Good evening, everyone. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead, a podcast about strategy games.

I'm your host for this week, Wesley Livesey, and joining me tonight is Benjamin Magnus.

Hello, Benjamin. How are we doing?

Doing pretty good. We are here today to talk about Rule the Waves 3. A new game release came out about a month ago, I think. Benjamin,

what is this game? Okay, so I can ask this question a lot when I stream it, and it's a,

you kind of roleplay as the secretary of the Navy for a naval power around the turn of the century when there was a lot of

naval innovation. So you're not necessarily the leader of the country. You're not just the

captain of a ship. You are in charge of the Navy, but that's it. So you control some things,

but not everything, from a very

broad overhead perspective. Yeah, I think, um, like one of the interesting things that I thought

about the game that surprised me. So this is the first rules, rule the ways game that I've played.

This is the third one, but this is the first one I've, I've checked out. And I think one of

that things that surprised me initially is there are certain areas where you have no control,

they just kind of happen. You're asked for your input sometimes via kind of endgame little pop-up

choice selections, but you have no control over politics or foreign policy or anything like that,

which felt weird to me, kind of from a strategy game perspective.

Oh, yeah.

There are definitely points of the game where you will, you will feel out of control by design.

And I think that is kind of the point at the end of the day is that, yes, you as the

secretary of the Navy might think it's extraordinarily important given current world tensions

to build eight new battleships. But the politicians have other things in mind and your naval

budget is not one of them. So, oh, now all those battleships that you've invested

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