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On a Monday afternoon, Jason Matthews, 47, enters Labyrinth, a card and card game store on the Capitol. He wears a fashionable blazer without a tie, a goatee and well-coiffed hair. Normally, the store is closed on Mondays at this time of year, but it has made special arrangements with owner Kathleen Donahue to meet me here.
Matthews is a lobbyist for a child trafficking organization living in Alexandria, Virginia. He is also co-creator of Twilight Struggle – perhaps the biggest board game ever made. Today, he has agreed to play the game against me.
As you may have heard or not, we live in what many critics regard as "the golden age of board games". According to ICv2, a commercial information site for the hobby games industry, board game sales have grown from $ 100 million in 2013 to $ 305 million in 2016.
Maybe this is the result of a backlash? human-interaction-modern existence. Or maybe it's just because the products themselves have improved so much, with engaging and sharp gameplay that is far from the typical slog of Monopoly.
BoardGameGeek.com, the hobby's most important discussion hub and discussion forum, maintains a database of 100,000 games and crowdsources a master list of the best of the best. Twilight Struggle, released in 2005, spent five years in first place, longer than any game before or after, except one. It has been dethroned by newer, more flashy-eyed games, but still hangs comfortably around fifth place. "I play thousands of games and most are forgettable," said Tom Vasel, host of a long game. running board game podcast and a video series called "The Dice Tower". "They are fun for a moment, but then they go away, only a few games transcend that, and Twilight Struggle is one of them."
The game – whose name is taken from a sentence of President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address – is a two-player fight that simulates the Cold War, with a player acting as the United States and the # 39 Other acting like the USSR On a map of the world, the two superpowers are trying to take and keep control of many individual nations that were caught in the middle of the conflict. Players do this by using their hand of randomly distributed cards depicting real events from the Cold War: Play a card called "Fidel", and the Soviets will control Cuba; Play a map based on Ronald Reagan's speech "Rip this Wall", and the US influence in East Germany increases. On the way, there is paranoia, bullying and a sense of life through another version of history – one where Israel can become communist after a bad performance in the Yom Kippur War or the first one. Iran remains under the sphere of American influence. The war of hostages is avoided
By 2018, of course, Twilight Struggle – with its recreation of a world in which the United States and Russia have agreed – is closer to describing the current reality than 39, at any time since its release. "He feels definitely relevant now," says Ananda Gupta, 41, who invented the game with Matthews. "All you have to do is add a few more cards and you could just extend it to today … If I had a mind to, I'm confident that we could make a cold war game on the model of the current "
Indeed, in various online forums, fans of the game have taken the habit of inventing their own contemporary cards, such as the one evoking The abandonment by President Donald Trump of our European allies at the court of Vladimir Putin, this card removes the blue-colored US influence markers from the game in Europe to provide an opening to the Russian reds. who created the map called "the art of the transaction."
Matthews was working in politics – he was chief of staff to Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., – before becoming He and Gupta – who used to live in the Washington, DC area, but now live in Los Angeles Angeles – met in a board game group based at George Washington University in 1998, but none of them was a student. They have become zealous for war games, a sub-genre of board games that reconstruct battles like Waterloo or Gettysburg.
The most hardcore war games are surprisingly complex and at that time, the genre becomes more mysterious. Matthews remembers a war game about guerrilla revolts in Central America that required players to read rule books three inches thick. Another notorious war game, the Campaign for North Africa, came with a 10-foot-long map and would have taken 1,500 hours to complete. His level of detail was practically parodic, with a "macaroni rule" that required the player representing Italy to reserve additional portions of water so that the troops could boil their pasta rations. "19659010" his beloved hobby confuses the complexity of historical accuracy, scary potential new players. Finally, he and Gupta, working full time and starting a family, no longer had the time for a typical 12-hour war game, let alone an epic 1500 hours, or energy to memorize long rules. From here, Gupta had a side game testing board games for a Californian publisher called GMT Games. Matthews often helped Gupta test the game, and soon, something hit him: "By playing some games, we were like, we can do better than that."
So the pair started to create a new type of war game that could fit into their schedules. "We wanted to create a game that two people who know the rules can play in the evening," says Gupta. "Something that people who are no longer in the university could have the time to play with a reasonable frequency."
They were interested in a scenario that could simulate the political aspects of the war, not just the military side. Eventually, they settled on the Cold War – the idea of Gupta – and after many iterations, they built a prototype map and printed the event cards at Kinko. Matthews carved an ankle to make the red and blue markers that represent the influence of a superpower in a given country. And in the summer of 2000, they headed to the World Board Games Championships – held nearby this year in Timonium, Maryland – to try to attract the attention of players and fans. publishers.
Their first choice of publisher was GMT. "It was not a mbadively impressive prototype, physically," says Gene Billingsley, co-founder of GMT, who watched Matthews and Gupta demo their game that day. Yet it took him less than 10 minutes to decide to publish it. He remembers that a colleague had asked him why he was so sure. "For once, I did not say anything about the gameplay," says Billingsley. "I said it carried me into my childhood, when the cold war was hot, when kids had to go under the desks for exercises, the game just has the ability to immerse you in its theme."
not sure it would be a success. "They thought it was good," recalls Gupta, "but they did not see the call, they thought that a Cold War game was kind of a loser in terms of attraction to the public. " GMT put the game on its "Project 500" list – a Kickstarter before Kickstarter that allowed fans to vote with their portfolios on which GMT games are expected to hit the market. Once a game had 500 pre-orders, the work began. "Twilight Struggle had a very slow climb up the list of priorities," says Gupta. "He dragged to a few hundred, but eventually he crawled up there."
The game finally started in December 2005. Matthews remembers that he was getting good reviews, and he was breaching the best BoardGameGeek cards. But the sales figures left something to be desired. War players "did not know what to do with," says Billingsley. The game was distinctly different from what they were used to – simplified instead of complex.
The turning point came at the Ohio Friends' Rally, a small, invitation-only event featuring publisher players, all hosted by Alan Moon, a prolific board game icon and designer. The Gathering of Friends addressed less to war games and more to Eurogames – a different subgenre derived from the German tradition of fast and simple board games emphasizing intelligent mechanics, sacrificing most the thematic and historical fidelity of war players. Fortunately, Twilight Struggle seemed to meet in the middle of these opposing styles. "I'm going to the rally, and everyone's stopping me, and they're like," Alan Moon did nothing but play your game all weekend, "recalls Matthews.
Billingsley remembers receiving a call from a colleague Rally who told him that Moon had said it was the best game he had ever played. "I said:" Can you you ask Alan if we can use this quote? "" said Billingsley. "By the time I had sent this email, I went to BoardGameGeek, and Alan had already posted something very similar: everything to suddenly, our phones were ringing.In the three months following Moon's Gathering of friends, Twilight Struggle had exhausted his initial draw.
"It's fun to be a bit of a geek," says Matthews. "It's just the right level of celebrity, is not it, no one knows who I am, I can go into any place and be totally anonymous, but when I go to conventions, people ask for my signature, they take pictures "
Twilight Struggle can now be played on computers and mobile devices against friends or strangers. A competition scene has also emerged, and the table game conventions spoken of by Matthews sometimes host a tournament of players vying for the crown of Twilight Struggle.
Matthews and Gupta spread the success of Twilight Struggle in different ways. Gupta went to the video game route and worked in a handful of major studios on critically acclaimed games. Matthews has created several new historic board games while retaining his day jobs in Washington, DC But what the two designers did not do, is build a new board game together – up to $ 39. ;now. A few years ago, Gupta, released from a contractual clause that claimed any intellectual property he was developing, recovered with Matthews to work on a near-long-running sequel. Their idea was to translate their magnum opus to the 18th-century colonial rivalry between Britain and France. They call it Imperial Struggle. It is expected to be published by GMT next year. The number of pre-orders is in the thousands.
This afternoon, however, Matthews is focusing on Twilight Struggle – specifically beating me to his own game. It's been at least a year or two since he's played it, he says. he, although he could always trace every inch of the painting if he wanted it. Playing as the United States, Matthews ends up with a lock on much of Europe and Asia for most of the game. Like the United States, I keep a tight lid on the Middle East, which is favored by the Soviet side. Africa, meanwhile, turns out to be a tug of war.
About 2 and a half hours into the game, with annihilation looking me in the face, I manage to win a victory by playing a card called "Wargames," "A risky game that involves reducing the global status of Defcon to a little less nuclear war. "Why have we already made this card!" Matthews screams as he lays his cards on the table in defeat. Throughout the game he has been a clever trash-speaker, well experienced in the games of mind necessary to unbalance the opponents.But he is graceful in his loss.
The two of us start to lock up the board and the plays. Matthews, organizing the card game of the event, mentions that his playing has become popular in the former East European countries, with translations into Polish, Hungarian and Czech – and country-specific maps. He says that GMT will charge him probably to write some new maps focused on the Soviets soon. They make a next Russian edition.
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