GMT Games Twilight Struggle (Deluxe Edition)

“Now the trumpet summons us again, not as a call to bear arms, though
arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are – but a call
to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle…”

• John F. Kennedy

In 1945, unlikely allies toppled Hitler’s war machine, while
humanity’s most devastating weapons forced the Japanese Empire to its knees in
a storm of fire. Where once there stood many great powers, there then stood only
two. The world had scant months to sigh its collective relief before a new
conflict threatened. Unlike the titanic struggles of the preceding decades, this
conflict would be waged not primarily by soldiers and tanks, but by spies and
politicians, scientists and intellectuals, artists and traitors. Twilight
Struggle is a two-player game simulating the forty-five year dance of intrigue,
prestige, and occasional flares of warfare between the Soviet Union and the
United States. The entire world is the stage on which these two titans fight to
make the world safe for their own ideologies and ways of life. The game begins
amidst the ruins of Europe as the two new “superpowers” scramble over the
wreckage of the Second World War and ends in 1989 when only the United States
remained standing.

Twilight Struggle inherits its fundamental systems from the card-driven
classics We the People and Hannibal: Rome vs. Carthage. It is a quick-playing,
low-complexity game in that tradition. The game map is a world map of the
period, whereon players move units and exert influence in attempts to gain
allies and control for their superpower. As with GMT’s other card-driven games,
decision-making is a challenge; how to best use one’s cards and units given
consistently limited resources?

Twilight Struggle’s Event cards add detail and flavour to the game. They
cover a vast array of historical happenings, from the Arab-Israeli conflicts of
1948 and 1967, to Vietnam and the U.S. peace movement, to the Cuban Missile
Crisis and other such incidents that brought the world to the brink of nuclear
annihilation. Subsystems capture the prestige-laden Space Race as well as
nuclear tensions, with the possibility of game-ending nuclear war.

This deluxe edition, first published in 2009, includes the following
changes from the basic game:
Mounted map with revised graphics
Two double-thick counter sheets with 260 counters
Deck of 110 event cards (increased from 103)
Revised rules and player aid cards
Revised at start setup and text change for card #98 Aldrich Ames

Components:

• 260 full-colour counters
• 22″x34″ mounted map with revised graphics
• 110 event cards
• 2 six-sided dice
• 1 24-page rulebook
• 2 full colour player aid cards

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