Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney. Join me today, once again, is Thro Moves Ahead founder, Troy Goodfellow. Hello, everyone. And we also welcome back, the Game King himself, Sean Alessium Sands. Hello. And Sean is going to help us today with a very special topic. The Game King turns out to be the King, a very specific genre, which is Tower Defense

Games. And this is a topic I've sort of had on my back burner for a long time, basically

ever since Defense Grid 2 came out, and I just took ages to get around to playing it.

But one of the things I've been wondering lately is that, you know, I feel like two or three

years ago, maybe three or four at this point, you know, I feel like two or three years ago,

maybe three or four at this point. Tower Defense, there's a lot of variety, there's a lot of

selection. It felt like it was sort of this hot, casual genre. And we had a really great

show on it with Quentin Smith from Rock Paper Shotgun a few years ago.

But lately, and I don't know if this is perception or this is reality, and this is one of the things I want to talk to you guys about, lately I feel like that genre has cooled off a little bit, like the novelty of it has worn off, or a little bit of the wind has gone out of its sails.

And I'm curious whether or not you guys feel that, a, that's a correct diagnosis, and B, whether or not there are some reasons for that.

But as I've been doing my research for today's episode, I've discovered that in any tower

defense game I play, they all have scoreboards, and Sean is at the top of all

of those scoreboards. Yeah, my name's Sean Sands. I have a problem. That problem is

tower defense games. And I, like, I haven't talked about this much. They're not actually in, you know, when you're in a situation where you're kind of talking about, you know, broad strategy games or games in general.

They feel like these little, they don't feel like something substantive enough to kind of throw in with everything else.

But at the same time, you know, the, in many ways,

they're, they're kind of like puzzle games to me. There, there are these games that,

that I just sort of sit down and, and play and, and just sort of want to unpack the mechanics

of the game, so I can get that sort of perfect curve, that ideal scenario of just dragging

these mindless stupid troops through this kind of funnel line that they'll always predictably

go through and just watching them evaporate into points. And that like, like, you know,

if we've talked about this on, on our podcast and on our site before,

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