Cold War Jeopardy

A ready-made Cold War review board for high school history. Copy it free, put it on the projector, and let students buzz in from their phones.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

Copies all 30 clues into an editor of your own. Free, no account needed.

Every clue on this board

This page is public, so anyone can read the answers — copy the board and swap a few clues before game day.

Origins and the Iron Curtain

$200
This phrase, coined by Winston Churchill in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, described the divide between Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe and the West.
What is the Iron Curtain?
$400
This 1947 US policy pledged support to nations resisting communist takeover, starting with Greece and Turkey.
What is the Truman Doctrine?
$600
This US initiative provided billions of dollars in economic aid to rebuild Western European economies after World War II.
What is the Marshall Plan?
$800
In 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded ground access to this divided German city, prompting a massive Allied airlift.
What is West Berlin?
$1,000
Formed in 1949, this military alliance bound the United States, Canada, and Western European nations against Soviet aggression.
What is NATO?

The Space Race

$200
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched this, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.
What is Sputnik?
$400
In 1961, this Soviet cosmonaut became the first human to orbit Earth.
Who is Yuri Gagarin?
$600
This US astronaut became the first American to orbit Earth, in 1962.
Who is John Glenn?
$800
This 1969 NASA mission was the first to land humans on the Moon.
What is Apollo 11?
$1,000
In 1975, American and Soviet spacecraft docked together in orbit during this joint mission, a symbolic thaw in the Space Race.
What is the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project?

Proxy Wars

$200
This peninsula was divided near the 38th parallel after a 1950-1953 war involving US-led UN forces and Chinese-backed communist forces.
What is Korea?
$400
This Southeast Asian country was split into a communist north and a US-backed south, in a war that ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975.
What is Vietnam?
$600
The Soviet Union invaded this Central Asian country in 1979, beginning a nearly decade-long war against US-backed insurgents.
What is Afghanistan?
$800
This Caribbean nation, ruled by Fidel Castro after 1959, hosted Soviet military support and became a Cold War flashpoint just off the US coast.
What is Cuba?
$1,000
In this African nation's civil war, Cuban troops backed the Soviet-aligned government while the US and South Africa backed rival factions.
What is Angola?

Leaders East and West

$200
This US president served through some of the Cold War's tensest years, including a 1962 standoff over Soviet missiles in Cuba, before his 1963 assassination.
Who is John F. Kennedy?
$400
This Soviet premier led the USSR through the Berlin Wall's construction and the tense 1962 standoff with the US over missiles in Cuba.
Who is Nikita Khrushchev?
$600
This UK prime minister served through much of the 1980s, working closely with President Reagan against the Soviet Union.
Who is Margaret Thatcher?
$800
This US president's 1980s military buildup and rhetoric calling the USSR an evil empire marked a sharp escalation before later talks of peace.
Who is Ronald Reagan?
$1,000
This Soviet leader introduced the reform policies of glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s, changes that helped bring the Cold War to a close.
Who is Mikhail Gorbachev?

Spies and Crises

$200
This US spy plane, flown by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down over Soviet territory in 1960, causing a major diplomatic incident.
What is the U-2?
$400
This American couple was executed in 1953 for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.
Who are Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?
$600
This British intelligence officer, part of a Soviet spy ring known as the Cambridge Five, fled to Moscow in 1963 after decades of espionage.
Who is Kim Philby?
$800
This CIA-backed 1961 invasion of Cuba by exiles ended in a swift and embarrassing failure for the new Kennedy administration.
What is the Bay of Pigs Invasion?
$1,000
This CIA officer began spying for the Soviet Union, then Russia, in 1985 and was arrested in 1994 after one of the costliest security breaches in US intelligence history.
Who is Aldrich Ames?

The Wall Comes Down

$200
Built in 1961, this barrier divided a German city into a communist east and a democratic west for 28 years.
What is the Berlin Wall?
$400
This Polish trade union, founded in 1980 and led by Lech Walesa, became the first independent labor union recognized in the Soviet bloc.
What is Solidarity?
$600
This country opened its border with Austria in 1989, allowing thousands of East Germans to flee to the West.
What is Hungary?
$800
This process formally reunified East and West Germany into a single country on October 3, 1990.
What is reunification?
$1,000
This Russian president stood atop a tank to defy an August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, and later led Russia after the Soviet collapse.
Who is Boris Yeltsin?

Final Jeopardy — Thirteen Days

This 1962 confrontation began after a U-2 spy plane photographed Soviet missile sites under construction on a Caribbean island.

What is the Cuban Missile Crisis?

How to run this board

From the Iron Curtain speech to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this board walks students through four decades of superpower rivalry: containment, the arms race, proxy wars, and the personalities on both sides of the standoff.

It fits comfortably in a 50-minute period if you keep answer discussions short. Splitting the class into three or four teams that share one phone each keeps the buzzing manageable and the arguing productive.

Save Final Jeopardy for the last five minutes and collect written wagers and answers as an exit ticket - it tells you exactly who is ready for the unit test.

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