Hmm, I see. But that probably would have forced me to play Truman for the event if he placed ops into WG and i wanted to control West-Germany at the end of the turn. And I rather keep it in deck to help me in la France.
In the end I managed to get France controlled before triggering Decol, which at least prevented him from reaching France through Algeria. (SEA and Thailand was already gone after I had to use Vietnam early to get an op into Afghanistan).
Note: I only now realised that the extra ops you normally play into WG then go into France. But I’m still not comfortable with having WG so open, without the ops to get it really easily.
Playing Decol is too much to concede, way worse than losing influence in W Germany. You can gamble on no RS, but once you’ve seen that headline, it’s just a question of how much influence you will have to lose in W Germany.
Would you ever play De Stal in AR1 as the US, before the Soviet player has chance to build up any ‘spare’ ops? I’ve had that done to me when playing as the Soviets and it feels really annoying.
Finland, 1-3 Europe setup influence, Syria… you can get 4 influence together and go ANYWHERE. The worst thing that can happen to the USSR is lack of access to S America, Africa, SE Asia… and to be given that freely is just a fantastic gift.
For a bit, he had Control of Central and South America, and was close to having it in Africa. The only thing I had any kind of control in was the Middle East.
I clawed my way back from a 19 point deficit to about a 5 point one, but it kept slipping away. I have never played a game into Late War before, so have never seen those cards. I keep hearing about the great cards the US gets at that point, but I sure didn’t see any of them, except as they got spaced by jraven!
I just felt like I was always on the defensive. I got really lucky for a turn when jraven had a bunch of low ops value cards, but even then I couldn’t capitalize much because so many of the cards in my hand were USSR events that I didn’t want to happen!
For the 10th turn, my cards were things like Che, Fidel, Warsaw Pact Formed, Liberation Theology, Decolonization, Arab-Israeli War, then Summit and Voice of America for a couple that didn’t suck. It was just bad.
Impressive. Rare to see communists in Canada. I think the mid war is where the US has all the really good cards. Late war can be a bit more USSR if the US has used their sneaky tricks to dump the red cards during the mid war.
Coming back to this. It obviously isn’t, but it was either Vietnam or use Nato (my only >1 op-card) or Truman, which I didn’t want to play as my first card to keep that threat on the board. On top of that, the coup on Iran failed miserably the first AR (it stayed at 2/0), so it was probably my only real chance to get into Afghanistan. That’s why I figured, I’ll give up on Thailand (especially after I decided I was playing decol this turn), and fight for Pakistan and India.
To be honest, I’m not even sure when that happened. I got to the point I stopped paying attention to what he was doing on the last turn, as the game was lost and just tried to make him lose Control of Central and South America. Got half of it.
Chris did a very good play. Scored Asia with Korean War, since I made a risky bet on it. Then 5YP’d the Europe card. Started crying at that point. But tried to prevent Soviet control of South Am with nuke subs.
For those who are interested in this sort of analysis nonsense, here’s an interesting decision I had to make, and maybe the key moment in the game.
The setup is this. At the end of T2 I was down 3 in score (from T1 ME scoring headline for the US) and behind in Europe, but had a strong position in Middle East. Asia was at a tense standoff, with two battlegrounds each and one non-battleground each. The final US turn put a China-card’s worth of US influence into North Korea, so Asia was set to score US +5.
In turn 3, I knew a bunch of @lalunaverde’s cards. The key ones were Asia Scoring, Decolonization, and Blockade. I had CIA, Red Scare, Containment, Five Year Plan, Korean War and Europe Scoring.
Here’s what I reckoned. I needed to keep FYP to dump Europe Scoring at the end. So I needed to play CIA in AR1 to get it out of my hand safely. The obvious headline is Red Scare, which renders the US hand really useless. But it seemed obvious that Asia Scoring would be the headline, and I didn’t want to be 8 points down even with an excellent position on the board.
So I headlined Korean War, with a 1 in 3 chance of success… and rolled a 5, scoring 2 points for the war, and +5 for Asia scoring. A swing of 12 on one die roll.
Was it sensible to play like that? It worked out, but it felt very jammy.
We didn’t move into Thailand and Iran knowing that Defcon is at 4, so Asia remained half empty. Vietnam Revolts forced my hand and did a coup on Vietnam only to be countercoup. Then moved into Vietnam with 4 influence. But Chris coup with the China card and completely flipped it.
In hindsight, I should have coup Iraq just to drop the defcon to 3 and proceed to Thailand before the Vietnam card. I would have then I kept holding on to Indo-Pakistani War and try to keep defcon at 3.
The Korean defence was a gamble. I’m hoping I would get the Korean War card or the war roll would fail.
Another fail is not to play the Central America scoring card as I have dommination. But the Soviet control of South America was deemed higher priority - at least to break the control and establish a presence. A coup in Panama ruined my last chance to compete.
And to do a failure finish: I screwed up on the Lone Gunman. At least, it’s not the CIA this time!
So, 2/3 chance of -5 VP, 1/3 chance of +7 VP in headline, also you needed the MilOps so even if not headlined you would event it anyway for net -5 (2/3) or -3 (1/3) VP.
Put another way, the Korean War headline could be said to be worth 12/3= 4, - 2/3 VP, so +3.33 VP.
Red Scare, on the other hand, is maybe worth 4 OPs in the headline, 4 OPs if not headlined. Pressure is hard to gauge with blockade in the picture, but you didn’t mention any other cards so it seems likely to be a wash.
So, the decision of whether or not to headline Korean War could be framed as take 3.33 VPs or don’t. Seems sensible put that way, right?
I’m actually terrible at these kind of analyses in real games, and just assume any 1/3 chance will fail.
