In this episode of Rule Breaker Investing, David Gardner returns with Volume 11 of one of our OG episodic series: Mental Tips, Tricks & Lifehacks. He shares seven small ideas that punch above their weight: from a clever $10 household fix, to a mindset shift borrowed from Kevin Kelly, to dialing down big ambitions into “little bets” that actually get done. Oh, and some recent board game picks!
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David Gardner: How do you decide which AI stock to look into and on which ones to take a pass? What do you believe that most people don't believe? And can you do this trick that apparently 25% of Americans can, but 75% cannot, and it just takes one afternoon to learn. It provides you a lifetime of entertaining little kids. It's worth it. It's time for the 11th episode and one of my favorite recurring series on Rule Breaker Investing. That's Mental Tips, Tricks and Lifehacks Volume 11 this week, only on Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. A delight to have you joining with me this week. We're going to have some fun together. Let's get smarter, shall we? It's the latest. It's Number 11 in our historical running series of Mental Tips, Tricks and Lifehacks. The series started with Volume 1 on June 15, 2016. The most recent was November 2024. I counted them up. In the history of this series, I've now shared 74 Mental Tips, Tricks, and Lifehacks over 10 previous episodes with pretty much no repeats. If you find your curiosity sparked by anything I share with you this week, and you want to go back and check out that series, well, www.rulebreakerinvesting.com has a pretty great tab. It's the podcast tab up top on that page. If you click it, you'll be dropped into a page that has all of my previous Mental Tips Tricks and Lifehacks episodes listed, in order, which is a lot easier than going back through Apple Podcasts, Google, or Spotify and trying to locate an episodic series. One of the great things about rulebreakerinvesting.com is that podcast tab. Whether it was last week with my Blast From the Past or other recurring series, they're now all conveniently organized for you if you want to go back and binge listen to any of these series, including this one. Also "Games, Games, Games" doesn't have to be just once a year on this podcast for December.
What are some recent board game recommendations I have for your summer for games that have come to my table repeatedly in recent months? Before we get started, let me ask, are these Earth-shattering, life-improving, unforgettable tips? Absolutely not. Maybe in some cases, but these are mainly just hacks. A lot of Lifehacks. This series is designed to make life more elegant, fun, and navigable. I'm coaching you very explicitly here. Like any good life coach might too, I'm aiming most of all, for your success. These are things that have worked for me that I hope work for you, too, and they can be quite small. By the way, like in Volume 3 from March 2017, when I suggested you stop taking elevators most of the time. You're going to get where you want to go quicker. If you just take the steps, you're going to get more healthy steps in if you stop taking elevators.
Obviously, if you have luggage or a huge climb, feel free to take the elevator. All that and 73 more in the past, but that was then, and this is now. Let's just about get started. But before we do, I just want to mention that I grew up with someone from the age of 4. We went to nursery school together. I've admired him throughout my whole life. He's one of those people who is just a winner, somebody who went to Yale University, played basketball there himself, got a Harvard MBA, has gone on to do good things in this world. He's running his own not-for-profit. It's called Management Leadership for Tomorrow. I'm referring to my friend John Rice. I knew John when I was 4-years-old, and here I am at 59, and I was so delighted. He was standing there wearing a UCLA uniform, number one on the front because his daughter, Kiki Rice was on the national championship-winning women's basketball team this past weekend, playing point guard for UCLA in her final year. She's probably headed to the WNBA next. But I don't think John listens to my podcast, but I just want to give a shout out, because how proud am I to have known John and his family? I haven't spent a lot of time with Kiki. I think I've watched her on television more than I've seen her in person. But it's just a reminder to me it's so true of the stock market, as well. It's a phrase I use a lot drawn from sports. In fact, I say things. You've heard me say this before. I say things like, "What do winners do?" The answer is winners win. They don't win every time, but they consistently win.
One of the harmful bad disclaimers, you'll see anywhere is on financial television. You hear it all the time on CNBC, past performance is no guarantee of future results, and it's repeated constantly in many different forums. And that is almost always exactly the opposite of how you should be thinking about life. Past performance is maybe the single best indicator we have of future performance. You have to disclaim financially that you can't expect the results from that fund or that stock in the following five years that you got over the previous five years. But in my experience, what do winners do? Winners continue to win, and I congratulate the Rice family, especially Kiki, on a fantastic blowout win over South Carolina, winning the National Championship.
Let's get started with this week's podcast. Mental tip, trick or lifehack Number 1. This one is a mental tip. If you've read my book Rule Breaker Investing, this one might sound familiar, but under the assumption that not everybody hearing me right now in the podcast this week has yet read Rule Breaker Investing. I'm always trying to get these ideas out to the broader world. Anyway, I want to go over my two simple tests I like to apply before I buy a Rule Breaker stock. I had the pleasure of being on a Korean YouTube channel that will air in the coming days or weeks. But I recorded that yesterday with a wonderful host. It was in support of Rule Breaker Investing, which has come out in a Korean edition. So he's a big fan of the book, and we talked about the book. But he asked me near the end, with a lot of AI stocks coming out these days and more coming in future, how do you know which ones to pick? I said, "I'm glad you asked because everyone is talking about AI, and mostly should be. It's very understandable that you get excited about the possibility of investing part of your NASDAQ into this new industry, this plate tectonic shift in technology, the many industries that will be spawned by artificial intelligence". "How do we know which ones," he asked, "To pay attention to and which ones not." I said, "Let me tell you about my snap test."
Mental tip trick or life hack Number 1 is the snap test and the cola test. I did this for him, and I'm going to do this for you right now in case you don't want to watch me on Korean YouTube. Here's the snap test. If you snapped your fingers and the company that you're looking at, the stock you're researching disappeared overnight. Would anyone notice the next day would anyone care? That is the snap test. It was made, especially famous by Thanos, the Marvel villain who snapped his fingers and caused half of all existence, including many superheroes, to disappear at the end of one of Disney's great Avengers movies. But imagine if the stock you're researching, in this case, we'll just say the AI company that you're looking at. Imagine if they disappeared. Would there be national headlines the next day? Or just within the industry itself, would people be a buzz? Let me add this in, too. Would they be deeply upset? Because all of a sudden, some capability or possibility has gone away altogether.
You want to be generally researching stocks and thinking about putting your own money into companies that pass the snap test. Lots of people would notice, and many people would care. In fact, I strongly suggest that that is what explains most of the great stocks of any given era, the companies that do such purposeful work, that reach so many people that add value to the world, to the lives of those of us buying the products and services of those companies. The great stocks are always going to pass the snap test. If you want to know right away, which AI stocks to think more about and which ones to ignore, I've just put forward to you my snap test, and let me close it out with the cola test because these two things are related, but they're separate.
They each work on their own. It's kind of about testing your gut and seeing what the world thinks of the company you're looking at. You already know the snap test? Here's the cola test. If the stock or company you're looking at in artificial intelligence or any other industry, if that company were Coca-Cola, that is, they are the dominant brand. Everyone knows Coca-Cola worldwide. We've heard of it. And is that company the Coca-Cola of its industry? If it were, can you find a Pepsi-Cola? Is there another analog to what that company does? Is there an evident competitor? Does somebody else provide a similar product or service, maybe not quite as great or as well branded, but maybe, hey, tastes a lot alike. Is there a Pepsi cola in that company's industry? Companies that pass my cola test, you can't find any Pepsi-Cola. When we're looking at that company, there is no clear competitor.
Across Rule Breakers that I talk about all the time on this podcast over many years, many examples come to mind, but I'll just give a quick one right now, Intuitive Surgical, which is the worldwide leader in robot-assisted surgery. They are definitely the Coca-Cola of their industry, and I challenge you to find any well-known, well-resourced branded company that is anywhere close to Intuitive Surgical when it comes to robot-assisted surgery, which, by the way, is the future of surgery. In fact, it's not the future. It's the present. It's happening and has been happening for the last couple of decades. This has been a 100-bagger stock for Rule Breaker listeners and members, one for me personally, and it's a great example of a company that brilliantly passes the cola test.
Now you know how I would decide which AI stocks we want to look at in the future and which ones we want to ignore. The ones that pass the snap test, if they disappeared, snap, would anyone notice, would anyone care and the cola test. If they are the Coca-Cola, are you unable to find a Pepsi-Cola rival? Those two simple tests taken together help me save a ton of time whenever I'm doing stock research, looking truly for the Rule Breakers, the great stocks of any generation. This one included Mental tip Number 1, snap, cola. Let's go on to Number 2. Number 2 is a trick. This one is pretty quick. I can get this one across very quickly. I've had a long-time frustration in my household. Admittedly, I don't do nearly as much housework as other members of my household.
I think most of all of my hardworking, amazing dear wife, who does a lot more around the house than I do. But one of the things I've tried to do over the years and be helpful is put dishes in the dishwasher. But are you like me? Sometimes you don't know whether the dishes already in the dishwasher are clean, just sitting in there having recently been cleaned or whether they're the dirty ones where you can just drop your coffee cup, your used coffee cup right in along with them. I'm quite sure some of you have already figured out this trick. But I was this many years old 59 when I finally discovered, thanks to a talented daughter-in-law of mine, who has a good eye for things, when I finally discovered that for $10, you can go onto Amazon and you can buy a magnet that you affixed to your dishwasher, especially if it's metallic, and the magnet has a slider that either has the word clean exposed or you can flip the slider across it, at which point on the other side, the word dirty emerges. All you're doing is you're toggling clean or dirty with a little sign that's on your dishwasher. I wish I'd known about this I don't know, maybe 50 years ago or 40 or 30 or but I only just found out about it recently. If you're just finding out about this for the first time and you find yourself similarly confused and frustrated in your own circumstance, I highly suggest you take me up here on Trick Number 2 and pay 10 bucks for the clean, dirty magnet that is so awesome and easily obtainable on amazon.com.
Let's move on to Number 3. Number 3, I'm going to call this one a life hack. It is admittedly, there's a lot of overlap between mental tips, tricks and Lifehacks. By the way, maybe I should define my terms briefly. I view a mental tip as a mindset shift that's designed to improve your thinking. When I think about these things, and I go over my list of seven, I'm like, Is that a mental tip? Is that a mindset shift designed to improve your thinking or is it a trick, which I'll define as a clever shortcut that elegantly achieves a result, which is exactly why I called Number 2, the clean/dirty magnet a trick because it's a clever shortcut that elegantly achieves a result.
Finally, I think we all know what Lifehacks are, but a practical technique that maybe simplifies your daily tasks, makes your life more manageable. Those are the terms. I probably should have defined them up front. But I think, Number 3, I think it's a life. It's this question that I find myself fascinated by. I've been asking it loud on this podcast the last few years, but I've never included it in this series. I found myself asking it of Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired Magazine, who joined us just two months ago this week on this podcast. We had such a delightful conversation about the future. Kevin is my favorite of all the futurists. Here's the question that we kicked around.
What do you believe that most people don't believe? I put this forward to you as a life hack because in my experience, that is a wonderful question. You can pull out at various different contexts or moments and really spark some interesting conversations. Could be around a campfire, could be at the office water cooler, could be at a cocktail party. What do you believe that most people don't believe. Talk about going one level deeper for almost any conversation, but not too deep. This is not an alarming question, I don't think, to ask. It's a very thoughtful question to answer. On the podcast two months ago, Kevin took it up a notch farther. He said the question he likes to ask is, what do you believe that most peers of yours, whom you respect don't believe. Very similar, but maybe one notch more, because we're not just talking about most people now. We're talking about people that you're with that you respect and admire and what's something you believe that they do not believe? That's the lifehack. It's just that question which can spark many conversations and often quite memorable conversations, things you might be thinking about years later when you come across that person again, and I want to flag Kevin's most recent Substack essay.
I just read this yesterday because I think it came out on Monday, April 6, and I thought it's fantastic. It's entitled Some Contemporary Heresies. What Kevin does is, well, first of all, he defines a heresy as something that you believe that the people you most admire and respect don't believe and reject out of hand. You can see how closely this relates to our conversation two months ago. But with that criterion in mind, he basically puts out what he says are a bunch of contemporary heresies that he's collected. He says those aren't necessarily his own. Sometimes they're other people's, but most of them are plausible and not insane that others around him have said that they believe. He's just a collector of these things.
Some of them are trivial, and some are quite dangerous. True heresy, he says at the start of the essay. But what I really love about this essay and completely recommend to you if you find yourself interested in this topic is he's collected 84 contemporary heresies. This is not a list of seven tips, tricks and Lifehacks. This is not your favorite dirty dozen. This is actually a long broad list of contemporary heresies. What I realized is I can gamify that list. I can start randomizing off that list and scare up, I don't know, a debate game among my friends. This is probably more a campfire activity, but I love to take things and then gamify them further. It's just such grist for the mill. It is very rich. What do you believe that most people don't believe gets you thinking, and Kevin takes it a notch higher, and I totally recommend his essay. Again, Some Contemporary Heresies published on April 6, if you want to have more fun with that.
Let's move on to Number 4. Number 4 is also a life hack. Broadly, I would just describe this as dialing down the size of things or a good book by Peter Sims, Little Bets making little bets as we go through life. Now, is one of those recurring themes that pops up in the wonderful book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, where he reminds us that we can choose the size of our challenge. I quote. He writes, "We forget we have control over the scope of the project. We can dial it down to a more manageable size, and we must, if we ever want to see it finished." We've all been in situations where we feel overwhelmed. We feel like we may have to drop something altogether or postpone it until we realize maybe we could solve just a part of it and make some progress just off that one thing, which reminds me of a second book where this concept pops up, which is the Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Stephen Kramer. It's a wonderful book where they explain why small wins beat huge abstract goals, and I quote, again, from them, "Large problems cause paralyzing emotionality and overwhelm cognitive resources. Whereas, small wins can be gained from breaking down such problems into manageable pieces and approached on a small scale initially for more innovative solutions."
Again, Thiago Forte from Building a Second Brain, Amabile and Kramer from the Progress Principle. I mentioned Peter Sims, his wonderful book, Little Bets, which, by the way, starts off with a great story of the comedian Chris Rock at a dive bar. I think it was in New Jersey. He doesn't look like the Chris Rock you might be associating with Madison Square Garden because he's got his yellow legal pad out. He's standing up at a microphone in New Jersey at a bar that not many people are attending, and he's just haltingly throwing out a joke or two or three. He's just seeing what people do.
Then he notes in his legal pad. People did laugh at that one. What he's making in the words of the author Peter Sims, is he's making little bets every joke you make in life, is in a sense, a little bet, a bet that people might laugh. A bet you might lose. You might be wrong on. What Sims demonstrates is Chris Rock's creative approach, which is just to nudge things out there in a small, well off-Broadway context and see which jokes people respond to. From there, he starts combining the ones that are working together. All of a sudden, of course, some months later, he is at Madison Square Garden entertaining the entire sellout crowd as Chris Rock, the one that we know, but it all starts with the little bets he's making in the dive bar.
Again, the key to take a larger project that you might be working on or a goal that you have, breaking it down into smaller problems in order just to solve one of those by constraining the scope of the work to solving just one key problem, let's say. Then, by the way, after that, another key problem. In fact, Peter Sims uses the phrase rigorously smallifying your problems. He talks about how liberating it is.
Then maybe one fourth example from another book that I love author I've had on this podcast, James Clear and his book, Atomic Habits, and I mentioned him last week in context of Blast From the Past. But this time, I just want to point out James mentioning that you can decide the type of person you want to be. You prove it to yourself with small wins. As you develop a new habit, you're deciding the type of person that you want to be, but you now need to actually do this. You need to do that thing. You need to wake up a little bit earlier that time or have one less drink or whatever it is, proving to yourself with a small win one after another, as you build a new habit or get rid of an old one, it's all about not being perfect and not doing it all at once. It's about dialing down the scope and creating a momentum with small wins.
In conclusion for this one, when you do that, you're doing three things at once. The first is you're lowering emotional overload and cognitive strain. But the second thing you're doing is you're keeping your projects moving by cutting away the nonessential pieces for the moment. You'll get to them later. But for now, you don't have to do it all at once. Third, you're also accumulating evidence that's reshaping perhaps your identity, your own confidence in James Clear's words, while discovering creative solutions that might work for you, one little bit at a time, thinking again of Peter Sims. Number 4 this week, a life hack, dial down the size. It's easy to get overwhelmed in such a busy, noisy world that we all live in, and we're trying to do our best. We're trying to do it all at once sometimes. I'm just here to remind you this week that you don't have to do it all at once. You can do it one bet, one win at a time.
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David Gardner: Let's move on to Number 5. I said in my cold open at the top of this week's show that I think I've done this right. I've Googled it, 25% of Americans can do this, which means three and four of us cannot. I'm here with Number 5 to suggest that you put in the time. Let's just call it a Paperback Book One Afternoon. I did this about 40 years ago, and I'm really glad I did. We all can do this. Juggle. You can juggle. The book is juggling for the complete clots. I just looked it up. You can buy it for $15 on Amazon or wherever fun books are sold $15 book. The authors even throw in three bean bags. They're attached to the juggling for the complete Klutz book that you can start getting your hands dirty with.
I will tell you that all of us can juggle. It starts not with three in the air but with just one, and then you add two, and you'll find yourself standing probably up against a wall so that you don't throw your beanbags too far forward. You start learning to do it on a single plane. then, really, with two bean bags, one in each hand, someone tosses you a third and you simply toss one of the ones you're holding into the air, catch that one and keep going. I realize for those who can't juggle, you might think, I could never do that. It looks like magic when other people do it. I can only do three myself. Of course, some people can do four or five or they're juggling flaming bowling pins. But for me, just the delight of being able to juggle with three balls, my whole lifelong, I'm so glad I spent time one afternoon teaching myself how to do that. When you do connect with that one in four of our fellow Americans, and I realize we have a lot of international listeners, I bet this is a a global ratio. I'm going to say one in four of all Earthlings can juggle. When you encounter one of those 25 percenters, you can have fun juggling together.
As I mentioned at the top of the show, it at least entertains little kids. There are other benefits and uses to juggling as well. You also look like you're a pretty nimble, spry person. I do have decent hand-eye. I don't think I'm amazing at that at all. But you definitely seem to punch above your weight class in other people's eyes when you demonstrate an ability to juggle, especially if they don't. My hope is that over the next 10 years, based on the extreme popularity of this one podcast episode, we will bump the global juggling percentage from 25-26% as a consequence of this week's podcast. Sarcasm is the wit of fools. Number 5, I'm going to call it a trick this time. Teach yourself to juggle.
On to Number 6. Number 6 is a mental tip. This one's maybe easier said than done, but I think you can do it. I try to do it all the time myself. Here it is. Always take the high road. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime protege at Berkshire Hathaway, had a great line here. I think it's Munger. It might actually be Buffett. I probably should know. Buffett and Munger fans, I apologize for saying it was the other guy when I got it wrong, but I know the line for sure, and here it is. “Always take the high road. It's a lot less crowded.” I could almost end Number 6 right here, right there this week because I think that is so well worth keeping in mind. When you take the high road, not only is that probably the nobler choice, whichever direction it took you, but you're going to feel way better about yourself that you took the high road, and people observing you, maybe just casual passive observers or people who years later hear about what you did will admire that you did that. You are exemplifying for your family, for maybe future generations, that you took the high road, and as Buffett or Munger has said, it's a lot less crowded.
This concept, like Life hack Number 4 this week, Dial Down the Size, This is one of those things that recurs in different contexts. It recurs in well, here we go, different books. I'm thinking about Arthur Brooks and all of his writings about happiness, his column for the Atlantic, Arthur a multi timeime guest on this podcast as well. I've so enjoyed listening to and learning from Arthur over the years. He gives very concrete high road rules. He basically says, "Don't attack or insult others or even try to win. Just use your values as a gift, not a weapon." He also reminds us, "Don't assume other people's motives. Shirzad Shaman does a great job with this, as well, in positive intelligence.
Shirzad says, I have studied the human mind and psychology for much of my life. One thing Shirzad has concluded is as much as he's studied others, he's realized how often wrong he is I am you are when we're assuming other people's motives. The truth is we really don't know often what is going through other people's minds. We tell ourselves in our own minds, Oh, it's for this or that reason, John always says this. Doris always does that because she's that way. But Shirzad and others remind us the best thing you could do is ask. Double-check, if you're right. Say what you think you were telling yourself about that person's motives, double-check with them in respect of them and also helping out yourself, too.
All of these are sort of ideas that have come to me largely through Arthur Brooks' work. One other favorite related concept that I have from Arthur is when you find yourself in a stressful situation where people are arguing from two different sides, and you find yourself on one of those sides, one of the most powerful things you can do to help out everybody is if somebody on your own side is trashing people on the other side. If you stand up to those people on your own side, if you confront them about that, well, that's a great high-road activity, but it's really one of the most unifying and I would say, helpful things that we can do. I'd love to see a lot more of that in our society today, people not just sideing with others and then allowing those people to dictate through their own words and their actions what you or I think because we seem to be on that side, but really openly questioning sometimes the tactics or motives of people who might be aligned with us. Especially if you're taking the high road and you recognize that they're taking a low road, calling that is a beautiful and powerful thing to do. Again, that by way of Arthur Brooks.
Sam Horn, who has also been on this podcast, her book Talking on Eggshells on Authors in August last August, Sam Horn captures the spirit. Taking the high road for Sam means being big enough to admit our mistakes and more interested in making it right than acting out of ego and having to be right. I remember her phrase. She loves to fight fire, not with fire, but with water. Fighting fire with water by keeping you cool and treating people with respect, even when they're raging. All of these are different versions of taking the high road. But I'm here with a little reminder this week that mental tip, trick or Life hack Number 6 is always take the high road.
Finally, this week, as foreshadowed earlier, it's time to talk games. Mental tip trick or life hack Number 7, I'm just going to call it a life hack because, darn it, getting through life, playing games with other humans and enjoying each other's company in competitive or cooperative circumstances is one of my favorite pastimes. Yes, it bleeds out into this investing podcast from time to time, and it's about to do so right now. Let's call Number 7 a life hack, as I present to you five board game recommendations for your mental health. Mental improvement, if you will, maybe you'll be able to play one or more of these this summer.
In no particular order, let's start with Rebel Princess Deluxe Edition. Now, this is a trick-taking game. This is a clever game that's model on Hearts. If you've ever played the card game Hearts, you already basically know how to play Rebel Princess, except that there are shifting rules each round as players try to avoid winning tricks as a fairy tale princess dodging unwanted suitors. There's some Disney Princesses theming going on in this particular game that might be of particular interest to some of you or no interest at all for others. But you don't have to care one jot or no Disney Princesses to smile at the theme here. But what you really have is you have a trumped game of hearts with a little bit more variety, some special abilities, and it plays quickly and plays very well with three to six players. Rebel Princess Deluxe edition has been hitting our table. This game, and in fact, the others I'm sharing with you this week, this is not a particularly thinky game. This is not a long game. These are quicker, more social, shorter games that you can enjoy with people who sometimes wouldn't say they themselves are gamers, but maybe they like a good card game.
Let's move on to board game Number 2, far away. Far away is a compact card-laying game where you build a journey outward by laying cards one at a time in front of you. You choose from three cards each time and play one of them in front of you. You're building a tableau in front of you, and then you're going to score it in reverse. You're laying down eight cards over the course of a 20-minute game from left to right, but you're going to be scoring it in reverse. It creates a satisfying think backwards. Puzzle. I find I'm not very good at faraway. It has a couple of simple expansions that add a little bit more flavor. I completely recommend this small box game, and it's two expansions.
You know, one measure of the quality of a good game, good strategy game is how many interesting decisions you have in how many minutes. If you wanted to be mathematical about this, I would say the best games have the highest ratio of interesting decisions per minute, if you like, not that any game is actually scored that way, but that's my bias. I love games that give you you could do this one or that one. Which one do you want to do? Keep going. As you make those choices throughout the game, it's going to result in your destiny, your final score, whatever that is. Faraway has you thinking backwards. It's a very smart little game.
Let's move on to Number 3. Number 3 is a streamlined tile-laying strategy game. One of my favorite designers, Reiner Knizia, past guest on this podcast, Reiner, one of the great game designers of our time, operating from his native Germany these days. I think Reiner lives in or outside Munich most recently. But players are rebuilding landscapes by laying down tiles, rebuilding Scotland or Ireland. The board flips over and has two slightly different versions all in the same game box. You're scoring points through elegant placement of your tiles in certain spaces.
Of course, I'm not going to explain the rules here. I am here to say that the game rebirth, which is the name of this game, is one that we have played probably most frequently of all games in the first quarter of this year. I strongly recommend rebirth, especially for people who want a little bit thinkier game than something like Rebel Princess or faraway. This game will still play under an hour. I really love tile laying games.
Now, if you're not a gamer, you're not somebody would recognize what I'm talking about when I say that. If you think about something like scrabble. Scrabble is essentially a tile-laying game. Each of the tiles has a letter on it, but you're laying them out. In this case, in the game of rebirth, you're laying out hexagonal tiles with symbols on them that combine for various point combinations and score you points over the course of the game. Reiner has a lot of great tile ang games, and Rebirth is the most recent great one.
Two last ones for you, Crokinole. Crokinole is a classic. It's over a century old. I think it started in Canada. A lot of you will recognize this, and many others will be like, How do you spell that? Well, it's C-R-O-K-I-N-O-L-E. But it is a fast tactile dexterity game. It's a flicking game where you're flicking discs with your fingers into the middle of a crokinole board, trying to keep your discs staying there in the middle where they're worth the most points, trying to knock your opponent's discs off the edge. You're flicking wooden discs for 15 or 20 minutes with your friends, and this is one of those games that just heats back up for our family every few years. We don't play crokinole for a while, and then it hits the table again, and then we play it 17 times in a row over the next ten weeks. We're in one of those Crokinole gems right now as a family. I'm just reminded how much fun and how accessible this game is for all ages. Of course, you're going to have to buy a Crokinole board, which is usually a handsome wooden. I think it's octagonally shaped, board with discs. I think it's completely worth the investment.
Crokinole and then the last one, I'm saving this one for last because this is the craziest and silliest game of all, a chaotic, high-energy racing game where wildly different characters move unpredictably toward the finish, driven admittedly more by chance and spectacle than control. In a lot of ways, this game should not work at all, but the game magical athlete, for us, has caught our attention. I first read about Magical Athlete, which came out in the last year or so. You can find it on Amazon. If you were to buy Magical Athlete, you might have to wait a couple of weeks. It's a smaller box game from a smaller publisher. It's not like Star Wars monopoly where Amazon's waiting with 100 to sell anybody who wants to buy.
This is a little bit more of a bespoke game, but Magical Athlete first came to my attention when I read a review on BoardGameGeek. By somebody who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I see his name is Danny Talon, and I absolutely loved his review. He said, "I have a weird job. I work at Empire Board Game Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico." He said, "I really should be called a cafe, not a library, but I digress, which is an amazing job for someone like me, Danny Wright, since I'm a hobbyist. When I'm not making sandwiches or drinks, I'm either recommending games to people who come into the library or teaching them games or making up inane trivia games with my colleagues to pass the time. Of course, people browsing through our 1,100 game library are always going to have questions. I have several iterations of responses I give to people who ask for help." He'll say things like name a game that you like. Or I like to think of games on a two-axis scale and using his hands, he'll gesture. He'll say on one, it's short to long, short games to long games, and then the other axis is serious to goofy. "What are we feeling tonight?" He'll say to patrons entering the board game cafe, and he says, hint hint, it is always going to be medium serious and short. Short games that are medium serious. But in recent months, he goes on to say, It's been hard not to include magical athlete in my recommendation list during most of these pitches. It is one of the dumbest, simplest, and funniest games you can play. It has no right to be as good as it is.
As part of my job, I've shown this to pretty much every type of gamer, grandparents and grandkids. A loud group of teenagers who just finished their fourth game of Cards Against Humanity, couples on a first date, double dates of the most competitive married people I've ever met. Our monthly Autism Speaks Gaming Group, and I also recommended it to a real group of four hypercompetitive friends who gave me $50 because I let them finish their game of Magical Athlete after the store closed. They paid Danny 50 bucks to keep it open so they could finish their game of magical athlete. He concluded, literally none of the people I have demoed or recommended this game to have not been falling off their chairs, laughing. By the end.
I'm closing out my board game recommendations, mental Tip trick or Life hack number seven with Magical Athlete. I feel like I haven't explained what the heck's going on with this game, but I also don't want to make the mistake of starting to tell you the rules. What I'll say is you're racing along a track toward the finish. You've drafted a set of four different characters. Each will run one race for you. There are four short independent races in the game, and each time you'll be taking one of your athletes who you've drafted, it might be a ghost, it might be a witch or a dragon or something far silly and it'll run that race for you. Over the course of four races, you're trying to rack up as many points as you can. But instead of steady predictable movement, each racer is going to follow its own quirky rule set that basically will trigger in surprising ways as dice are rolled, each turns. There's very little direct control once the race begins, which is why people who don't like this game, and I completely understand why some people might not, there's very little choice you're making by Thi Nguyen definition of games. Thi Nguyen the game's philosopher, we've had on the podcast a few times. He points out the beauty of games is they give us agency. We make choices that's different from other art forms, and we learn as a consequence of the choices.
Well, Magical Athlete, you're really not making that many choices. You're mainly watching a hilarious race play out in front of you, and it's delightfully unpredictable. I would say it's magical. It's a sporting event. It's the kind of game that anybody can play. Everybody should play at least once, and a lot of people are going to laugh together at what happens in this 20-minute-long game. Another thing I like about this game and a number of others I mentioned to you this week is they're all somewhere 20 to 30 minutes, for the most part, which is a little bit of my theme here. As I close out this week's podcast, with Life Hack Number 7, some board game recommendations for you.
Before we go, let me just summarize what we visited this week. We started with mental tip, Number 1, Snap Cola. Number 2, The clean dirty toggle for your dishwasher for ten bucks. I call that a trick. Number 3, was a Life Hack. What do you believe that most people don't? Number 4, also a life hack, dial down the size. You can make things easier for yourself when you just narrow in. Number 5, a trick. I hope you'll do this if you haven't already. You can. You will. It'll be fun. Teach yourself to juggle. Juggling for the complete clutz. Number 6, a mental tip. Always take the high road. Of course, Number 7, a life hack, five board game recommendations for you, perhaps for your summer ahead. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, anyway, thanks a lot for joining with me. This week for our 11th installment of Mental Tips, Tricks, and Lifehacks, have a wonderful week ahead. Fool on.
David Gardner has positions in Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Intuitive Surgical, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Intuitive Surgical, and Walt Disney. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2028 $520 calls on Intuitive Surgical and short January 2028 $530 calls on Intuitive Surgical. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
