A New Twilight Struggle Awaits With South Asian Monsoon

June 13, 2023 by brennon

Jason Carr and Jason Matthews are working on a new standalone game that uses the Twilight Struggle mechanics. Twilight: Struggle: South Asian Monsoon is a new one-to-two-player affair set in 1959, focusing on the Cold War tensions happening across South Asia.

Twilight Struggle: South Asian Monsoon // GMT Games

South Asian Monsoon works as a standalone addition to the Twilight Struggle series which covers the Tibetan Insurrection in China and the unfolding relations between the People's Republic and the United States. It has been designed to be much shorter than a normal game of Twilight Struggle but longer than the Red Sea. Over the four turns, you'll be seeing how you follow or indeed change the course of history.

Twilight Struggle: South Asian Monsoon - Playtest Components // GMT Games

From the designers...

"Twilight Struggle: South Asian Monsoon is intended to provide experienced players of Twilight Struggle with a new, more nuanced challenge. The nations represented in this game – in South Asia, the Indian Ocean and along China’s Asian periphery - are more remote and independent-minded. All of the countries represented joined the Non-Aligned Movement. Unlike other parts of the globe, the United States and the Soviet Union can only project military force into the region with difficulty. In short, this is the region of the Cold War where nations felt emboldened to assert their independence and resist the bipolar world that the superpowers had created elsewhere."

It's neat that there is a shifting of focus towards a lesser-known series of events playing out on the other side of the world. You'll get to know characters like Nehru, Mao, the Dali Lama, Zhou Enlai, Indira Gandhi, Khrushchev and more and see if you can swing events in your favour to come out on top. Not only are you trying to keep an eye on the straining tensions between nations but also planning for the future.

I also really like that the GMT Games team have focused on the way this game plays as a solo experience, opening up the options for folks who want to plot and change history on their own!

Will you be giving this Twilight Struggle game a go?