Bruce and Rob welcome Troy back to the show by monopolizing conversation as they describe their reactions to War in the East. Bruce consults von Manstein’s Lost Victories in the hopes of discovering where they went, but Rob is pretty sure the Germans dropped them somewhere in the Pripyat Marshes. All Troy knows for sure is that 2by3 scored a big win with this game. Then Rob takes a trip into Dungeons and finds a pleasant surprise, while Bruce is really pleased by an invasion of Poland wargame with a marvelously bad interface.
Show links:
- Battle of Smolensk (1941) – The map may help you enjoy the show
- Rob’s Dungeons review
- September 1939
Tweets that mention Three Moves Ahead Episode 104 – What Would Manstein Do? -- Topsy.com // Feb 17, 2011 at 5:08 pm
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by jfudge, Robert Zacny. Robert Zacny said: This week on #3MA: more geeky wargame talk, more @TroyGoodfellow, and some board games we rather like. http://bit.ly/es2tVl […]
Busted Battle of Smolensk link there…
Rob needs to get his Ummms under control.Seriously, once you hear one it will drive you crazy trying to listen.
Dungeons was awful. I felt like I was playing Evil Genius meets The Sims.
Nice followup to the War in the East show. Good to hear some love for the game coming from Bruce.
There was some talk about wishing to move units around in WitE as Corps instead of divisions (I think), but it was my understanding that the way you stack more than three divisions into one hex is you group them together as Corps. Then you can move them around as Corps, and unpack back down to divisions as required.
Good to hear White Dog Games getting a shout out by Bruce. They have a lot of freeware games, some print and play, some against an AI that you can play with. Also some of the Premium titles they sell, for mere pounds, are based on interesting battles/times – its just the coding behind these games is rather homebrew/amateurish, especially when the UI is concerned. Still, its good to support a fringe development team and taste their esoteric range of budget priced “board and chit” based wargames.
I recently took at look at their Isandlwana game, and wrestled with the UI a bit, but enjoyed the ride. It was a shame the game didn’t seem to recognise the end game condition though.
Aww, that’s really unfair, Ben. We all use “umms” to punctuate our speech and Rob is no worse than anyone else. Also, Anders, you fail at game criticism because you just sold me on Dungeons!
Anyway, listening to the show now. Glad to hear Bruce and Troy again.
Has something changed about the way the podcasts are being distrubuted/posted? I have iTunes set to auto-download new episodes and this ine isn’t getting picked up. If I refresh it’s like it doesn’t think a new one is available.
I am also not getting the last 2 episodes on Itunes, it shows the last one available as episode 102.
Personally I believe Dungeons was a little bit of a dissapointment, my favorite game all categories is evil genius, so I had high expectations on a game which I thought would be in the same genre.
Too bad.
Now digging into Cities in motion from paradox seems quite promising if you like building games, although a bit slow paced.
The part of the show regarding WitE and war gaming was too long by far and was some of the most boring pieces of podcasting I’ve heard.
I’m saying this because it was a surprise to me that this happened, as TMA has been consistently interesting for me since I started listening, some 70 shows ago. Even the WitE episode itself was more entertaining.
In general, I suggest you refrain from going into minute specific details on any games. I’d probably have been just as bored if you’d discussed the cool-down time for SC2 unit abilities.
Alternately, you could skip episodes that seem like they would focus on the details of games you don’t care about, or simply bail on an episode that so clearly bores you to tears. When the episode description involves Bruce looking up campaign histories, and includes a link to a map, it’s a good indication that we’ll be going into some detail.
The bottom line is that a lot of factors limit us on Three Moves Ahead, and perhaps the biggest limitation is that we play games that take a lot of time to appreciate and understand. For this week, I had been playing quite a lot of WitE for a review and Bruce still had quite a bit to say about it. Troy was busy with relocating and rebooting SimTroy. So Bruce and I did what comes naturally: we went deep on the game that we were playing the most.
Was it a bad show? I really don’t think so, and I certainly enjoy having conversations like this with Bruce. It’s possible that we were just amusing ourselves, and tons of listeners were thinking of ways to kill themselves during our War in the East discussion. But I haven’t gotten too many complaints about the episode, and 3MA is not a podcast that will be interesting to every single listener every single week. A hazard of our subject matter, and our personalities.
I enjoyed this episode quite alot – specifically because you did go into detail on WitE. I can’t see myself buying the game cause it seems too daunting to learn, but I am still curious about the experience of playing it. So I found the focus very interesting.