shadows or remnants lingering on the board.

I met John Brieger and played Chrono Corsairs shortly after this, at the GAMA Expo in March. The game is beautiful, and the time travel elements, replaying the day, were very interesting.

JPC: Yeah, something of that sort. Where you tweak the war in this case, and the outcome’s that. Then you go back and relive it, and there’s slightly different outcome. And you kind of Groundhog Day the thing a little bit. So that way you can look at all the tropes – you’ve got the Groundhog’s Day type of time travel, you’ve got the 12 Monkeys kind, you’ve got the…

DTD: The only real one… Primer.

JPC: Primer! Exactly! If you ever see the schematic for Primer!

DTD: Oh yeah, it’s the only movie that needs a full Wikipedia page just to understand it.

JPC: And I still don’t know if it all comes together and ties it off.

DTD: But I don’t know how many times you’ve watched Primer. But one of the main characters has the earbud in his ear the entire movie, which means almost all of that movie is him doing it a second time.

JPC: Oh my gosh, I didn’t notice that.

DTD: Primer is a terrible movie, but it’s what happens if scientists and engineers decide they’re going to make a time travel movie. It’s so… I love the thing, but I will never say it’s a good movie.

JPC: I like how low budget-y and just straight up, and how they’re just talking shop and dead pan about it, going through the motions. I think it’s great.

DTD: No art, just all function.

JPC: Yeah, yeah. Actually, yes. So, in Merchant’s Cove, one of the characters you can play is a time tinkerer type of guy.

DTD: Yeah, a chronomancer.

JPC: So, we knew we were getting into a little bit of deep waters with trying to work with that. So, it being in a fantasy world…

DTD: But it’s one character out of a bunch of characters, so you don’t want to go deep and crazy.

JPC: Yeah, everything in that game is… it’s light enough to be able to interact with the game properly. And so, the idea with that one, is we basically have a Doc and Marty kind of thing, or Rick and Morty type of thing. But it’s skinned more or less as a Gandalf and Hobbit situation. So, in this case, you usually just have 1 piece [pawn] that you move around. You move your pawn and do the thing [action]. The one thing you can’t do on any given turn with any character is the same thing [action]. You gotta go do something else. That’s kind of a fundamental thing [rule]. This particular character has 2 pawns, it’s got the assistant and then the chronomancer wizard. And they are on a rondel that goes around, and they do these actions as they go around this thing [pawn]. And one of the rules is one [pawn] can’t jump ahead of the other, because one [pawn] runs forward and the other one stays behind. So, you are kind of looking at a Murano type thing, where the boats can’t switch it up. You need to work within these margins.

DTD: I was just thinking that. Inka and Markus Brand. Murano.

JPC: Yeah, I know. Those are our guys. And so, we’ve got that going. And then there’s points on each precise side, where we took the freezing time literally. There’s a time freezer, and it’s like a big fridge. So, one of them will go in there and get frozen in time, until the other catches up with it.

DTD: And it’s mandatory?

JPC: It’s mandatory. One [pawn] lets the other out of the freezer. And then you can take frozen hourglasses out and you keep them. So, when you need to pay for time later in the game, you can pay with these little frozen hourglasses. While you are in the time machine, you are sliding tiles through [the rondel]. So you push a tile that you have already seen in your recent past, and you push it through. Then you’ll re-experience it in the rondel as you take the loop again, and as you change times the rondel will revisit a lot of tiles you’ve seen, you’ll visit a lot of tiles you haven’t seen. And as you take them out of this thing, you flip them over and they upgrade, then you put them back into the market [off the board], where you can draft them again. And it’s like, “Haven’t we seen this tile before, except for it’s a little better than it was.” Following the Valletta rule, where every tile on its back side has a precisely better version of the front side. So, you don’t have to keep flipping them around. So, your rondel is generally getting better as you go around the board, and you’re borrowing this time from yourself. And where time fits in beautifully is, it’s a time track game. So, you think of Kraftwagen or something like Tokaido. 

DTD: Village… Inka and Markus Brand.

JPC: But it’s a communal one. So, it’s like the player whose time piece is further back in the mechanism will be the last player and they can pick the turns. In this case, when you get those frozen time pieces out of the freezer, you can cheat it. “I will pay two hours of time”, and instead you turn these frozen hourglasses back to your freezer and effectively your pawn doesn’t move, and you’ve kind of sand bagged.

DTD: It fits the theme, yeah.

JPC: So, that was our push. And one of the first ideas about the 2 pawns not being able to cross each other, is one was supposed to be you and future you, or past you. And you would create a paradox if you to go past each other. But we kind of reworked it, so it’s a nicer system.

DTD: I’m on that Kickstarter. I think I wrote the news story about it when the Kickstarter hit. That’s really a terrible thing about Kickstarter, is having to write the stories. Because then I just back them all.

JPC: Yeah, because you make them sound good.

I always thought it was because of poor impulse control, but I am more than happy to blame it on exemplary writing skill.

DTD: Well, I won’t write the story unless I really read through it and understand everything about how this game is going to work. And by that point it’s like, “Well, now I have to back it. Now I love this game.” [laughs]

JPC: So, when the designer had come up with that particular role, it was a different theme, and it was an investment-type. I think it was a farmer, where you took a pawn and you could either take what it gives you now, or you could delay to get better things as it went down the path. And that part of the inspiration for something like that, was how far do you go down this thing and jump around? There were quite a few iterations of that.

DTD: I really dig… that’s probably my favorite mechanic, is the delayed gratification mechanic. Like Macao has a weird rondel.

JPC: I want to play that. I have it. That was a grail game; I got it.

DTD: That’s a good one. That’s Uwe.

JPC: Feld.

DTD: Feld. Dammit. That’s an old Feld, you’re right. I’ve played it a couple times. I have all the old Felds I think. That’s one of my favorite ones. Merkator was the Uwe one that was an old Uwe that was on my grail list.

For those of you keeping score at home, so far it’s
Jonny – superior board game knowledge
Corey – barely more sentient than a corgette.
Let’s blame it on post-prandial somnolence.

JPC: Oh, yeah you showed me the box for that. That was cool.

DTD: Then Tzolk’in is the best physicality of a delayed gratification game. Because it just inherently makes sense. You need to put your pawn on those little tickers.

In Tzolk’in, you place your wooden markers into divots on the large plastic gears. Each turn, the gears turn, moving your marker to a new, better reward. If you take your marker back, you earn the reward. So the longer you wait, the better the reward.

JPC: Yep, it sure does. I had a thing which got dropped in Coloma, which was you would put your dudes on the cards instead of the cards just being cards. And when you put a dude, you put him on the left spot. And when you activated the card, you return him back to the supply and you do that left spot [action]. And if you waited for the clicker to go around to a certain point, there are 2 distinct spots on that map which would be advance your dudes. And so, everybody’s dudes would click over one spot to the right spot, which did something better and different, perhaps, than the other side. In which case, you could back-fill and start to fill in the front side.

DTD: So, you could have 2 dudes on a card.

JPC: And then when you fire them off, you could have this massive BOOM!

Jonny made the greatest explodey sound. Hand gestures and everything. It was magnificent.

DTD: Lots of things happening. Well that’s pretty cool.

JPC: That made that game considerably heavier. With the actual worker placement on all those cards. And the other thing that game had text on cards. You could do things like, “Search through your deck and find every one that’s a blah blah blah, and stick it on top of this.”

DTD: I hate to say it, but “search through your deck” is one of my least favorite things.

JPC: Me too, me too.

DTD: Especially if it’s “search through THE deck”. I hate that.

JPC: It was fairly specific, in that there was one card in there, the Bell Tower, which is the centerpiece of Placerville. It’s got this big old bell tower in it. It was kind of like the 8-ball in the game; if you get it late in the game and you play it, it’s worth a lot of points. So, there’s a card in there with an option that effectively lets players go and find that if they hadn’t come across it already. And it was good for that. But otherwise, it’s a mechanic that I won’t put in a game anymore. You learn.

DTD: Let’s see, there’s the “look through the whole deck” card. “Look through the discard” isn’t as devastating, and I deal with that fine.

JPC: As long as the discard is small, yeah.

DTD: There’s the “cancel it / no you can’t” card.

JPC: Oh yeah, the veto, and then the veto the veto card.

DTD: Those are terrible.

JPC: Those are bad.

DTD: Oh, and there’s a couple of games recently, that have really gotten me angry, that have a secret thing that happens at the end of the game that can crazy cheese your score.

JPC: Oh, Kingsburg… Cthulhu Kingsburg? Yeah.

The bad thing is Jonny knew exactly which game I was referring to. This means it wasn’t just me.

DTD: Kingsport [Festival].

JPC: Yeah, yeah. That’s the game that did it to me. I almost flipped the table I was so upset. I don’t get mad when I play games. It made me so mad about that stupid…

DTD: Me, too!

JPC: There was a card that penalized me for having all my little discs on the board. And I had done really good getting all these discs and doing all these neat things. And the card said if you have discs on the central spot, lose 3 points per one. And just wiped me. I said, “I didn’t even know that card was in there!” Everything in this game was telling you, “Do this. This is good for you.”

DTD: Then it nailed you, that it was bad at the end. Something similar happened to me. I was doing really well, and the last card was get a gillion points if you specifically had this, this, and this. And the guy next to me did, and so he won.

JPC: So, here’s an interesting take, and you said that you like secret scoring cards and such. I played a game recently, not a great game, called Amazonas. You can get it really cheap, it’s old. You are dealt cards, like route cards, locations, like Ticket to Ride, at the start of the game. And you get from point A to point B, whatever else. And you have to go to these spots. It drives where you are going. And a very, very low scoring game; like we are talking 10 points might win the game. And for each of these zones you don’t meet, you lose 3 points. That’s just it. And enough has got enough of these, so you know everybody starts the game, like 12 points in the hole, let’s just say. Because I’ve got 2 locations on each of these cards, and I’ve got 2 cards. So, what’s interesting about that, is nobody had a card that was going to gain them points at the end of the game.

DTD: It was almost always negative?

JPC: No, because you were getting positive points through just the normal processes. But the game is coming to an end, and I don’t know if you got your routes or not, but I know if I got my routes. So, the asymmetry of the information is, I know I got all my routes, and at the end of the game I’m sitting here, and you’re ahead of me. And so, if I knew that everybody was just getting bonus points for their hidden cards, you’re just going to get further ahead of me, so I know I lost. But I actually don’t know if I lose [in Amazonas], because you might have blown up on all these points, and then you just plummet, so I might still win.

DTD: You might go back.

With negative points on end game goals, I know the maximum score each opponent may have, instead of the minimum. Psychologically very different.

JPC: So, psychologically it kept me engaged until the reveal, versus games like [The Voyages of] Marco Polo or something, where you disengage at a point because you go, “No matter what, I know I’ve maxed. I did or didn’t meet my goals; this is how far my margin is. If I add that [number] to it, this person is only going to go further.”

DTD: But it’s not all that different from if you met your goals and I didn’t. It’s kind of the same.

JPC: But the difference is what I know, versus what you don’t know.

But I know that you know that I know. And you don’t know that.

DTD: Well if you are behind me, then if you had got a lot more goals than I did, you might know if you can get to my current position, but beyond that, if you can get ahead of me, you’ve got a chance if I didn’t get anything.

JPC: Or you’d fall back below my position if it was penalizing enough. So, to me, if you deal somebody hidden goals at the start of the game, I feel like you should almost make them strictly penalties for not doing something. Where, if they are potentially good things, it’s just more on that sort of thing. People say, “Well, you don’t know if you’re going to win until the end of the game.” I’m like, “No, I know I lost.”

DTD: But a lot of them have ridiculous amounts of end game points. Like the end game points are equal to the in-game points. In which case, you could be anywhere in that range, so it’s still random if you got enough to get way better than how much I got, even if I started ahead of you.

JPC: Yeah, depends on the margin. Because it could be equal, could be less. Like we talked about Carcassonne, where the field points could be more than the entire endgame period.

DTD: And it seems more games have that than not. Most games that have end points have a crazy amount of it. And there’s a little bit of points during the game, which seem almost inconsequential.

JPC: I mean there’s kind of 3 tiers of it. We could look at Egizia, in the game you are getting points in real time as you do things. I did this, I get points, you move your piece. Then there’s goals that happen periodically. When a row on the pyramid is full, the person with the most bricks there gets this bonus. Then there’s endgame things; The person with the most bricks in the pyramid total gets this endgame bonus. And there’s one more type, which is these hidden cards that you acquire during the game, that will get you this many points if you did A, B, and C. And if you kind of look at the psychology of all these different things, you can watch this happen in real time, you can observe that this will be tagged on inevitably at this point, because those things are starting to become more crystallized; Jockey for position on those points, then give up on them or not. And then you have this other thing going, like “Dude, he’s got 8 face down cards over there, and I’ve got 2.” And then flip, flip, flip, and then Boom! “Dude, you’ve been in back the whole time!”

DTD: And now I’m not.

JPC: And then there’s some things that, what about somebody who at some point in the game already has a fairly average or robust game state, and they pull a card out. The likelihood that it is auto-filled, because it met all these [conditional] things, is great. Then you go, “Oh cool, 8 points for having 4 buildings. I already had 4 buildings, so I just drew 8 points.” Versus getting them earlier in the game, where you look at this, and go, “I need to sacrifice, and I need to work for this.”

DTD: Now, I’m not a huge fan of the penalty for not fulfilling the card you got.

JPC: If it’s, again, randomly drawn I think that’s a little mean. But if it’s way up on the front end of the game, like Amazonas, we are all having equal spots.

DTD: That’s OK, but these endgame scoring things, where you can get more and all that. I’m not thrilled about penalty for… You get +5 for doing it, but -2 for not. 

JPC: Yeah, yeah, because that’s such a huge… That’s what I was talking about with the zero dice thing. Zero is bad enough. Punishment, like negative, on something is even worse than the feeling of failure you get as punishment on top of not getting your potential. Well, -5 if you do, +5 if you don’t, you go, “This is a 10-point card, depending on how it shakes.” It’s never a 5-point card, although it appears to be. I wonder about if there is… There’s probably games out there, and maybe I’m not thinking of them, if you were to get game state scoring cards that perhaps showed a roman numeral 3-round game, and if I draw this card and cash it in on the third round, it’s worth fewer points than had I done that earlier.

DTD: I have definitely played games where the amount of points you get is the most, the earlier you fulfill it.

JPC: Castles of Burgundy kind of had something like that.

DTD: A little bit. But I’m thinking one of the Pfister Games. There’s something I played recently where it was pretty difficult to fulfill these cards, but they were worth more points the earlier you fulfilled them.

JPC: That kind of scales to that problem, where you can’t just luck into them late-game, when you have the most robust economy, and the best game state, where you just go, “Bing, got it! Ha-ha.”

DTD: And they also have to be specific enough for it, so it’s actually pretty difficult to randomly just nail it.

JPC: I mean the ones where you need to actually deposit a… Spending the goods means you need to have an excess of goods, and if you have a ceiling of those things, then that’s probably OK. Yspahan or something, it says “turn in camels for victory points at this ratio”. Sure, you got the card, but you also need the camels to do it. And most likely you aren’t just sitting around with a surplus of camels collecting…

DTD: Just collecting them like crazy.

JPC: My game has camel meeples, it’s a great game.

DTD: Camel meeples always make a great game. There’s no exceptions. At all. I’m going to go with that. It’s a guarantee. It’s driving me crazy what this game was; I remember it had 3 distinct eras, or phases, or rounds, or whatever you want to call it. And the points definitely dropped depending when you fulfilled your quests.

Quote me on this. Successful games always have camels. It might be subtle, but theres always camels in there, doing their camely thing.

JPC: Well the biggest one, which is the game almost, would be Cavern Tavern from Final Frontier. You get a card and then you time stamp the clock, and each hour that has gone by, you get worse and worse and worse rewards.

DTD: Actually, I really liked that. What I did not like on Cavern Tavern was the specificity of the dice. There were a lot of spaces that weren’t “You need 2 or higher”, or you need this. They were “You need a 3.” And if you don’t have it, you’re done.

Also, no camels. Not one hump.

JPC: Something I missed in the first half of that game; I believe you can sum dice. You can take a 1 and a 2 and make a 3. And I think I missed that. And I felt like getting a natural role of a crucial ingredient was more difficult than it should have been, instead of a spectrum, like you were talking about. Greater than, less than.

DTD: Because of that group of games, Cavern Tavern I thought had neat ideas, but it didn’t grab me hard. Rise to Nobility I liked quite a bit, but that is so hard to teach. It’s got a gillion intertwined mechanisms, and you can’t start with any one of them, because they all depend on each other. I mean, you can say you get this resource there. But now it gets weird.

JPC: Yeah, there’s some fascinating things with that game. I mean the basic idea is you can spend dice up to this pip value in sums, and it’s cool. But then the game is fairly complex. And there were systems when we saw it, and we looked at it. This boat can hold 12 dice or something on there, and we said, “There’s no way we’d even put 2 dice on that boat!” And then there’s this track, and it says if you’re way up on this track you can do this [action] thing and unlock this little [bonus] thing. And we were like, “We are miles away from that. We will never get there and see that.” There’re all these things where we just thought we will never do this. And an hour and a half later…

DTD: You’re there.

JPC: This is the coolest mechanic in the game and you’re all over it, and to realize the apparent value of these things won’t be realized for about an hour and a half. The second half of the game, in a 3-hour game, you’re going to love that they are there, and be totally invested in them. And to think about the design process of going, “Not a legacy game, not a campaign game, just to have the mechanics sitting there on ice in front of everybody. Don’t worry about that. Trust me, later you’ll be knee deep in that and you’ll be all about it.” And that was cool, because it meant they didn’t just playtest the first half hour, and go, “Rinse. Repeat. Do this for 4 rounds, then score up your points.” It had this arc that these tertiary systems become primary systems way down the road.

DTD: There’s a lot of games where you can tell the timing of the game was there in order to defeat an inevitable power creep. Like, “This game is 6 rounds long. And you can see that if you went a seventh round, everything would be meaningless.”

JPC: It would explode.

DTD: And it’s the other neat mechanism to do: is you have another set of things to do when these become meaningless. So that was pretty cool.

JPC: That is actually a pretty cool thing, because that’s true. Even if I’m teaching people a design seminar at protospiel, talking about the multiple paths to victory thing. Just imagine somebody who does the most obvious action, and it’s a safe one. Then you have the guy who decides to build an engine, but in so doing has to go, “Here. Zip.”, and make the game end at the convergence of that. If that means 6 rounds until that converges, it’s going to be a 6-round game. And if it’s a seven-round game, the guy sand-bagging an engine is just going to skyrocket, and he will always win. And if it’s any sooner, the other guy will just Hail Mary to catch up with the tortoise. That’s definitely something to be conscious of, is that games do have a [time] window. And to play to that window, work the math to that window.

DTD: I feel that a lot of games have unfortunately a window that’s like half a round. So, you can play these games and it feels like, “You know, this game went just a tad too long, you know. That last round everything was a little too crazy.” I run into that a significant amount of time.

JPC: Then there’s if you’re really good at it, a game always feels like it’s cut short, versus…

DTD: But there’s some really good games that are like that. They’re really tight, and really short, and you go, “Man! I just built up everything. That next round would have been awesome!” But you also kind of know that next round would have been so overpowered and crazy. A lot of the engine builders have to do that because they have exponential growth.

JPC: Right, sure. You want to see your engine fire off, like twice, to get the feeling of it. And then shut ‘er down. But, there’s some other ones where, without a linchpin move, that somebody might have been cut off. They go from 5 points, and “Had I done this, this would have filled this, would have filled this. I would have had 50 points.” And so, it’s not the ones where, “I would have had enough to make the margin, and just barely beat you.” It’s the one from going where I look pathetic, to looking competent, had I had that round. And you have to psychologically tell everybody else what you would have done on that last round, had you done it. And where it would have filled in, and you actually would have been here. And kind of steal the glory from the victor. “Technically if I had 1 second, and I had not done that one thing a round ago… I did this, because I did not anticipate the end, I would have been nipping at your heels.”

I think this is a psychological necessity of playing an engrossing game. You need to narrate the play-by-play of what you would have done if there had been just one more round.

DTD: Well, I think you want people to get that sense that everything they’re doing is just mind-blowingly cool. And there’s a lot of ways to get that. Like, [Voyages of] Marco Polo put in amazingly overpowered characters. But they’re all amazingly overpowered, and somehow, they don’t break the game. But it is just so cool. It is a dice drafting game, and one of the guys’ powers is just, “set your dice to anything you want”.

JPC: It’s just how much you want to pay for it. Because there’s other systems in place that balance those. OK, well sixes are better than ones. Well, but they also cost more than ones.

In Marco Polo, you can place your die on a space already occupied by another player. But you need to pay money equal to the pip value of your die. So to play a fantastic 6 costs you 6 money, but that lowly one only costs a buck to play.

DTD: And it’s got that neat system of piling the dice and paying for it, which was pretty cool.

JPC: And Marco Polo II, played that one as well.

DTD: Two? It’s one point five. In Marco Polo one, travel was ridiculously difficult, and you really had to focus on it at the expense of other stuff, and I think it was a smart move to underplay travel in Marco Polo II. That was a good move.

JPC: Yep, opened up the board a little more. And get the people those bonuses.

DTD: The extra resources were nice, and the rotating market was nice. Those were cool ideas. You play Gùgōng?

JPC: I love that game.

DTD: It’s pretty cool, but man, that game broke my brain.

JPC: Really? [laughing]

DTD: The first time I played it, I might have told you this, I played half or three-quarters of the game, and then went, “I’ve got a great engine that generates zero points. But it’s really fun. So, I’m going to lose bad, but this does nothing for the rest of my game.” But it was really cool just to play with all the cards.

JPC: Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

DTD: The card thing is really nifty.

JPC: The cards are great. And I guess, like Hadara, some people could gripe that you did see the cards earlier, I saw you pick it up, I guess I could memorize what’s in your hand. But I don’t think that’s in the spirit of what’s going on. You just need to…

DTD: Except for little exceptions, like I know you’ve got the really low card, or you’ve got the really high card.

In Gùgōng, action spaces have face up cards. To use a space, you need to place a better, higher card, taking the original into your hand. There’s also a way to replace the highest cards with a very low card again.

JPC: You watch a spot, and you go, “I just hope somebody takes that and tips it over, so it goes back low, and then Ill get back in there.” And you just wait for that to happen.

DTD: And that double gold thing is really neat. The double cube. That’s a cool idea. I got a kick out of that.

Simple idea. Gùgōng comes with a double gold cube, the size of two wooden cubes glued together. It acts as two cubes, but also has special board spaces just for it.

JPC: I did too. I enjoyed that. Again, I like the little micro-games. I like Trajan, stuff like that, or Village. You’ve got these little spots you can visit and do different things at.

DTD: A lot of different things going on.

JPC: That mechanic drove it, and it was fast.

DTD: Ours was long. When I played, I played 5 people, and it went like 3 hours plus. But we had a lot of thinky, thinky people. And it was two in the morning when we started. So, it was one of these convention plays. And I have since bought it, and I haven’t played my copy yet. I’ll probably pull it out again soon, but the expansion is just about to deliver. I kind of want to play with that.

JPC: Yeah, I didn’t get the deluxe edition. I missed it. I did the deluxe expansion, so I have to wait for the retail version of the expansion, which is due out sometime later this year.

DTD: Yeah, I thought there was some sort of kit to deluxify your Kickstarter. I bought something, because I have the normal retail Gugong, and I did something with the Kickstarter for the expansion to deluxify. I’m a sucker for extra bits and toys.

JPC: One of my friends has the deluxe one. It was pretty crazy, little metal first player marker.

DTD: I don’t want to know too much; in case I don’t get it. I don’t want to know too much.

JPC: I like that game a lot. It’s a good designer. You good?

I peeked at my phone, mostly because it gave me an odd message. But I was taken aback that 5 hours had gone by, and I think Jonny was a little shocked as well. Honestly, it went by like a flash, and I wasn’t looking for an excuse to go, but all good things must end.

DTD: I think we are good. I saw a weird EMail, so I just wanted to see if it was actually important or not. The answer is “not”, because the answer is always “not”.

And so ends the longest interview I have done, but more importantly one of the most fun. I could sit and sip tea and talk shop with Jonny all day long and longer. I truly hope I get the opportunity to do just that soon. It is one of those jokes of destiny that soon after this day, the world fell apart, and I need to wait a bit longer to hang with JonnyPac again.