It’s more a fancy lecture and masterwork design class than a bunch of guys guessing about what works when board game desiger Lee Brimmicombe-Wood sits down with Troy and Bruce to talk about his history of making games about air power, the challenges in getting all the cool technical bits down and the difficulties in making the bombing of civilians a game factor you cannot ignore. Can you make a strategic game about an air war still be about flying? What limits do you put on the player to make Luftwaffe raids roughly historical?
Bird of Prey
Duel in the Dark
Among the Dead Cities
John Butterfield
John Tiller’s War Over Vietnam
The podcast is only a little over 4 minutes, both MP3 download and iTunes version!
Troy re-uploaded the podcast. If you re-download it you should be fine.
Yeah, sorry about that. There was a problem in the first upload. All fixed now. Re-download and you’ll be OK.
Cheers, shopping trip saved :)
Great show. Bruce is great when he’s on subjects he really likes and has tons of experience with. Lee is a great guest.
I feel like you guys cut this one short. I know you try and keep it to an hour, but that should be a goal not an immutable law.
Alternatively, when the conversation is really cracking and goes long, just split it into multiple episodes and release it over two weeks. I was so hoping to see ‘and hear the rest of this conversation next week’ when the show has minute left.
Yes it’s a shame you cut Lee off, but it was an excellent podcast nevertheless. I love hear people talking about their obsessions.
I laughed out loud when Troy made that firestorm comment at the end.
Excellent episode, even with the discussion cut short. It gets my vote for the best 3MA of 2011 (s0 far…)
Superb podcast. Plus ‘Brimmicombe-Wood’ is possibly the most English name I’ve ever heard. And I’m English.
I loved this podcast. I haven’t played any of the games discussed, but I know about all of them Maybe I’ll preorder the upcoming game. Lee has such a charming and delightful manner of speaking — I almost wish you had let this go three hours. I do hope you have him back when Bomber Command is released. I think I would enjoy listening to him talk about tiddlywinks for two hours.
Thanks Bruce, for getting him on.
Had you told me that Bruce was going to be on, AND you were going to be talking with a designer of games involving the tactics/strategy of airpower, AND it was Lee Brimmicombe-Wood no less, AND the discussion was going to include his body of work with GMT Games–my favorite contemporary boardgame company–I would have originally thought you were playing a cruel joke! Instead, what a great surprise!
Thanks very much! I enjoy the podcast, listen regularly, and would enjoy it even more if the show chose to expand focus with some occasional time spent talking about the finer strategy boardgaming experiences to be had.
Lee was indeed a great guest, and I was thrilled to get him on the show. Unfortunately, we aren’t set up for a three-hour podcast, either from a scheduling perspective or sound editing. I know the ending sounded a little abrupt, but Lee had so many interesting things to say that I felt bad guiding the conversation as much as I did, so when we ran out of time I hadn’t gotten us to our stopping place very well. I know we could easily have filled another two hours. I promise that when Bomber Command comes out we will have Lee on again (if he agrees of course) and will work on scheduling a longer block of time, and do it a little in advance so we don’t drop a huge block of editing on poor Michael Hermes and just say “here you go.” Michael’s sound editing is very valuable to us! Thanks as always to him, and to Lee for being such a wonderful guest.
We generally shoot for an hour in podcasts, rarely go 90 minutes, and Rob minds less than I do about hitting the 80 minute mark. An hour is a good length and I’m sure if we knew just how gregarious Lee would be, we would have planned it out tobe longer or better structured. There is usually some hassle before the show that eats time, we have time zone issues, etc.
Anything too far over an hour or 90 minutes at the far limit and you run into people not listening through.
In any case, Lee is welcome back any time and now we know what kind of talker we are dealing with.
Great show, it’s a shame that the conversation got off though. Don’t have much free time for many board games these days, wish I did though and it was great listening to this.
On the editing front, if you did go two or three hours, you could just chop out the first hour and edit that this week and release it as a one hour episode.
Then edit the next the following week, etc. No need to add extra work.
As it was already said: A great episode with an almost perfect mix of game development, game rules, history background and discussion. And Mr. Brimmicombe-Wood was a very eloquent guest. Indeed a pity that there was a “hard end” , but an episode on the game’s release was announced at least :-).
I remember that there was quite a debate around 2002 when Jörg Friedrich’s book “Der Brand” was released here in Germany, where he took a very critical look on the allied air raids against Nazi-Germany.
Holy cow. Lee Brimmicombe-Wood… I bought the Colonial Marines Technical Manual expecting fanboy crap (I here admit I’m a crap fanboy), and got something truly amazing that remains on my reference shelf to this day. I had it in the office with me at BioWare when writing the Mass Effect codex.
I had no idea he made games, let alone ones so highly regarded. In a sense, I feel I’ve failed as a gamer.
I liked the podcast especially as I wish there was a companion podcast covering just board games but one gripe here was there was no discussion about why raid/battalion/etc level games don’t seem to translate to PC’s. We have plenty of tactical level and plenty of grand strategy but very little in the middle on the PC. This was hinted at in the first couple minutes of the podcast and then never touched again.
Not sure if you guys noticed, but the Sticher version is stuck to 4 minutes mark as they didn’t re-download and encode the latest version , probably because the RSS feed hasn’t been updated.
Just listened to this one and enjoyed it greatly. Can’t argue with your decision to bring it to a close after the 1 hour mark – as it is I often end up listening to these in 20 minute chunks so longer is not better – but I hope you can find time for a follow up with this guest someday as there’s plenty of meat left on this bone.
I don’t play boardgames and don’t have a huge interest in air power but I listened to every second of this podcast and could definitely do with more. Very enlightening on historical points, very interesting on boardgame design issues, and just an all-around excellent episode of 3MA. I look forward to the (I hope inevitable) next episode with Lee.