17 August 2012

Random Friday Wargaming: China-Vietnam War

It's always awesome when you find games in other languages... China-Vietnam War was published in Chinese.







Anyone out there know anything about this one?

Master links/images from Boardgamegeek.com; message boards linked to Consimworld. Other links to the actual game pages...


By: Brant

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't know much about this one; apparently it was one of the first hex-and-counter wargames to be published in Chinese (it was published in Hong Kong in 1984).

Lawrence Hung of Hong Kong, who has an opinion about everything on Boardgamegeek.com (except when he checks in to tell you that he has no opinion about what you were discussing), rated it low and said:

"Probably scrapped this before. This is a locally produced wargame in Chinese with some SPI old game as prototype. I cannot say this is a bad game as the game did protray the Chinese People's Army tactic of "human wave" with a degree of success. The production is ameuter and rough. Game system is too "shallow", offering few strategies available for both sides. I played this when I was a teenager and had fun with it. After all, this is a real battle fought by our countrymen when I started to have memory of what happened in my surroundings. The game was pubished 5 years after the war. So the OOB is a kind of approximation only with no real historical unit designation but generic counters. Again, if you can't read Chinese, this game is not for you."

The red-on-white counters are the Chinese.

Brian said...

Oh, and certainly this has been the only game to focus strictly on the 1979 war - there was a sceanrio covering it in SPI's The China War, and some scenarios from tactical games, but that is it.

Certainly at the time it was a very ill-reported conflict - I remember trying to puzzle out what was going on with my big National Geographic wall map of Vietnam (I was 15 then, and just starting in on wargames).