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Part of GMT's Lunchtime Series, Twilight Struggle: Red Sea – Conflict in the Horn of Africa is a two-player card driven game that builds on the award winning Twilight Struggle.
The year is 1974, and the Soviet Union and the United States have been locked in a life-or-death struggle across the globe. As so often happened during the Cold War, a relatively obscure region of the globe suddenly took center stage. Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, a bedrock U.S. ally in Africa, had grown old and increasingly dictatorial. When he was overthrown in 1974, a Marxist coalition took the reins of power. This new revolutionary leadership initiated a chain of events that upset the regional balance of power and unleashed all the familiar elements of Cold War competition in the Horn of Africa.
With a more limited scope and much shorter playtime, Twilight Struggle: Red Sea is the perfect way to introduce new players to the Twilight Struggle system, while maintaining all the tension, decision making, and theme of the original classic. The cards from Twilight Struggle can be used in TS: Red Sea and vice versa.
Part of the Twilight Struggle family — see Twilight Struggle for the combined view.
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- Fast playing (30-45 minutes)
- Good introduction to Twilight Struggle mechanics
- Maintains tension and decision-making of the original
- Streamlined rulebook
- Offers a different feel from Saigon 75 by focusing on influence rather than military units
- Learning curve for determining area control formulas can be challenging without an app
- Experienced players will have a significant advantage due to card knowledge
- Cold War influence struggle
- Horn of Africa during the Cold War
- Twilight Struggle
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- action selection — Players choose between using cards for operations points or triggering events, with a tension between the two.
- area influence — Players place influence tokens to gain control of regions.
- Card Driven — Cards dictate operations points for adjusting influence or trigger events.
- DEFCON Track — The DEFCON level can impact available actions and can lead to an instant loss if it reaches DEFCON 1.
- Victory Point Track — Players advance on a victory point track, with scoring rounds determining progress.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- We don't Need Another Hero my name is Marty
- I can't believe how fast the other 75 went I was really surprised
- we are such Geeks it is so sad
- The question is whether or not there's hate drafting going on here either because you really don't have the time to do that
- I will say that's one thing about an app Marty that it can hurt you because you don't understand the nuances of a game
- The beauty of the app is it just basically I played it up Oh I thought I would get more victory points than that nope oh well who cares and I would move on
- I think I would put this on the table and this is blasphemy I know it is more than Twilight Struggle if I owned a copy
- It's that you lose you lose whoever forces the the Defcon want to occur
- well I ran out of this space on my stupid PlayStation so I gotta go get one of those
- I just know this after this they better get started working on the Elder Scrolls because that's what I want