![]() ![]() Also, with just one opponent, there is little downtime. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. First, by definition, half the players win. ![]() Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s a two-player game - the Americans vs. Gupta has a few theories about why his game has done so well. It has gone on to amass 17,781 ratings on BoardGameGeek, as I write, with an average rating of 8.33. That first printing sold out in 20 minutes. Even then, it took a grinding 18 months for Twilight Struggle to generate enough pledges to warrant a printing. Interested gamers would pledge money, and GMT would print the game if enough capital was raised. Salvation came in the form of the company GMT Games, and its Project 500 - a kind of Kickstarter before Kickstarter was cool. “The Cold War? Why would anyone want to play a game about the Cold War?” Gupta recalled being asked. Courtesy of Ananda Gupta.īut publishers balked. The first Twilight Struggle test map, circa 2002. The two would discuss key aspects of the Cold War - the domino theory, the arms race, the space race - and these would make their way into the game. Gupta, a history buff, was doing policy work at a think tank, then was in school for computer science, before dropping out after he landed his first job in the video-game industry. Matthews, of Alexandria, Virginia, is an American history expert and was the legislative director for Sen. Gupta and Matthews instead designed a game about the geopolitics, rather than a hypothetical military conflict. Most games on the topic had focused on when the Cold War got hot. ![]() “We’re probably not going to do a better job than he is,” Gupta joked. They originally intended to do a game about the Spanish Civil War but realized they’d been scooped by a guy in Spain. A typical Twilight Struggle card reads, “Truman Doctrine: Remove all USSR Influence from a single uncontrolled country in Europe.” The Twilight Struggle rulebook is a relatively slender 24 pages. Rather than overwhelm players with a fat rulebook at the start, the designers spread the information required throughout the gameplay, on cards. ![]() Simplification, to Gupta and Matthews, was the name of their design philosophy. The rulebooks were overlong, the game mechanics baroque. Not GW students themselves, they were friends with some, and would go to the school to play and also to bemoan the increasing complexity of historical games - a genre especially dear to them. That’s where Gupta and co-designer Jason Matthews met. Twilight Struggle traces its roots to the early 2000s and a board gaming club at George Washington University. So, how do you design the world’s best board game? The first lesson is persistence. 1 There’s more to these games than “ roll the dice, move your mice.” Games in this broad category are typically characterized by deep strategy, an emphasis on skill and the lack of player elimination. The Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride - popular gateway drugs of the genre - are the third- and fourth-best selling board games on Amazon. Over the past five years, their market has grown an average of 15 percent a year, to $700 million in 2013. Serious games - whether they be hobby games, boutique games or Euro games - are having a moment. I spoke with Gupta, and turned to a vast board game database, to uncover what makes a board game great. In Twilight Struggle, players peddle influence and alter history with playing cards in an effort to win the Cold War. A video-game designer at Firaxis Games by day, he recreated a post-World War II universe out of cardboard. Gupta, 38, of Columbia, Maryland, is the game’s co-designer. 1 spot on the authoritative gaming-world website BoardGameGeek. The game is called Twilight Struggle, and it’s the top-ranked board game in the world. The game ends in nuclear war only about 5 percent of the time. ![]()
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