Cold War can’t freeze this hot game
Twilight Struggle makers aimed to simply bring era’s tension to life
WASHINGTON— On a recent Monday afternoon, Jason Matthews, age 47, walks into Labyrinth, a board-and-card-game store on Capitol Hill. He sports a trendy blazer with no tie, a trim goatee and a well-groomed head of hair. Normally, the store is closed on Mondays this time of year, but he’s made special arrangements with owner Kathleen Donahue to meet me here.
Matthews is a lobbyist for an anti-child-trafficking organization who lives in Alexandria, Va. He’s also co-creator of Twilight
Struggle — perhaps the greatest board game ever made. Today, he’s agreed to play the game against me. As you may or may not have heard, we’re living in what many critics have deemed “the golden age of board games.” According to ICv2, a trade-news site for the hobby-games industry, board game sales increased from $100 million (U.S.) in 2013 to $305 million in 2016.
Perhaps it’s the result of a backlash against our screenswallowed, devoid-of-humaninteraction modern existence. Or maybe it’s simply because the products themselves have gotten so much better, with engaging and sharp gameplay that’s a far cry from the typical slog of Monopoly. BoardGameGeek.com, the hobby’s most prominent news hub and discussion forum, keeps a database of 100,000 games and crowdsources a master list of the best of the best. Twilight Struggle, released in 2005, spent five years at the No.1spot, longer than any game before or after it, save one. It’s since been dethroned by newer, flashier, flavour-of-themonth games, but still hovers comfortably around fifth place.
“I play thousands of games and most are forgettable,” says Tom Vasel, host of a long-running board-game podcast and video series called The Dice
Tower. “They’re fun for a while, but then they go away. Only a few games transcend that, and
Twilight Struggle is one of them.” The game — whose name is taken from a phrase in U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address — is a two-player fight that simulates the Cold War, with one player acting as the United States and the other acting as the U.S.S.R.
Across a map of the world, the two superpowers attempt to take and maintain control of the many individual nations that were caught in the middle of the conflict. Players do this by using their hand of randomly dealt cards representing actual Cold War events: Play a card called “Fidel,” and the Soviets will control Cuba; play a card based on Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech, and U.S. influence in East Germany increases.
Along the way, there is paranoia, brinkmanship and an overall sense of living through an alternate-reality version of history — one where Israel may turn communist after a poor showing in the Yom Kippur War, or Iran remains under the U.S. sphere of influence and the hostage crisis is averted. In 2018, of course, Twilight
Struggle — with its re-creation of a world in which the United States and Russia locked horns — is closer to describing current reality than at any point since it was released.
“It definitely feels relevant now,” says Ananda Gupta, 41, who invented the game with Matthews. “All you’d need to do is add a few more cards and you could just extend it to today ... If I had a mind to, I’m confident we could do a Cold War game along the lines of the current one that’s happening.”
Matthews used to work in politics — he was chief of staff for Sen. Mary Landrieu — before becoming a lobbyist. He and Gupta — who once lived in the Washington, D.C., area but now lives in Los Angeles — met at a board-game group based out of George Washington University in 1998, though neither was a student there. They bonded over their zeal for war-gaming, a subgenre of board games that reenact battles such as Waterloo or Gettysburg.
The most hardcore war games are astoundingly complex, and at that time, the genre was getting only more arcane. Matthews recalls a war game about Central American guerrilla revolts that required players to read three inch-thick rule books. Another notorious war game, the Campaign for North Africa, came with a three-metre-long map and was said to take 1,500 hours to complete. Its level of detail was practically parodical, with a “macaroni rule” that forced the player representing Italy to reserve extra portions of water so troops could boil their pasta rations.
So, the pair set out to create a new type of war game that could fit into their schedules. “We wanted to make a game that two people who know the rules can play in an evening,” Gupta says.
They were interested in a scenario that could simulate the political aspects of warfare, not just the military side. Eventually, they settled on the Cold War — Gupta’s idea — and after many iterations, they built a prototype map and printed the event cards at Kinko’s. Matthews carved up a dowel to manufacture the red and blue markers that represent a superpower’s influence in any given country. And in the summer of 2000, they headed to the World Boardgaming Championships — held conveniently close that year in Timonium, Md. — to try to get the attention of players and publishers.
Their first choice of publisher was GMT. “It wasn’t a massive- ly impressive prototype, physically,” says Gene Billingsley, cofounder of GMT, who watched Matthews and Gupta demo their game that day. Still, it took him less than 10 minutes to decide to publish it. He remembers a colleague asking him why he was so sure.
“For once, I didn’t say anything about gameplay,” Billingsley says. “I said that it transports me to my childhood. To when the Cold War was hot. When kids would have to get under desks for drills. The game just has the ability to immerse you in its theme.” But GMT was not sure it would be a hit. “They thought it was good,” Gupta recalls, “but they didn’t see the appeal. They thought a Cold War game was kind of a loser in terms of audience appeal.” GMT put the game on its “Project 500” list — a Kickstarter before Kickstarter that allowed fans to vote with their wallets on which GMT games should come to market. Once a game had 500 preorders, manufacturing would begin.
“Twilight Struggle had a really slow climb up the priority list,” Gupta says. “It hung out at a couple hundred, but eventually it did crawl its way up there.”
The game finally debuted in December 2005. Matthews remembers it getting nice reviews, and it was making a dent in BoardGameGeek’s top charts. But sales figures left something to be desired. Wargamers “didn’t know what to do with it,” Billingsley says. The game was markedly different from what they were used to — streamlined instead of complex.
The turning point came that spring, at the Gathering of Friends in Ohio, a small, invitation-only event comprising board-game players, designers and publishers, all hosted by Alan Moon, a board-game icon and prolific designer. The Gathering of Friends catered less to war games and more to Eurogames — a different subgenre spawned from the German tradition of fast and uncomplicated board games emphasizing smart mechanics, while sacrificing most of the thematic and historical fidelity that war-gamers prized.
Fortuitously, Twilight Struggle seemed to meet in the middle of these opposing styles. “I get to the Gathering, and everybody’s stopping me, and they’re like, ‘Alan Moon has done nothing but play your game the whole weekend,’ ” recalls Matthews.
Billingsley remembers getting a call from a colleague at the Gathering who told him that Moon had said it was the best game he ever played.
“I said, ‘Can you please ask Alan if we can use that quote?’ ” says Billingsley. “By the time I’d sent that email, I went to BoardGameGeek, and Alan had already posted something very similar. All of a sudden, our phones were ringing off the hook.” Within three months of Moon’s Gathering of Friends, Twilight Struggle had sold out its initial print run.
“It’s fun to be sort of geek famous,” Matthews says.
“It’s just the right level of famous, right? No one really knows who I am. I can walk into any place and be totally anonymous. But when I go to conventions and such, people ask for my signature, they take pictures with me and it’s all that kind of thing. My kids are weirdly proud of it.”