Hello, and welcome to three moves ahead. I'm your host, Bruce Garrick.

And tonight, we're going to talk to a very accomplished game designer about a very unusual

game. But first, I'd like to talk directly to you a little bit about how this game works. I'd like to save all of my time for the guest, and I don't want to really interrupt him too much to explain the game mechanics, although I know that's sometimes unavoidable. And I'd also like you to know something about the game before we chat, if you aren't already familiar with it. And if you're familiar with the game, we want to just jump straight to the discussion,

you can fast forward to about five minutes into this.

The game designer is Mark Herman, and the game is called Churchill.

It's a game that investigates the relationship between Winston Churchill, Franklin, Delano Roosevelt,

and Joseph Stalin, as they tried to both win the war,

that's the Second World War, and imposed their own ideas on the post-war piece.

And it translates this into a three-player board game.

Now, the game was released this past summer and has been both popular and controversial.

It's popular because it's already sold out its initial print run.

And it's controversial because people have been questioning certain game design decisions, and I'm going to talk to Mark about those.

While the game has quite a few moving parts, the core concepts are actually quite straightforward, and once you overcome the unconventional combination of mechanics and unusual concepts, I think the game is actually quite simple from a rule standpoint.

It basically consists of two linked parts.

Okay, so there's this strategic map board that depicts the European and Pacific theaters of war in a stylized form,

and it has tracks leading from each major front to the Axis power being confronted.

So there's a track leading to Germany from the eastern front and then from the

Western Front to Germany, also the Italian Front.

And then armies progress along these tracks.

And so in this way, it's superficially like the State of Siege series, if you just want

to try to visualize it. But unlike State of Siege series, if you just want to try to visualize it.

But unlike State of Siege, the fronts are directed by the players, and the die rules are,

...