Things have been a bit slow on the gaming/painting front, but fg and I managed to play a game of Twilight Struggle last week.
The game is highly rated, and you can find reviews and tutorial videos of it (that's how I learned the game), but my personal take is that it plays like Go with cards. The world is divided into six regions, and within each region there are countries. The aim of the game is to score victory points through the playing of cards and also by having more influence than the other player in a region so you can dominate it.
As the Soviet player, I initially got off to a strong start in Europe, but lost steam after a while. I shifted my focus to the Middle East, but a good event card which would have let me dominate the region was cancelled by one played by fg. Thereafter I got some bad cards that gave fg central and south America, and I lost on VPs before the game ran to its turn limit.
For us, the fun of the game was mostly topical - the events described in the cards were things we heard about as children and teenagers, even if the true significance were not apparent to us. If you are a child of the Cold War era and cheered when the Berlin Wall went down, you will like the game. If, on the other hand, you don't know how David Hasselhoff single-handedly united East and West Germany (or that there were such things as East and West Germany), then a lot of the game will be lost on you.