Interesting game haven't seen it mentioned here but I could be blind. Hey, I'm old.
Kind of Twilight Struggle'ish. Conversion of the board game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/931950/Labyrinth_The_War_on_Terror/ (https://store.steampowered.com/app/931950/Labyrinth_The_War_on_Terror/)
Barth and I did a PBEM game of it a few years ago. Lost the photos after photobucket gave all of use freeloaders the boot.
http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=18727.0 (http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=18727.0)
I bought in early, but despite knowing my way around TwiStrug fairly well, could not make heads or tails of the game from the tutorial; and with recurring bug complaints I decided to hold off playing until further notice.
That time has not yet come. :-[
I have the boardgame and the expansion but never got into it. Too many fiddly rules for me..
I feel like I've asked this before, but does this play similarly at all to the COIN games?
Not in the least similar to the COIN system.
The TwiStrug system (for want of a better term) is very much more a traditional card game -- with two players each using a hand of cards unseen by the other player. Playing cards allows you to place and/or remove your or your opponents' influence in map areas, which adjusts your relative score accordingly (a tied score being 0).
The games have more bells and whistles than that -- Laby has a LOT more things you can do with this than TwiStrug for example -- but that's the underlying basis.
The COIN version of Afghanistan is A Distant Plain, which is a typical 4-player 2-team game, also card driven to some degree but not nearly as much so and where two players use the same new card each turn. There are more types of pieces with different abilities (sometimes for different factions) being placed and moved around and taken off the board.
I actually have a paid account for Imageshack, so my duel with Bartheart is still here on Grogheads, yay! http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=16763.0 If you're familiar with the COIN system, you'll see obvious differences in the basic playstyle pretty quickly.
I have the Steam versions of Twilight Struggle & Labyrinth. I enjoyed them both, though haven't played for a while - definitely found Labyrinth the more challenging.
I own three COIN games and would confirm they're very different beasts. In COIN the cards are almost an optional extra - you can progress a game with little card use, in TS & Labyrinth the cards are the game.