I Love the Smell of Dice in the Morning

Stuart and I have been trying to get more wargames played in 2026 -- our goal is at least one a month -- and last week we played one that was new to both of us; The Nam (not that one).

You can read Stuart's in-depth summary of the game here. I am in agreement with him for the most part; it's a fun enough game that runs well, if a little lacking in specific Vietnam War flavour, and it seems to have a lot of vague and ill-defined mechanics, or at least organisation that obfuscates key terms.

That said, there were two mechanics that jumped out at me as quite interesting: activation/initiative, and game duration. Unit activation is handled in a system very much like the initiative token system of Troika! and it worked just as well here. It's not quite the same, as The Nam doesn't have simultaneous combat like Troika! so there's an element of imbalance, but as most of my force was hidden for much of the game, I could miss turns without repercussions.

Game duration was also interesting. The game is measured in "minutes" rather than turns, and our mission had a 60 minute limit. At first I thought we were going to be playing in real time -- which is itself a fascinating prospect, and one to which I may give some thought -- but they are in-game minutes. At the end of every turn, the player that went last rolls a dice and adds that many minutes to the clock; if the limit is reached, the game ends. The tactical element is that the dice size is chosen by that player, so there's an element of clock manipulation.

In our game I needed to slow things down to have time to push my force forward and capture objectives so towards the end I opted to roll 1d4 for the clock each time. Stuart, who was losing troops too quickly for his liking, would much rather those had been d12s!

As it was Stuart looked at his depleted force, and having to choose between sucking up fewer activations or gambling on keeping his activations or suffering an automatic loss, put his faith in the dice, which of course betrayed him and ended the game with 25 minutes to go.

(Stuart had two objectives to my one, so he was technically in the controlling position. Could he have held out for 25 minutes and won? I think it was possible but very difficult; I had realised that activations were the key and targeted his force so as to reduce its possible activations, so I suspect a death spiral was more or less inevitable. The question is how long would that spiral take?)

Will we play again? Perhaps. It was fun enough for an evening's entertainment, but aside from a couple of mechanics, it didn't grab either of us. And we do have plenty of other games to play.