Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

With me tonight are my increasingly irregular, regular panelists, Dr. Bruce Garrick, and Julian Murdoch.

Welcome back, guys.

Yay.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It's never over for hova. Oh, my God.

Good Lord. And here I was going to say, I've missed recording with you, Bruce, and now I'm not so sure. I thought we were talking about Kanye and Hova. I mean, I don't know what you guys are talking about. I mean, that's the most important thing in my world right now. I'm glad we're all on our best behavior, because tonight we are joined by our friend Soren Johnson, lead designer of Civ 4. Soren, welcome back to the show. Hey, guys. Great to be here.

So our topic tonight comes from Saurin, actually. We're going to be discussing smaller strategy games, smaller scale strategy games, smaller projects, and sort of comparing that

with the, not to say necessarily old model, but sort of what we all think of as PC strategy

games, big, sprawling, strategic epics.

Soren, you want to talk a little bit about what brought this topic to mind?

Yeah, well, for me, I've really become enamored recently by the fact that there is sort of

this kind of new type of strategy game coming out, which has a much smaller scope than what we're used to.

And, you know, these would be games, you know, sort of like, um, Toy Soldiers, uh, Horde, uh, Dungeons of Dreadmore, uh, DefCon, Adam Zombie Smasher, things like this.

Games that are, you know, they're usually sold somewhere between, you know, $10 and $20.

And it's something where, you know, it's not this major production.

You know, there probably isn't some, you know, huge backstory and giant campaign,

and it doesn't come with, you know, a huge suite of editors and, you know, high production

values. And, but beyond that, it also, the gameplay itself is not kind of overflowing with stuff,

you know, hundreds of units and tons of features and all these things to manage. Usually it's something

that where the gameplay itself is fairly streamlined, you can often explain it to someone fairly

simply, and usually you also can feel like within half an hour you're already playing the game,

as opposed to a lot of strategy games where you feel like, you know, really it's going to take a good three or four hours before I even get to the point where I begin having the fun, you know, which is when you start, you know, learning the system, you know, you look at a game like Sorts and Soldiers, which I think is like, well, perhaps the best example of a game at this scope.

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