Well, somehow the human race has hobbled, fumbled, and otherwise limped across the finish line of another year without destroying itself or the planet. Maybe it’s the books I’ve been reading lately (novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Max Brooks’ World War Z) but the end of another year always puts me in an apocalyptic mood. I grew up in the 1980s and between the MAD MAX films and their Italian knockoffs and more serious alarmist fare like THE DAY AFTER and TESTAMENT I was always really afraid of nuclear annihilation- although I was pretty sure that I’d be alright if I could exploit the post-apocalyptic fashion demand for feathers, leather goods, and sports equipment so I could trade for water, food and fuel. Most kids back then were afraid of bogeymen like Jason Vorhees or Doug Henning but I was scared more by real people like Ronald Reagan and Caspar Weinberger. I lost sleep thinking about careless world leaders with their aged, trembling fingers on the collective button. I remember a nightmare I had when I was about 10 years old where the United States and the Soviet Union made a deal to nuke a certain percentage of each country “to be fair”, and my home state Georgia was on the ol’ atomic chopping block. So in the spirit of apocalypse, and to ring in 2008, I thought we’d have a look at a few of my favorite games that prominently feature the ability to go nuclear on your buddies from across the table.

1) NUCLEAR WAR- We’re going all the way back to the heart of the Cold War with our first entry in this arm race- 1965’s NUCLEAR WAR was designed by an aircraft engineer and after some four or five expansions (including a more recently topical one called WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION) it still remains a total blast to play today. It’s a simple take-that style card game (which means you play cards to hurt other players) with a really neat mechanic- cards are played to a player mat where they are revealed in sequence. So you put down a delivery system on one turn- like a Saturn rocket for example- and on the next you put down the warhead. When the missile’s loaded, you point at either whoever has cheesed you off the most during the game or at someone that screwed you in some game three weeks ago and let ‘er rip- which happens in game terms by means of spinning a big, old-fashioned spinner. Damage is measured in millions of people, so you have the complete and utter joy of saying things like “you lose 25 million people”. There’s a lot of wrinkles to that basic formula, such as anti-missile defenses, special events, dud bombs, and so forth and the expansions give you a wealth of options to play with including submarines, space platforms, special powers for each player, cannons that can lob small warheads with impunity, and tons and tons of events that can be completely devastating. The game is just good, clean fun- nothing fancy, “elegant”, or artsy-fartsy like so many games released in the wake of the European design paradigm. I’ve seen games literally end on the first turn- when one player loses all his people, he gets a final retaliation where he can launch all of his missiles at other players. If that player knocks someone else out, they get a final retaliation. And so on. The game teaches a valuable lesson, I think.

2)WAR ON TERROR- Banned in the UK along with other cultural touchstones like The Sex Pistols’ “Never Mind the Bollocks” and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, WAR ON TERROR is a satirical game much in the vein of NUCLEAR WAR but reflective of our current geopolitical state. It’s a silly, almost ridiculous game that feels like equal parts RISK, NUCLEAR WAR, and SETTLERS OF CATAN. There’s a map of the world which gets seeded with oil chits featuring a number between two and twelve that provide payoffs based on who has a development there and players, each representing an abstract “Empire” vie for economic supremacy while also dealing with the specter of- you guessed it- terrorism. But here’s the rub- the terrorist pieces aren’t controlled by a single player. All players can use the terrorists! So sure, you can fund terror all you want to scare your opponents or lay waste to their developments but you can bet that at some point you’re going to be fighting those same terror cells you bankrolled. The nukes in the game show up as cards and as players get them the game experience changes dramatically- threats are made, bribes are exchanged, and the looming fear of a nuclear exchange makes for giddy fun. Since the game thrives on wheeling and dealing, it’s not uncommon for players to make a small fortune selling nukes or even using them mercenary-style for the highest bidder. In one game, we had a major international incident where a memo I had written (the game comes with a notepad for this purpose) was discovered on the floor by another player- and the memo featured my crude drawing of this player under a mushroom cloud with the caption “$25 mil per attack”. Not only does this game also feature a spinner, the bane of luck-hating gamers everywhere, but it also has a real black balaclava festooned with big red letters reading “EVIL”. Yeah, I know. You’re already putting in the order.

3)TWILIGHT STRUGGLE- The previous entries in the list are pretty much dumb fun; you wouldn’t want to play them with a crowd looking for “serious” gaming, whatever that means. TWILIGHT STRUGGLE, designed by Jason Matthews and Ananda Gupta definitely takes a more serious approach not only to mechanics but also to its theme- this time we’re back in the Cold War era of 1945-1989, when the threat of nuclear war was very real even for those of us who grew up in the tail end of that period. I believe TWILIGHT STRUGGLE is the best card-driven wargame published to date, which is interesting because it is really more of a political game and in as much, it perfectly captures the tug-of-war over certain regions and the shifting tension between the Superpowers during this time. You don’t play TWILIGHT STRUGGLE to toss nukes around at all- it’s more about beating your opponent in the Space Race or thwarting their political aspirations in key countries through cardplay and manuever. I really love how the nuclear issue is handled in the game through a “Defcon” track. Certain cards, events, or player actions can cause the Defcon level, representing an overall abstraction of nuclear tension and brinksmanship, to rise and as a result certain areas become too volatile and unstable to operate in politically or militarily. If a player causes the Defcon level to reach five…it’s Dr. STRANGELOVE all over again and neither player wins as the unthinkable happens off stage while you’re packing up the game. The Cold War theme and its attendant concepts are brilliantly incorporated into the game and the use of photographs and period imagery and phrases really creates a great sense of atmosphere- “duck and cover” indeed.

4)SUPREMACY: THE GAME OF SUPERPOWERS- Nothing short of the music of Wham! screams “1980s” quite like the box, board, and components of SUPREMACY, a game that I used to really love and still really like quite a lot despite the fact that the game is one of the few that I’d say is probably horrendously broken and borderline unplayable. That may be a little extreme and my opinion might be colored from the last few games where my friends wanted to play with all of the expansions, which turn a pretty simple RISK-style world domination game with a mid-80s worldview into a sprawling, overly complicated mess of tanks, subs, chemical weapons, merchant marines, minor powers, and on and on and on. I think there may have even been helicopters. SUPREMACY’s main claim to fame, other than what I still think is one of the neatest supply-and-demand market economy systems in a game , is that it comes with these fantastic plastic mushroom clouds, which of course designated the regions of the world map that you’ve blown back into the stone age. Nukes, as in WAR ON TERROR are a hot commodity because they’re as much a deterrent and a bargaining chip as they are a means to clean house, so to speak. They’re expensive to build and sort of hard to obtain due to the goofy research system that finds players paying to draw cards out of a stack of development cards in hopes of finding a nuke before they go broke, but once they enter the game it becomes a pretty dangerous place. I’ve played the game quite a few times, and I have yet to see a single game fail to end in complete nuclear annihilation despite the presence of “L-Stars”, sort of the game’s version of the Star Wars/SDI defense system. As in the previous games, it makes a pretty stark point.

5) DUNE- I’d be lax to leave out The Greatest Game Ever Published, Avalon Hill’s 1979 masterpiece DUNE, even though nukes are a pretty small part of the game. If you know DUNE, you know that each family has a cache of nuclear weapons called (I love this) Family Atomics. And if you really know DUNE, you know that the simple equation of lasgun plus shield equals a nuclear explosion due to the Holzfield effect. But I digress. Of course, both doomsday effects are present in the game as is pretty much everything that matters in the first two novels and even some stuff that doesn’t, represented by cards featuring Jubba Cloaks and a Trip to Gaumont. The Treachery Cards in DUNE are but one cog in a brilliant system of mechanics within mechanics. Family Atomics have pretty much the effect you would imagine although complete global destruction is mercifully impossible. But in addition to dropping the bomb on those damned Sardaukars you can also use them- just like Paul Atreides does in the book- to blow the Shield Wall and deny Arakeen and any forces there of its protection from the hostile elements of Arrakis, a neat strategic twist that shows how closely the designers paid attention to the novel. There’s also some pretty tricky ways to nuke your buddies in DUNE thanks to all the special powers and abilities. If you know, thanks to your Atreides ally, that someone has a shield card you can send one guy with a lasgun to nuke a whole army. Or you can get your Bene Gesserit ally to use the voice to make them play a shield and accomplish the same effect. The presence of nukes is just the icing on the most delicious piece of spice-cake you’ll ever eat.

There’s plenty of other games out there, most from the 1980s, that prominently feature nuclear weapons and apocalyptic scenarios including the hopelessly rare, title-says-it-all 1985 game NUCLEAR ARMAGEDDON, which features plaster-cast mushroom clouds and the quite crappy RISK 2210 A.D. which lets players lob tactical nukes around in a futile attempt to make one of the duller RISK variants somehow interesting. There are also several wargames that take a more serious approach and present feasible (well, for the time) scenarios and situations that could lead to nuclear exchanges and other incidences of atomic misbehavior. Games with nuclear weapons are becoming few and far between these days, which is kind of disappointing because there’s very little that provides the sheer satisfaction of literally nuking your friends in no uncertain terms. I find it interesting that aside from DUNE, which presents them in a fictional context, the other games feature the ability for all players to lose- anyone who believes that board games can not bear subtexts or even messages would do well to have a look at how these weapons are portrayed in these titles.