MATCHING GAME VS TWILIGHT STRUGGLE

Matching games are games that require players to match similar elements. Participants need to find a match for a word, picture, or card. For example, students place 30 word cards; composed of 15 pairs, face down in random order. Each person turns over two cards at a time, with the goal of turning over a matching pair, by using their memory. Most matching games are objective, with correct answers in the rules for what counts as a match, pair, etc. Some however, like Dixit or Apples to Apples, are about subjective matches picked by one or more judge players. Here the correlation between a match holds value only as other players decide it, but rules dictate who will make those decisions and when.

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Twilight Struggle: The Cold War, 1945–1989 is a board game for two players, published by GMT Games in 2005. Players are the United States and Soviet Union contesting each other's influence on the world map by using cards that correspond to historical events. The first game designed by Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews, they intended it to be a quick-playing alternative to more complex card-driven wargames. It achieved critical acclaim for its well-integrated theme, accessibility and introduction of Eurogame elements. After being voted the number one game on BoardGameGeek from December 2010 to January 2016, it has been called "the best board game on the planet". Twilight Struggle is played competitively and was unofficially adapted for play-by-email and live online play. GMT released a Deluxe Edition in 2009, as well as a Collector's Edition as part of the crowdfunding campaign for the game's official adaptation into a video game; this Digital Edition was released in 2016. With over 100,000 copies sold, the game is GMT's all-time best-seller. According to its designers, "Twilight Struggle basically accepts all of the internal logic of the Cold War as true—even those parts of it that are demonstrably false." The game board thus presents a map of a bipolar world according to domino theory, where the US and USSR spread influence to all other countries (except China, which is shown as a powerful card, which must be handed to the other player if used, representing China tilting from one bloc to the other), and attempt to establish control depending on the stability of a country. One scholarly analysis proposed that "hile Twilight Struggle is at its core an area control game, what set its apart from being marked as a Risk clone is the combined effect of material aesthetics and design mechanics meant to embrace a particular point of view tied to the Cold War zeitgeist." Gameplay is divided into ten turns. Each turn players randomly draw a hand of event cards from a single deck. The starting deck contains only early war cards, with historically appropriate mid war and late war events shuffled in on turns 4 and 8 (for a total of 103 cards in the first edition). Players both use a card in the turn's headline phase (in which each player must play a card for its event) and six to eight action rounds.

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