Patrick Martin
United States
Wisconsin
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I am the happy owner of both Twilight Struggle and 1960: The Making of the President thanks to the online play implementations of both games over at wargameroom.com. Naturally, when I noticed a new client for "1989" available, I was intrigued. Some quick inquiries in the chat room later, and I had the fortune to be taught the game by the game's designer! Now that's service! I have since played several games against several different opponents, as well as several solitaire plays to try and learn the deck. Here are my thoughts on the game.
Physical Components:
As a print and play game, the quality of components is pretty much up to the print-n-player. The card and map artwork are very similar to Twilight Struggle's (TS), which is good, since if you are playing on a table top, you will likely be using the counters and rules from TS. The only gripe I have is a minor one -- I would have preferred if all the tracks could have somehow been fit into the southwest corner of the map rather than being tacked on to the east side of the map and increasing its overall physical size.
If you happen to use the Wargameroom client, the digital components are to the same high standard as the Wargameroom TS client. The map is an image of the real game board (as opposed to an stylized map for certain games) other than the occasional (quickly fixed) bug, the rules implementation is wonderful.
Overall then, no complaints about the physical appearance.
Rules:
So, what's under the hood? If you are familiar with TS, you will pick up the basics of the system right away. Draw a hand of side-suited ops/events cards and alternate playing them. Unlike TS with its three choices for ops usage, 1989 combines the "coup" and "realignment" actions into one action called a "support check" which functions like a coup but with modifiers for control of adjacent spaces. The "Tiananmen Square Track" functions similarly to the space race in TS as an outlet for unpleasant cards, with the additional change that players add the discarded card's ops value to their dice roll to proceed along the track. The USSR stability track serves the same role as the defcon track in TS (again with whoever causes the USSR to 'blow up' losing the game.
The map is the familiar point to point style of TS, with each area having a stability value of 1-5, and a number of connections to other areas. Areas are grouped into countries (E. Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria) which are analogous to the regions in TS. One new addition is that each area of the map besides its stability is marked as being one of eight types of regions (Elite, bureaucrat, farmer, worker, church, student, intellectual, or minority). These designations provide a framework for certain events (e.g. an event may allow influence placement only in "farmer" spaces etc. etc.) and are important to scoring but otherwise don't affect the normal flow of the game.
The really substantial difference in the game rules are the scoring cards, or as they are called here "power struggle" cards. Instead of immediately scoring a country (the 1989 analogue to regions in TS) upon play of its 'power struggle' card, there is first a 'power struggle'. The power struggle uses a mechanism clearly borrowed from the battle resolution system of We the People -- each player draws a number of cards equal to two times their number of controlled areas in the country plus 5 for the communists or plus 1 for the democrats. These cards are drawn from a separate deck of power struggle cards, which are divided into four different tactics (Rally in the square, March, Strike, Petition) with values of 1-3, plus value 3 'leader' cards which are associate with one of the area types (student, intellectual, church, worker etc.). Play of struggle cards starts with the player who played the initial power struggle card, followed by the other player attempting the match it with a similar tactic (i.e. march to match a march). There is then a dice roll modified by the numbers on the just played cards to see if "initiative" passes and players reverse the order of play or not. The twist here is that the "leader" cards are only playable if you control at least one of the appropriate type spaces in the country where the power struggle is going on. Thus, one could have a large hand by holding a bunch of worker and farmer spaces, but end up drawing a bunch of student, elite and church leaders that would be useless to you. When a player manages to play a card that their opponent cannot match, they win the power struggle. The winner rolls a pair of dice to determine if their opponent must remove between 0 and 4 influence in the country, and if they gain between 0 and 4 victory points. After applicable influence is removed, the country is scored similarly to TS, with points for presence, domination or control, plus one for each battleground area controlled. If the democrats won the power struggle there is also a fifty percent chance that they seize power of the country in which case that country's power struggle card is removed from the deck and country doesn't score again until the end of the game. If the communists retain control, they get bonus victory points, which increase if they are able to hold the country through a 2nd or 3rd power struggle. These changes to the scoring mechanism make scoring somewhat more random, and also reward players for occupying non-battleground areas.
Gameplay:
So, how does 1989 play? Despite having core rules borrowed and lightly modified from TS, it plays much differently than TS. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, there is not the same coup-defcon engine driving events as in TS... support checks don't degrade USSR stability, and there are no restrictions on support checks in battlegrounds. I felt at least that this left the beginning of the game much less scripted than in TS... you could expand where you wanted without having to worry about what your opponent would or wouldn't be able to do. Also, the fact that other than the student and intellectual spaces, all spaces on the map are stability 3 or greater means that it is generally much safer to place influence in non-battleground countries. There also seem to be fewer opportunities to lock out an opponent from an area... about the only country where that seems to be a serious risk is the democrats getting locked out of Romania. Overall then, the influence placement decisions in the game felt sort of like a cross between TS and 1960... controlling ANY space helps you somewhat, but you need to have economy of force lest you get ahead in one country at the cost of letting your opponent get ahead in two.
There are some subtleties that are not immediately evident as well. There are several "chains" of cards that require previous card plays that seem to help the democrats, which means the democrat player has to think carefully about playing a prerequisite as ops. I didn't initially notice the different "power" values for the different countries, which make Poland more valuable for the communists to hold than Hungary for example. As mentioned earlier, the democrats need to make some effort to not get locked out of Romania, and there are a number of cards in the deck that make controlled areas in Germany important as well. There also seem to be very few unsuited cards in the deck, meaning you will likely have to deal with one or two more enemy cards per hand on average than in TS.
Overall then, is it fun? Yes it is. I didn't feel quite the same degree of tension as in a TS game, but the power struggles can be quite exciting and it seems like even if you get off to a bad start you aren't out of the game. The sense of theme is a bit more nebulous than in either TS or 1960 to me, but that's probably due in part at least to relative unfamiliarity with many of the actors etc. named on the event cards (give me a break, I was eight years old when the wall came down).
I would rate this somewhere between a 7 and an 8 on the BGG scale, versus the 9 I give to TS. It is an interesting and fun variant on the theme, but it definitely does not replace TS. I would say that anyone who has enjoyed TS should try 1989 at least once or twice though, and if they do they'll probably consider adding it to their 'rotation'. With the free wargameroom.com client, there's no cost to try out the system, so give it a try! The designer is still listening to feedback and seems to be considering some balance changes to cards etc. so any feedback you have after playing may even make it into the final release.
Many thanks due to Ted for his great contribution to the community!!
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Matt Davis
United States
Upland
California
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For clarification - is it true that whoever causes the USSR Stability to drop to 1 loses? I don't see this in the rules, but perhaps they've been changed since the review was written, as this is still somewhat of a work in progress.
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Patrick Martin
United States
Wisconsin
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Ah, you are correct to question this. In fact, in the current rules, dropping USSR Stability to 1 gives a 50/50 chance of a coup, which ends the game immediately with a final scoring round and with the added penalty that the player whose card play dropped the stability loses 6 points.
Thus, there are certain circumstances where you might deliberately drop USSR stability in the hopes of prompting a coup (e.g. you're currently ahead by 7 points, and the current scoring position is a wash, but you're looking at a hand full of powerful events for your opponent and want to take the 50/50 shot at an instant victory)
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Judit Szepessy
Canada
London
Canada
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Thanks for this useful review.
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