Three Moves Ahead 589: 'Board Game' vs 'Simulation'-style Strategy Games

Three Moves Ahead

Idle Thumbs

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

4.8 • 532 Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2023

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's an all-star panel as Len and Mike Williams are joined by Mohawk Games' and Idle Thumbs' own Soren Johnson and Paradox Tinto's Johan Andersson to chip away at a tricky target: the different design goals between a more "Board Gamey" strategy game like Civilization and the "Simulationist" breed exemplified by Europa Universalis. We discuss what we like and don't like about each one, who the audiences are for each, and how to navigate the significant overlap in those audiences. In the end, maybe it's not as adversarial after all...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves
0:02.0	Ahead. I am Len. I am your host for this week.
0:05.2	And we have a very cool panel to discuss a very interesting topic.
0:10.1	Starting with, I think we pretty much just call you a 3MA regular at this point, Mike Williams.
0:17.8	Yeah, I guess I am probably 3M regular at this point. We kind of, yeah, yeah,
0:23.8	dragged you into it. And this one essentially started from a talk that I was a part of, what was
0:32.1	the last episode for Tara now, where I was dividing the line between strategy and grand strategy, I guess.
0:43.8	Yeah, yeah, you've talked a lot about us grand strategy people and our complicated games,
0:52.1	which is sort of, yeah, part of the impetus for this.
0:56.5	And to discuss it, we've also brought on to game designers that you guys probably know,
1:02.6	including co-founder of Mohawk games and our fellow idle thumbs podcaster, Soren Johnson.
1:10.5	Hey?
1:11.0	How's it going?
1:12.8	And the studio head over at Paradox Tinto, Johann Anderson.
1:17.9	Yeah.
1:18.3	Hi, guys.
1:18.9	How are you doing?
1:20.7	And we, it was not by accident that we invited you both on because, you know, Johan, you create a lot of the more complicated
1:33.4	simulation-y sort of games that I really like and that some of the other three-ma panelists really
1:39.9	like. Whereas Soren, I've actually I've actually seen you argue that, uh, you see those maybe even as
1:48.4	something separate from a game as more of like a, like a simulation sandbox.
1:54.1	Uh, do you want to, do you want to answer to that for that accusation?
	...

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