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

Tonight, we welcome back, GamesBeat's assistant deputy tactician for the West Coast, Rowan Kaiser.

Good morning.

We also welcome back our friend freelance writer, Ian Boudreau.

Hello.

And finally, we're joined once again by Kataku's Heather Alexander.

Hello, friends.

And we've brought this squad together for an important mission, a discussion of one of the

defining strategy subgenres of our era, the tactical management game.

Rowan, this is a topic you've been kicking around in your head and, uh, over late night

IMs for a while. So let's talk a little bit about what we mean here and why the term is both

like more specific and yet less confining than just saying XCOM alike.

Yeah. So this is, you know, sort of like the podcast we did a year ago on survival strategy,

where we look at like these new-ish or suddenly popular genres that has popped up in

strategy games.

And that one, we spent a lot of time, like over the history of like where this genre came from

and all the combinations of like roguelikes and the sims and all those things that went into it

and this one uh that answer is actually super simple it's that foraxis rebooted xcom in 2012

xcom was really good and xcom was really popular and a bunch of people have made games built on Xcom.

But as you apply, there are like some sort of different ways that you can look at the term Xcom-like, which has been sort of the go-to terminology that people have used to describe these kinds of games.

And I think there are two different directions that you can go with that.

The first is like the form of how XCOM combat works,

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