Twilight Struggle: Why Is This Ranked #1?

Last week we were only able to stay for a couple hours, but we did get a chance to try out Twilight Struggle (TS) for a few turns of play. When we quit, I (as the US) was ahead by a few points, with a strong position in the Middle East balancing off a stalemate in Asia and a slight disadvantage in Europe. Overall we enjoyed the game. But it came with a high set of expectations: For several years running, this has been the highest ranked board game on BGG, with an enormous number of ratings falling in the 8-10 range. That's out of over 10,000 games total!

Here the Soviets are running rampant in the Arab world, unlike our game.

In many respects, it's pretty implausible candidate for the top slot on the rankings boards:

• It's not really a European-style game except in victory condition mechanics, and virtually all the other top-ten titles are Euros. In many ways it's more like a classic Diplomacy-era wargame from the 60s, a genre that usually has narrow appeal.
• It's exclusively a two-player game, unlike most of the other popular games.
• The production standards are good for its category, but it's still a retro counter-based game in a world of high-chrome releases with figurines and meeples. The card art is of the "grainy vintage photo" variety.
• The gameplay is completely free of social or diplomatic aspects, and enforces a cutthroat aura of (thematically appropriate) paranoia that makes it impossible to play a "friendly game" of TS.
• Good play requires a thorough knowledge of the deck and a certain amount of card-counting, a skill that isn't easily mastered by casual players. (A novice player will be crushed by an experienced one.)
• The theme itself (nuclear brinksmanship) is dry and sobering and free of all but the darkest sort of humor.

But it's remained durably popular, even rising in popularity as it ages (most games fade as players seek novelty). Why?

First, I think it's important not to discount the nostalgia market. There are quite a few aging wargamers who no longer have the time and inclination to cover their entire basement floor with Case Blue maps, but still want to recapture the vibe of 70s-era Avalon Hill gaming. And Twilight Struggle does a good job of playing like people remember the games from that era playing. That's not necessarily the same thing as actually playing like those games, mind you! Instead, this is a game that extracts the aspects of retro wargame play that are most memorable (sustained struggle around a single strategic objective, for example) and creates an entire game of nothing but that kind of element. It's a "good parts" version, as fans of the Princess Bride might say.

Second, it's something directly relevant to the lives of many players. As a theme, it feels relevant to most older players who lived through those events. This is unlike most other wargames, which exist in an inaccessible world of dusty tomes full of military jargon. Even if you don't remember exactly who Gary Powers was, or why he was in a U2 over Soviet territory, the notion that this stuff once made front-page headlines makes it feel instantly immediate. In some sense, the early success of wargames can be traced to ex-WW2 officers wanting to revisit the themes that had been headlines in their early lives. This is the same principle at work.

But the biggest feature that distinguishes TS from other games ranked close to it is the sense of constantly being in a state of crisis management. The uniquely clever twist of this as a card game is that you are often being forced to play cards that hurt you, rather than help you. There's a sense of drama to catastrophe, and the feeling of constantly being on the brink of it. Mitigating harmful effects is a more compelling thematic premise than advancing helpful ones. There are other games that use disaster control as a thematic overlay (Red November, say, or Pandemic), but they still present the threat as being external. In TS, you meet the enemy, and he is you. Just like the real Cold War.

I'm not sure where I'd rank this myself. It's not precisely my style of wargame, with low-level turn-by-turn strategy balanced by the high-level randomness of a few powerful cards. (I tend to prefer high-level strategy to allow long-term planning, with low-level randomness to vary the exact cost of victory in isolated battles.) But I like the idea of a game that is trying not just to kill me, but to force me to slowly strangle myself by means of my own decisions. It feels cunning and devious in a way that other games never attempt to be.