Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Bruce Garrick. Today, a special game discussion about game designs about Vietnam.

And I have with us, Nicholas Karp, a noted game designer, long history in the business, who also happens to be the CFO and founder of Shenandoah Studio, makers of hits like Battle the Bulge and Tribe on Moscow and

the upcoming Desert Fox, which you will see soon on an iPad near you. Nick, welcome to the show.

Hi, Bruce. Glad to be here. So, Nick, I know you're doing a lot of stuff in gaming these days

that doesn't involve 30-year-old chits and counters and maps, but I really wanted to talk to you about this game, Vietnam, 1965 to 1975, which you published, which you designed and was published by Victory Games,

which was the successor, sort of successor corporation to SBI, Simulations, Publications, Inc.

One of the sort of founders of the whole board gaming hobby.

Tell me a little bit about, because for our listeners who probably 99.3% of whom have not played Vietnam in 1965 to 75, but some of whom may have heard of it, I'll just say that the game was, it came out at a time when people weren't really making Vietnam games.

It was less than 10 years since the end of the war, although not necessarily since the end of the American military involvement.

It was a stupendously ambitious game, what would be considered on the very high end of both complexity and time commitment for the time.

Although I think there were a lot more long monster games that you made at that time.

But I just want to talk about how a game like this would come to fruition. What,

Nick, what you were thinking about when you were making it. It was a very different time in

game design, I think, compared to what we have now. Tell me a little bit about how you came up

with this idea. Well, I had worked at SPI as a teenager,

and then for a summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, and then it went away,

and Victory Games took its place.

And I was interested in getting my hand back into game design.

So went into Victory, spoke to Mark Herman, the head of that enterprise, bringing a list of

topics that I felt would be new and fresh.

I didn't feel like rehashing something that had already been done to death.

And, you know, the top of the list was Vietnam, which I had grown up with.

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