Operation Apocalype

Vae Victus #10

by Philippe Richardot

Reviewed by David Fox

Operation Apocalypse is one of that rarest of all creatures, a tactical Vietnam game, this one based on the helicopter assault scene in the movie "Apocalypse, Now" … "I love the smell of napalm in the morning". It's a solitaire game, with the player running a company of Americans assaulting a river-side village defended by a game-controlled Viet Cong. The Americans come in infantry squads, with plentiful helicopter support, including both transports and Huey Cobra gunships, plus a devastating air strike on call. The Cong trots out bunkers, heavy machine guns, and a mortar. The map and (cut-and-paste) counters are quite striking, in the now-standard VV style, with a 3-D perspective on the map offering us hanging fish nets as one of the more unusual wargame terrain types. As for the rules, well, I had to drag my old college French dictionary out from its honorable retirement and, thereby, was able to struggle through them. There is help available for the lingually challenged, as Richard Fluck has posted translations on the Internet at http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~rfluck - many thanks to RF for providing us with a copy. You can also get them, plus up-to-date errata, from Boulder Games.

The VC set up randomly, according to their general attitude, which can be either defend, when they'll hold out to the last counter, or retreat, where they attempt to slink away into the jungle. The basic American task is to kill VC units; evacuate civilians, whose counters, when turned over, can turn out to be harmless non-combatants, deadly grenade-throwing terrorists, or the valuable VC Commissar; and, of course, to keep casualties to a minimum. Lest you get complacent as the Americans, there is also the possibility of a VC counterattack roaring out of the jungle late in the game.

The game does a fine job of recreating the American frame of mind in Vietnam without a lot of picky tactical rules. The Americans move very cautiously, wary of triggering VC defensive fire, intent more on spotting the Viet Cong positions and attacking them from a distance with gunships and airstrikes than on closing for short-range assault combat, a potentially bloody affair. As the American squads take losses their movement and fire capabilities downgrade dramatically, so it behooves you to call in a dust-off to evacuate the wounded, whereupon your squad returns to normal. American casualties must be kept light, since losing two squads, or just the commander alone, will almost certainly guarantee defeat. The game thus becomes a very taut, exciting affair. I found myself becoming very wary of taking any chances, instead, looking to gang up on isolated VC units in a cloud of smoke grenades or pound them from a distance with the Cobra gunships, my most dangerous weapon. Proper planning is important, too, as your platoons must be landed in tight, mutually supporting groups, spread out widely enough to cut off a possible VC withdrawal but not too wide lest they fall prey to a sudden counterattack.

Negatives ? Well, this isn't exactly the definitive tactical wargame, and there are some idiosyncrasies. The American helicopters are very easy to shoot down, and even the heavily armored gunships went down quickly before the lightest of VC small-arms fire. The rules don't quite state just when the Americans get to fire - there is an American defensive fire phase; is this when all American fire, including assaults, is carried out ? Must be, or maybe I'm suffering from poor translation here. Although the American squads do suffer when they take casualties, once the wounded are evacuated the squads are magically rejuvenated, without any sort of efficiency penalty. And the magazine was missing the all-important Viet Cong Set-Up and Attitude Tables; see the errata note, above.

But these were minor drawbacks. Operation Apocalypse demonstrates that you don't need volumes of fiddly, multi-sub-paragraphed legalese to effectively simulate squad level combat. What the folks at VV have here is a nice base system which I think would adapt well to cover other modern commando operations like, say, the Son Tay Raid or the Israeli assault at Entebbe. Good Stuff.

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© Copyright 1996 by Richard Berg
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