Post by Gilvan Blight on Feb 2, 2009 12:55:56 GMT -5
Quickly: very different and very good. Looks like crap though.
[glow=blue,2,300]Summary:[/glow]This one is going to be hard to describe.
In Twilight Struggle two players take on the roles of the United States and the USSR during the Cold War. The game is played through 10 turns that each correspond to 3-5 years real time. The first three turns are called The Early War, the middle 4 is the Mid War and the last three are the Late War.
Game play is card based and is centered around influence. The board is a map of the world divided into various regions and sub regions. There is Eastern and Western Europe (bot sub regions of Europe), The Middle East, Africa, Asia and South Asia (South Asia being a sub region of Asia), Central America and South America. Each region is divided up into key countries. Some of these key cities are designated as Battleground Countries (which is important for scoring). Players start of with a set amount of influence in set cities and then get to spend a set amount of influence in all other cities. The USSR starts in Eastern Europe and the US player starts in Western Europe. It's worth noting that both the US and USSR are not part of the map that can be influenced. They are always controlled by the appropriate superpower. Each country has a Stability rating. Having more influence in a country then your opponent by at least the stability rating means you 'own' that country.
Each turn players get a hand of cards. These cards serve three purposes. First each lists an Event. These events are all real life events that happened during the Cold War and are either neutral or associated with a specific superpower. In general they allow the players to do a wide variety of things generally involving shifting the influence around the board or adding influence or taking away the opponents influence. There are a ton of event cards and their effects really do vary. Along with an event on each card there is a number called Operations Points. This can be used for three different things. 1) Adding influence to cities you have influence in or ones adjacent to at a cost of 1 for 1 if it's a neutral or friendly country or at a cost of 2 for one in an opponent controlled country. 2) Staging a Coup attempt. This is a die roll based attack on a country that an opponent has influence in. 3) Trying to a re-alignment. This is another die roll to change influence, but this time both players get to roll and either player could loose influence. The last thing the cards can be used for is for the Space Race. Generally you need to discard a card with the right number of operations point then roll within a certain range to increase your level in the space race. The most interesting twist to all of this is that if you use a card with an opponents event on it for influence then you must let them do whatever the event lets them do. This makes for extremely strategic play.
Along with using cards to add influence to cities around the world the players also have to be concerned with their number of military operations and the Defcon Level. Each time you do a Coup attempt and every time you start a War (from a War event) you get operations points and the Defcon Level drops. If you ever make the Defcon level drop to 1 you loose the game as the world explodes into full on Nuclear war. At the end of each turn if you don't have as many military operations points as the current defcon level you loose points.
Now points: the way you get points is four ways. The easiest is to play a card that gives VPs, these are more common in the Late War. The next way is with a Scoring card. There is one of these for each region in the game. When they come up players must play them (you can't 'throw them' on the space race for example). The way scoring works is that you get points based on how much influence you have in that region. The interesting part is that players don't score independently. There is a scoring track that starts at 0 and goes from -20 (USSR win) to +20 (US win). So once you calculate your score you subtract it from your opponents to see where the overall score moves on the scoring track. You also score points for progressing in the space race and you get points when your opponent hasn't conducted enough military operations each turn.
The actually game play goes like this. Each player gets a set amount of cards. Then each player chooses one card's event to be the Headline for that turn. Headlines are then resolved based on which was worth the most ops. points (US wins ties). Then the turn starts with the USSR player. S/he players one card and acts on it then the US plays one card and acts on it. This is done 7 times during the early war and later 8 times for the rest of the War. At the end of turn 10 the position of the scoring marker determines the winner.
[glow=green,2,300]The Good:[/glow]It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds. This is probably the most unique game in my gaming collection. It's also one of the most fun and probably the best two player game I own. This is also one of the most strategic games I own, and reminds me of games like Chess where you will actually plan multiple turns ahead and be trying to figure out what you opponent is planning at the same time. The cards themselves are rather amusing and nothing is taken too seriously, which is a nice touch when dealing with a touchy subject. The game seems extremely well balanced as well, with the lead changing constantly. The last good point is that this game actually taught me some things. There were quite a few 'I didn't know that happened' moments while playing. That's not something you get often from a boardgame.
[glow=yellow,2,300]The Bad:[/glow]It looks uber complicated. The instructions don't really help. This is a very daunting game that I put off playing for weeks due to the perceived complexity. If you go on Boardgamegeek you can even get 6 page flowcharts that walk your through your turn, and spreadsheets for tracking influence changes. The good part is that it's really not that complex. After the end of the middle of turn 2 I think both Pandora and I had it pretty much down. There are quite a bit of little details you will have to learn and remember, but once these are down it's not an issue. The one problem that does stick around though is the game is long. Due to parental obligations it took us three nights to get one game in. I would guess we probably spent a total of 5-6 hours playing. Added to this is the fact there is a lot of thinking and quite a bit of math involved. This means this isn't an anytime, all the time kind of game. I would have to be in the right mood with enough time available to play this in order to break it out. This means it will get a lot less use from me then games I can whip out and finish in an hour (Pandemic for example). Lastly this game can get a bit nasty. It is definitely a cutthroat game and when your opponent hits with with a string of nasty events you can get rather frustrated. Adding the randomness of dice rolling for a few things in the game just compounds this frustration. This can lead to a few fights during the game, at least it did for us.
[glow=red,2,300]The Ugly:[/glow]The game is just ugly. Especially for someone who is used to very pretty Eurogames and stuff from Fantasy Flight, this game looks like crap. It has an un-mounted thick card board, that's hard to get flat. It uses ugly two colour chits for everything. The chits didn't even come off their card well. The cards themselves use maybe 4 colours, though the art is rather nice and contains a lot of actual new shots. Now this is put out by a War gaming company GMT and I guess for a GMT game this is pretty top notch. I guess most war games come with paper maps in two colours, so I guess for this style of game it's not bad. I would really like to see a nice deluxe edition with a mounted board and pawns and wooden pieces instead of chits. Actually if such did come out I would probably buy it even though I already own the game.
[glow=purple,2,300]Overall:[/glow] Definitely one of the most unique and strategic games in my collection. Even though it looks like crap and seems very overcomplicated and daunting it's actually rather easy to learn and a ton of fun. Besides the poor production quality the only real problem with this game is that it's not an everynight game. You have to be in the right mood and have plenty of time.
[glow=blue,2,300]Summary:[/glow]This one is going to be hard to describe.
In Twilight Struggle two players take on the roles of the United States and the USSR during the Cold War. The game is played through 10 turns that each correspond to 3-5 years real time. The first three turns are called The Early War, the middle 4 is the Mid War and the last three are the Late War.
Game play is card based and is centered around influence. The board is a map of the world divided into various regions and sub regions. There is Eastern and Western Europe (bot sub regions of Europe), The Middle East, Africa, Asia and South Asia (South Asia being a sub region of Asia), Central America and South America. Each region is divided up into key countries. Some of these key cities are designated as Battleground Countries (which is important for scoring). Players start of with a set amount of influence in set cities and then get to spend a set amount of influence in all other cities. The USSR starts in Eastern Europe and the US player starts in Western Europe. It's worth noting that both the US and USSR are not part of the map that can be influenced. They are always controlled by the appropriate superpower. Each country has a Stability rating. Having more influence in a country then your opponent by at least the stability rating means you 'own' that country.
Each turn players get a hand of cards. These cards serve three purposes. First each lists an Event. These events are all real life events that happened during the Cold War and are either neutral or associated with a specific superpower. In general they allow the players to do a wide variety of things generally involving shifting the influence around the board or adding influence or taking away the opponents influence. There are a ton of event cards and their effects really do vary. Along with an event on each card there is a number called Operations Points. This can be used for three different things. 1) Adding influence to cities you have influence in or ones adjacent to at a cost of 1 for 1 if it's a neutral or friendly country or at a cost of 2 for one in an opponent controlled country. 2) Staging a Coup attempt. This is a die roll based attack on a country that an opponent has influence in. 3) Trying to a re-alignment. This is another die roll to change influence, but this time both players get to roll and either player could loose influence. The last thing the cards can be used for is for the Space Race. Generally you need to discard a card with the right number of operations point then roll within a certain range to increase your level in the space race. The most interesting twist to all of this is that if you use a card with an opponents event on it for influence then you must let them do whatever the event lets them do. This makes for extremely strategic play.
Along with using cards to add influence to cities around the world the players also have to be concerned with their number of military operations and the Defcon Level. Each time you do a Coup attempt and every time you start a War (from a War event) you get operations points and the Defcon Level drops. If you ever make the Defcon level drop to 1 you loose the game as the world explodes into full on Nuclear war. At the end of each turn if you don't have as many military operations points as the current defcon level you loose points.
Now points: the way you get points is four ways. The easiest is to play a card that gives VPs, these are more common in the Late War. The next way is with a Scoring card. There is one of these for each region in the game. When they come up players must play them (you can't 'throw them' on the space race for example). The way scoring works is that you get points based on how much influence you have in that region. The interesting part is that players don't score independently. There is a scoring track that starts at 0 and goes from -20 (USSR win) to +20 (US win). So once you calculate your score you subtract it from your opponents to see where the overall score moves on the scoring track. You also score points for progressing in the space race and you get points when your opponent hasn't conducted enough military operations each turn.
The actually game play goes like this. Each player gets a set amount of cards. Then each player chooses one card's event to be the Headline for that turn. Headlines are then resolved based on which was worth the most ops. points (US wins ties). Then the turn starts with the USSR player. S/he players one card and acts on it then the US plays one card and acts on it. This is done 7 times during the early war and later 8 times for the rest of the War. At the end of turn 10 the position of the scoring marker determines the winner.
[glow=green,2,300]The Good:[/glow]It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds. This is probably the most unique game in my gaming collection. It's also one of the most fun and probably the best two player game I own. This is also one of the most strategic games I own, and reminds me of games like Chess where you will actually plan multiple turns ahead and be trying to figure out what you opponent is planning at the same time. The cards themselves are rather amusing and nothing is taken too seriously, which is a nice touch when dealing with a touchy subject. The game seems extremely well balanced as well, with the lead changing constantly. The last good point is that this game actually taught me some things. There were quite a few 'I didn't know that happened' moments while playing. That's not something you get often from a boardgame.
[glow=yellow,2,300]The Bad:[/glow]It looks uber complicated. The instructions don't really help. This is a very daunting game that I put off playing for weeks due to the perceived complexity. If you go on Boardgamegeek you can even get 6 page flowcharts that walk your through your turn, and spreadsheets for tracking influence changes. The good part is that it's really not that complex. After the end of the middle of turn 2 I think both Pandora and I had it pretty much down. There are quite a bit of little details you will have to learn and remember, but once these are down it's not an issue. The one problem that does stick around though is the game is long. Due to parental obligations it took us three nights to get one game in. I would guess we probably spent a total of 5-6 hours playing. Added to this is the fact there is a lot of thinking and quite a bit of math involved. This means this isn't an anytime, all the time kind of game. I would have to be in the right mood with enough time available to play this in order to break it out. This means it will get a lot less use from me then games I can whip out and finish in an hour (Pandemic for example). Lastly this game can get a bit nasty. It is definitely a cutthroat game and when your opponent hits with with a string of nasty events you can get rather frustrated. Adding the randomness of dice rolling for a few things in the game just compounds this frustration. This can lead to a few fights during the game, at least it did for us.
[glow=red,2,300]The Ugly:[/glow]The game is just ugly. Especially for someone who is used to very pretty Eurogames and stuff from Fantasy Flight, this game looks like crap. It has an un-mounted thick card board, that's hard to get flat. It uses ugly two colour chits for everything. The chits didn't even come off their card well. The cards themselves use maybe 4 colours, though the art is rather nice and contains a lot of actual new shots. Now this is put out by a War gaming company GMT and I guess for a GMT game this is pretty top notch. I guess most war games come with paper maps in two colours, so I guess for this style of game it's not bad. I would really like to see a nice deluxe edition with a mounted board and pawns and wooden pieces instead of chits. Actually if such did come out I would probably buy it even though I already own the game.
[glow=purple,2,300]Overall:[/glow] Definitely one of the most unique and strategic games in my collection. Even though it looks like crap and seems very overcomplicated and daunting it's actually rather easy to learn and a ton of fun. Besides the poor production quality the only real problem with this game is that it's not an everynight game. You have to be in the right mood and have plenty of time.