"New" Game Round-up: GMT Sequels for Twilight Struggle, Dominant Species, and Triumph & Tragedy

The year is 1974, and the Soviet Union and the United States have been locked in a life-or-death struggle across the globe. As so often happened during the Cold War, a relatively obscure region of the globe suddenly took center stage. Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, a bedrock U.S. ally in Africa, had grown old and increasingly dictatorial. When he was overthrown in 1974, a Marxist coalition took the reins of power. This new revolutionary leadership initiated a chain of events that upset the regional balance of power and unleashed all the familiar elements of Cold War competition in the Horn of Africa.


With a more limited scope and much shorter playtime, Twilight Struggle: Red Sea is the perfect way to introduce new players to the Twilight Struggle system, while maintaining all the tension, decision making, and theme of the original classic. The cards from Twilight Struggle can be used in TS: Red Sea and vice versa.

The game combines the Pacific naval war and the land war in Asia (including the Chinese Civil War), both equally weighing upon victory. The naval war is dramatic, featuring short, decisive battles and expanded roles for airpower and island bases. In the tradition of Triumph & Tragedy, the three-sided aspect features negotiation, diplomacy, and subterfuge within a multitude of strategic possibilities.


Like T&T, the game allows players freedom to diverge from the inclinations and policies of the historical actors and plays in 4-6 hours of constant tension and involvement.

Sixty-something millions of years ago: A great ice age has ended. With massive warming altering the globe, another titanic struggle for supremacy has unwittingly commenced between the varying animal species.

Dominant Species: Marine is a game that abstractly recreates a small portion of ancient history — the ending of an onerous ice age and what that entails for the living creatures trying to adapt to the slowly-changing earth.

Each player assumes the role of one of four major aquatic-based animal classes: dinosaur, fish, cephalopod, or crustacean. Each begins the game more or less in a state of natural balance in relation to one another, but that won't last. It is indeed "survival of the fittest."


Through wily action pawn placement, you attempt to thrive in as many different habitats as possible in order to claim powerful card effects. You also want to propagate your individual species in order to earn victory points for your animal. You are aided in these endeavors via speciation, migration and adaptation actions, among others.

All of this eventually leads to the end game — the final ascent of a vast tropical ocean and its shorelines — where the player having accumulated the most victory points will have their animal crowned the dominant species — but somebody better become dominant quickly as a large asteroid is heading this way...