This week we were playing some Vietnam War platoon level, with The Nam rules from Caliver Books. The Nam uses the same system as Living On The Front Line, also from Caliver Books. I will start this post with some thoughts on the rules, and then move on to the action from the game.
The Nam is very much a platoon level game, taking us over four hours to play through an action between a platoon of US infantry and a similar sized force of veteran Viet Cong. I would not go any bigger than this. We did not use the vehicle rules for this one. It is quite a detailed game, so you are resolving attacks on individuals and deciding whether PFC Schultz is going to fire on rapid fire mode with his M16, and whether Comrade Vinh has any grenades left.
We liked the card activation system, which uses ordinary playing cards to activate individual fire teams, with a joker used to re-set the turn, so there is no guarantee that all your troops will move in a given turn. The rules measure troop quality and weapon quality as important factors. Oddly, this does mean that lower powered weapons - like a .45 pistol for example - don't have a chance to kill anyone. I'm not sure how this conclusion was reached?
Combat effiects on individuals can lead them to being pinned down, wounded, or killed, although there is not much differentiation between the wounded and killed results, and the authors don't go into any detail on why this might be important. The Nam is also a little confusing about the difference between ducking and taking cover, whereas there is none. Reading Living on the Front Line, it becomes obvious that the two are the same, but the Nam uses different languge, while also referring to the duck mechanic, which is confusing.
Living on the Front Line lets players freely activate troops in pairs, whereas the Nam brings in the concept of the fire team, a four man unit. It does not explain whether there is any unit cohesion required and what to do when these fire teams get split up as men are wounded or pinned down.
The rules feel quite generic and could be used to simulate any modern platoon level battles, including WW2 and post Cold War engagements (Caliver has published a 'Wild Geese' supplement for Cold War African conflicts). Hence, there is not much specific feel for the Vietnam war here or counter-insurgency battles in general. I had been hoping Living on the Front Line might deliver gritty, urban scenarions with a 1970s/80s feel, but I don't really think it does.
For our scenario, we included rules for hidden deployment and booby traps, which did introduce some of the tension of fighting guerrillas in an rural environment, but once the VC were revealed it began to feel like a standard kinetic infantry battle.
My other concern relates to grenade launchers. The VC were equipped with two in our battle, and the Americans had four in their platoon. These quickly dominated the battlefield and I wondered whether they were too powerful?
That said, subsequent research has revealed that the M79 grenade launcher was a dominant tool for platoon leaders in Vietnam. Nicknamed the 'blooper' or Big Ed it does seem to have been heavily relied on in infantry combat, with up to four issued to each platoon (one per squad). But once both sides started using these in our game, they totally transformed the nature of the battle. Did they unbalance the game? I'm not sure. In the actual war, the M79 grenadier was issued with smoke grenades, but there are no rules in this game for using smoke, other than to demoralise enemy troops by dropping coloured smoke on them.
A nice mechanic in the game is the way it measures game time, with a clock ticking down. At the end of each turn, one player rolls a dice (anything between a d4 and d12) to determine how many minutes passed in the last turn. The game ends when you reach the time limit - in this case 60 minutes. It provides an interesting level of optionality for players - towards the end, I was keen to bring the game to a conclusion as I still controlled two objectives but was starting to lose men, whereas my opponent was winning the rolls and using a d4 to make sure the time dragged past. I liked this.
A hot day in Binh Long: March 1966
On to our game. We played the ambush scenario from the rules, with the VC lying in ambush. There were three objectives, with one in each player's deployment zone and one in the middle of the table. We rated the VC as veterans and the Americans as trained, per the advice for an historical scenario in the 1965-67 period of the conflict. The VC started hidden, and we used a system of bamboo bushes to designate hidden troops, dummy locations and booby traps, which seemed to work quite well.
Playing as the Americans, I used a fairly standard approach, bringing up two flanking squads in the jungle while my third squad moved up to occupy the central objective in the village. My officer and three M79s were in the 'HQ' fire team bringing up the rear.
A quiet afternoon in Binh Long - the US platoon moved on from the north side of the picture, beyond the duck pond. The VC were deployed in the bamboo to the bottom of the picture.
I decided to hold the central objective once taken and then advance cautiously towards the bamboo. One of my point men stepped on a booby trap, which took him out of the battle fairly quickly. A single VC fire team revealed itself early and began engaging my forward squads with AK47 fire. On the left one of my fire teams was hit by an RPG from a VC ambush position which was a bit of a game changer for me, as it took out four of my soldiers in one explosion.
A US infantry squad composed of two fire teams is moving up through the jungle on the left of the hamlet.
It was at this point I decided to switch my tactics from trying to take the third objective in the bamboo thicket, which was becoming increasingly risky, and ordered my men to fall back to a more defensive position. Many of them were already hugging the padi dykes, which we judged as providing cover against directional fire. I did like this rule mechanic which lets troops 'go to ground' and hug the dirt, making them much harder to hit or indeed spot. The troops in my central position were in this position, forcing the VC to start hitting them with RPGs. The Nam recognises that soldiers can take cover even in the open, and that we're not playing on a hypothetical lawn. This is the jungle baby!
This is the situation as I began to run into problems and started taking RPG fire. Both fire teams in the foreground started taking casualties from fragmentation grenades.
The VC now decided to reveal their full ambush and push forward. I used my grenadiers to start bringing the hurt to them and managed to take their officer out, but I was taking casualties on both flanks as I tried to pull back, and unit morale was dropping towards my designated platoon break point. If you did the numbers, I had not taken many KIA losses (I was not counting, but think only two), but the increasing number of US wounded was taking its toll.
The firefight as it developed on the left of the US position - the VC fire team on the right is reloading after some enthusiastic use of their AK47s. The US troops had adopted more of a defensive posture.
I finally reached my unit break point after my officer was hit with shrapnel. This meant the effectiveness of the platoon was going to go down fast, as a side begins to lose activation cards quickly after this. There is a sudden death mechanic which lets you gamble to reduce this loss of effectiveness, but there is a chance that your platoon will break anyway and you will lose. We had played 35 minutes of the engagement in game terms with 25 minutes left. I did not think I could hold out against the VC in this position for another 25 minutes, the way things were going, so rolled to try to keep my platoon coherent. Sadly I rolled a 1 (on d8) which led to an automatic defeat. In retrospect I think it was the right call, but I was unlucky.
A VC fragmentation grenade blows up in the rice fields. US troops with orange markers are hugging the ground, giving them bonus cover saves. Some are just taking up position along the padi dykes. Where's the artillery support? Maybe in the next game.
Overall I think the Nam is a nice little platoon level system. There are some aspects of it which I think need some work, but it is not a broken set of rules by any means. As mentioned above, it is not specfic to this particular conflict, you could use it to manage any platoon level battle, from 1939 onwards. Here are some ways I think it could be improved:
- Wounded vs killed - More detail is needed here on the impact of wounded troops; I wonder whether the US player should get penalised for leaving wounded on the battlefield to be captured? The alternative would be to also remove a second soldier assigned to look after a wounded man - there is nothing here on the role of corpsmen in Vietnam either.
- Bodycounts - Again, specifically for Vietnam, some rules are needed to incentivise the VC not to leave bodies behind. Perhaps the US player gets points for capturing areas with VC dead in them?
- M79 grenade launchers / RPGs - Are they too dominant as battlefield weapons? Should the M79 be provided with smoke grenades as well? What rules should be used for smoke?
- Leaders - They seem a little underpowered at the moment; there are optional rules for leader special abilities, which we may try out. Currently their influence seems limited. The rules are not clear whether you can activate a leader independently of his fire team. The loss of an officer costs only two morale points, which seems limited (both officers were hit on our battle). Should senior NCOs also be added as leaders, with 2-3 leaders per platoon?
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