2010-2: Twilight Struggle (+2)
On to my #2 game (and suddenly also the #1 game on boardgamegeek.com): Twilight Struggle (“TS”), a game which somehow manages to encapsulate the entire Cold War.
Narrative Theme: 9. A “10” is role-playing game territory, so you know a board game's special if it's garnering a 9. And TS is special. It's a “card-driven wargame” (“CDW”), which means that, every round, you play a card from your hand to “pay” for an action you want to take. Each of these cards has a point value and an event (e.g. “UN Intervention”) on it, and you get to choose which you want to use, the event or the points. The catch in TS is that events are generally good for either the US or USSR, and if you play a point-card that is BAD for you, the event happens anyway. Narratively, the cards are divided into several decks (early/middle/late war), with historically timely events in each one. Each event has a photograph of it, and the rulebook has a section devoted to explaining the historical significance of each event. So you literally see the events of the cold war play out before your eyes. Add to this the board, which is a world map that, country by country, shows how much influence the US and USSR have in that particular location. There's also a tracker that shows the DEFCON status; essentially the game rewards you for driving DEFCON as low as possible, but causes you to instantly lose if you hit 0 (i.e. you started a nuclear war). My point is that you actually feel like you are recreating, reasonably accurately, the struggles of the cold war.
Mechanical Theme: 10. The essence of TS is this: you are trying to manage disasters, control the uncontrollable, and predict an unpredictable opponent. At any moment, your opponent could wrest worldwide political dominance from you, and the best way to slow them down is also the fastest way to global destruction. In other words, it's the Cold War in a nutshell. A lot of your actions boil down to using the points on cards to pour influence/resources into “battleground” countries for various nefarious purposes (causing coups, shoring up political support, etc.). The rest of the time you're managing various card-driven events, working towards winning the space race, and trying to guess which region of the world in the most crucial to concentrate on. As the game progresses and the conflict spreads to more and more regions of the world, your resources become ever more stretched. Brilliant design, head to toe.
Price vs. Component Quality: Twilight Struggle “Deluxe Edition” (read: 3rd ed.) can be yours for around $35. First and second editions, curiously, cost a tad more than that. I'd give those earlier editions a 3-4 for their price/component quality ratio, while 3rd edition ranks a 7. There was a lot not to like about the quality of the first two editions. Unmounted cardboard map, tiny dice, thin counters, misprints on the cards and in the rulebook... all of which were remedied by the deluxe edition, which also revised the board art (which was already fine) and added a few rules variants and extra cards into the box as well. This moves my ranking from “significantly substandard” to “slightly better than average,” and also seriously tempts me to trade away my second edition and buy the third.
Rule Complexity: I'll give this a 6-7. The mechanics of the game aren't particularly complicated, but a few of the event cards are a tad opaque and some of the terminology is a bit confusing. I certainly got rules wrong for my first several games. Also, while the rules aren't complicated, there are certainly a lot of pieces interacting at once, which can lead to the dreaded “analysis paralysis.” And there's certainly a serious learning curve. Knowing what cards are in the deck, so you can “play around” the scary ones and go looking for the great ones, is crucial. Any game that has alternative “opening gambit” suggestions on boardgamegeek has got to be reasonably complicated.
Depth/Replayability: 9. I love almost everything about this game, but the factor that holds everything together is massive tension. You have no idea what/when cards will come up, nor when the game will end. And the deeper I get into the game, the more I realize how true this is, and how many factors you have to juggle to stay afloat. I don't see myself getting bored for many years to come.
Mechanical Elegance: 8. All the pieces are brilliant, and work together very well. There's a bit of shuffling, book-keeping, and chit-piling that I could do without, though, which does pull things down a notch or two.
Length vs. Enjoyment: 8. The side of the box says that the game takes three hours. But it's not really a 3-hour affair. Since the game can end at any time, I've occasionally seen 20-minute blowouts, and have only seen the game last until late war a very few times. I average 60-90 minute games. But however long you play, you're so engaged it feels like no time at all.
Other indefinables: I've tried this game's predecessor card-driven wargames (Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage, Successors, Paths of Glory, etc.), and I've played its successor euros (1960: The Making of the President, Founding Fathers, etc.). None of them come anywhere close to the perfection of Twilight Struggle. It's the perfect abstraction level, the perfect game length, and the perfect subject matter for this sort of game. Just go buy it, already.
Best for: History buffs, cold warriors, people who want a lesson in good game mechanics, and those who are interested in card-driven war games and are looking for a not-so-scary entry point.
Avoid if: You don't like simulated conflict, regardless of abstraction level.