Quote:
Originally Posted by paulfish1963
I find that the early part of the game favors the USSR, and if the USA player can survive, he can come back to win by the end of the game.
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Yes, I find this to be the case as well. It seems like the USSR is a speed player, trying to tie up the game in the Early or Mid War as much as possible. By Late War, there are a host of really bad cards that will hollow out Eastern Europe if the Soviets aren't careful.
For those who like to go deeper, here is a strategy site dedicated to discussing the game. They just (as of Jan. 14) finished their analysis of all the cards.
Twilight Strategy
And finally, here are a couple of my own gaming group's houserules, mostly born of discussions about official rules ambiguities, with a few half-hearted attempts made to justify them:
- If you play UN intervention for the event, you get to add its OP to the total. (We couldn't figure out why it would have an OP at all otherwise.)
- Bear Trap and Quagmire expire automatically on the end of your turn. (Rules as written don't make this clear whether it "carries over" into next rounds.)
- China counts as a full non-battleground country in Asia, and only the USSR can ever put or remove influence from it. Until China is "activated", the China card does not exist and has no in-game effect. (The optional China rule seems to be intended to hamper the USSR, but the majority of the optional cards introduced in the later edition seem to help the U.S., especially in the late game. Leaving China as a guaranteed non-battleground Soviet ally seemed like an interesting rebalancing for Asia Scoring and the Destalinization card.)
- Any card that "cancels" a given card will also "prevent" it. So NORAD cannot be played as an event after Quagmire has been played.
- Any card that allows a "free" coup or realignment may ignore DEFCON, but it also prevents that player from reducing DEFCON.
It's a fun game and it's clear the makers took a good amount of time in making it work. However, they admitted that it's their first attempt at making a game at all, and I think the ambiguity of the language shows this.