Twilight Struggle is a masterpiece. There are no two ways about it. It's a miracle of design, a product of sheer brilliance. It's the closest boardgaming has come to becoming a true art, a real and universal contribution to human culture. Yeah, I really, really, REALLY like it.

 

For those of you that don't know it yet, Twilight struggle simulates the political/diplomatic conflicts of the Cold War, from the beginnings to the very end, one player being the United States and the other the Soviet Union. It's mostly an area-control game with hand management, with the cards depicting a historical event (be it generic, like “Socialist governments”, that keep coming back from the discard pile, or specific, like “Marshall Plan”, that are removed from the game once used) and an abstract number that shows the “overall strength” of the card. Both players receive cards depicting american and soviet events; when you play a card with an event from your side, you can choose to either use the abstract number to use “generic actions” or you can choose the event, which influences the map in specific locations. The stroke of genius comes from the other possibility: when you play a card with an opponent's event, you have the abstract number for generic actions AND the oponnent's event occurs. Since you can only hold on to one card from your entire hand from one turn to another, those horrible events you just got WILL happen, sadly enough.

 

A lot of the game, thus, is damage control. Is managing your actions so that the events you just got will hurt you less, while still trying to get control of a solid part of the continents being fought. And the battle is fought all over the world, in six different stages/continents (three, in the beginning, with three more added at around 30% of the match). Scoring is somewhat convoluted to understand in the first match, but it works really well to build up tension during the match: there are scoring cards in the deck that are distributed along with event cards, and scoring is triggered when a player plays the specific card for that continent (this card you cannot hold between different turns).

 

So even the scoring mechanism has a damage control element to it. When you draw a scoring card for a continent, you have to evaluate how well or poorly you're doing in that location, and how possible/impossible it is to get more points (or less damage) from that situation. Sometimes you just have to give up and take the damage (or else you'd risk getting hurt even harder), and sometimes you have to fight. However, if you are too obvious in your actions, the other player can get suspicious and figure out what you're trying to do; since it's always easier to do something without someone getting in the way, you frequently have to be subtle as to how you go about things.

 

This pressure is augmented by the fact that Twilight Struggle is often a game where a small element can have huge effects. The control of a single country can mean the difference between zero and four points during scoring (in a game where having 20 points more than your opponent gives you an automatic victory), so attention to detail is quite important. A few players have expressed some frustration as to how you have to pay attention to everything in the game, but it only takes a few matches before your eyes are wide open throughout the game.

 

Theme is implemented to perfection in Twilight Struggle. Not only do you have over one hundred historical event cards happening throughout the game (all of them nicely illustrated with photographs of the moment, or at least drawings of the cultural symbols involved) but the overall feeling of paranoia and a fundamental lack of knowledge of what the adversary is thinking is also always present. I'm usually not a very theme-focused player ( saying “theme is a collection of nouns and verbs that facilitate the explanation of the game mechanisms to new players” would perhaps be overdoing it, but not by much) but this game is the exception. I really feel the history in this one, with the coups, the neighbor influence (realignment), the chasing after . For those who are less history-savvy (like myself), the rulebook even includes a paragraph about each event, a true history lesson from the designers.

 

Like pretty much every game ever made, Twilight Struggle is not for everyone. It's a two player affair (in which the 13+ age estimate seems appropriate) with somehwat complex rules (compared to most eurogames; by wargame standards it's quite simple) and can take up 3-4 hours for a match to be played to completion (sometimes it takes only half an hour, but that only happens due to poor/risky playing of one player). It's not the kind of game that gets played in a gaming group reunion, more like the game you invite one gaming buddy for an afternoon of intrigue and mutual plan-meddling. It's a game in which experience clearly counts, and not due exclusively to strategies and mechanism-manipulation knowledge. Just knowing all the 100 cards (you will, by the end of your third match or so) gives a player a HUGE advantage. A newbie has close to zero chance against an experienced player (in over 30 matches I've never seen a newbie win), to the point where the first match pretty much “doesn't really count” (I believe in this for most games, but it's particularly clear in this one). Each new player you teach this game is almost like an boardgaming investment: in a few matches, you'll really have your opponent: until then, you just hope the person will like it.

 

Luck also plays a significant factor in the game, something a few players may dislike. You have the card draw factor AND dice-rolling to solve coups and realignments. Since this can be quite a tight game, and with a few domino-effects developing over the course of the game, a player has to accept that sheer bad luck could be the deciding factor in an agonizing defeat. However, elements like this keep a game with fixed setup and specific cards (“never go into Egypt before sadat comes out”, the american player will keep in mind) with enough variety for multiple plays.

 

 

Production values of my copy leave something to be desired (thin and small chits, crappy “what-GMT-calls-deluxe” board) but it seems that this is all being fixed in the newer edition coming out in a few weeks. It even comes with a chinese civil war variant, to address a supposed lack of balance due to the soviets being stronger (they really are, but I think it makes the game more interesting, and can be fixed with a VP auction in the beginning to decide who's USSR) and also a few extra event cards. With these changes, it becomes even easier to recommend this fantastic game, which is something I do every time someone asks me for an intense and engaging 2-player game.

 

Rating Given:

 

10/10.