Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Bruce Garrick.

Tonight, we have Brian Train, game designer and wargamer. Brian, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Bruce. Thanks for having me on.

So, Brian, you have been designing games for a long time. I assume you've been playing games for longer than that.

Tell me, what was your first game and how did you kind of get into the hobby?

Well, the first war game I ever saw was about 1976, and I was at the home of my best friend.

And his older brother had a copy of SPI's old World War III game. So I happened to have a look at it when he had it set up. And, you know, I think you've seen it. It's got a whole map of the world and all this mysterious-looking counters. Or they were mysterious to me then. But then all those mushroom clouds. I'd think, oh, now what is this?

This is a, you know, I'd always enjoy board games, you know, chess and risk and stuff like that.

But this was something new.

But it wasn't until three or four years later, about 1978 or 79, that one of my uncles sent me a copy of Tactics 2 for Christmas. Okay. And that got

me started. So I took to that right away. And then after that, there was a store in my town

that sold some war games. They sold new and used ones.

So that was where my pocket money went for the next few years.

I bought a lot of older stuff, smaller games, you know, the old SPI folios, things like that.

Yeah.

And so you obviously did that for a while.

What got you to decide you wanted to actually design a game?

Well, it wasn't very long before I decided or I found out that people weren't really designing the kinds of games that I wanted to play.

So there were, and there seemed to be a few sort of situations I thought that would be you know pretty

well ready made for games so it wasn't long after I started playing that I started designing the first

one technically the first one that I ever designed was when I was still in high school uh it was in

81 or 82 and it was a game called Pusan Perimeter.

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