St00pid Pinko Commies!
After playing some Zombinion with AJ earlier in the day, El-Kabong came over for some serious, hard-core Cold War Action! Twilight Stuggle is a game I’ve been watching climb the rankings on BoardGameGeeks for some time. It’s currently floating at 4th place, which puts it in some crazy-good company. The top-five on their site is:
As an avid board gamer, I consider Puerto Rico and Power Grid alone 2 of the greatest games ever. Obviously I needed to check out this game.
This first thing I noticed when researching this gem? It’s only 2-players! How can this be? BoardGameGeeks rated a 2 player game higher than Dominion? Not only that, but it didn’t come from Europe! If you know me at all, you know that I despise Ameri-trash board games almost universally. So what was the deal with this 2-player game from GMT that was racing up the BGG rankings?
Why does El-Kabong's hair look like Bozo the Clown's?
I’ve played a couple of turns of this before, but I’ve never finished the game. I know the jist of the game-flow, but not the specifics, so El-Kabong and I quickly set up the board and dug into the rules. We intended to follow along in the rule book for the first turn, then get down to some serious Cold-Warring! Step one found the first flaw in the game. The physical board’s quality is terrible! It is fold-out cardboard, but it’s thin, easily warps (this set was already slightly bowed upwards) and won’t stay down. We ended up putting a large, heavy, glass mug on one end just to keep it down. Step two found the second serious flaw in the game: the rules. Typical Ameri-trash, war gaming rules which don’t flow, are difficult to follow, and don’t proceed in a logical manner. We kept having to flip back and forth in the rules book during the game. Specific questions that came up during the game were not easily answered and were difficult to find in the book. So far so yuck!
I spent too much time in the Middle-East early in the game.
We played through a turn and a half, then decided that we had figured out enough of the rules to start over with the aim of finishing the game. Wow, I really like this game. The board sucks, the rules are difficult to read, and the small, square, cardboard chits to mark your influence are begging to be eaten by my cat and found 5 years later under the couch, but the game itself is really, really good!
The USSR swoops into the gap I left in Europe.
The first 3 turns are referred to as Early War in the game, and they are designed to destroy the USA player’s morale. Really. That’s the only explanation I can think of! USA will win before turn 4 without seriously strategizing her ass off, fighting for every inch of Europe, and just a tiny bit of luck. I’m told that the game has the reverse issue in the late game, with USSR getting the shaft, but since I’ve only ever played USA and I always lose before turn 4, I’ll never know!!
The next time I play, I’ll be dropping all my initial Western European Influence in West Germany and focusing my attentions in Europe almost exclusively.
I really like the flow of this game. All the pressure points applied to the two players and the multitude of ‘battlegrounds’ around the board keep the game interesting. The intense pressure felt even on the very first turn is amazing, at least for USA. I look forward to making it past turn 4!! I’ve still never seen the Mid-War cards!
The game ends, USA goes down in flames as USSR seizes control of Europe.