Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host Rob Zakney. I'm coming to you live from Dr. Bruce Garrick's House for a special Winter of War Gaming Edition, tabletop, tabletop day with Bruce himself. Bruce, welcome to the show.

Hello gamers.

So we've spent the weekend playing a variety of interesting games, 13 days, which is sort of a distillated Twilight struggle.

Let's say it's a short form Twilight struggle that involves a lot of the same risk-reward mechanics, bluff mechanics.

But it only takes 30 minutes to play.

Yeah, which is a huge advantage.

And we also spent pretty much all of yesterday playing the Magisterial Churchill by Mark

Herman.

Bruce, I want to spend a little time talking about this game because I thought it was really

interesting, but why don't you set the stage a little bit and talk about what Churchill is and why it was sort of at the top of your list for games we should play together while we were visiting.

Okay, so when Rob said that he could come for the weekend, I thought that there were a number of things we could play. Of course, we over-planned or at least underestimated the amount of time that would take to do things, which is normal and fine.

But the one thing I definitely wanted to do was I wanted to play Churchill because Rob, I think it's been on three moves ahead.

I talked to Mark Herman about it,

and we never got you to play it. We almost got you to play it. I think last time you came when I lived

in North Carolina, but we ended up playing Triumph and Tragedy, which was great. But this time,

I think I thought it would be really important to see what you thought.

I was really curious to see what you thought about Churchill and just the way that the game is structured, the way the mechanics play out, and what to make of the crazy victory conditions that we ended up at the very end of the game trying to sort of desperately, I think you and Evan,

so my friend Evan came over to play. It was a great time. I really enjoyed having him. He ended up

winning. Just barely, I think, Rob was the British, Evan was the Americans. I was the Russians. And that caused, uh,

me to, um, try out some different strategies. Let's put it that way. Um, so we can talk about that.

And, uh, I think the first, the first surprise for me was that Churchill was not, in fact, a game of martini and cigar appreciation and colonialism, but is instead a strategy, war game adjacent, almost like, bartering game, covering the multilateral conferences that sort of marked each stage of World War II, where the big three powers and the representatives would meet, and discuss both general war fighting strategy where they're going to prioritize resources, and also what the post-war order was going to be.

And so the way the cycle of playtime... And also what the post-war order was going to be.

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