Twilight Struggle: Core Rules.

In my last related post, I shared a quick and easy way to gain immediate context about the game Twilight Struggle.  In this post, I’ll take a closer look at the rules.

(To be sure, my purpose here is not to explain every rule - rather it is help accelerate the learning process so that we can get closer to playing the game and eventually developing winning strategies.) Section 1 of the rulebook (“the core rules”) is divided into the following 11 sub-sections:

1. Introduction
2. Components
3. Game Setup
4. Game Sequence
5. Card Play
6. Operations
7. Events
8. DEFCON Status and Military Operations
9. China
10. Scoring and Victory
11. Tournament Play

As we take a close look at the rules, it’s important to always keep the primary objective in mind, which is to “score Victory Points (VPs)”.  More specifically, we need to score Victory Points through:

1. geographic Influence over the six Regions
2. the play of certain Events

Since the game map is where the action will take place, let’s start here. The six regions referred to above include:

1. Europe - divided into two sub-regions: Eastern and Western Europe
2. Asia - also contains one sub-region: Southeast Asia
3. Central America
4. South America
5. Africa
6. Middle East

Each region is made up of connected nations or countries, each of which has it’s own Stability Number.  This number represents the Country’s overall stability, independence and power.  This number is important because it determines how much Influence (more on this later) is required to “control” that particular country.

Since our objective is to have greater influence over these six regions than our opponent, it’s important that we define just what this really means.  There are three levels of Influence one can have over a particular region:

1. Presence: Control at least one country in that Region.
2. Domination: Control more countries and Battleground countries in a particular Region than your opponent.  At a minimum, a superpower must Control at least one non-Battleground and Battleground country in order to achieve Domination of that Region.
3. Control: Control more countries in that Region than your opponent, and Control all Battleground countries in that Region.

This sounds simple enough!  At this stage, we have a better understanding of the board as it relates to the six regions and some traceability towards winning the game through gaining Influence over a particular region - through Presence, Domination or Control.

Let’s take a quick look at the rest of the board.  In addition to the regions and country “blocks”, the board also contains the following sub-sections:

• Turn Record Track
• Victory Point Track
• Action Round track
• Events In Effect
• DEFCON Status
• US Required Military Operations
• USSR Required Military Operations
• Space Race Track

While the details can be found in the rules, a couple of quick points to take into account:

• The Turn Record Track is divided into three periods: Early War (turns #1-3), Mid War (turns #4-7) and Late War (turns #8-10).  This is important because the rules change depending upon the period - we’ll investigate in more detail later on.
• The Space Race Track is another means of accumulating Victory Points.

A player has “control” over a country if she/he has Influence points greater than or equal to the country’s Stability Number and as with any game, scanning the organization of the rules is beneficial to establish context.  It’s similar to reading a textbook - first scan the table of contents, then the pages, and then start reading the text - i.e. have an understanding of what you are reading before you start.  Our goal at this stage is to try to understand why these rules are organized in this manner and to see if we can improve upon this organization to help accelerate our understanding.

Let’s see if we can essentially summarize each of the eleven sections so that we can get to the next level of understanding.

Introduction Components Game Setup Game Sequence Step 1: Improve DEFCON Status Step 2: Deal Cards Step 3: Headline Phase Step 4: Action Rounds Step 5: Check Military Operations Statu Step 6: Reveal Held Card (Tournament only) Step 7: Flip ‘The China Card’ Step 8: Advance Turn Marker Step 9: Final Scoring (After Turn 10 Only)

In fact, we should be able to summarize these rules in a few short paragraphs.

The game encapsulates the 45-year struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union.  This struggle is spread across 10 turns - each turn represents between three and five years and is divided across three main time periods:

Game Sequence:

1. Early War
2. Middle War
3. Late War

The game’s ten turns From what we know thus far (and from looking at these section headings), we can guess that the rules that apply to each turn can likely be found in sections 5-9.  But first, we need to focus on what we’ll be looking at 99% of the time - the game board (typically referred to as the “game map” primarily because it is actually a map of the world).  Here too you can divide your thinking. Looking at the game map we

Game Setup: Since the rules have a section illustrating how the game is played, it’s probably worth investigating whether we should setup the game to align with that example.  It turns out that the example starts from the beginning of the game so this strategy will work well for us. Game Setup: Shuffle the cards.  USSR player sets up first and places Influence markers in key locations indicated in the rulebook.  US player sets up second.