Arcade Castle - Episode 19 - Warcraft!

Arcade Castle: A Gaming Podcast

In Episode 19, Arcade Castle finds itself in the Warcraft Universe and, as luck would have it, they find a copy of the Warcraft Board Game, released in 2003 by Fantasy Flight and Blizzard Entertainment, based off of the landmark Real-Time Strategy (RTS) computer game Warcraft: Orcs and Humans from 1994.

In this episode, Arcade Castle looks at the historic Warcraft franchise that spans across the decades and spawned the global phenomenon that itself has last going on twenty years: World of Warcraft. They talk about the key components of the original Warcraft title and see how well it was adapted to the tabletop. Can a game that is 'real-time' with simultaneous actions and everyone playing at once be crafted into a board game where players take turns?

Additionally, this is not the first RTS board game adaptation Arcade Castle has encountered on the podcast, as they first played the Age of Mythology in 2016.

(Click this link to check out Episode 03 that covered the Age of Mythology)

Arcade Castle hopes that by comparing these two games side by side it will highlight what developers feel represents the genre, and what game mechanics, rules, and player interaction designers believe capture the digital code of the video games in the board game format.

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Episode Outline:

00:00-20:00 - Arcade Castle touches upon the RTS genre, instead wanting to focus their attention on the Warcraft RTS franchise, and the Warcraft universe at large. They discuss the history and impact of not only Warcraft on the RTS genre, but the societal impact of the brand.

20:00-40:00 - Arcade Castle takes an in-depth look at the Warcraft Boardgame, how it plays, the rules, mechanics, and player interaction and try to determine how well it succeeds in adapting this classic RTS title

40:00-60:00 - Arcade Castle compare the strategies you bring to the RTS videogame genre and the strategies you bring to the Warcraft Boardgame and see if there are any commonalities between the two. Additionally, they compare the Warcraft Board Game and the Age of Mythology Board and see which game was a better adaptation of the Real-Time Strategy genre.