Twilight Struggle is a game that confounds me a bit. I think I can safely say it is an excellent game that both my wife, <PERSON>, and I enjoyed very much. . . although. . . we shouldn't have.
Let me explain.
I'll begin with the standard description of the game's rules and components (interspersed with thoughts and feelings - b/c I'm that kind of guy) then end with a summary.
Rules - Rated
Being my first "wargame" rulebook and first one from GMT, maybe that is not bad (and also maybe not fair). I don't know, but I am used to the glossy and colorful rules from my "eurogames" - I mean, you only have to look at the first page of Caylus or Goa and you know right away that you just want to eat the whole book up. But TS rules are those black-&-white-each-paragraphed-numbered-decimals-all-over-the-place ones that gives a dry, textbooky feeling. Not, in other words, one I would wish to eat without loads of ketchup.
That being said, the rules are certainly servicable and relatively short (so I understand) for a "wargame" - 10 pages with somewhat smaller than normal font. The illustrations in the rules section of the rulebook are few, but give you an idea about what you will be looking at in the game - the Cards and Counters. 993
The middle of the book has a detailed example of play with nice pictures (b&w) of what would be happening on the board. And the end has a great section describing, each in a paragraph, the History of the Card Events (explained shortly) - in other words, a little history lesson about "De-Stalinization", or the "Salt Negotionations", or the "Lone Gunman", or "Glasnost", or "Aldrich Ames", etc..
The complexity of the Rules, to me, was similar to that of either of the 2 games mentioned earlier, or Puerto Rico (also a wife and my favorite for the 2 of us). A difference being that in TS you have less options as to your actions on the (card)board.
In TS, one plays the Russians (my wife) and the other the U.S. (me) in, appropriately, a struggle for control of the world during the Cold War. And what is so simple (beautifully) about the game is that that is exactly what you are doing - trying to "control" Countries and Regions more so that your opponent (my wife). You play on a big board (takes up a whole table) of a nice, colorful yet simple map of the World.
How do you do this you may ask? Well, you Eurogamers out there . You know El Grande (of course - one of our Holy Grails). And you know that you put little "caballero" cubes in regions of Spain, and attempt to have more there than your opponents when scoring occurs, so that you get more VPs. Well. It is basically the same idea.
You and your opponent each get dealt (from one deck) a hand of 8 cards (more later). Unless it is a Scoring Card, each card has:
- an "Event" that represents a true, historical Cold War occurance
- a symbol that says whether the event is associated with the U.S. or the Russian side (which it then likely benefits)
- and a number in that symbol (from 1 to 4 as far as we discoverd thus far) that represents your Operation Point (OP) value.
Each turn you and your opponent alternate playing a Card and either use the OP or use the Event.
If you use the Card for is OP, you can do so:
- to place out numbered (equal to the OP# on the Card) Influence Markers (square, "cardboard" chits) onto Countries (showing how much Influence you have there).
- to attempt (by each rolling a die and possibly adding some other points to it) to "Realign" a country (or countries) by making your opponent lose some of her Influence there.
- to Coup in one county in an attempt to push out your opponent's Influence and maybe even add some of you own (also by rolling a die - this time just you versus the individual Country's "Stability" X2, with you adding the Card's OP value to your die roll)
- to allow an attempt (with a die roll) to move along a "SpaceRace" track to garner VPs or special abilities
If you use the Card for the Event (which obviously would benefit you in some way) you simply take the action described on the card. 237