Chadwick's Tet Offensive & more
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We're back to Vietnam today, examining the Tet Offensive as interpreted by Frank Chadwick.
First, the map. It's mounted, and garishly colored, with stylized polygonal provinces. This isn't that big of a deal in itself. However, there are two problematic design issues:
- Some of the necessary text on the map is black on dark green background, rendering the text very difficult to read.
- Some of the locations are very small, and will need to host tall stacks of counters. The small provinces are mostly close together, and around Saigon, compounding the problem.
Other than these two issues, I don't really have a problem with the map.
Playing the game
The rules are not lengthy or difficult, and the games plays relatively quickly. We could see it possible to play it in maybe 90 minutes once we were more comfortable with the rules.
I played the US side. I didn't understand what to do with the RF/PF forces, so I left them off the map. There doesn't seem to be anything in the rules about where to emplace them.
We also found the flag standees to be too cumbersome, so we used the insurrection markers instead.
One of the more interesting concepts in the game is using "demoralization" as a victory condition. Demoralization is computed from cities lost, forces taken casualty and the like. Each force (US, ARVN, VC, NVA) has its own demoralization sudden death. For the NVA/VC to win, they need to force this by the end of the last turn. Since the game only has 5 turns, they can't be wasting any time about it.
We learned that the VC and NVA need to strike very hard and very early in the game, because for the first tow turns (out of 5 turns total), the US and ARVN forces have extremely limited movement, they simply won't be able to respond quickly. The trick for the reds is to take more ground in two turns than the US and ARVN can win back in three. Since the US and ARVN has movement phase at the end of the turn, this is almost like having two turns.
We'll be playing this again I'm sure.
Here's the end of the game:
Objective 218
I was going to hold off on more games of this in favor of bumping H-index to 12 with Fire in the Lake, but AS wanted to play it, so why not? We played two games:
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I won this one pretty fast as AS placed to right instead of pushing me back on the left. This was a command post win.
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Another win for me, I seem to do pretty well at this game, unlike Zombie Dice or 6 Nimmt! This game went down to the wire, and I was able to sneak in behind with a LGEV to zap the CP, then occupy the CP with my next card. I think I had 1 or 2 cards left in my hand.
I'm still finding more strategy in this game. I would have thought it played out in a dozen games.
Zombie Dice
I'm trying very hard to break my losing streak with this game. So far, I seem to be almost at the break even point, where I'm almost winning as many games as I lose. We played two games:
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I won this one! Finally! And by a good score, 14 to 5. But it was close: AS's situation into the last roll was 9 brains with one blast… and 2 more blasts! Is this the start of my winning streak? Let's play again and find out…
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No! The winning streak is stillborn! I lost this game 14-13 despite starting 6 brains ahead. Dammit!
Once again, much hilarity.
Star Realms Colony Wars
Another win for me! By 1 point! I usually lose to AS at Star Realms, so this is significant. He plays what I can best call a "damage-first" game, which is not heavy on initial trading, nor does it emphasize scrapping cards. What this means is that his hands will do a pretty good chunk of damage fairly early on, and will continue to damage in medium sized hits along the way. However, he does get hands late in the game which may be almost all Scout/Viper hands. I'm trying to split the difference here, with getting some damage cards early, while also trying to scrap a few cards and have at least some trade every turn.