Twilight Struggle is not a light game. Not by our standards, anyway - GMT, the publisher, rate it a mere four out of a possible nine. Mind you, GMT also produce huge games that look like this monstrosity. Let's just say it's a bit more complicated than Lost Cities. As it would be unfair to write a full review of Twilight Struggle after just a handful of games, this is instead our initial impressions of the game.

First, what is it? It's a wargame of sorts, but as it's the Cold War with its intrigue and subterfuge and war by proxy, it's not a wargame as you might know it. In fact, direct conflict is disastrous: trigger nuclear war during your turn and you immediately lose. Nuclear armageddon makes losers of us all, of course, but as the instigator you look pretty bad. I guess that sheepishness you'd feel would make you the ultimate loser.

Twilight Struggle is about influence - spreading your influence, reducing your enemy's influence, and attempting coups to flip countries to your way of thinking. One player takes on the role of the USA, attempting to stymie the red menace, while the other tries to unite the workers of the world as the USSR. The board is a map of the world, with important countries/groups of countries highlighted as boxes and linked to show which are 'next' to each other. The board has a fairly stark and minimalist look, with pale colours to help show which countries are part of which region, and a few tracks for keeping score and tracking turns. The turn track and "Space Race" have photos of US & Soviet leaders and little symbols of spacecraft, but apart from that it's very uncluttered, giving it a sober, war-room-like feel. There are no units, as in most other wargames, but instead tokens representing the level of influence you have in a country, which can be flipped if you have enough to have control. With so many countries and possibilities it's a little overwhelming at the moment, but the blue/red of the control side of the tokens do give a very good overview of the state of play.

At its core, Twilight Struggle is a card driven game. There are 110 cards, each representing an event from the Cold War. Some are events that favour the USA, some the USSR, some whomever plays the card. Each card also has an Operations Value, which can be used instead to spread or reduce influence. If a card has one of your events (or a neutral event) then you have to choose between the Ops Value - allowing you to increase your influence - or the event. You can't have both. If, however, the event helps your opponent, then playing it means the event will be triggered. There are a lot of choices here - how do I minimize the impact of this hideous event that favours my opponent? Is this card worth more as the operations value or the event? If I do use the ops value, do I take the safe option of increasing my influence, or do I take the riskier (but potentially more rewarding) route of kicking my enemy out of that country I need to control?

While you have the long-term goal of trying to control the most regions and gaining the most points, some cards are 'Scoring Cards' that must be played and focuses the players on the short-term goal of taking a particular region. In the beginning, only Asia, Europe, and Middle East scoring cards are in the deck, making the game focused on these areas. If you don't have one of these cards, there's a good chance your opponent will, and your opponent's move may reveal this threat. Unless it's a bluff. Or a double-bluff. Come the 'Mid War', all other areas might be scored, making the game rather tense as you try to guess if your enemy is making plays for a card coming up in the future, or if it's a bluff, or if they're about to gain a bunch of victory points as they take over Europe and play the Europe scoring card. Similarly, if you have a scoring card, it's a game of bluff as you try to build up your influence in that area, whistling and remaining nonchalant as you subtly build up influence without arousing suspicion. It's a fantastic way of abstracting how certain regions became battlegrounds in the Cold War.

Twilight Struggle seems, at this early stage, to have staying power. As further games are played, and the importance of certain cards, countries and strategies become clearer, we're hoping to indulge in some rather tense ideological warfare with more focus and less randomish "um, maybe this is a good move"-type play. The signs are good.

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Alan writes:

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas. But for some poor souls, the holiday season can be a time of bitterness and sadness. I'd like to take a moment to think about those less fortunate, those who are having a holiday that won't be filled with cheer and goodwill, but instead full of tears, regret, and frustration. I'm talking, of course, of those people who, with their family gathered around them, think it's a great idea to break out Monopoly.

But Monopoly is a classic that the whole family knows, you may well be thinking. But like Cliff Richard and the clap, just because something has been around for a long time and remained in circulation, it doesn't mean that it's any good. If a game generally has an obvious winner two hours in, but it takes another two hours to confirm it, something's wrong. All those stories of families falling out around the Monopoly board? Maybe it's not the family that's disfunctional. Maybe it's the game.

So my advice for the holiday season is to keep yourself warm by slinging that copy of Monopoly in the fire, and setting up a game that's quick to learn, has some interesting decisions, and won't cause violent recriminations and fistfights and banishments from the family home by the end. I recommend For Sale.

I've found that For Sale is quite easy to bring to the table. The property-buying-and-selling theme helps, as it's familiar and not going to put anyone off in the same way as a fantasy or sci-fi theme might. "It's like Monopoly, but quicker and better," you can say, even though the first part of that is a lie. It's not like Monopoly. It's fun.

Set up is simple. Each player gets a pile of coins, with which they will use in a series of auctions to buy a portfolio of properties (or hand of cards, if you prefer). These cards are valued between one (a cardboard box) and thirty (a space station). On each round, one card for each player is revealed, then in turn each player has the option of bidding higher than previously, or passing. If you pass, you pay half your current bid, or nothing if you haven't bid so far, and take the lowest-value card on display. If you win the auction, you pay your full bid. Then another auction round begins, starting with the winning player, until all the cards are gone.

With everyone now owning property, it's time to sell them off quick before the market tanks. A second deck of cards, this time representing sale values between nothing and £15K, is laid out one for each player, just as with the properties. Everyone selects a property card and places it face down, revealing it when everyone has done so. The highest value property gets the highest value cheque, the second-highest value property gets the second-highest value cheque, and so on. Soon your hand of properties will be replaced with a hand of cheques. Add these to anything left over from auctioning. Got the most money? Hooray! You won! Don't have the most money? Well, you didn't win, but with a game as short as this, you may be able to win the next one.

For Sale has a lot of interesting decisions you can make for its short play time, but never complicated enough to linger over. There's some randomness and luck, but not the frustrating kind, just enough to make the game different from play to play. Crucially, while some good decisions in the auction phase of the game can leave you in a strong position for the selling phase, a win is not guaranteed. Unlike choosing For Sale over Monopoly - then a win is almost certainly guaranteed.

For Sale at BoardGameGeek.

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Alan writes:

Alan: Aha, this is how the line of sight rules work.
Gillian: What's "line of sight?"

This short snippet shows the difference between Gillian and me. I may have picked up Memoir '44 without an exact idea of how it would work, but years of video games such as X-Com or Jagged Alliance 2 or tabletop games like Warhammer meant that I at least had an idea of concepts such as Line of Sight, or Hit Points, or Damage Modifiers. But even these basic terms were alien to Gillian - yet we were able to pick up and play Memoir '44 with almost no fuss. It's a wargame, in that there's tactics and strategy and dice rolling, but a pretty simple one.

The first thing anyone will notice about Memoir '44 is that once the game is set up, it looks fantastic. Other games may go for wooden blocks or cardboard chits, but Memoir '44 knows what it is. It's a game about recreating warfare, and chances are the last time you did that, you were wielding a stick and making the noise of a gun while charging across the playground. So you get a whole load of plastic soldiers and tanks to play with.

As you'd expect from the name, the game takes place around the D-Day Normandy landings of June 1944. Each of the 16 scenarios pits the Allies against the Axis forces. The board is double-sided, one side all green, and one with a beach, so while some battles take place inland, in some you'll be recreating the assault on the beaches. The board is divided into hexes, and there's an illustration on each scenario showing where hills, trees, bunkers and barbed wire should go- all thick cardboard hexes or plastic like the soldiers. Troop deployment is part of the set up - your forces are where they start are decided by the scenario.

On your turn, what you do is dictated by your hand of Command Cards. On your turn, you play one of these cards, take the moves and attacks it allows, and then draw a card at the end of your turn. Most of these cards allow you to move units in one section of the battlefield, so you're always having to adjust your strategy to what your hand will allow. It's as much about managing your hand of cards as it is your troops.

Attacks are resolved by using dice; the more powerful he unit, the more dice you can use. Fr example, infantry use 2 dice when shooting at a unit two hexes away, while a tank unit uses three. Hits are decided by the symbols on the dice, so more fragile units have more chance of being hit. It's a neat system that gets rid of the need for lookup tables and calculations and other things that can make wargames quite daunting. Hit points are easily tracked, too - each hit removes a model, and when a unit runs out of models, it's destroyed. Each destroyed unit gives you a victory point, and depending on the scenario there may be victory points for taking a particular hex. Get the required points, usually between four and six, and you've won.

Memoir '44 is an easy game - perhaps too easy for some, as sometimes opportunities for tactics are low and luck can occasionally decide a game. It's very accessible, and is perfect for anyone with an interest in WWII, as the theme is strong and there's lots of historical detail in the rule book. With the mountain of expansions available, it does at times feel like a starter pack - though nowhere near as bad in that respect as the likes of Warhammer or Warhammer 40K.

And don't worry about the Line of Sight rules. They're simple.

Memoir '44 at BoardGameGeek.

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Alan writes:

Time for a big deal. It's time to talk about Dominion.

Why such a big deal? Well, so far the games I've written about are either getting on a bit, like Carcassonne, or a little bit under the radar, like Cold War. Dominion is still pretty 'hot'. It's still winning awards, including the prestigious Spiel des Jahres. It's getting a bit of hype outside of the usual places, with mentions in the likes of Wired and the usually video-game-centric Escapist. At my local gaming night, there can be a bit of debate over what games to play, and games come in and out of fashion, but there's usually always someone up for Dominion. There are already two expansions out, and there's talk that there will be seven in total. Dominion is a big deal (though there's more shuffling that dealing in the game itself).

Apparently, Dominion is a game about controlling land. I know this because I just looked at the rules, and it says so in the introduction. I've never felt like I'm claiming land when playing. The rules then go on to be a little bit more honest: "This is a game of building a deck". That's more like it. What you really feel like you're doing is creating, as you play, your own deck of cards that you will use to win the game. Despite the large box, Dominion is a card game - all that's inside that box is 500 cards. That's a lot of cards. Here's how it works:

First, pick which ten sets of cards you will play with, from the twenty-five in the box. Here's the suggested starting set of 10, plus the treasure cards and VP cards that are part of every game:

You start the game with a deck of ten cards - three 'Estates' and seven 'Coppers'. The Estates are victory point cards, utterly useless to you right until the moment the game ends - at which point the VP cards are the only cards of any worth.

The Coppers are more immediately useful. Take this starting deck of cards and shuffle them up. If you're not good at shuffling, don't worry - this game will give you lots of practice. Deal yourself five cards. This is your starting hand.

Each turn works in the same simple way. You have one action, and one buy. At the end of your turn, you then discard your hand into your personal discard pile, and deal yourself five new cards. If you don't have enough cards in your deck for a new hand, you take your discards pile, shuffle it up, and this becomes your deck. With your starting deck, there are no action cards, so it's buys only. With the three copper cards, you can buy anything costing 3 or less. Let's grab a Silver. This, along with the hand, is discarded. Play passes to the next person, and you deal five more cards.

Again, no actions, but four copper this time. That's enough to buy a Smithy, which allows you to draw three more cards. As before, your hand and the Smithy is discarded. Play passes on, and five more cards are dealt. Except your draw pile is now empty - all of your cards are now in your discard pile.

Not to worry - shuffle up that discard pile, and make a new draw pile. Deal five cards.

Hooray! An action card. Play the Smithy, draw three more cards.

Now you have three Copper and one Silver. For your buy, you can now buy anything worth 5 or less. Play continues until either the Provinces (the big value VP cards everyone wants) run out, or three other piles are gone. That's it. Simple.

Except it's not really simple. What strategy will you go for? Buy up the cheap VP cards? Nice idea, but they'll clog up your deck, giving you frequent useless hands. Wait until you can afford the big VPs? Ah, but what if you wait too long? Maybe you should buy the card that attacks your opponents... or maybe you should buy a defensive card, in case they attack you... Every choice you make feels meaningful, as you know that you will get to use whatever you're buying in the future. There's an element of risk, too - should you play the card that gives you +2 Treasure, or should you play a card that allows you to draw the Gold that you know is in your draw deck?

Dominion is a game that can be played casually of an evening, but it's also the sort of game where you could create spreadsheets and graphs and figure out the best strategies. Good luck, though, if that's your thing - there are actually over three million possible games in this box - the number of ways you can choose 10 cards from the 25 possibilities is 3,268,760. It'll take you quite a few years to get through that many games.

And if you were to take the time to play over three million games, a couple of things about the game might eventually get to you. The cards are clear and functional, and most of the art is nice enough, but a couple are rather ugly. It may be a rather useful card, but I really don't like the orange-haired weirdo on the Festival card. The Militia look pretty unthreatening for a military force. The Bureaucrat card, on the other hand, has rather nice art despite it being a bit duller than a festival.

Also, you'll notice that each card has a black border. While this looks nice, it's apparently quite likely to fade quickly, not a great design choice. These are relative minor gripes, however - Dominion is easy to pick up, has loads of depth, and plays in a short enough time that you can have a few games in one sitting - even more so if you're playing with two, as there are less VP cards up for grabs. You can adjust the game with your choice of cards, too - if you want a relaxing game with little conflict, you can choose a set with little interaction. Conversely, you can choose a vicious set of cards and have everyone hate each other by the end of the game.

But they'll probably still want to play again.

Dominion on BoardGameGeek and Rio Grande Games.

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Alan writes...

One thing that has surprised me since board games lured me in is the choice of themes. Growing up with Fighting Fantasy books and Games Workshop, I was used to two themes - fighting in the future, and fighting in a sort of medieval fantasy past. Orcs with axes, or Orcs with laser guns. That's not to say that they're without merit, of course; in particular, the maniacal religiosity of the Space Marines in Warhammer 40K is a particularly great unexpected touch that adds a lot to the game. But within gaming, I was expecting a world of sci-fi and fantasy, with perhaps the occasional historical battle. Of course, I was wrong. So far on this blog we've had intrepid explorers and medieval French towns. Time for some warfare. Except - again a pleasant surprise - we're not shooting at each other. Like the real cold war, it's a game of influence, bluff, and pushing your luck.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB is a Fantasy Flight game, and I've noticed that this seems to mean a quality product, certainly in terms of the components. Some may find that there are pieces here that are unnecessary and too flashy. There's a 'balance token', for instance, that's assigned to the player who is losing; that player gets to choose who goes first when taking cards. The balance token is a green poker chip with a shiny pair of scales pictured. It could be replaced with a rule that simply says: "The player with the least amount of points, or the player who lost the last round if it's a tie, chooses who will play first." But I like my little green token. As I like the rest of the components. All of the cards have evocative photos and are of a high quality, the larger agent cards look like mini personnel files, and there is a 'domination token', or shiny poker chip, for both sides. The game could have been done more cheaply, but I'm glad they've gone that extra mile. It looks and feels fantastic. I mean, look at this:

Quality, all over. Apart from one place. The rulebook.

The rulebook isn't awful. I mean, all of the rules are in there and it has examples and isn't riddled with typos or anything, but something's gone wrong when you're dividing a game into six phases and it's still confusing. There are at least three rulebook replacements as downloadable files on BoardGameGeek - that's not a good sign that the included rules are doing a good job. I'm not entirely sure of the problem, but I suspect that it's over-explained. There are also little unnecessary rules about shuffling - one player shuffles then the other cuts. Frankly, if you can't trust your opponent not to fiddle with the deck, get another opponent.

The game plays like a sort of 'advanced blackjack'. First, an objective is revealed - this is usually a country, but can be an event. It'll be worth some victory points, and has a 'stability value'. Players take turns drawing 'groups', eg police, artists, radio stations, in order to get as close as they can to this stability without going over. But each card belongs to a faction - military, economic, political, or media - that has a one-off special effect, such as stealing a group, or forcing your opponent to discard one. You win the 'influence struggle', you place your domination token. That's right, the victory points aren't yours yet. Each player then reveals his 'Agent X', one of six characters who may affect the outcome of the round. If the loser has the Master Spy, he takes the points. So if your opponent looks like they're trying to lose, watch out. Unless they're trying to make you think that. Or maybe they're trying to make you think that they're trying to think that. And so on.

Gillian: Now, I will warn you, bluffing is involved. Bluffing, of course, being a fancy word for 'bare-faced lying'. You don't know your partner's hand, and you don't know whether they are trying to win or deliberately lose. And to begin with, neither do they know this of you, but if you're rubbish at bluffing, they soon will. Nothing like the joy of winning a round only to find out that, with a turn of your partner's agent card, the points have been snatched away from you like the star prize on a gameshow.

Gillian was a terrible bluffer, at least in our first game. "Hmm, I think I'll pass, I don't want to risk civil disorder," she said, unconvincingly. Civil disorder is similar to 'going bust' - go over the stability number, and you lose the round, and your Agent X. I didn't believe her for a second, and sure enough, she had played the Master Spy. In subsequent games, however, her bluffing is much improved.

In short, then, an excellent game that can be used to teach your loved ones to effectively cheat and lie, with a great backdrop of paranoia and tension.

Cold War: CIA vs KGB at BoardGameGeek

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Gillian writes...

I've always thought of Alan as a man who would be suited to the salons and gentleman's clubs of Victorian England - he is at odds with the Youth of Today, particularly those in slatted sunglasses, and has customised his iPod to resemble some form of steampunk mechanical orchestra. In this crazy costume-drama-cum-Adventures-Of-Willie-Fogg fantasy, he strides from the cold and smoke-filled north to the oak-timbered premises of a society of visionary scientists and thinkers, checks his stovepipe hat and snuff tin at the door, and fulminates hirsutedly about scripture, temperance, a good whiskey and lands left to discover. So it was with some interest that I eyed the box of Lost Cities in his bag during a train journey to the coast.

Lost Cities allows the player to choose from one, or more,  of five possible expeditions - Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples, underwater kingdoms, the wastes of the Poles, or what I initially presumed to be Mars until I realised that while the Victorians gave us photogravure and excellent moustaches, they didn't really have any grasp on intergalactic travel. Perhaps it's Vesuvius. Anyway, you have your five territories to go and explore, and it's you and your opponent's job to select wisely which ones to explore. From there on, it's essentially a card game - the hand of cards dealt gives you a selection to choose from, you start laying the cards corresponding to each area, which ideally would be the full set numbered from two to ten, but as there is no restrictions on how many or which territories to choose, your opponent may well get in there first with the best cards, or even withold the plum numbers in an effort to lower your score.

Now, my experience of poker is based on watching gambling advertisements and knowing someone who loved gambling to the point of betting on virtual horse-racing - I have never tried to play myself, and as I'm about as good as hiding my reactions as a two-week old Jack Russell, I doubt I'd be much good. Lost Cities, though, awoke the competitive streak in me pretty quickly. As some of the game involves racing to place your cards (which must be placed in order, so you can't start with the high scores first and then collect the rest over) before the deck runs dry, you need to watch your opponent, particularly if you and they are both fighting over the same territory. What also spices the game up are investment cards - these represent multiplication of the final score, but can only be placed before any numbered cards, so just like the stock market or a box of Beanie Babies, you have no idea how much of an investment something will be until you make your choice and see what happens.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. Once your deck runs out and the round is over, it's time to score - and as each expedition gets twenty points knocked off the score to represent the risks involved, investment cards can be a real burden. Less than twenty points worth of cards, and you end up with a minus score. A minus score which then, thanks to investment cards, will get multiplied. If I learned anything in GCSE Maths it was how to get frustrated easily, and when I saw what I thought were wise investments result in a score of -60 in my first round, I realised that it paid to both weigh up the risks and watch your opponent's actions carefully.

Alan: On the odd occasion that I've played darts, there's something that I find more frustrating than trying to hit the right bit of the board. I stand there with 89 to get, my dart in treble 17, and my tongue poking out of the side of my mouth as I try to figure out what I have left. It's a bit like that at the end Lost Cities. Your opponent's score, and indeed your score, are hidden information to those of us without fast arithmetic skills. There's a bit of tension as you add up your scores and it's close - but there's also a bit of annoyance if there's a wide disparity.

You could, if you wanted, strip back this game to just the numbers and miss out the theme entirely. It barely matters that you're a moustachioed explorer, but it's nice and unusual nonetheless.

The best thing about Lost Cities so far is that one of us often says "again?" at the end of that round. You know a game will only take ten minutes or so.  

So. It's a nice, quick game - you can play one round, or as many as you like in the style of the sore loser's 'best of three' - and the cards and very small board means it's portable enough to play on a train. You will need a pen and paper to score up, and possibly also the knowledge that multiplying minus numbers is A Bad Thing if you want to up your chances of winning. Me? I was hoping that, against everything dimly remembered from hot afternoons drawing pictures of robots in the back of my maths exercise book, that the x sign would quickly start cancelling itself out.

Lost Cities at BoardGameGeek

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