by bassoon201
I bought this game for $10, read a bit about it, love twilight struggle, and some said that they had played with their significant other and had fun.
So this was my 2nd play of Campaign Manager, and after bugging my wife the past few days (I felt inspired during the election as a political junkie ... I even brought it to the election party I went to... for some reason no one wanted to play :shake:...) I finally got her play. After a quick run through of the rules, brought out my dice tower (always have to have one when rolling dice)and drafted my deck -McCain-(since it was my 2nd time playing) and gave her the pre determined deck -Obama. We also started off with the initial (starred) battleground states. I picked off Missouri and Florida in quick succession before my wife started to get the hang of it. She got out her media card first, as I picked off states one by one. Her first victory was New Jersey, and started to understand how the game flowed, what her cards did, and how to win states. She gradually clawed her way back, to us running neck and neck with the last 4 states out, Montana, Washington, West Virginia, Iowa. At this point we both looked at the Electoral Vote strip and realized that I just needed 5 votes and she needed Washington plus 3 states. She quickly won Iowa.
This where the strip got confusing (for someone who hadn't really analyze it before...and the 1st time I played I lost by quite a bit to a friend) There is a yellow space at the end of it, so I initially thought that if you reached that, you won - and so I only 5 more points.
Washington was almost Obama's on the economic line, but I thought I just needed the 5 points from West Virginia, so I played a shift 2 spaces towards minority issue (The state was economic, what with the housing bust and stock market crash that had just happened to put ALL the last states 2 points onto the Economic issue) AND I had control of the entire state on Defense so I won! BUT, as I thought about it, "did getting to that yellow space represent 270 OR 269..." I wanted to be sure, so I added up all the battleground states found out that I only had 269 EVs. BOO, but I wanted my wife to have fun AND I wanted to win legitimately, so I said, "lets play the last turn again, because I would have tried to block you in Washington..." So I did, blocked her initially, won West Virginia next turn, but was out of cards, and she had a few in her hand. So while I was busy drawing cards, she won Washington, and then Montana, to get.... 269 EVs! We had tied, it was late, and (more importantly) my wife enjoyed the game and we will play again! Still surprised by the tie at the end. :p
All said, this is a fun game when in the right mood, and elegantly/simply captures the theme of a tense campaign battle!