13 Days Review

On October 14^th, 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane flying over Cuba spotted a Soviet missile base under construction, setting off 13 Days of tense strategic posturing by the US and USSR during which the world has never been closer to complete annihilation. The stakes couldn’t be higher. You’re eyeball to eyeball with your adversary, better hope they blink first…

13 Days of concentrated tension. 13 Days of bluff, counter-bluff and manipulation. 13 Days in which you’ll be so far off the edge of your seat, someone else can borrow it while you play. What else would you expect for a game about the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Before you is a compact board featuring the key battlegrounds of the crisis. This goes far beyond Cuba, although any action in there is made doubly important by it’s connections to other local battlegrounds. It encompasses Berlin, a hot spot ever since the Berlin airlift of 1948, Italy and Turkey, sites of US missile bases that drove the USSR to try to place missiles in Cuba in the first place, as well as the world’s media, the UN and world opinion. Yet only some of these places will be the focus of your attention.

In each of the games 3 rounds, you’ll secretly decide on an agenda, a key region whose control will be worth the most prestigious of currencies: points! This region could be either one of the locations on the board, or one of the 3 Defcon tracks putting a real edge to those sabres you’re rattling (more on these later). For each of the little influence cubes you have more than your opponent in that area, or for each space higher on the Defcon track, you’ll pull the prestige marker one space closer to your side of the tug-of-war style victory point track. But your opponent will have some idea of where you’re aiming: for each of the 3 agenda cards you draw at the start of a round, you’ll place one of your flag markers out on to the corresponding part of the board. Then begins the real game, of bluffing, of second guessing your opponent and of trying to control the board without losing control of the Death-con tracks.

2 minutes to midnight

You see, the more influence cubes you dump on to the board, the more you’ll increase the corresponding Defcon track, and you’ll know you’re going too far as your marker starts to cross over all the nuclear weapon symbols! Every marker starts at Defcon 3. Everything is hunky-dorey at Defcon 3. If a marker strays into Defcon 2, that’s not the end of the world. No, the end of the world is if you end up in Defcon 1! Don’t end up in Defcon 1!

Except… you kind of can. You see it’s only at the end of a round that anyone remembers to check whether nuclear war has been declared, which means it’s perfectly ok to throw yourself into Defcon 1 so long as you can pull yourself back out in time. You’ll also want to make sure that no more than 2 of your markers are at Defcon 2 for the same reason. Screw up at the end of a round, and you’ll instantly lose the game. I mean, we all kind of lose when the nukes start flying but at least your opponent can sit in her bunker with the sense of smug superiority that they didn’t start it! To make matters even more exciting/terrifying, all the Defcon tracks escalate one space at the start of every round!

Round 1 begins and everything seems peaceful. You can throw out cubes to your heart’s content. But from Round 2 onwards, you realise the Defcon tracks are in the danger zone and you’re running out of cubes. Suddenly you’re scrambling just to keep yourself from losing, let alone trying to actually dominate the key regions of the board. And all of this is made wonderfully harder thanks to how card play works in this game.

A struggle in the shadows

Much like board gaming legend Twilight Struggle, who is very much the illegitimate father of this game even if he won’t admit it, you’ll use a hand of cards that can be either played for influence on the board, or for the event on the card. The stroke of evil genius being that if one of your cards is for your opponent, they will get to use the event’s power when you play it. Thus, your hand of cards themselves will be acting against you, before your opponent can even begin to start doing something.

This becomes a huge part of the game. Even with a hand of only 5 cards, choosing which card you play in what order is extremely tough and extremely important. You’ll be trying to only play your opponent’s cards when they can’t make full use of the event, and trying to maximise your own. Then there’s trying to get your cubes on the right spaces, without giving away to your opponent which one you care about. And then you’ve still got to try and keep the Defcon tracks under control!

To give you a little bit of relief (Ha!) you only play 4 of your 5 cards each round. So at least one of your opponent’s events can be thrown away right? Wrong. The final card in your hand is slid under the board to create the Aftermath pile. At the very end of the game, assuming we’ve all survived, the total number of cubes on cards corresponding to each faction in this pile is counted, and the faction with highest total gets a 2 point bonus. Thus, hiding that really powerful 3 cube card in the Aftermath can really come back to haunt you!

Unlucky for some?

I have been blown away by 13 Days. Like being on the receiving end of a nuclear missile. It is insane how much game they have crammed into such a sleek, deadly package. MAD even. You will play 12 cards in the entire game. You have a very limited choice on which to play too. It is really all about the order. And yet it is the most crazily tight set of decisions! You’ll agonise over every single one of them, because to put a foot wrong can be devastating.

Perhaps that is a criticism? But I can’t feel that it is. This is the Cuban Missile Crisis! There wasn’t time for mistakes. Every decision was of brutal importance and a foot wrong could have changed, even destroyed, the world.

There is luck in the card draw. You can absolutely end up drawing a full hand of your opponent’s cards, and it’s not like every card comes out every game to fully balance that out, but since the game is so much more about how you use them then what you get, this is not necessarily a bad thing either. This way you control when they get to use that event’s power and you can absolutely mitigate against the worst of them. In fact the only real criticism I have is that sometimes you want to push your opponent into launching a nuclear attack, particularly if you have a poor turn and this is the only way to make up for lost prestige. Yes, you win the game… but at what price? It is a motivation purely from the fact that this is a game, and breaks with the otherwise realistic battle of wills you are experiencing.

I wish I could compare this to Twilight Struggle more than just illustrating how many of the mechanisms have originated from that game. Not having played it, I can’t. But I can say that this is a tremendous game in its own right. If you’ve ever been curious about Twilight Struggle, at number 2 on Board Game Geek that wouldn’t be surprising, but haven’t had the ludicrous amount of time and energy it demands, then 13 Days is for you! Playing in an astonishing 45 mins (and it really does after your first game) you get an exceptionally tense 2-player game that, unlike Twilight Struggle, you’ll actually get to play regularly! Absolutely, totally, recommended!

 

Rating: MAD-deningly good

 

Our copy of 13 Days was provided to us by Esdevium Games for review. It is available from all good local hobby stores for an RRP of £34.99.