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

Joining me tonight is my regular wingman, Troy Goodfellow. Troy, welcome to the show.

Yes, great to be back again. I was just here last week. It was fun. We missed you.

My winter of wargaming took an odd turn as I fought the battle of trying to eat solid food again.

We had a stomach bug going around Boston that it's like any other normal

stomach flu except you don't get better for 20 days. So that was a fun way to spend my

February. Well, we're glad to have you back and where we can restart or reboot the winter of war gaming

because we took a detour through city building last week.

But let's get back to all the fun stuff, the death.

The death, the destruction, and the victory points.

Troy, you sort of had an idea riffing off of some of the stuff we've been talking about what the war games were playing, and it was sort of about how you decide who wins a war game.

Yeah, I mean, we all do these theme shows every now and that, and I think we should have one right kind of in the middle of the winter of wargaming to talk about the way that war games talk about victory.

What is a victory in a war game?

And a lot of it comes down to how the scenario was designed

and what the scenario designer thinks is important,

or how they try to capture the history of that battle or of that campaign.

And this is not always an obvious thing.

And it's come up many times.

We've talked about different war games throughout the history of the podcast.

The issue of casualties or terrain or turn limits or how sometimes the design of a game

bumps up against the way victory conditions are defined,

thinking of the Panzer General games, for example,

...