March has seen a dry spell in my gaming activity.  After four straight months of 25+ games played, I've only managed to get in 12 games so far, with only tonight's Lumbersmiths Friday Night Gaming to save me.  But what lacked in quantity was made up for in quality with my first play of Twilight Struggle on Tuesday night.

Overview
Twilight Struggle is the relatively new card-driven wargame from GMT games.  The game covers the Cold War struggle between the world's biggest superpowers, the US and USSR, from the end of WWII until the late 1980's, when the US would eventually prevail.  In the past few weeks I've done a lot of reading about the game, and each article I read piqued my interest more and more, until I finally broke down and placed an order with Thought Hammer.

While referred to as a card-driven wargame, I hesitate to categorize Twilight Struggle as a wargame.  At its core, the game is more an area control game.  I wouldn't exactly say it's closer to El Grande than a wargame, so I might put it squarely between the two camps.  It's an area-control pseudo-wargame, if you will.  Categorization aside, the basic premise is players take turns playing cards from a common deck to exert influence over a world map.  The game is played over 10 turns, with victory being achieved by netting 20 victory points for an automatic win, or by having the most victory points at the end of 10 turns.  Additionally, a player might instantly lose the game during play if they are responsible for triggering a nuclear war.  More on that later.



The Turn
During each turn, players draw a number of cards to fill their hand to the current hand limit.  Next, they choose 1 card from their hand to play as a Headline, which causes the events on the cards to be triggered.  After that, the bulk of the turn is spent with each player alternating play of a single card, until a set number of action rounds have been played.  Finally, players gain or lose points based on the number of military operations they performed, the current DEFCON level is improved, and a new turn begins.

The turn order was easy to follow, with the bulk of the work coming during the card phase.  The only thing we had problems with was tracking turns.  It was very easy to forget to update the current action round track, which led to a lot of card counting to see how many cards were left to play.  But this isn't a flaw in the game - just the players.

The Mechanics
At the core of the game is the event card deck.  The deck is arranged into three separate piles - Early War, Mid War and Late War.  Players start by drawing cards from only the Early War deck, and the other decks are shuffled into the draw pile during later turns.  The cards contain both an operations number (Ops) and an event.  The events may be a US event, USSR event, or a neutral event.  When playing a card, the acting player decides whether to play that card for Ops or to use the event - one, but not the other.  The only exception is when playing a card as Ops that contains your opponent's event, the event still occurs.  Your opponent's events usually hurt you, so timing the mandatory play of some of the cards is key.

When used for Ops, you gain a number of Ops points equal to the number on the card.  These points can be used to place influence markers on the map, to attempt a realignment roll in an enemy-controlled country (reducing his influence there), or to attempt a coup in an country (possibly reducing his and adding your own influence).  Much of the early game seemed to be using ops for influence markers, while in the later game they tended to be used for coups or realignment.  This makes sense when you consider that the board is so wide-open at the beginning of the game.  Much of the early and mid-game is more of a "land run", while the later game is trying to overthrow key enemy-controlled regions to tip the balance in your favor.



The events on the cards are wonderful.  Each event is tied to either a moment or concept in Cold War history.  Generally, the more powerful the actual event in history, the more powerful the card would be.  For instance, the powerful early cards for the US include the Marshall Plan, the US/Japan Mutual Defense Pact, and NATO.  For the Russian player, powerful cards like Warsaw Pact Formed, Fidel and De-Stalinization have large effects on Soviet influence across the globe.

I have a passing interest in history, only because my education in the subject has been so poor.  As I get older, my thirst for knowledge increases, and history (especially WWII & on) is one of the subjects I've become much more interested in.  Twilight Struggle has piqued my interest in the subject of the Cold War, and I have found myself looking up terms on Wikipedia, as well as chatting up my coworker Scott, who is a history expert.  His insights have made me appreciate the game a lot more.  Just this morning I got a nice explanation of the Suez Crisis.  Not only did I learn a lot of history, but I can now begin to understand why the card's effect removes US influence from the UK, France and Israel.

In addition to the cards, there are a few extra rules I'll gloss over for the sake of brevity.  There is a Space Race track that players compete on.  Each turn a player can play a card to the Space Race to try to advance the track.  Events played to the Space Race do not occur, so this is one way to ditch a particularly evil event card that benefits your opponent.  Additionally, the Space Race gives victory points and other benefits to the player who first reaches particular spots on the track. 

Another neat rule is the DEFCON track.  The DEFCON level goes from 5 (peaceful) to 1 (nuclear war).  Certain events and wars will cause the DEFCON level to degrade.  As it degrades, coup attempts in certain regions might be prohibited.  If it ever reaches 1, nuclear war occurs and the active player loses.  This means when the DEFCON status reaches 2, certain actions or events become impossible to play, as they would instantly lose you the game.  This was a very powerful Soviet ability that was realized halfway through our game.  Since the DEFCON level is only improved by 1 level at the beginning of a turn, on many turns it might go from 2 to 3.  This gives the starting player the opportunity to perform an action that degrades the DEFCON level, immediately putting it back to 2 and locking his opponent from taking DEFCON-reducing actions (like coups in all-important battleground countries).  Since the Soviet player usually plays first (the exception being the headline cards), this gives them the ability to restrict US actions.

The Scoring
Scoring can happen in a handful of ways.  Several cards when played as events give victory points (VPs) based on meeting criteria.  Additionally, points are awarded at the end of every turn based on the DEFCON level.  A player must take enough actions that increase his military operations points or suffer a VP loss at the end of the turn based on the current DEFCON level.  In our game, I lost a number of points for having not taken the required military operations.  Since a number of the actions that give you military operations also degrade the DEFCON level, the US seems to be on the short end of the military ops stick.

Finally, the most points come from scoring the various regions on the board.  Each region has a scoring card that gives points to the player who is most influential in the region.  Just having control of a country in the region scores points, but if you are able to control a majority of the battleground countries in that region, you'll score more.  If you're able to shutout your opponent completely, you'll score a windfall of points.

The scoring cards come out in different eras, with Europe, the Mid East and Asia being important early, and Africa / Central America / South America adding to scoring later in the game.  Scoring cards must be played at some point in the turn if you draw them, so you cannot hold onto (or discard) a scoring card that would help your opponent.  At the end of the game a final scoring is completed, with each region being scored one final time.

The Conclusion
I found Twilight Struggle to be a fantastic game.  While I don't consider it a true wargame, it does have a war-ish theme.  The nice thing is there is not much direct conflict (no troops directly attacking other troops except for the occasional war card - and even that's abstracted), so the game is very strategy-driven and less tactical than a wargame.  The history of the game, while abstracted to just the mechanics, makes for a fantastic backdrop.  It's refreshing to play a war-themed game that isn't WWII-based.

Our playing time was much, much longer than others have quoted, although we were interrupted several times and spent time reading the rules and referring to FAQs.  I think the game could be played much quicker than the 4 hours it took us for a first game.  If I could get this down to 2 hours or less, I think I'd play it frequently.

Even though I'm not familiar with this genre of games, Twilight Struggle seems to be a unique offering.  It's refreshing to play a game that's so different than what I'm used to, and enjoy it more than most of what I've played lately.  This game will definitely have a permanent spot in my collection, and I can't wait to play it again.

The Session
Although this post has gotten long, I'd like to wrap up with a couple of paragraphs about my first game.  I let Jay take the USSR, while I took the US.  Although the Russians are supposed to have an early advantage, my turn 1 and 2 hands held some big US events.  The US/Japan Mutual Defense Pact gave me an early foothold in Asia.  By turn 2 I had played The Marshall Plan and NATO, giving me a nice head start in Europe, and had concentrated my ops in the Middle East, scoring it for an early 7 points.

In the middle game, Jay took over.  I fell behind on the Space Race and was forced to play some big Russian events, including Fidel which let him into Central America.  I was able to cause a stalemate there, and neither one of us was able to score it.  Jay's dice rolls in the midgame were fantastic - pulling off some great war and coup rolls.  De-Stalinization put him squarely in control of Africa.  Coupled with a steady stream of military operations points, he had a commanding lead (over 10 points, as high as 15) going into the Late War.  He played this section of the game flawlessly.



The Late War saw a turn.  The US events are much better in the Late War.  This, coupled with some unlucky dice rolling by Jay's coup and Space Race rolls, let me slowly take control back.  I took and held South America, Asia, and Europe and was threatening Africa.  I conceded the Middle East to Jay, as there was no way I could recover it.

Unfortunately, the bad luck of Jay's dice was met with an equal amount of bad luck on my last turn.  I had a positive score of about +5 going into the last turn, but I drew three scoring cards - Central America (draw) the Middle East (Jay's score) and Africa.  Africa was still up for grabs at the beginning of the turn, but since 3 of my cards were scoring and not Ops, Jay was able to hold enough battleground countries to score Africa.  Additionally, he was able to play Ops and events at the end of the turn when I was forced to play scoring cards - and he took away my domination of Europe.  Between Africa and Europe, that was a several-point swing.

When all the regional scoring was done, Jay was leading by 1 point.  I had control of The China Card (worth 1 VP to the holder at the end of the game), thinking I had at least kept a draw, but Jay pointed out that I had no military ops, while he had the requisite 2.  He scored his points and won by two.  What a close game!



In hindsight, I made a lot of mistakes.  There were a couple of turns I forgot to ditch a card on the Space Race.  I also neglected to read the text on Chernobyl closely enough.  I thought the card prevented an opponent from adding infuence to a country for the turn.  I had it in my hand on the last turn.  I was thinking of playing it in France to prevent him from placing influence there, but knew he could just as easily take back a different battleground country in Europe.  However, the text on Chernobyl prevents the Soviet player from placing any influence in an entire region for the turn.  That should have been my headline event in either Europe or Africa.

Despite the mistakes, we had a lot of fun.  We were going to call it early because things were going slowly, but I talked Jay into playing it out.  I'm glad we finished - the game was tense all the way to the end, and a 2-point margin of victory could have gone either way.  Despite the long play time, it was a very successful first play.