Good evening you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakeney. This evening, I am ensconced at the cliff top home of our elite irregular panelist, Dr. Bruce Garrick. Bruce, thanks for coming on the show, and thanks for hosting me. Hi! Hello, gamers! So, up front, I should apologize for our regular schedule for Three Moves Ahead this last month. It's been a bit of a wild month for a lot of reasons,

and we had a couple shows.

Well, okay, it's partly Bruce's fault.

Bruce recorded half of a podcast where one of his guests was not on the actual recording he submitted.

Stupid MP3 script.

And then we had another show fall through at the last minute.

So two shows ended up kind of being lost for two weeks in July, so that's caused some

causes some problems.

And I don't know what order these podcasts are going to come out.

So you can hear this message on a couple different podcasts.

But anyway, so as it's become a bit of a tradition when Bruce and I visit, we've played a lot of board games, and we're sort of wrapping up our visit with some podcasting about what we've played.

And the first game we're going to discuss is a board game by GMT games called Cataclysm, a Second World War, designed by William Toslavich and Scott Muldoon.

And, you know, Bruce, you sort of put this one in the hopper because it sounded like you had a very

conflicted relationship with it.

And also that it's a little bit the new hotness in strategic level World War II board gaming.

So why don't you set the stage a little bit?

What is cataclysm?

And why were you having trouble coming to grips with it, having played it a few times?

Okay. So Cataclysm is a game that fits what I would call the medium-weight strategic genre.

It tries to do what I think is the Holy Grail for a lot of game designers, which is that

it is taking the strategic World War II level and trying to compress it into a game that

can be played in one session, right?

...