Twilight Struggle Review - RIB20
Twilight Struggle Review
Disclaimer: I asked for and was provided a review copy courtesy of GMT Games.
TLDR: This game belongs on everyone’s shelf, it’s a classic for a reason and a new favorite of mine. Very few gaming experiences that hinge on strategy make you feel the way this game does when making decisions.
Twilight Struggle is one of the smartest games I’ve ever played. I’ll say right now that although it’s listed as a 2-3 hour game, my experience with this has taken up double that per session. This is mostly because for a new player, and even for me, thinking about what to do takes up more time than you’d think. If two confident and experienced players faced off here, they’d probably only take 2-3 hours, but I played this game with a different person each time, so although my turns were relatively short (let me not lie, I took my time), explaining things and setting up the board while talking about it, as well as simple goofing off, ate up the hours like nothing else. This is a great game, it’s as simple as that and you really don’t need my opinion to know that, it held the number 1 spot on BGG for years and even now, almost 20 years after its release, it is still in the top 15.
Speaking of years after release, I think it’s important for you to know that GMT Games is putting out a 20th Anniversary Hall of Fame edition next year. I don’t know much about the details or specifics but it looks really cool and I honestly do recommend holding off on buying this until that comes out, or preordering for a pretty big discount. Since the holidays are coming up, if you’d like a 2 player experience to take up an afternoon with, go ahead and cop it now, either way it’s a fun time to be had (I don’t use affiliate links, I really do think this game is worth the purchase for anyone who likes board games, this time period, or a 2 player experience).
Twilight Struggle is a 2 player, card driven game. You and another vie for control of countries as the US and USSR from 1945-1989. As with many games of this nature, the cards are pretty much all themed around real concepts, people, events, and objects from that time period, and the end of the rulebook is filled with historical descriptions to learn from (you do not need any historical knowledge to play or enjoy this game). The very end has the designer’s notes, which I’ll reflect on before continuing. The first paragraph talks about how important time was in making this game. This game being short simply did not align with my experience, but I can completely see how it can go much quicker with two people who know what they’re doing. One of the best things that the designer’s chose to do is their own sort of rule of cool, where they opted for playability over realism. The game very much does feel like you are a side of the Cold War, it is extremely immersive because of how it makes the player feel, even if it gives up on simulationism to do so. In this game, all countries aside from the two superpowers are essentially just pawns, China has a bit of influence but this is limited to its own mechanics, and the domino theory of influence is what drives this game, even if such a thing is very much false in reality. The designer compares this to the old animations you’d see about the spread of the USSR influence across a map, I think it’s a great choice.
I was surprised to see in these notes that other Cold War games treat nuclear war in a desirable way. In this game, the player that causes nuclear war loses on the spot. This makes more sense to me, personally, but admittedly I don’t have experience with other Cold War games. The designer who wrote this section, Jason Matthews, touches on two more points before closing. These are the DEFCON system (how close you are to nuclear war + the worse it is, the more coup attempts or war cards you have to play in order to not lose Victory Points) and how hidden information influences the play experience. I personally believe that this latter feature is the crux of the game, the idea that you don’t know your opponent’s goals is a fairly common mechanic, but this game pulls off that suspense in a pretty unique way.
The game is split into 10 potential turns, each starting with drawing for a full hand and then playing cards through multiple rounds within those turns. You and your opponent are drawing from the same pool, which gets additions when the middle and late war periods hit, as well as losing cards when they are played as one-off historical events. Since you are pulling from the same deck, your hand will be made up of cards that may benefit your opponent. In most cases, you will only have one card left in your hand by the end of the turn.
Cards that benefit you or that are neutral can be played for their point value (which can be spent on various actions) or for the text description, which may or may not be a one-off event. If you are playing a card that benefits an opponent for the point value, which you’ll be doing a lot of, that event must occur. These events typically shake up how much influence you or your opponent have in various countries, which are grouped by regions, and interact with a lot of the other elements on the board, which include the Space Race, DEFCON counter, Victory Points, and Required Military Operations (coup events and specific “war” cards, this is influenced by the DEFCON counter).
Along with a player enacting nuclear war, there are three other ways to win. The first player to get 20 Victory Points wins, if a player Controls Europe during scoring, they win. If the game lasts until the end of Turn 10, scores are tallied for each region and the player who Controls Europe wins, else whoever has the most Victory Points after scoring. This scoring system is where some real suspense occurs. Certain cards drawn determine when a region is scored, and scoring cards MUST be played before a turn ends, sometime within all the rounds that take place in a turn. I think it’s also important to note that each turn opens with a “Headline Phase” where you and your opponent pick a one card from your hands, scoring cards included, and reveal it at the same time so that their events occur, with the card worth the most points going first.
The points that cards grant you can be used on four different operations: placing influence in a country where you already have influence or that is connected to a country with your influence in it, realignment rolls (reducing opponent influence), coup attempts (remove opponent influence and potentially add your own), and the Space Race, which grants bonuses to players who are lucky enough to reap them first. When a card is used for points, it usually goes in the discard pile, which is shuffled back into the deck at the end of a turn, along with cards played for their event that are not limited. Events can also leave permanent effects on the field, so each side has various reminder tokens with card names on one side and their effects on the other to keep in mind how the rules may have changed as the game progressed.
I’ve found that it’s an extremely intuitive game, there’s a lot going on and I know I said that it takes time to explain it, but that’s more to do with quantity than confusion. You can teach this game to nearly anyone and they’d be able to flow with it very easily. It is a bit of a challenge to remember all the things that you can do during your turn, but that adds a lot to the fun. Each round is tense and full of deliberation, there isn’t any boredom here. There are lots of things you can do, every choice comes with tradeoffs, and you don’t know what your opponent could have up their sleeve. This game uses dice but honestly I would really say that strategy is overwhelmingly the deciding factor here. This is a classic for a reason, it’s superb and the feeling that comes with playing it is truly one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve ever had.
Nikhil Saxena
Founder, Destrier Studios
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