Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. And I would like to welcome you to the first inaugural Winter of Wargaming. I'm joined in this by our elite irregular panelist, Bruce Garrick. Bruce, welcome to the show.

Yeah, hello gamers. So I thought for the Winter of Wargaming, it would be good to start with a classic, and something

that's always been on my pile of shame, as it were, as a strategy gamer, 2003's Course in Pocket

from SSG.

And I remember reading reviews at the time saying this was kind of the pinnacle of traditional

I-Go-U go war game design,

hexes galore, operational scale, and it's the eastern front.

And so I've been playing it for the last week, and I've been getting into it quite a bit,

but I would love to just talk to you a little bit, Bruce, to, you know,

as someone who was more into war games back then, if you could just sort of set the stage, like, why was this game such a breath of fresh air at the time? Well, I don't know that it was

a breath of fresh air. I think it was a breath of, gosh, I don't know what it was a breath of. I can't

even think of a metaphor for it. Was it, was it refined scotch? It was. So I think that it's important.

Well, before I answer your question, here's what I want to ask you.

Okay.

When you played it, did you feel like, ah, this is something that, you know, it's a piece of gaming that I can clearly see why this was so amazing.

I did not at first, but I got there.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

All right.

So I want to make that point.

We can start out with that because this game really is nothing more.

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