Showtime Hanoi
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I'm slowly working my way through a stack of smaller Vietnam games, and this is one I've wanted to play for quite some time. It uses the same card draw initiative system which the designer's (Paul Rohrbaugh) other games use, which is an ordinary deck of playing cards. This in itself is not that bad.
However, this game just like the three other games I've played have inconsistencies in the rules which stymie a quick fix, and would require actual development to fix rather than a simple house rule.
In this case, putting a single hit on the A4, which is the only plane which can bomb the target (required for a US win), renders it only able to take one Action, which is going to be move to the edge of the map in the direction it's going, or perhaps if lucky take a shot at any North Vietnamese aircraft foolish enough to get in front of it (which is unlikely).
This leads to what feels like gaminess: have the A4 only on a straight track to the target, then dive low enough to get a decent bomb drop.
That just seems weird.
I wanted to like this game a lot more than I do.
It feels like there is almost a really cool game here. But with previous experience with these titles I'm not willing to spend a lot of headspace figuring out what on repeated reading are inconsistent, amnbiguous, or jarring rules which do not make sense.
