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

Today I am joined by two of my regular panel, freelance writer Julian Murdoch and Dr. Bruce Garrick. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks for having us. So for the last few weeks, we've all been sort of in the throes of a new obsession, Martin Wallace's card-based war game, A Few Acres of Snow. Today we welcome Mr. Wallace to the show to talk about a few acres and to discuss why we're all so hooked on it and why Bruce felt so strongly that we absolutely had to do this show right away. It was the greatest thing he'd played in years, and we had to play it right away. That was roughly the tone of how we brought this topic up to us. So I guess I wanted

to, you know, Bruce, since it's kind of your topic, I wanted to start with you. What is a few acres

of snow and what is it that really clicked with you about this design? First of all, let me thank

Martin Walls for agreeing to be on the show.

I was very kind of him to do so.

The thing that you know and Julian knows, since I mentioned it pretty much every freaking week that I'm on,

is that I really like elegance in game mechanics and clever takes on things that we've seen before.

And I was really surprised.

I don't get surprised much, but a few riskers of snow was sort of this very interesting combination of game

mechanics that I'd seen but not put together quite in this way and I thought it was a really good

and clever application of elegance and game mechanics to a different kind of simulation problem.

And I was so intrigued by it that I really wanted to know how and why it came to be.

So I thought, well, why don't we just ask the person who made it some questions about it.

So that's how we ended up getting Martin Wallace.

But I don't play as many board games as uh... the two of you do because uh...

a don't really have the opponents and b don't have the time but uh... when i

played a few acres of snow i thought wow this is really this is a really clever uh... sort of hybridization of game mechanics that I'd seen before

and put together in in a way.

I thought really,

the game mechanics sort of played their topic much better than most game mechanics doing.

The theme was really represented better than most themes are.

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