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

Joining me today is 3MA founder, Troy Goodfellow.

Hello, happy whatever day this is, or when you're listening to it, it's a beautiful

springs, finally here in most places in the world, I think.

So naturally, we're all inside talking about strategy games on Skype.

We know our audience.

We also welcome back, our friend, game designer David Heron, of the Game Design Roundtable

podcast.

Hello, I'm looking out a beautiful bay window.

So I'm totally okay for the next hour.

Finally, for the first time, we are joined by freelance critic, Austin Walker of Clockworkworlds.com. Austin, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I can see a farmer's market in the distance that I cannot attend because I'm on this podcast with you. It's gorgeous. It's great. I wish I was there. But I'm glad you've invited me. I am staring at a windowless corner of an undersized bedroom in an apartment that had no

business being a two bedroom.

So I feel like I've already lost today's podcast.

Anyway, today's topic actually comes from a conversation that David Heron and I were

having as we played a few too many games of Heroes of the Storm

last week. There's a very important lesson about quitting while you're ahead that Heroes of

the Storm taught us last week. And I suspect we'll have to relearn it every weekend with Heroes.

But anyway, as we were sort of grinding game after game, we got to talking about what we've

been playing lately, and that also

indirectly turns into the games we haven't been playing or haven't been enjoying. And David,

you said something that sort of caught my attention. You said that you've been playing

4x games lately and starting to wonder, like, why am I playing this? What's the point of this?

...