Typically, my strategy posts cover fairly long, heavy games. These are the ones that benefit most from my approach of three easy-to-remember strategy tips for beginner and intermediate players, as you get some guidance for a game which you might not play again very soon to apply the experience you gathered from the first game. This is not the case for Twilight Struggle: Red Sea (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games): This game plays in barely over 30 minutes, so you can easily play it several times in a row. I still want to cover it here not only because I think it’s a fun game, but also because of the fondness I have for its big sibling Twilight Struggle (Ananda Gupta/Jason Matthews, GMT Games) – after all, original TS was the game with which I kicked off this series, and I know how many of you love it too. Yet this little TS spawn plays decidedly different. And so I want to focus on a few things that might be new even to seasoned TS players…they certainly were for me.

Dominate Adjacency

In Twilight Struggle’s little domino theory shaped world, adjacency was important. Yet if you were kicked out from a region, you could often wait for an event that would get you back in or at least do a slow crawl over time. That’s not a viable option in TS:RS’s lightning-fast competition, as you simply do not have the time – getting shut out from Africa early in the first turn can already lose you the game. Thus, spread out, cover your bases, do not hang by the thread of only one country in a region. In a zero-sum game like TS:RS, that also means the opposite for your opponent: If you have the opportunity to cut off their access to a region altogether, go for it!

Tilt the Flashpoints in Your Favor

The two Flashpoint countries Ethiopia and Somalia are TS:RS’s equivalent to Europe Domination in TS: If you control them when the scoring card comes up, you win. Just that controlling two fickle countries in Africa is easier than five reasonably stable ones (and possibly a bunch of others to shore up your position) in Europe, and so the auto-win turns from a very remote possibility (I’ve seen only one in my ~40 TS games against human opponents) to a pretty common way to win. That means that you should absolutely compete for those two countries when there is still a chance that Africa Scoring will be played. Try to get them both. Don’t let your opponent have both. Once Africa Scoring won’t come back again (because it’s turn 8, and it is in the discard pile), your priorities can shift.

Control the Lynchpin Egypt

If neither of you is going to win by Flashpoint control, it’s likely that Final Scoring will decide the game after two turns. Most of your points until then (and during Final Scoring) come from scoring the two regions, so you want to have more Battlegrounds per region for Domination. As there are only three Battlegrounds overall (original TS has 29), each of them is pretty important, but the fact that Egypt is a Battleground in both Africa and the Middle East means that once you control it, your opponent cannot dominate either region.

The only way to Egypt on the map is through Sudan, so the battle for Sudan often decides who gets to control the all-important lynchpin. There is no simple recipe for that, though – see what opportunities your cards hand to you:

• Play Dhofar Rebellion as the Soviets and place your free Middle East influence in Egypt.
• After the Soviets have placed a lot of influence into Ethiopia, one-up them with Strongman of Sudan as the US.
• Headline Nasserism as the Soviets and overwhelm the US in a coup battle for Sudan
• …get creative!

And which tricks do you use to win at Twilight Struggle: Red Sea? Do you find it very different from the original Twilight Struggle? Let me know in the comments!