You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, the official podcast of Flash of Steel.com.

I am your host, Troy Goodfellow, and you are listening to episode number 95, I believe.

It's 95 or 96?

I think it's 95.

Why do I always get this wrong?

Kind of a big flip chart on the wall.

This is episode number 95.

And with me today is my regular panelist, freelance writer, Rob Zakeney.

Good evening.

It's just the two of us tonight.

We like to avoid doing duet shows for a number of reasons, mostly because you'll get tired of our voices. But it's just one of those weeks where people are busy and backups are busy. And it's the holidays. Woohoo. But this week we do have a topic, an actual real topic. Imagine that. Not that our other topics aren't real.

This is a game design topic, something we haven't really done in a while getting into mechanics.

And it was prompted by a form spring question that I got from a listener.

I get quite a few form spring questions, and they're all very interesting. But this one I thought, said, well, this is actually such a good question.

Why don't we just do a show on it?

And it was a question.

Let me just read it for you here.

You've talked from Sam 1-1-2-3-5, which I think is not his given name, but I can't be sure.

You've talked a lot on Flash of Steel in three moves ahead about tutorials and strategy games, but what makes a good end game? And I reply, you know, we have talked about it in the way we've talked about the snowball effect and how that affects. That was many, it was a long time ago, we talked with the snowball effect in games, and I'm sure that will come up tonight. But he's right. He really hasn't, we haven't really talked about what happens when a game comes to an end. And how the ending of a game is really an important part of the design process. It's something that can keep you interested in keeping going. or it can make you want to turn off the game early,

because you know what's coming and the like.

So I thought this was an interesting question worth pursuing.

So Sam, thank you for that question.

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