Very interesting article about the design of the game
Twilight Struggle along with the designer's observations on the ideal number of players and run time courtesy of the FiveThirtyEight blog. Good info for players and budding boardgame designers.
Designing The Best Board Game On The Planet
By Oliver Roeder
The game ends in nuclear war only about 5 percent of the time. That’s a good thing. It gives Ananda Gupta faith in humanity.
The game is called Twilight Struggle, and it’s the top-ranked board game in the world. It occupies the No. 1 spot on the authoritative gaming-world website BoardGameGeek.
Gupta, 38, of Columbia, Maryland, is the game’s co-designer. A video-game designer at Firaxis Games by day, he recreated a post-World War II universe out of cardboard. In Twilight Struggle, players peddle influence and alter history with playing cards in an effort to win the Cold War. And, ideally, avoid nuclear apocalypse.
I spoke with Gupta, and turned to a vast board game database, to uncover what makes a board game great.
Read it
here.
