13 Days Card Game

Okay, everyone, after one play and the expectation of playing again tonight, I would like to give a quick review of 13 Days.
13 Days is a two player card based area control game. Wow, now that I write the description out I can see how many adjectives that game description has, but I digress. You are playing through the struggle of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The general way it works is using influence in different arenas (military, political, and opinion) to gain prestige based on your opponent’s and your own chosen agenda for the round. You will have a hand of 5 command cards, you may play a card for a command or event benefit, using command to add or remove your own influence from different parts of the map. However, if at any time you place more than one influence in one place from a command action you also move your Defcon marker up for each influence beyond the first. You also have a hard cap of 17 influence total and 5 of your influence on each of the 6 locations. If you choose to use the event on a card matching the country you represent (US, Russia, or either can use the UN cards) you just do what it says on the card, often changing influence without changing the Defcon level.

There is a twist to this though, when you play an opponent’s faction card (which you will have to do), you must use it for the command and they have the option to use the event for free on your turn. This really requires you to think about which card you will have left over at the end of the round. After you play through 4 cards each going back and forth you place your last card in an aftermath pile. After three rounds you go through the aftermath pilot and whoever has the most command down based on their factions cards in the aftermath pile gets two additional prestige.

Overall the prestige you get at then of each round and the end of the game is more of a tug of war. You can never have more than 5 prestige over your opponent and each prestige move the marker closer to your side of the scoring track. The game ends either by a person reaching Defcon 1 and staying there until the end of a round or having all of their Defcon markers (3) in the Defcon 2 area causing them to lose, or 3 round are completed and the person with the most prestige after the aftermath wins. If the scoring marker is in the center, the person holding the personal letter token wins (which is how I won).

This is definitely comparable to the game Twilight Struggle, but a much lighter implementation. It has the same feel, the cards have historical images, and there is even a booklet to discuss the events of the Cuban missile crisis. The mechanism is very similar to Twilight Struggle as well. However, 13 Days took 45 minutes instead of 3 hours. It is a much more focused game with a number of choices and a lot of thinking and planning based on what your opponent might do, but it is not nearly as broad or deep as Twilight Struggle which goes through the entire Cold War and deals with the all the world.
I like 13 Days a lot, I know Jennie and I will be playing way more often than Twilight Struggle just because of the time requirements if nothing else. We also will be keeping Twilight Struggle though, the amount of depth and interactions in that game make it worth it, even if it only happens once a year. I would give 13 Days an 8.5 out of 10, I think it great and works well for a two player quick game that requires some thought.