Good evening, you are listening to Through Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.

Today, for the first time in forever, I am joined by Julian Rabbit Murdoch. It's not been that long. I mean, I guess it has. It's been a while. I think it has been literal months, if not the better part of a year. I think it's probably even the better part of a year. I think that's true. We also welcome back once again, our friend from the Game Design Roundtable, David Heron.

I am here to tell you. part of a year. I think that's true. We also welcome back once again, our friend from the

Game Design Roundtable, David Heron. I am here to tell you why the games you love are terrible.

Our listeners, our listeners really love that service, actually. You should actually put that up on

Kickstarter. And another thing I don't like about X-Con.

Yeah.

So today we're going to be talking about a board game that I've been very curious about for a long time.

GMT games, Sakigahara, the Unification of Japan, from designer Matthew Calkins and artist Mark

Mahaffey.

It's a war game about the final campaign of the Sengoku period

in which Tokugawa Iasu finally won sole rulership of feudal Japan.

So if you know like the Shogun games,

this is the sort of epilogue to Shogun that you never actually see

because none of these people were alive during this period.

And, you know, I mentioned the artist here because honestly, like the way I came to this game

is I started seeing people like tweeting pictures of it at JenCon a couple years ago.

I sort of made a note of it. And then I came across it in the flesh, and it is a beautiful and thematically appropriate

board game in which you command troops with the appropriate Japanese clan symbols on them,

and they are played on this gorgeous map.

But the important part is because they are large wood blocks, everything is

basically played in secret. It is a game where you can have large stacks of units, but your

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