Good evening. You're all listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney.

Join to me today. We welcome back, our friend, Lorse Warns, T.J. Hafer.

Hello. We've also got Chief Thoracic Specialist, Rowan Kaiser, for Venture Beat,

joining us one more time.

I don't even know what that is, but thank you.

So here at the start of the year, we're going to do our traditional sort of end of year roundup.

We're going to be talking about the year that was in strategy games and what some of our highlights were and what some of our low lights were and what games that maybe we still need to get around to or give

another look or give a fairer shake. And my answer for that one might surprise you.

So, you know, Rowan, let's start with you because you wrote up a very handy list. Just overall,

you know, there's been a lot of talk that 2017 in general was a very good year for games.

Did that translate to it being a great year for strategy games?

It was a great year for strategy games in terms of variety.

We got all kinds of different games, most of which were quite good. We didn't have like

the superstar, oh my God, I can't believe this is so great that 2017 was for like, you know,

your open world action adventure types or your general mainstream games. I think that was 2016

when we had Total Warhammer

come out of nowhere and Darkest Dungeon and a bunch of other great things. This year was a lot

more of like a consolidation of that plus, you know, a bunch of really interesting, maybe not

quite perfect games. So I think this year is broad, but not necessarily one that we're going to be talking about

is one of the truly great years for strategy games, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it was, I think it was a pretty damn good year for strategy games.

It's just that 2016 was so stacked.

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