Gupta: We wanted it to be two-player and fast playing. Both of us felt that the card-driven games had started with a very playable, broad-stroke feel, and that that tradition needed some bucking up. I love the more complex ones like Here I Stand and Barbarossa to Berlin, but we couldn't let the We the People style games get overwhelmed.
Matthews: For us, it was a lifestyle kind of thing. Since We the People, card-driven games were getting longer and longer. At the same time, as we both transitioned from students to husbands and fathers our playing time kept shrinking. I love Paths of Glory, but I don't have many eight-hour, single-game sessions nowadays. Twilight Struggle is a reflection of how our lives have changed more than anything else.
Another important goal for the game was to try and put the players in the perspective of the protagonists. The Cold War was much more nuanced and less bipolar than Twilight Struggle. But that didn't matter, because Americans and Soviets acted as if the world was bipolar and black and white. We wanted to infuse the game with that attitude.
Was it hard to achieve those goals?
Gupta: It required us to make a lot of decisions that felt painful at the time, like getting rid of military units. We had a pretty clever system that let both sides deploy units representing large conventional-force commitments, but it doubled the length of the game. That wasn't acceptable.
Matthews: On the perspective front, it was rather easy. We all understand the kind of mental cartoon that they Cold War conveys, we just kept trying to include little aspects of it here and there.
What challenges were hardest to overcome when condensing 45 years into a game of 180 minutes?
Gupta: Deciding which events got cut. Jason came up with a huge list of events based on his research. We had to cut probably two-thirds of them. It wasn't so much the 180 minutes as the approximately 100 cards we had to work with.
Matthews: Agreed. There's still more stuff I'd like to have in there. You could do a whole game just on the Arms Race component of the Cold War. But, to keep focus, it's not really a component of the game.
How long did you work on the cards and balancing them?
Gupta: A long time.
Matthews: We started with some basic numerical balance -- number of cards, number of operations points. Then we tried to assign operations points to events in such a way as to pose a dilemma to the players. We didn't get this perfectly right with every card, but I think players find plenty of tension with the choices we made.
As players gain experience and learn the cards, do you find games becoming more and more competitive?
Gupta: I still routinely lose. I think I am destined for Ted Raicer's fate -- always to lose at my own designs.
Matthews: I had a pretty good record, but there are some sharks out there. With the advent of CyberBoard and the Wargameroom (an excellent port of the game by the way), there are folks who have played the game many more times than I have.
Has the strong positive reaction to the game surprised you?
Gupta: We were pretty confident that wargamers would take to it nicely, since so many have forgotten what it's like to be able to play a game to completion in an evening and we were convinced they would be refreshed by Twilight Struggle's playability. But the Eurogamer cross-over definitely surprised me. I didn't anticipate so many Eurogamers being willing to play a game with such substantial theme. There may be some untapped potential there.
Matthews: I think we were lucky to gets some positive buzz in important "Euro" publications like Counter. Having Alan Moon support the game so vocally was both a surprise and, I think, a great help.
Would the U.S. have won the Cold War without our greatest president, Ronald Reagan, being in office? Note: There is a tongue-in-cheek element to this question. Matthews works for a Democrat; in my day job, I work for a Republican.
Gupta: I think Reagan contributed tremendously to the moral case against the Soviet Union; he said things that previous presidents and other Western leaders had never said, and those words brought tremendous hope and courage to millions of people trapped in that totalitarian system and probably accelerated the collapse. But I do believe the fundamental incoherence of socialism would have brought down the U.S.S.R. eventually no matter what.
Matthews: While I am having to bite my tongue, I will say this much, Reagan is a Cold War icon. His speeches were second only to Kennedy's and it would be impossible to conceive of the Cold War, as we understand it, without him. I'm also not totally convinced that U.S. victory was inevitable. For one thing, the West would convince itself every 10 years or so that we were losing the Cold War. So, to grant the Gipper his due, I think he pulled us through one of those periods. In any case, he was a damn sight better than... oh, never mind.
