Playing the Collection: Getting GMT to the Table (Part 2)

In the previous discussion of my GMT Games-based shame, I covered the gist of my issues in getting their games to the table and looked at the first of three shelves.  Today, I’m looking at the remaining two shelves of GMT titles.  These shelves include one of my favourite games and a whole lot that I think I am really going to enjoy when I do get them on the table.

Having completed a suitable preamble, let’s just jump on into the first shelf:

1960: The Making of the President is a fantastic game.  It’s another card-driven game that plays similarly to Twilight Struggle.  I think it’s actually one of the best GMT games in terms of production and theming.  It’s gorgeous, it flows, and it just makes sense.  The game rehashes the 1960 US presidential election between Nixon and Kennedy.  Personally, I like playing as Nixon in this game.  I find it more fun, I prefer the starting setup, and I like the event cards.  The events are a lot like those found in Twilight Struggle, but the debates add a new twist, with players competing to dominate the narrative on certain issues of national importance.  This game is a lot of fun and, after Twilight Struggle, is my most-played GMT title. 

Cuba Libre and A Distant Plain are both entries in GMT’s COIN (Counter-Insurgency) series (entries 2 and 3, respectively).  This is a hugely successful and beloved series of games.  They feature a government faction and one or more insurgent factions that wage asymmetrical warfare.  I need to find a group to bring this to the table, as I feel that either game will be really satisfying.  Of the two, my understanding is that Cuba Libre is the more straightforward, covering Castro’s insurgency of the late 1950s.  It supposedly sticks pretty closely to the core rules of the COIN series, on which the other titles build.

Dominant Species remains unopened, but I’ve actually played it twice now with someone else’s copy.  This is, at its core, a worker placement game.  The goal is to evolve and proliferate your animal species to inhabit and control their habitat.  My first game of this was, in all honesty, a little ropey.  I feel that I got off to a bad start as I didn’t fully understand the game and found that I had a skewed set of priorities at the start of the game that came back to bite me, later.  The second game went a lot better and I feel that I could explain the game reasonably well to a group.  It’s a bit on the heavy side, but worker placement games seem reasonably popular in our group, so I might get some takers. 

Churchill: Big Three Struggle for Peace is another that I’ve not played.  Conceptually, I love the idea of this game.  Although this is themed around the second world war, this is not really a war game.  Yeah, you still need to win the war, but it’s something of a foregone conclusion by this point that the allies are on the path to victory.  What this game is about is ensuring that your nation (the UK, USSR, or USA) is the best placed to thrive in the post-war era.  GMT have managed to create something even nerdier than a WW2 wargame.  This is all about the conferences.  I desperately want to play this game. 

Pericles, Space Empires 4X, Colonial Twilight, and Imperial Struggle were all games that I ordered on GMT’s P500 preorder system.  I imagine that Colonial Twilight and Imperial Struggle will be the easiest to get to the table. Colonial Twilight is a COIN game, like Cuba Libre and A Distant Plain, but it’s actually the first COIN game to be built for two players. It covers the Algerian war for independence. Imperial Struggle is a CDG, similar to Washington’s War, 1960, and Twilight Struggle. The reunion of Ananda Gupta and Jason Matthews (the designers of Twilight Struggle) makes for a promising prospect. This is probably the game I am most excited to play. I think Pericles and Space Empires 4X will be harder sells.

Paths of Glory is an older GMT game about which I had read very positive reviews.  At the time that I read about this game, it was aggressively out of print.  I had a look around and eventually managed to find a reasonably priced copy on eBay.  It’s not as polished as a lot of GMT’s more recent games.  The biggest difference production-wise is that the board isn’t really a board, as such.  Rather, it’s a large paper poster.  I know this isn’t all that uncommon in wargames, which is why many players invest in a perspex or clear plastic sheet to weigh down and flatten this type of board.  Again, it sits unplayed. 

Command & Colors: Ancients is another GMT game that gets a lot of praise.  I did take it to club once, shortly after I got it and just before the first lockdown.  What I did not realise is just how many cubes we would need to sticker.  We ended up doing that instead of actually playing and I’ve not managed to get it back to club since.  Hearing nothing but good things about this wargame, I actually think it will go down pretty well once we get past that whole, dry cube aesthetic.

It’s not just games from GMT Games that sit on my shelves unplayed, but for a company that I really love, GMT’s titles seem consistently unplayed.  That is just criminal.