When I mentioned my experiences with Paths of Glory a few weeks ago, one commenter asked about doing an AAR of my futile efforts against Bruce Geryk. I replied that I wasn’t quite sure how that would work. Now we are going to find out.
Twlight Struggle is a two player card based strategy game from GMT, makers of Paths of Glory, Command and Colors and the Great Battles of History series. It has a Cold War theme (well executed, in my opinion) and has a number of nice little features that make it both easy to learn and challenging to play. Bruce and I will be playing this with the VASSAL engine mod of the game.
This is not intended to be a poor man’s “Tom versus Bruce”, especially since Dr. Geryk has a good chance of winning this time. Hopefully it will be a chance for the two of us to discuss design issues, strategy and why the Communists could never have won the Cold War. Bruce will be a partner in blogging while the game is ongoing, which means he’s getting admin privileges here. Don’t piss him off. If it works, I might try something like this with other games and maybe other opponents.
The two of us have to work out the rules about reading each other’s posts. And I’ll try to work out the image upload thing so I can post snapshots of the game board as we go along. Any ideas or insights will be welcome.
I’m Soviet Russia. Bruce is the Red, White and Blue. Cards have been drawn.
Looking forward to reading the TS blog! TS is a great game. Reminds me a lot of Chris Crawford’s Balance of Power, but in CDG format. Actually, now that I think of it, I believe the designers mentioned Crawford as an influence.
When finished you may also want to post your AAR over at BGG, folks over there get a kick out of that stuff.
Do you like tactical gaming? In the future if you’re ever interested in doing an AAR using either WinSPWW2 or WinSPMBT let me know. Doing a modern day game with the US versus Iran may be fun.
I can’t wait to read the AAR. My interest in boardgames/wargames has really grown in the last year and now I find myself with yet another game format of must have purchases. $-)
I wasn’t a huge fan of TS. It just seemed like the return of enjoyment on the invested fun was a bit low. The caveat being that I only played it once.
Haven’t picked up TS myself, as it is not a good match with my usual gaming crowd; and at some point I decided not to buy games that I am unlikely to get to play. :)
Looking forward to reading this, though. If you ever want to try your hand at the Age of Bony, btw, drop me a line.
Twilight Struggle: Turn Three // Jan 1, 2008 at 2:28 pm
[…] you don’t know what we are doing or why, click here. Or you can just start with Turn […]
The Anatomy of the AAR // Feb 8, 2011 at 12:25 pm
[…] on and are able to highlight decisions that made the world turn out the way it did by the end. The board game AARs I wrote with Bruce Geryk tried to take this route, explaining beyond the rules as we played; there was no real need to go […]