Hey,
So this weekend was HAVOC. A weekend-long miniature wargaming convention in Shrewsbury, MA. Mark and I ran a large game of Charlie Company on Saturday afternoon.
Charlie Company is a Vietnam game where players take on the roles of Lieutenants and Sergeants in a platoon and fight their way through various missions. Most of the time, when we play we only have one platoon. So that’s 5 players at most (1 Lt. and 4 Sgts.). In practice we usually have 3-4. But it’s certainly possible to do a bigger game and that’s what we set up for HAVOC.
In our scenario we had two platoons march in along a broad front and establish two ambush zones. Then the company commander and some Cobra gunships would strafe a VC camp, driving the troops out into the ambush. As is usual for Charlie Company, the plan goes completely FUBAR almost immediately and the platoons had to assault a heavily entrenched NVA position.
The signup sheets said we had a full game, but we only had 7 players. A bit of a disappointment, but still more players than we’d ever had in one game of Charlie Company. Luckily, no actual Vietnam vets participated. I expect that they’d self-select out, but I can’t imagine how awkward it would be to game that.
However, the game was a stark reminder of how old the historical wargaming set is getting. By tradition, the youngest players are the Lieutenants. In this case, one player was clearly qualified. I forget exactly how old he was, but he was probably in college. The next youngest player, who took on the other Lieutenant, was older than Mark and I. Two of the players claimed that they had been wargaming since we were in diapers.
Those two players were the “Eds”. Imagine a crusty old mountain man wargamer. Now double him. Those were the Eds. If I’m ever a player in another Charlie Company game, I want the Eds in my platoon. They were hell on wheels. They were in the same platoon and their Lieutenant basically just sat back and let them win the whole game. We gave a quick explanation of how American squads would set up an L-shaped ambush pattern, but these guys were planning a few improvements before we even started discussing it. When the game started, they rushed their troops in and set up. When plans changed, they just assaulted the bunkers. They used smoke grenades for cover (something which the rules allow, but which I don’t think we’d thought to use in our games) and just piled into the bunkers and sorted them out.
Meanwhile, the other platoon was having classic newbie syndrome. They advanced very cautiously, thought for a long time about what they were going to do and got completely flummoxed when things changed on them. The only good thing was the one guy who covered the rear and was less surprised when the local VC forces ambushed them from behind. They had about six casualties while the platoon of the Eds had like two or three.
Overall it was a fun game. I screwed up on the die pools for the VC forces which was kinda brutal so I just fled out early after they started taking hits. Our total game time was about 2.5-3 hours so we had plenty of time to clean up afterwards.
Larger games seem like they’d be more fun and the system is simple enough that even when people were kind of dithering, things still moved along, but the scenarios really need some thinking through to make sure that there’s always a challenge for the various platoons. Although Mark did inspire an Urban game in Hue during the Tet offensive. I’d almost certainly play that with just a platoon and maybe a couple of extra players here to represent local ARVN forces or something. Two platoon in a city would be a real nightmare to track.
Afterwards, all the players seemed pretty happy with the game so I guess that’s about as good as you can hope for.
later
Tom
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