More Twilight Struggle

Jeff and I broke out Twilight Struggle this evening. It’s been a long time since either had played and it was slow going in the early turns reacquainting ourselves with the cards. Jeff played the Soviets. I spent a lot of influence in the early game building up in eastern Europe right along his border but he picked up a nice set of points about mid-game by shutting me out of SE Asia and several more points with OPEC.

However, I played “Ask not what your country…” not long after to dump 5 Soviet cards and drew all American or dual cards and began turning the tide for the Americans eventually scoring with domination in Africa, Central and South America.

After swinging the VP total toward the Americans and bringing in the Late War cards, I drew KAL-007 and War Games when the DefCon was at 3. Played KAL-007 as my headline. Jeff played an event that discarded a random card from my hand. I was sweating it out but he didn’t pull War Games and I was able to play it as my first action to squeak out a 3 point win.

War Games feels a bit cheesy to me but with Aldritch Ames lurking in the deck, I’d rather close the door on a close game than take a chance on having the outcome scripted for me by the Soviet player.

While it runs just a tad long because we don’t play often enough, this is one of my favorite 2 player games. Very elegant design that wonderfully recreates the tense Cold War era politics.