Hello, fine followers of Strategy and Wargaming. One thing that has been bugging me for quite a while is the idea of going beyond the written word.

There are several reasons for this, the first is because talking about strategy and wargames is fun. Way more fun than writing about it. The problem with doing that is that, currently, I just don’t have a lot of free time. Between having to juggle real-life work, family life, going back to the gym, and the constant trips I have to do, very little time is left at the end of the day, and since Strategy and Wargaming are still growing quite a lot, I’ve focused a lot on writing a lot, even if that’s not what I think I should be doing. I’m starting to feel more like someone who delivers the news, and less like the guy who writes great in-depth reviews and highlights why games and history are a match made in heaven.

A couple of weeks back Al, the guy behind RTSHQ reached out to me with a very nice email and we started talking and the idea of doing a weekly podcast started to float around. We both like strategy games, we specialize in different genres, and we got along great. So why not try something? Besides, there’s only one good strategy game podcast around, and that’s The Historical Gamer Single Malt Strategy. There’s enough space for everyone.

Jump forward to today and everything is set and ready to roll, and Critical Moves is being made right now. We’ll start recording our episodes in a couple of days and they’ll be out, weekly, from the 1st of November onwards.

The team’s fantastic, and besides me and Al- who are the more vanilla co-hosts- we have Joe, who’s a PhD in Educational Leadership; Tim, who’s a game designer for the RTS Beyond All Reason, Shane a Youtuber focused on wargames and with a special love for War In The Pacific (so you know he’s serious); Last, but certainly not least, we have Brian, who’s the audio engineer and editor for the podcast. He’s also a passionate fan of strategy games and a history buff.

We’re aiming for weekly releases with the average podcast time being around 1 hour at most. We already have the episodes until the end of 2024 lined up, and to give you a brief glimpse of what’s on the horizon, expect discussions around strategy games remasters, the renaissance of RTS, Realism vs Fun, the state of some franchises, the media we would like to see being turned into strategy games, the games we love the most, and the best titles of the last 12 months. We’re going for a friendly, relaxed, friday-night kind of mood.

So yeah, that’s that. If you would like to, go to the Critical Moves Podcast website, join our Discord, and subscribe to the YouTube channel.