Good evening you are listening to The Three Moves Ahead and I'm your host Rob Zagney.

Joining me today, once again, is our friend, Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

And we also welcome back our friend, freelance writer, T.J. Hafer.

Hello, hello.

So, as you start the show by apologizing a little bit for probably the audio quality you're hearing right now. I am recording

from a very new and very empty apartment. And while I did consider running into a rugstore

and just like buying out their entire inventory and scraping everything around my living room,

I opted against that. And so we're just going to have to put up

with a little bit of the echo from this cavernous new living room. So apologies, and hopefully

regular service and regular audio quality will be restored shortly. That apology is also

extended, of course, to our producer of Michael Herbys,

who I am certain probably spent far too much time trying to wizard his way out of having this

echo, even peer on this track. Anyway, so today we are gathered together to talk about

alternate histories, and Rowan, this topic idea came from you, so I'll just sort of throw it over

to you, and maybe you can take this into what you wanted to get at by discussing this.

Yeah, so this kind of came up for me mentally when I was playing Hearts of Iron 4 quite a bit this

month, or last month, I suppose.

Basically, it's a game built around this, you know, arguably the most dramatic 10-year span in history and, like, all the different things that could have happened in that time.

So it's sort of built around consistent alternate history.

Like some of it is, you know, within the like main game, what happens if this army wins here?

Whereas other parts of it are built in like what happens if France goes communist or France goes fascist, things like that.

...