Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead. I'm Len. I'm your host this week and almost every week at this point. And I am joined by our friends, Rowan Kaiser.

Hello.

And Ian Boudreau.

Hey, everybody.

And we are here to bid farewell to 2023 in strategy games, a year that has kind of been

talked about in the wider gaming world as maybe one of the best years ever.

I don't put a ton of stock in Metacritic, but apparently there's more, there were more 85 plus Metacritic reviewed your Metascore games released this year than any previous year on record, which partly also just because there's way more games now.

Yeah, that's, I think we need a control on the other side of that.

Yeah.

But there have been some bangers.

Whether or not it was a great year for strategy games,

specifically is something we'll explore.

Usually what we do on these year-end shows,

or at least something we try to answer is

what was the story of strategy games in this year? What were the bigger themes? Rowan, what are

your thoughts on that? So, yeah, I've skipped the last couple year-in review shows because I couldn't really, I don't know, get my head around it.

But this year, I feel like there's two clear trends, which is, they're kind of related.

But it's that the big strategy game companies have kind of taken a major step back, Paradox, Creative Assembly

for Access, being the major ones, and the mid-sized games and a lot of trends that we have

been looking forward to from mid-sides game companies, particularly survival strategy games and tactical RPGs,

the Battle Brothers like, those have been like maturing. They're doing really, really well.

And I think when you look at the strategy games of this year, we're just like pretty much the

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