As a matter of principle I pride myself on the fact that I’m a diverse gamer who always keeps an open mind to any game, but for the past 15 years since Twilight Struggle released I have resisted it simply because I honestly have no interest in the cold war at all. Having lived through the tail end of it myself, even as it was happening I barely understood it nor cared to know anything about it.

Yet I find myself somewhat obligated to try it as a writer for a gaming blog to play games like Twilight Struggle that are universally hailed as masterpieces, in particular a game that held on to the number one spot on Boardgamegeek for years and still ranks in the top 10 today 15 years after its release.

Finally after years of avoiding it I gave it a try, first by playing the digital version and now the physical version. Today we review Twilight Struggle, 15 years behind schedule!

Overview

Final Score:  (3.35 out of 5 Stars)

Designer: Ananda Gupta, Jason Matthews

Twilight Struggle is thematically a game about the cold war in which players via for power over a map of the globe in a “struggle for global supremacy. Always on the brink of nuclear war, players manipulate and maneuver the abstracted concept of influence on the board as they try to dominate entire regions from the America’s to Southeast Asia and everything in-between.

In more practical terms its a game about victory points, scored through a wide range of methods but most notably through the scoring cards that reward control on the map. Each round players can play only a single card at a time from their hand in a back and forth battle to manipulate the board and events on the global stage in their favor. This process is further complicated by the fact that there are American friendly cards and Soviet friendly cards in the single deck from which both players draw cards. Hence as an American player for example you will at times be forced to execute events on cards that benefit your opponent and vice versus, leaving much of the games strategy to timing. Any given card can be super powerful or super weak, depending on when it is played and much of the strategy and sort of high level thinking behind the game lives in this space of assessing when exactly that is.

The game largely comes down to who can best balance the benefits and drawbacks of the cards, timing of when they are played and smart positioning of your influence. There is some luck to the game as players take some of the more riskier moves like waging mini wars in different regions, performing coups or trying to win the space race, but there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that a skilled player will always win against a lucky player, hence the luck can be mitigated entirely through tactical and strategic game play.

Twilight Struggle is an award winning game and I have no trouble understanding why. Its a game that is incredibly simple to learn how to play, yet bottomless in terms of depth of strategy and gameplay, it is very much like a game of chess where learning the rules of the game is just the beginning of what is a much larger world that surrounds the mechanic.

There is of course more to it then this brief description but it suffices to say that the game looks far more complex then it is, though it has the look of a war game it most certainly is not one and the basis of its duel use card mechanic is a tried and true one responsible for some of the best games on the market today in the genre of historical war games.

The only question that remains is does Twilight Struggle really earn its keep with me, or is it like many of the top 10 contenders on Boardgamegeek overrated?

Components

Score: 
Tilt:

Pros:   Its a beautiful game, plain and simple, capturing via colors and art perfectly and the innate feel of the cold war.

Cons:  Like most GMT games, the cards are of such high quality stock that they are almost too stiff to shuffle.

GMT games is probably not known for high quality components, though it should be! In fact they should be famous for changing the reputation of historical simulation games and war games in this regard, as the more commonly known “chit games” have always been notoriously poor quality. Back in the day when a lot of these types of “token based” war and simulation games where made they were known for having really shitty components, poorly written manuals for really complex games, lack of “color” and artistic style. They focused on gameplay but never components. GMT has changed all that and shown that you can have the best of both worlds.

In fact, some of the GMT games on my shelf like B-17 Flying Fortress Leader and Empire of the Sun are among the most beautiful table decorations I own, with some of the highest quality components I have ever seen in a game. Twilight Struggle (current printing) benefits from this change and GMT provides truly high quality, gorgeous components for the game with an artistic flair that just fits. Yet their wise enough to understand that I want to pay for a game, not fancy miniatures, something that has grown incredibly tiresome in today’s gaming market where games are five times as expensive then they need to be just to have some plastic representation that serve no purpose in the game-play at all. This annoys me to no end and I’m glad GMT understands that good components does not mean wasting my money on pointless and usually unnecessary plastic sculpts while simultaneously ugly components devoid of any art or style, are just as distracting and disturb enjoyment of the game. The middle ground they found is exactly what I like to see in games today.

The mounted gameboard is astonishingly colorful, wonderfully illustrated and incredibly useful (for gameplay) in terms of organization and layout. It makes playing the game easier, faster and makes grasping its concepts simpler, serving not only the aesthetic but practical purpose for the game. I love that and GMT should be commended for how well thought out the game-board is. Somehow they managed to capture the color theme of the cold war as one might imagine it with the deep dark blood reds of the Soviets and the cool, clean blues of the Americans. This is a game-board you will just love owning, giving you that warm fuzzy feeling of money well spent.

The cards and tokens in the game are also of the absolute highest quality you can get, truly made to last with a lot of thought going into the legibility and usability of both, not overwhelming them with art and color but ensuring that each component has thematic weight and recognizably. In fact after a few plays of Twilight Struggle I can tell you what each card does just by the picture and I have the memory capacity of a goldfish. Unfortunately GMT has a tendency to make the card stock too rigid, they are actually difficult to shuffle.

I would not consider component quality a huge must for a game like this, but the fact that the components are great is a huge boon for the game, I love being surprised and impressed by something unexpected, it carries a lot of weight with me.

Theme

Score: 
Tilt:

Pros:  Its difficult to imagine a game capturing a theme better, this is the cold war in a box.

Cons:  Your interest in the theme will have different mileage, its not exactly the most interesting of subjects.

I walked into Twilight Struggle with very limited if any understanding or interest in the cold war, yet after playing the game I have found myself engrossed in the subject going so far as reading books on the topic. To me, when a board game not only teaches but creates interest in a subject, its an automatic win in the theme department and Twilight Struggle has certainly done that with a very large, nuclear bang.

Twilight Struggle does an amazing job of creating that anxiety of the cold war in which there is a constant move and counter move as was often the case historically between the Americans and the Soviets. That feeling of being limited to what you can do out of fear of the ultimate consequence. There is a kind of sense of scale as well and the weight of players actions create a constant re-assessment in trying to understand the “why” of each play. Every card play, reveals something about your opponents strategy, yet you can’t help but imagine the world in which these events take place thanks in large part to the clever way in which cards and history are linked.

Because each card represents an actual event in history and the draw deck is broken down into early, mid and late war cards gradually shuffled into the main deck, their is a kind of progression through history that you feel through the cards as they are played. Even the focus of what regions are important, the fluctuations in where the influential political battlefields are and the places were it all takes place breathes life into the thematic and often historically accurate feel of the game, yet it is not scripted and each game you play you get a truly unique alternate version of history.

I think Twilight Struggle has done an incredible job of bringing the theme of the cold war to life, in particular in making you feel that anxiety of the era. Its truly an amazing sensation that even now I find difficult to describe but as I write I can’t help but to nod my head in agreement and understanding of why this game was both so popular, highly rated and won so many awards. Its a beautiful coordination between theme and game-play deserving of all its accolades.

Gameplay

Score: 
Tilt:

Pros:  The card mechanic is brilliantly done, with lots of difficult decisions and interesting strategies to explore while being relatively easy to teach the rules.

Cons:  The game favors the soviets and the game suffers from an overwhelming expert syndrome problem that can make it difficult to induct to players.

Twilight Struggle is hardly the first game to make use of the card driven “operation costs” mechanic we see in the game at its core, but what is surprising is that a game with this mechanic could become such a hit with the general gaming public. Topping the charts on BBG (boardgamegeek), Twilight Struggle has achieved considerable acclaim considering its historical war game roots.

We see this mechanic in classics like For the People, Washington’s War and Empire of the Sun, attributed largely to the wonderful designer Mark Herman. Yet Twilight Struggle somehow manages to improve on the concept mainly by simplifying it down to its basics and implementing it in a simple way mechanically while gripping tightly to the reason for its existence, that deep strategic core that drives paralysis analysis. I think Mark Herman is a great designer but he designs games for war gamers and it really took someone more in tune with the general board game culture to understand how to leverage this mechanic in a way that it could be absorbed by more casual gamers which make up the vast majority of people out there rolling dice. I really think its this leveraging of Mark Hermans great revolution in game design that has produced a game like Twilight Struggle, yet Ananda Gupta and Jason Mathews also really opened the door into some interesting elements of play that don’t really exist in the Herman design on which Twilight Struggle is based.

This is a mechanic you will be thinking as much about during the game as between games, as its a an endless well of potential and its why so many of Mark Hermans games are so highly regarded among war gamers, yet Twilight Struggle in my eyes simply does it better than all of its predecessors in many ways. Not necessarily because it goes deeper but rather by making the experience far more palatable, approachable and easier to absorb. Twilight Struggle is a game you can teach in 10 minutes flat with few “exception based” rules that can make so many historical war games difficult to manage at the table and while a novice opponent may struggle to beat a more experienced player speaking to its depth, it won’t be the result of not understanding how to play. This is a vast contrast to most games that use this card driven mechanic that really require considerable amount of study just to play correctly. One exception might be Washingtons War which I found had a very similar feel, yet lacked the depth of card play that Twilight Struggle has.

More than that however, Twilight Struggle creates a sort of static zone of gameplay. There aren’t infinite possibilities and combinations and though from play to play you will always be surprised by the way cards and situations combine, there is a tone to the game, a strategic playing field that a single person can absorb, understand and work within thanks to the fact that in playing the game your not constantly trying to remember the many rules and exceptions to interactions as is the case in so many of the games where this mechanic appears. Its why I say its a better version of the game as it has considerably fewer if any “gotcha” moments in the rules, yet has them in immense quantity in terms of game-play.

Don’t get me wrong I love Empire of the Rising Sun, Washington’s War and even Paths of Glory, but I never feel comfortable pulling these games out with a friend and saying “hey lets play a fun game” even though I desperately want to play those games with someone because they really are amazing. They just require a lot more explanation and understanding of rules to really play even remotely competitively and really the first few games of these great titles are going to be very much learning the rules games. Even after playing them many times, it still can feel like a bit of a grind to get through them. Twilight Struggle is the first game in this vein I have seen that I really believe anyone can learn to play in 10 minutes from opening the box and that just makes this a gem among gems.

Twilight Struggle gameplay is all about subtle plays and I have to admit the first few times I played it, even though it always drew me back, I felt helpless and limp. It was easy to learn how to play, but learning to play it well really required some study, understanding of the cards, the subtle interactions of those cards and the importance of key locations and most importantly paying attention to what has and hasn’t been played. In a sense this is a drawback of Twilight Struggle. It suffers from what I like to call “expert syndrome” where new players don’t have a prayer in hell winning against someone who has a few games under their belt, which notably is not an uncommon phenomenon among strategic war games, but at least the cause is not the lack of understanding the rules which is more typically the case with all other games I have played in this vein.

When it comes to the road to experience mileage will vary, I have found some get it right away, others struggle with the subtle way the game is manipulated card play to card play. In fact I have found that non-gamer or casual gamers tend to pick it up faster then veteran gamers that enter the scene with a lot of expectation and assumption from the genre. This may explain why its so popular on boardgamegeek.

Still I found that when I teach the game I spend as much time explaining the rules as I do giving strategy tips and advice. Most players become competitive only after many plays and only IF they like the game initially which filters out a lot of people, in fact most people. If you can manage to find someone who sticks with it during this learning the strategy curve, the game not only becomes absolutely amazing, but extraordinarily diverse.

You will never play the same game twice especially since every opponent will ultimately develop their own style and approach to the game. That is assuming you can hook them which is a iffy proposition. The subject matter and the complexity of the strategy that really favors expertise can be a real turn off in the initial plays and it will take many plays for a player to really become competitive against someone who has already gone through this cycle of learning and developing their skills.

I do find some flaws with the mechanic as well. For one, its clear to me that the Soviet player has a significant advantage. This is not just a sort of personal opinion but a fact based statistical reality. No matter where you turn for these statistics, tournaments, online play in the digital version of the game or personal experience the win rate of the Soviet is ALWAYS much higher then the Americans. I think this is mainly because the turn order does not change and the Soviet Player starts with that powerful China card, but it could be a other subtle elements combined that drive the results.

This can be a deal breaker because all things being equal the Soviet player will win more often than the American player. An American victory is a far more respected and coveted thing in my eyes, but it does not change this simple flaw in the game.

At its core, Twilight Struggle is a game of chess, a battle of wits in which you analyze your opponents plays to asses what he may or may not be after and I think really experienced players will make intentionally misleading plays to try and trick their opponent into believing in certain assumptions. This of course assumes that both opponents are experts, so when novice players who don’t know the cards are involved this tends to carry considerably less weight if any, but I suppose to some extent this is always true about strategic war games.

Which brings me to my point. Twilight Struggle may indeed be a much simpler to absorb and understand game rules wise but it is no less deep and strategic then your typical high level war game which kind of creates an unusual circumstance in the hobby. Here is a game anyone can learn to play but it exists in that same plane as Empire of the Rising Sun or Paths of Glory. Removing the complexity is ingenious but it does result in this weird space were highly experienced war games playing casual gamers creates a very wide gap of gaming results.

I can say already now that I have a grip of this game that 95% of all people I play against I beat by the 3rd or 4th turn definitively in what can only be described as a crushing defeat. Its rare that I run across a player who has studied the game enough to really give me any semblance of competitive play. It did not take long for me to get here, but it did require a much bigger effort then simply a few plays. Reading and understanding the cards, the structure and format of the game where key to bringing me up to this level. This is the main distinction between war gamers and casual gamers, one studies games the other plays them, however when you make a game like Twilight Struggle that is interesting and simple enough for casual gamers, yet is very much on that higher plane of war gaming two worlds collide.

Replayability And Longevity

Score: 
Tilt:

Pros:  The various interactions of the cards and situations on the board can make this a puzzle to solve every time you play.

Cons:  Strangely enough, it takes repeated plays before you really learn how to play well and once you do, the game starts to feel a bit scripted.

Twilight Struggle has been a top ten contender on boardgamegeek for over a decade and this comes to no surprise to me, however I personally believe that it can act as an entry point to a much larger world less visited by the casual gamers out there for which I appreciate it a lot more. Twilight Struggle can act as an introduction to the concept of true war high level war gaming and I think its a great place to start if you have interested in exploring this very different type of experience in the world of table top games. Washington’s War, Paths of Glory, Empire of the Sun and We The People are just some of the amazing games that use this core mechanic and are absolute gems worth your time to expand to.

That said, I do think that Twilight Struggle can become a bit scripted after sufficient plays, in particular if you are playing the same opponent repeatedly. I find most players find some rhythm to how they approach the game and so will you, so games can start to sort of meld together into a single memory.

Still I think there is definitely enough replay-ability to warrant a purchase of this game, I think I may have been spoiled by the digital version where I have already clocked over a 100 games. That is not something you are likely to do with the table top version.

Conclusion

What can I say about this game that hasn’t already been said by countless fans, its a gem worth your money. I would only caution those with no interest in the sort of historical war game genre that while this game is certainly not a war game, it definitely has that “history genre game” feel to it and that may be the reason I love it and someone else may not. It also requires repeatedly plays before you will really understand what to do and how to win, so you will loose a lot at first and there is no shortcut to that as the subtle ways the cards interact and what they can do needs to be nearly memorized to really get to that fundamental core strategy that fans of this game love.

At its core there is an amazing mechanic here and even if abstracted outside of the theme there are some amazing puzzles to solve generated dynamically through game-play. The game is full of really tough decisions, its over flowing with amazing “holy crap” swings and there is no such thing as a game you can’t come back from. I have one games where I’m at -19 points during mid war, so there is this really amazing “there is always a way to win” feel to it.

Great game, highly recommend it!