Ho Chi Minted: Vietnam ’65 launches for iOS on October 1st

The charred remains of my tank company, who detected a minefield the hard way.

I’ve been playing a preview copy of forthcoming iOS wargame Vietnam ’65 (you may remember it from when we talked of it about a fortnight ago), and man this game is interesting. I’ve spent an hour or so with it, which is only enough time to ascertain that it deserves more time. I think that if you like wargames, you’re going to want to see this one for yourself on October 1st, which is when developer Johan Nagel tells us it’s going to drop for iOS devices. Start making a Jefferson Airplane playlist on Spotify.

This game offers a totally different spin on asymmetrical guerrilla war. You command the American and South Vietnamese forces on a randomly generated map. The roads and villages you see on the map are different every time you play, and there’s another randomly generated feature that you don’t see: the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces are usually invisible on the map until they attack and they launch ambushes on your units and raid villages from the Trail. Over of the course of the 45-turn game, you have to suss out where the Trail is and deploy your forces to compensate. If you don’t, your “hearts and minds” score will drop and those villages will start supporting your enemies.

I’m just scratching the surface on what’s going on in this game. There’s a supply system that lets you keep long-range patrols supplied via Huey or Chinook supply drops, there’s building forward firebases to extend your operational range, there’s artillery and airstrikes you can call in for those rare moments when you get the jump on the VC — this is a big game, and there’s so many systems and maybe don’t all gel together. I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks wrapping my head around this thing so I can give you a good review the day it launches, but this is very promising already.

Watch a gameplay video after the jump.