Vietnam ‘65

My spreadsheet instincts kicked in the moment I realized that killing Viet Cong was almost a secondary concern in Vietnam '65. The real work is building a logistics chain that keeps your infantry fed, your choppers fueled, and your Green Berets deep enough in the jungle to actually find something worth shooting. That reframing alone puts this in rare company among wargames. The core loop runs on two resources: Hearts and Minds (H&M) at the village level, and Political Power (PolPow) that funds everything you want to requisition. Each of your ten villages starts at 50 H&M points. VC guerrillas filter in from the Ho Chi Minh trail each turn, and if you ignore them long enough, the North Vietnamese Army starts building its own firebases and pressing a proper offensive. So your turn is never a single action. You are simultaneously coordinating Huey resupply runs, sending infantry into villages with campfire icons to pull intelligence, pushing engineers out to clear jungle hexes and build forward operating bases, and pairing Green Beret recon units with Cobra gunships or artillery so that the moment a VC squad is spotted, something with firepower can reach it before it repositions. The Cobras are expensive and properly devastating but need confirmed sightings to act. The Green Berets can stay in the jungle for extended periods without a resupply run but cannot enter villages. That asymmetry between your unit types is the whole design, and it holds together very well. As a strategy player who normally wants a 200-hour campaign, I should be honest: this is closer to a board game than a grand strategy title. There is one randomized map type and a fixed 45-turn run. You can finish a session in roughly two to three hours. The lack of scenario variety and historical accuracy will frustrate grognards looking for a Ia Drang recreation, and players who have cracked the Green Beret plus Cobra pairing on Veteran difficulty will eventually find the system starts to tip toward predictability. The interface carries visible marks of its tablet origins. The radial command menu blocks portions of the map at inconvenient moments, and mis-clicks happen more than they should on PC. Unit scale is also undefined, which is a minor but persistent irritant. For newcomers to COIN wargaming specifically, though, Vietnam '65 is a genuinely smart entry point. The two-part tutorial covers Basic Training (unit movement, supply, direct and indirect combat) and Advanced Training (victory conditions, reading the intelligence map, enemy escalation). Neither lecture nor hand-holds excessively. You will probably lose your first two games, win your third, and then start actually understanding why you won. That learning arc is healthy. The post-launch update added fog of war, weather effects on helicopter movement, and custom game options, all of which sharpen the experience considerably. Cobra helicopters become meaningful late-game investments rather than opening-turn reflexes, and weather introduces a logistical variability that the base release genuinely needed. Vietnam '65 sits in an awkward market position. Hardcore wargamers want more historical fidelity; mainstream players see a niche subject and minimal production value and pass. Both groups are wrong to dismiss it. There is a coherent, original game system here that does something almost no other wargame attempts: modeling pacification as a mechanical priority rather than a passive background score. Its sequel Afghanistan '11 built on these foundations with more depth. If that one interests you, this is worth an afternoon as a prequel argument.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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