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

Tonight I'm joined by our friend, freelance writer, and shut up and sit down co-host, Paul Dean.

Paul, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Hello.

Together at last, after all those weeks of us passing like ships in the night.

Well, Troy had me on, but you went around for some reason, so...

It was not quite my beat. And I was taking,

I was enjoying a rare, a rare week off, uh, without just taking the show dark, uh, which happened

again last week due to some, uh, recording issues. Me being in Stockholm, I was not able to

assemble a show. Uh, so apologies for the gaps, uh, for the gap in, uh, episodes, listeners. Uh, we're back this week. So apologies for the gaps, for the gap in episodes, listeners.

We're back this week and we're back for a long time to come. But for tonight, we're going to be

talking about space 4x games. Earlier this week, I said that what I really want is a space

4X from someone who knows Master of R Orion was overrated and that most games in

this genre aren't very good, I don't think. But I was kind of inundated by people asking me

what the hell I meant and defending the first two Master of Orion games. Obviously, I was not

talking about Master of Orion 3. Everyone knows that's a dog.

But, you know, I got a lot of pushback, and Paul here was so incensed that he flipped every table in his house,

so I thought perhaps we should talk it over before blood was shed.

Well, to be fair, I only have one table in my house, so.

Okay, so it wasn't actually like a full on tantrum.

It was just you tipped over a table.

It was just a typical day for me, to be honest.

...