Could You Win the Cold War?

Michael Peck

Security, United States, soviet union

One of the best strategy games ever made puts players at the heart of the U.S.-Soviet struggle.

Perhaps it's wrong to be nostalgic for thermonuclear annihilation, but there are times when I miss the Cold War. Yes, it was a nerve-wracking time when life on Earth hovered thirty minutes away from near-extinction, and ordinary Americans and Russians went about their lives knowing that the Bomb could suddenly end them.

But at least the Cold War was predictable. It may have been the cold predictability of Mutual Assured Destruction, and stupidity and recklessness could have triggered Armageddon by mistake, yet we all knew that neither side would deliberately commit suicide. "Better dead than Red," and "We will bury you," vowed the antagonists, but that didn't stop Nixon from meeting with Brezhnev or Reagan with Gorbachev.

That predictability often led the Cold War to be compared to chess, or the Cuban Missile Crisis to poker. So it's fitting that someone has made a board game out the Cold War, and one that is regarded as one of the best strategy games ever made. Twilight Struggle puts two players into the shoes of the rival superpowers from 1945 to 1990.

Twilight Struggle is a mixture of chess, Risk and poker. The game consists of a roughly two-foot by three-foot board, a deck of 110 Event cards, and 260 small cardboard tokens (colored blue for the U.S. and red for Russia, of course). The board shows a map of the world with each nation depicted as a box, and with transportation routes connecting various nations. Each nation (except the U.S. and USSR) has a Stability number, from the Stability level 5 of Britain (rock-solid government) to the Stability 1 of many African nations (new El Presidente/Field Marshal/Supreme Leader every Tuesday and Thursday, holidays excepted). Certain nations, such as East and West Germany, India and South Korea, are marked as Battleground states that count extra for scoring.

Who controls a nation is indicated by Influence markers that quickly speckle the map in blue and red. A superpower controls a nation if it places Influence equal to a nation's Stability rating, and minus an opponent's Influence. So if the U.S. has 1 Influence point in Egypt, which has a Stability of 2, the Kremlin would need 3 Influence to count Cairo as an ally.