Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead. I'm Len. I'm your host for this week, and I am joined with our very good friend, John Bolding.

Howdy y'all?

And once again, we have UNC Chapel Hills, Dr. Brett Devereaux.

Hey, guys.

And we're here this week to talk about Farthest Frontier, which is a new sort of survival city builder, colony builder,

with sort of a vaguely Middle Ages theme from Crate Entertainment, who actually were previously known for Grim Dawn, which was an ARPG, not related at all.

This kind of launched into early access and made quite a wave in the like city builder enthusiast

community, I suppose.

It's got very positive reviews on Steam and has been just generating a lot of excitement from that.

Brett, what have you thought of furthest frontier so far?

I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would.

I mean, so it's early access, all the necessary caveats about it being rough around the edges, some performance issues, not. It's perfectly playable. It's very stable, actually, for me. I was surprised by that. I think it's really interesting in that there is a real effort in the design to incorporate a lot of different concerns in terms of

seasonality, diet variety, security concerns that really did shape the way that pre-modern

settlements were formed that are often missing in this genre or not really well implemented.

And so I thought that that was actually a sort of really interesting element of the design,

the complexity there with, and I'm sure we'll come back to some of these, but just to check

them off, you have to think about fending off raids, you have to think about different kinds of crops, different kinds of soil.

You have to do crop rotation.

And you also have to handle the over-exploitation of your natural environment in a way that is often not really a factor in these games. So I thought that

all of that came together to really give it some unique personality. I was enjoying it.

And John, I know you already posted to Twitter the conversation we had about how this is

definitely a John game. What is it that really grabbed you about furthest frontier?

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