Good evening. I am your temporary host for three moves ahead, Julian Murdoch.

Rob Zakeney is, I don't know where Rob Zakeney is, taking some time off, mostly because he

hasn't played most of the games we're going to talk about. I'm joined with,

uh, produced, joined with, joined by our producer Michael Hermes, Michael.

Good evening. Happy to be here. And, uh, Earthstwhilestwhile, freelance writer and formerly with Kill Screen, Ryan Quo.

Hello.

And noted game designer, Soren Johnson.

Hey, everybody.

So it's quite a panel we have today.

The jumping off point is going to be a little gem of a game that the four of us all happen to love, which is Noroshima, if you pronounce it that way, or Noroshima Hacks, which is both a board game and an iOS and probably Android 2 game implementation of it, which I think we're just going to start talking about what it is about this game we love, what it teaches us about the board game implementation process for these tablets that we all love so much, what it tells us about asynchronous play, some of the game design decisions, and we'll probably use that as a jumping off point to talk about some other games that we love that have made this jump into this dual zone

of being both cardboard and pixelated. Michael, I'm going to kick it off with you. Maybe you could

start just sort of by explaining this game a little bit for folks who haven't played

Noroshima hacks before. And how do you pronounce it?

In my mind, Neurosima. So we'll just go with that, or NS Hex, for the sake of the show.

But it is a tactical board game based, hex-based tactical war game based in a thankfully zombie-free post-apocalyptic setting.

It was originally an RPG setting.

The game comes from Poland, and it involves placing tiles.

Each player has an army with a headquarters.

Their individual headquarters has a certain power that it gives

to all of their following soldier tiles. And in a two to four player game, it's basically

knock down your opponent's health and strategically place your dudes around the board.

The fun comes in with the unique armies, the unique bonuses,

...