Three Moves Ahead 465: Mark Herman's Empire of the Sun

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

Strategy, Strategy Games, War, Games & Hobbies, War Games, Games, Video Games

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 5 April 2019

⏱️ 96 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rob and Bruce are here to sing the praises of Mark Herman's Empire of the Sun, a brilliant adaptation of the war in the Pacific. Enjoying the game through the magic of VASSAL, our wargaming duo describe how about Empire of the Sun does a commendable job of conveying the challenges of imperfect information, the plans of the Imperial Japanese fleet, and inter-service rivalry - all through the elegance of card-based play.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening you are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zakney.
0:03.5	Tonight, I'm joined by our elite irregular panelist, Dr. Bruce Garrick.
0:08.1	Hello gamers.
0:10.2	So it's not quite winter, but it is a war game, and it is a war game that I spent much of the winter playing with this guy right here.
0:21.0	We're going to be talking about Mark Herman's Empire of the Sun,
0:25.3	a strategic level, card-driven war game of the Pacific Theater of World War II.
0:31.7	Bruce, this was one that you've been keen to get me to try for at least a year.
0:36.5	And I think I remember last year I saw you at the tail end playing a vassal session with
0:42.7	our friend Don Stone.
0:44.8	And I think Don Stone wrapped that up by saying he thought it might be the greatest war game
0:49.8	he's ever played.
0:50.7	He wasn't sure, but he was inclined to think it was at the time. So, Bruce,
0:56.1	what is Empire of the Sun? Where did it come from? Yeah, I think it came from the very fertile
1:02.7	design mind of Mark Herman, but I think it also came from a couple other sort of confluences of
1:10.0	situations. One is uh it came from the card driven design a mechanic
1:17.3	which sort of solved some problems in game design that i think designers are having a problem
1:25.0	fitting history into their games uh so they kind of offloaded it a little bit into a different mechanic,
1:30.6	which I think really made a lot of,
1:33.5	it saved a lot of fiddliness in gameplay.
1:36.2	It also is the product of,
1:40.4	I think,
1:41.6	people being more willing to,
	...

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