Khe Sanh '68 (1)
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This game is a number of firsts for me. It's the first play in 2019. It's the first Khe Sanh game I've played. It's the first Decision Games mini-game I've played; and the first "Cold War Blitz" game system I've played. All that said, given the difficulty I've had this year getting anything at all finished, much less started, this is not going to be all that well-documented. I do plan on taking a few notes, but turn-wise play logging isn't going to happen with this game.
As usual, when I first laid the game out, I immediately had to do a lot of other things, so the game stayed set up for several weeks. This morning I just did what I should have done weeks ago, which is just start at the beginng of the turn sequence and just go through the motions. Make all the mistakes. Don't even worry about getting all the rules right, figure it out as I go.
One thing I've borked up is removing entire allied units on elimination, when it should be step reduction. The PAVN units are all single step.
On what's going to be the last turn, Tet kicks off, and there is going to be a lot of fighting. It will be quite ugly in fact.
- Khe Sanh hung by a thread!
- E-689, US retreats.
- Hill-861, US prevails.
- Lang Vei, US prevails.
Would have been nice to have had the AC-47 here.
Score:
- 10 Kha Sanh Fire Base
- 3 Rock Quarry
- 3 Lang Vei
- 1 Hill 861
- 1 Hill 558
- 7 Eliminated PAVN units
- -6 Eliminated US ground units
- -2 Eliminated air units
Total: 17 points for Tactical Victory.
AAR
Not a bad little game. As usual for Decision Games, the rules could use some improvement. For example, one of the cards states "North Vietnam" which is not marked on the map as Laos is marked. This may be DMZ West and DMZ Central, but these are not denoted so either. I'll definitely play it again, but not sure it's going to go into rotation.