by RockyMountainNavy, 7 October 2024
When it comes to wargaming the Vietnam War I am a bit of a neophyte. Many (too many!) moons ago in my early days of wargaming a friend traded Operation Pegasus (Perry Moore, Task Force Games, 1980) to me but I ended up trading it away because I was more into naval or air combat wargames at the time. Looking at my gaming collection today, I have two “modern” Vietnam wargames; Silver Bayonet: The First Team in Vietnam, 1965- 25th Anniversary Edition (Gene Billingsley & Mitchell Land, GMT Games, 2016) and Firebase Vietnam by Pascal Toupy for RBM Studios and published in C3i Magazine Nr. 34 in 2020.
I am also a neophyte when it comes to wargames by designer Paul Rohrbaugh. I have four of their titles in my collection; none are on Vietnam and three are postcard games. Truth be told, Paint it Black: The Attack on Lang Vei – February 6-7, 1968 is also the first wargame by High Flying Dice Games to enter my collection. All of which is to say that Paint it Black opened up wargaming the Vietnam War for me in a several enjoyable ways.
Paint it Black: The Attack on Lang Lei – February 6-7, 1968 depicts the attack by the 24th Regiment of the 304th Infantry Division of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) against a hilltop U.S. Special Forces camp named Lang Vei four miles southwest of Khe Sanh (see “The Battle of Lang Vei: An Operational Analysis” by Charles H. Briscoe in Veritas: US Army Special Operations History volume 15 issue 2). The attack was supported by the NVA 198th Tank Battalion of the 203rd Armored Regiment equipped with Soviet-built PT-76 light amphibious tanks. Yes, tanks. In the jungles of Vietnam. I previously read Blackhorse Riders: A Desperate Last Stand, an Extraordinary Rescue Mission, and the Vietnam Battle America Forgot by Philip Keith and have seen pictures of NVA tanks entering Saigon at the end of the war but I did not realize that armor—though light—played a role in the nearby parts of the Battle of Khe Sahn.
The physical components of Paint it Black are what I term “deluxified print and play.” The core game components are two 11” x 17” map sheets on heavier cardstock, 70 double-sided counters, and eight pages of rules. The physical folio-packaged game retails for $22.95; I strongly recommend spending the additional $8.00 to purchase the mounted counters (I hate making my own double-sided counters). Optionally, one could also spend $11 for the custom card set (printed on cardstock and definitely needs to be sleeved) but, truth be told, a standard deck of playing cards (including Jokers) is all that is needed for play. Oh yeah; players also need a d10 to play.
The desperate defense of Lang Vei in Paint it Black seems perfect for a Dan Verssen Games Valiant Defense-series title from David Thompson or a States of Siege, tower-defense game. In terms of game mechanisms, Paint it Black by appearances seems to take a cue from Mike Rinella’s Area-Impulse series of games. That is, the map board is divided into areas where each has a circle showing an area identifier above and terrain combat modifier below. Units have simple Attack-Defense-Movement factors. Unlike many of Rinella’s Area-Impulse system games, however, Paint it Black uses a card draw game mechanism to activate units and trigger random events.
Indeed, the Card Draw game mechanism in Paint it Black is truly the heart of the game. Every turn, after rolling for Artillery Support points (both NVA and US players) and AC-119 Gunship Air Strikes (US player only), the NVA player with the red cards plus one Joker and the US player with the black cards and one Joker separately shuffle their cards and draw. The player with the highest card wins the activation and can activate a number of units equal to half (rounded down but no less than 1) of the winning card value. There are special rules for face cards which allows players to choose to activate three units, call in additional artillery strikes, or reinforce. The first Joker card drawn triggers a random event and the second Joker drawn triggers the end of the turn.
The number of activations a player gets in a turn of Paint it Black also depends on the current status of two tracks; the US Resistance Level and the NVA Morale tracks. This makes the turn End Phase vitally important to track properly; both tracks move up or down depending on the number of friendly and enemy units or emplacements eliminated. If either track gets too low a die roll is required to avoid a decisive automatic defeat.
The balance of the rules in Paint it Black are very standard wargame mechanisms. Units expend Movement Points to move with the cost determined by the Terrain Effects Chart. There is a rule for Opportunity Fire during movement. Artillery and Air Strikes modify the Fire Combat die roll. Combat itself is a comparison of the attacker die roll plus Attack Factor adjusted by modifiers against the defending Defense Factor plus terrain modifier. If the modified attack factor is greater than the modified defense factor the defending unit loses a step. All-in-all a very simple set of rules that make Paint it Black easy to learn, easy to teach, and relatively quick to play. BoardGameGeek lists the game—with a maximum of eight turns—as taking 150-180 minutes to play but that is about double of my experience.
Historically, the attack on Lang Vei was a high casualty battle. As the Designer’s Notes for Paint it Black relate, “Of the slightly more than 500 man garrison at Lang Vei, over 200 were killed and 75 wounded. All of the base’s weapons and stores were destroyed or lost.” When playing Paint it Black, the question posed to players is not really who is going to win but how quickly can the NVA player win as compared to how long the US player can hold out. Victory points are scored based on eliminated units though (interestingly) the US player scores points for NVA armor units on the map at game end. A scrappy US player could trigger an automatic victory if the NVA player is too aggressive and loses too many units, but that ending is very likely a statistical outlier. More realistically, the US player will be the one trying to avoid giving an automatic victory to the NVA player by carefully husbanding their forces inside an ever-shrinking defensive perimeter.
Paint it Black: The Attack on Lang Vei, February 6-7, 1968 is a relatively low-complexity wargame that depicts a desperate, even hopeless, defense by a US player with special forces against an NVA infantry force backed by light armor. The card draw game mechanism delivers tension filled turns where fortune is fleeting and both players are challenged to act to keep their forces on the knife-edge of victory…or fall into inglorious defeat. For such a low complexity wargame I am very pleasantly surprised at the tension in each and every turn. I look forward to exploring other Vietnam War games by Paul Rohrbaugh and High Flying Dice Games. The combination of game mechanisms and lower price makes the series both interesting to play and attractive to collect.
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