Blockade needs a 3 card btw. Thanks for the game, sorry it was such a tough start to get out of.
Oh yeah, 3 :p
Here was my starting hand, minus the COMECON and Mideast Scoring (headlined, before Soviet had any chance to coup Iran and get an advantage there).
oof…
You had a rough starting hand to be sure, but I have willingly let Blockade trigger and still played some competitive games. Admittedly, that was mostly to hold De-Stalinization, but bad card draws tends balance itself out over the game. What you could have done was just leave West Germany open, play 4 into Italy, two into Greece, and 1 into Austria or Spain. Or, 3 into Italy and 1 into Canada (bringing it to 3), Spain, Greece and Turkey. Sets you up wonderfully for Marshall Plan, making it unplayable for your opponent. I’m guessing your opponent combo’ed Socialist Governments with an Italy Coup? Which is a danger of this set up, but then he is giving you Western Asia, which if that whole “Europe Control” thing doesn’t work out is a challenge to overcome.
On the otherhand, since you had Comecon, then you had your discard card, so you had the right set up, I think. You just needed to have held on to that card to the last turn.
Really, the only problem card in your hand, once you (imho) correctly headlined Middle East Scoring is Nasser. Ultimately, you are probably just going to have to bite that bullet and give him Egypt and Libya until Sadat roles around.
In round 8, I was forced to forfeit my position as Soviets (losing, too; +13 to USA with most continents US-dominated) - I will be travelling without reliable internet access (had hoped to finish this game before, but alas)
East83raider (United States) WINS
You had a rough starting hand to be sure, but I have willingly let
Blockade trigger and still played some competitive games. Admittedly,
that was mostly to hold De-Stalinization, but bad card draws tends
balance itself out over the game. What you could have done was just
leave West Germany open, play 4 into Italy, two into Greece, and 1 into
Austria or Spain. Or, 3 into Italy and 1 into Canada (bringing it to
3), Spain, Greece and Turkey. Sets you up wonderfully for Marshall
Plan, making it unplayable for your opponent. I’m guessing your
opponent combo’ed Socialist Governments with an Italy Coup? Which is a
danger of this set up, but then he is giving you Western Asia, which if
that whole “Europe Control” thing doesn’t work out is a challenge to
overcome.
The other bad luck streak was when the scoring cards came out. As you can see in the turn 5 screenshot, he only had dominance in Europe and Africa (the latter was me not using Colonel Rear Guards earlier than I did). I had dominance in Asia and the Americas, with zero soviet presence in South America. If you didn’t see the score, it would actually look like a decent mid war position for the U.S.!
Alas, most of the scoring cards came out during windows when soviets had dominance or at best ties, and the Americas never came out at all. Europe was going to nuke me for 7 points, but the Americas would have netted me about 11. Not immediately blocking Soviets dominating then scoring Africa with the Rear Guards was my most fatal mistake along with not holding onto COMECON to cancel Blockade. Getting a tie in Africa might have kept me alive long enough to start making a score comeback in the regions I dominated.
To be fair, we were well overdue European scoring coming out for the second time also! And I let the board get like that as I was pretty confident I could win quickly if I focused on certain things.
Not sure if it’s an iOS10 issue but the auto notification on the Twilight Struggle icon (red circle in the upper right of the icon) seems to be broken - it’s not updating and showing as “3” for several days even when I’ve made all my moves. It’s also broken in Ascension. So it could also be a Playdek shared code issue.
Is anyone else seeing that issue on iOS? Luckily I still get email notifications.
No IOS for me but I did have trouble logging onto the Playdek server this morning.
Congrats to rho21 on a well deserved win. We were able to finish a full game, but we went right up against the time limit.
I agree that for matches such as ours with big time zone differences between the players, 14 days would be much more reasonable. Also, Playdek really does need to add an option for both players to vote on extending the time limit in-game.
ForzaA forfeited in Turn 8 against east83raider. The score was 12 to the US and all but Europe and South America was dominated/controlled by the US.
I continually get incorrect numbers in the red circle icon - this morning it was “10” and I don’t even have ten games in progress.
The problem with making Blockade a “3” card is that if the US player has it, he can use it to take 3 ops points AND discard a USSR card, making it like an extra space race. That’s pretty overpowered. I think that having it be a “1” is reasonable, as the US always has the chance to put some replacement influence back into West Germany. Even losing West Germany is not a killer - I have seen several games come back from that deficit, both with me as US and my opponent as US.
@Courteous_D beats @agapepilot on a foolish DEFCON suicide play of Lone Gunman by the US. Things were not looking good in round 4 so I think this just sped up the inevitable.
Yeah, @agapepilot made the most of a string of 4 ops cards in the early war, but a successful Korean War, plus good fortune in drawing Decol and De-Stalinization, made for a decent Soviet advantage. I was happy enough not to see it through, though. The Middle East and Africa were disagreeably blue, and I wasn’t looking forward to the Late War cards at all…
Happily, the reactionary forces in Washington responded to the coup in far-off Zaire by BLOWING UP THE WORLD!
Dumb question perhaps, but I’m still a relative newcomer. Playing as the US, are you supposed to be allowed to discard a 3 OPs SOviet card as a response to Blockade? I tried it and the game wouldn’t let me.
Yes, any 3+ Ops card is fine. In fact some players use it hoping to force a discard of De-Stalinization if the US is holding onto it.
Where you really have to be careful is under Red Scare/Purge as then you’ll need a 4 Ops card.
Whenever I chose a Soviet card as a possible discard, my only option was “do not discard”. It might be a bug.
You don’t see a box up above the Do Not Discard appear saying “Discard [card you have selected]”? It is working fine for me here.
Not at the time, no.