1960: The Making of the President (30-31 August & 6 September 2009)

I have quite a number of 2 player games that Anne and I play (plus a few multi-player games we play 2 player) but I realised recently that most of them are 15-45 minutes in length. So I started looking around for meatier 2 player games that might appeal to both Anne and I.

Research on Boardgamegeek led me to 1960: The Making of the President and Twilight Struggle. 1960: The Making of the President is a game about the US presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy while Twilight Struggle is about the Cold War 1945-89. Both of these games are based on the "card driven" idea I first came across in We the People (one of the few war games I enjoy). Basically there is a deck of cards (most of which have a number and an event), and the game is played as a series of hands. During each hand the players alternately play a card and either use it's event to do the corresponding special action or use the number on the card in some way, typically to gain influence somewhere on the board or reduce the opponent's influence. Each game has a randomising mechanism: in 1960 it is red and blue cubes drawn out of a bag, in Twilight Struggle it is dice. We found the games 3-4 hours long but Twilight Struggle has instant win conditions that can shorten the game considerably.


As both of these games are expensive I wanted to try them before making a buying decision. I noticed that Andrew Hubbard owns one and Andrew Rea owns both. Luckily, due to the generosity of both Andrews we got to borrow and try out both games.

We started this game on Sunday with the idea of this being a learning game of the first 2 or 3 turns, but then we carried on the next evening. This had the disadvantage as we hadn't read the rules to the debates carefully before we arrived at the debates. The debates were a bit of a fiasco as we had kept cards with our opponent's symbol on them! We made sure that didn't happen with election day. We also made a mistake of forgetting that media control trumps carrying a state. Which probably cost Anne a couple of cubes in NY (probably reducing me from 4 to 1 rather than 4 to 3). Anne won every initiative draw except for the one on election day.

Nixon (Ian) 307
Kennedy (Anne) 230

In our second game, Anne was Kennedy again. Early on she concentrated on the East and South and later the Mid-West by the mid game she had had a lock on those three regions. I/Nixon moved through to the East and took over NY and then started to attack PA.

Nixon (Ian) 283
Kennedy (Anne) 246