1960: The Making of the President

The little sibling of Twilight Struggle managed to evade both my table and my collection for years—and, if I remember correctly, it was the first P500 I missed because of the capital controls, until a good Samaritan abroad could provide a card. At least the new edition is very nicely produced: the kind of game you enjoy laying out on the table and which puts you in a positive mood before the contest has even begun.

Its basic logic is more or less familiar from Twilight Struggle, but without the intermediate scoring and with a noticeably lower overall level of difficulty. The game flows smoothly and quickly, without demanding the same weight or concentration from the two players.

It does have ideas of its own, chiefly the momentum tokens and the bag building. Players move through that flow and through their cards, trying to make the most of what their side gives them, yet on my first encounter the randomness felt pronounced and the difference in card strength fairly large. Then again, I had a similar first impression of Labyrinth before I better understood how that game really flows.

So, on the positive side, I am keeping the production and, above all, how effortlessly it plays: it is the sort of game for which you can easily set up a second round straight away. But if I want something in this category and have the time available, the two words I need are Imperial Struggle.