Hexsides and Hand Grenades

Last time, I talked about my impressions of "Mike Force", a game about Special Forces operations in Vietnam from Joseph Miranda. To get a deeper impression of the game, I'm writing a first-turn report to show off how the game is played. I'm planning to do this with other games in upcoming articles, looking at first turns to show how a game flows. Setup: Communists: I'm playing the Early War scenario here. That means the NVA set up two static units inside Vietnam Communist bases and one static unit everywhere else. Rolling for initial Infiltration Points, we get a "5", which brings the communist infiltration level down to a manageable "10" on the IP scale. The level is still at "Medium", but only just barely. With some good play and a bit of luck, maybe we can knock it down to "Low". Free World: The marker is placed on the "8" space of the Recruit Points track. We roll a ...

Mike Force is a solitaire game of Special Forces operations during the Vietnam War. If that sentence doesn't get your heart racing then please put down the horse tranquilizers. Joseph Miranda (designer of so many games, why even bother listing them here) is behind this effort. It was published in the current (MAY/JUNE 2018) issue of Modern War. So what you get here is a game that focuses exclusively on the shadowy SOG portion of the conflict to the stubborn exclusion of any other element. It's like the opposite of Nick Karp's zoomed-out look at the conflict in his seminal 1984 game, "Vietnam 1965 - 1975". With the plethora of decent Vietnam War games already out there (Fire in the Lake, Vietnam Solitaire, Vietnam 1965 - 1975, etc.), you couldn't be blamed for asking the question: Did this game need to be made? And the answer I would give is "Yeah. Sure." Because this game is the war's underbelly that you rarely get glimpses of anywhe...