Tom vs Bruce: Twilight Struggle
TURN 7 – Nixon
Tom: My Quagmire card will keep Bruce busy rolling a d6 and burning valuable cards. Basically, the Vietnam War. Instead, it lets him discard the Muslim Revolution, which would have helped me. I guess a Quagmire is only as bad as whatever you have to throw into it.
Bruce: Quagmire is a good card for the Soviets to headline because it ensures that the first action the US will have to take will be a discard. This means that if you can get the Defcon to 4 as the USSR, you can headline Quagmire, then conduct a Battleground coup on round 1 to get the Defcon to 3, and then after the US discards a card, the Soviets can do another Battleground coup and take the Defcon to 2, thus shutting the US out of any Battleground coups for the whole turn.
Defcon management is a skill. When the Defcon gets to 4, the US player wants to get it to 3 before the end of the turn, because it improves by one at the start of the next turn, and at Defcon 5 the Soviets can conducts coups or realignments in Europe. That’s bad. Remember Greece 1947? Of course you do. Often, players ride the Defcon near 2 in order to prevent the other side from taking advantage of the relaxed atmosphere to improve its position. See how thematic it is? By keeping the world on the brink of annihilation, the superpowers limit their opponent’s freedom of action. Jason and Ananda are really geniuses.
Tom: You know what else is a skill? Playing RTSs. Remember when those were a thing and me and Bruce would play them? Those were the days.
Bruce: By the way, the US has a similar card, called Bear Trap (meant to represent the invasion of Afghanistan) and it works the same way. But these cards aren’t that powerful, because like Tom said, they can be used to discard an opponent’s events instead of having to play them. And Muslim Revolution is a really bad event, just like in RL. Glad I got rid of it!
