It was a good choice. The result is a brilliant design that has received widespread acclaim. Twilight Struggle is the first game ever to win two International Gamers Awards (for two-player strategy game and for historical simulation game), it was nominated for a Charles S. Roberts Award (given to wargames), and it was nominated for the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. It's among the top 15 highest-rated games of all time at BoardGameGeek.com.
Matthews, deputy chief of staff and general counsel for U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), and Gupta, a game developer for Breakaway Games, answered some questions for us about Twilight Struggle.
When did you first arrive at the idea of a game about the Cold War?
Gupta: We decided we wanted to do a game together in 1999 or thereabouts, some years after we'd met and played together in the group that would become the D.C. Gamers. The criteria for the topic were: had to be two-player, had to be politically interesting (that is, not primarily about military maneuvers), and had to be at least intriguing to both of us.
We started with the Spanish Civil War and quickly realized there was far too much to that conflict to really do it justice. (As it happens, someone with much more expertise on the subject is now doing a Spanish Civil War game.)
Then it occurred to us both that there were no good two-player Cold War games on a global/historical scale. Bruce Costello's Dropshot series is superb but the scenarios cover just a couple of years at a time and of course the game is about what happens when DEFCON is already 1. Kerry Anderson's Cuban Missile Crisis is also very cool but, obviously, is about 13 days instead of 45 years. We wanted to do the whole shebang.
Matthews: The topic was really Ananda's brainchild. The good part was that I was conscious for a little more of the Cold War than he was. If you went to college in the '80s and studied "political science," the Cold War was your major. So, once Ananda had his brilliant insight, I knew the daunting research work involved in something like the Spanish Civil War would be a snap in this case.
The most difficult part would be eliminating elements and events to keep the design focused. The thing about other Cold War designs was that they tended to come in two flavors: "third world war" games about hypothetical Soviet invasions of Europe or multiplayer Risk-like games.
Neither of these games really had much to do with the Cold War that we all know. Third world war games intrinsically change the Cold War to a hot one. In so doing, they marginalize the political and diplomatic dance that was the hallmark of the conflict. Multiplayer games sideline one of the Cold War's most important dynamics, namely that it was a bipolar world and begged for two-player treatments. That's not to say that there were not good games on the topic. Ananda mentioned a couple of excellent contemporary designs, it's just that no one seemed to have gone after the heart of the matter.
Why did you think the Cold War could be turned into an entertaining board game?
Gupta: I've always been interested in the modern period, and I think the Cold War, which was fought across the globe on so many different planes -- military, intellectual, artistic -- really deserved a good treatment.
Also, so many people who bought Twilight Struggle have a favorite card. I've lost count of how many people have told me about how they personally experienced or participated in one of the events we depict with the cards. There aren't a lot of conflicts that have that going for them.
Matthews: The great thing about card-driven games that distinguishes them from traditional wargames is that they handle political events so effortlessly. In the past, wargames that wanted to include a large political component had to add a lot of complexity. There would be lots of contingent rules for dealing with various circumstances. The problem with politics and wargames is that politics is invariably changing with the tides. So to craft rules that were both comprehensive and flexible was a huge undertaking.
The addition of cards in wargames allows designers to take all that stuff out of the rulebook and put it on the cards. The rules found on the cards can be short-term or long-term. So, they give designers the flexibility to make short-term rules changes that reflect some short-term political reality. All of this can be found in Mark Herman's We The People. What's more, that game also has a Go-like area control mechanism. We the People is about a military conflict with a deep political component. It did not require too much imagination for us to make the leap to a political conflict with a deep military component.
