The Legion: Rumble in the Jungle

[Whiterook]

This thread is a running log of a Vietnam War miniatures game I’m working on, which is inspired by a Mike Lambo book-wargame, called “Ghosts of the Jungle”, with Australian SAS troopers in the Vietnam War, plating out the action is a book with simplistic maps that you mark your troop movements with a pencil.

While being a cool game in itself, I decided I’d rather play a game with miniatures, and things started to change drastically; so much so, the ideas roiling around in my head have taken on a life of its own! To be honest, I have no clear idea of where this will lead… an upgraded version of Mike’s game, or a totally new game, only time will tell. For those not familiar with game design, there are generally two ways this goes down: One way is you get the germination of an idea and you design a new and unique game onto itself; the other way is, you “borrow” parts of another designer(s) game and morph it into something of your own. The latter can come dangerously close to plagiarism if you’re not careful, but rest assured there are TONS of games out there that use ideas, concepts, and almost entire mechanisms that parallel other games! The truth of the matter is, designers often inspire other designers… it happens.

For me, I will start with the disclaimer that this game under development is for personal use only — it is NOT for sale, nor as a pitch to a game company, or as a real life product. Could it morph into a totally unique game, totally different from its’ original inspiration? Sure… but that’s not the current intent and I do not foresee anything beyond takeing one persons idea and playing it out in my own unique way, for personal use only. There! On with the show!!!

One of the first things to change was the combatants. Instead of Australian SAS Troopers fighting the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA), I decided to Americanize it; my miniatures would be… 


The Legion: Rumble in the Jungle, a team of U.S. Army “Green Berets”, of the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), better known by their nickname, “The Legion”.

The 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) derives its lineage from two units of World War II fame -- the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the First Special Service Force ("The Devil’s Brigade"). The OSS was formed in 1941 to collect intelligence and wage secret operations behind enemy lines. Small teams of OSS operatives parachuted behind enemy lines in Europe and Asia to lead partisans against the Axis Forces. From these guerrilla operations came the nucleus of men and techniques that would form the Special Forces Regiment.

The First Special Service Forces was a combined Canadian-American Force constituted on July 5, 1942, in the Army of the United States as Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment, 1st Special Service Force. The Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment, 1st Special Service Force was first activated and trained at Fort William Henry Harrison, Montana. The Force participated in the Italian Campaign and saw additional action in Southern France. The Force was disbanded in Menton, France, on Feb. 6, 1945. The unit was reconstituted in the regular Army on April 15, 1960, designated as Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces Regiment.

On Sept. 21, 1961, at Fort Bragg, N.C., the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) was activated officially. Just one year later, elements of the 5th Special Forces Group began serving temporary duty tours in the Republic of Vietnam. Full deployment of the group was completed in February 1965. Units from within the group deployed from its operational base at Nha Trang to the four military regions of South Vietnam. Operational detachments established and manned camps at 254 locations to train and lead indigenous forces of the Civilian Irregular Defense Groups and regular units of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam. The 5th SFG (A) also formed specialized units that conducted special reconnaissance and direct action missions.

Despite being one of the smallest units engaged in the Vietnam conflict, the group's colors fly 20 campaign streamers. Soldiers from the group are among the most highly decorated warriors in the history of our nation. Sixteen Medals of Honor were awarded (eight posthumously). The group is awarded the Presidential Unit Citation (Army) Vietnam 1966 to 1968, The Meritorious Unit Commendation (Army) Vietnam 1968; Republic of Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm, Vietnam 1964; and Republic of Vietnam Civil Action Honor Medal, 1st Class, Vietnam 1968 to 1970. On March 5, 1971, the colors of the 5th SFG (A) were returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., by a 94-man contingent, led by then-Col. (retired Maj. Gen.) Michael D. Healy, thereby terminating their official Vietnam service.

These Legionnaires will fight as a 4-man Special Reconnaissance (SR) team, made up of highly trained military personnel… Green Berets.

Special reconnaissance teams operate behind enemy lines, avoiding direct combat and detection by the enemy. As a role, SR is distinct from commando operations, but both are often carried out by the same units. The SR role frequently includes covert direction of airstrikes and indirect fires, in areas deep behind enemy lines, placement of remotely monitored sensors, and preparations for other special forces. Like other special forces, SR units may also carry out direct action and unconventional warfare, including guerrilla operations.

During the Vietnam War, respective division and brigades in-country trained their Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol members (now known as the Long Range Surveillance units). However, the US Army's 5th Special Forces Group with support from seconded Australian SASR and AATTV instructors, held an advanced course in the art of patrolling for potential Army and Marine team leaders at their Recondo School in Nha Trang, Vietnam, for the purpose of locating enemy guerrilla and main force North Vietnamese Army units, as well as artillery spotting, intelligence gathering, forward air control, and bomb damage assessment.

Long range surveillance teams operate behind enemy lines, deep within enemy territory, forward of battalion reconnaissance teams and cavalry scouts in their assigned area of interest. The duration of an LRS mission depends on equipment and supplies the team must carry, movement distance to the objective area, and resupply availability. LRS teams normally operate up to seven days without resupply depending on terrain and weather. SR units are well armed, since they may have to defend themselves if they are detected and their exfiltration support will need time to reach them.

Basically, these are Bad-Assed soldiers! Highly skilled; lethal and deadly.

Since reconnaissance is a basic military skill, "special" reconnaissance refers to the means of operating in the desired area, and the nature of the mission. In US Army doctrine, there are five basic factors:

1. Physical distances: The area of operations may be well beyond the forward line of troops, and require special skills to reach the area.
   
2. Political considerations: Clandestine insertion also may be a requirement. If there is a requirement to work with local personnel, language skills and political awareness may be critical.
   
3. Availability of required special skills and expertise: The most basic requirement for SR is to be able to remain unobserved, which may take special skills and equipment. If there is a requirement to collect intelligence, skills anywhere from advanced photography to remote sensor operation may be required.
   
4. Threat capabilities: This usually relates to the need to stay clandestine, potentially against an opposing force with sophisticated intelligence capabilities. Such capabilities may be organic to a force or be available from a sponsoring third country.
   
5. Follow-on special forces missions: This is the concept of preparing for other functions, such as Unconventional Warfare (UW) (i.e., guerrilla) or Foreign Internal Defense (FID) (i.e. counter-guerrilla) operations.

All this fits well with a game of stealth. The nemisis will be the Viet Cong, in the Vietnam War. Scenarios will generally Mission-based, where the team will undertake actions such as moving through the jungle assessing enemy strength, disposition, and position; target acquisition; hostage rescue; high value targets elimination; search & rescue…etc.

No turn limits will be imposed: Play will progress until the mission parameter requirement(s) are met, or team elimination or exfiltration parameters ending the game are met (provided per each scenario).

[mikeh]

Nice write up on the Green Berets. I don't remember if it was you I told this to or not but here goes again. When I was at Schofield Barracks we had a unit of Green Berets come in for just a few days maybe a week. I only saw one of them walking down the sidewalk, out looking around I guess, anyway we were under orders not to even approach them or ask any questions of them. To this day I wonder what they were up to. Also to this day I can see him in my mind. A little shorter then me, I'm 6', and at that time I was in excellent shape. This guy looked like he could snap me in half any time he wanted to and maybe I remember him so clearly because he really walked the walk if you know what I mean.

[Whiterook]

So yeah, I liked the use of square spaces, such as was used in Lambo’s “Ghosts of the Jungle” game… you see this style of game spaces in a few other games as well, such as Flying Pig Games’, “Crowbar”. In the case of Ghosts, it was mainly due to Line of Sight (LOS), which in that game, was horizontal row and vertical column based (no diagonals). To be honest, I balked at this, as I thought that seemed over simplified, however, it worked quite well; it plays out as a mechanic for a game that isn’t deep rooted as far into the weeds as in a ‘traditional’ wargame …this is ‘fast play’ style gaming and in being such is, well, simplified to some great degree. Again… it works. So, as I’d like my game to play similarly, the Legion will be a square space gameboard battlefield.

I use Apostrophe Games’ tiles (see here), which are two and a quarter inch square, cardstock tiles that come in a nice box, which is perfect pre-made storage! The product comes with 48 High quality, blank, square tiles, with pre shaped rounded corners. They are diecut, so one sides’ edges are slightly rounded, with a glossy surface; the other side is more matte finish. I use the glossy side for the artwork.





Permanent ink art pens are used to draw the shapes (e.g., palm trees, huts, roads, swamps areas). I prefer nibbled art pens. For this project, I used a Platinum Carbon Pen; a cheap priced art pen at just under $8 USD, it’s available at Amazon, and is almost as good as my old, professional art pens I used since art school, which are unfortunately now discontinued! …I was was surprised, and extremely happy to see this pen perform brilliantly.



On the subject of my old pens, one of the issues I have with those is, the ink cartridges aren’t made anymore, and other brands don’t fit well in them (by design of the company that made them, of course); but this Platinum Carbon Pen is fully compatible with those previously used art pen ink cartridges, and I bought a ton of them… at $7.44 for a pack of three, four cartridges per pack, on Amazonlink.




So how did I create the artwork on these terrain tiles? Well, after freehand drawing in the image (e.g., palm tree from top view) onto the tile, I color filled the images and background with COPIC permanent markers, an Artist-grade ink that behaves much akin to watercolor paint. I can then go back in and firm up any penned ink lines and add in fine details. COPIC markers have this odd, but wonderful ability to blend colors applied, and also have a specific clear liquid concoction (also delivered by COPIC marker pens) that can help soften the blends; that blending doesn’t work so well on glossy surfaces so, these ended up being more of a layering effect, rather than a blending effect.

Having some tiles tp literally play with, I setup some scenarios for play and figured out I was short a few tiles for where I currently was in the playtesting process. I’ve got it down to a fairly efficient process to create them, but they are indeed, time consuming… but in a good way!  The system is playing far better than I anticipated for this early on to be honest. I had a good feeling that using homemade tiles would be neat, but this is proving itself to be awesome! And I love having a good, fast, dice chucking game!

I’m thinking of making a chart with the four main characters, with cartoon renditions of the guys, a short bio, and maybe a wound tracker for the skull-shaped LITKO tokens I bought to track wound conditions; after the third hit, it’s a kill (KIA); the tracker would be more streamlined, instead of placing the tokens on the tile with the mini and having to move it with the mini. These are the LITKO Battle Wound markers for wound tracking. See here for a full description and link to where to buy them

[mikeh]

I'm enjoying watching this come together.

[Whiterook]

Feb 27, 2023 17:37:55 GMT -5 mikeh said:

I'm enjoying watching this come together.

Thanks… I appreciate that!

I’ve been researching what kinds of bunkers Charlie used out in the field. I need one for a few demolition missions, but I’m also thinking of some ambush rules, for times when the team runs across a bunker or command post unexpectedly. I’ve got the idea in my head what I want to do for a bunker tile(s), so that’ll happen coming up shortly.

Also gonna pull the trigger on some road hexes… see what they look like; as I’ve playtested the game, I see it would play better visually, with roads depicted, rather than ‘theoretically there’. There would end up being a lot of them actually, so I want to try one before I commit. Right now, I like the ideas of using a printed map in the Jungles rulebook for knowing what tiles are a VC activation zone, but eventually, I’ll have new missions and mission maps, the latter probably using images of the actual individual tiles I’m designing to assemble maps…not sure what program to use for that, but maybe something as simple as Word, or Excel like Scott uses for his games.

[Whiterook]

My design space!



…the COPIC markers can spew ink droplets badly if you tug the caps off too aggressively, and it’s permanent ink dye so, I use an artist drawing pad to make sure my desk is safe!

[Whiterook]

I made a bunker tonight… you can see it here.

[Whiterook]

So as you may have been following along on the other threads on the tiles design and production, I now have 78 tiles with 1-3 Jungle images, 1-2 huts, rocky hills, rice paddies, swamps; and also a bunch of road tiles with jungles, concrete bunkers, huts, and a radio shack.





These will allow me to play any scenario so far of The Legion: Rumble in the Jungle.

[Whiterook]

I got the idea in my head of putting some felt on the base bottoms of minis; I don’t know how durable the surface of the tiles are, with the COPIC marker artwork and I don’t want the metal base under of the metal figures to scratch the surface so I decided to try som felt. I believe the ink dye is pretty tough, but the mini bases under the miniature figures are just metal fender washers, including their somewhat sharp edges. So, I bought some adhesive backed felt sheets at Hobby Lobby, which was about $1.29 a sheet…the sheets are about the size of typing bond paper.

I started with marking around one of the mini bases with a thin leaded mechanical pencil, and then cut the felt circles out. The next step is to peel the back off the adhesive and stick the circle on the mini bases’ fender washer. Finally, they need some trimming around the edges, as no matter how careful you try to cut with scissors, you’re going to have some external overage. I suppose you could use a craft knife, but I hate ER! You can run your thumb and forefinger around the edge to help round out the edges of the felt a bit better. Overall, a little tedious to do, but what a nice end product it produced!







I tried them on the tiles and what a HUGE difference! The metal minis still have the weight, but they are quieter to move around when you plop them down, and they slide effortlessly and not abrasively on the tile surfaces.

[mikeh]

So when can we expect a kickstarter! Nice job Em, you are really moving this project along.

[Whiterook]

So there I was, shoulder to shoulder, backs to the wall… Ahhh, ooops, that was F-Troop! Let me start again… So there I was, in ACE Hardware, looking at electric weed trimmers on the Memorial Day Sale (yup, ordered one! …only had a floor model left but could order a brandy-dandy new one never touched!). As I was checking out, I saw a cluster keys with rubber edging on the finger grips… “do you sell those?”, I ask. They do! Looked the right size, so I went to look at the… kinda pricey at 99 cents a pop, but they had four colors so, what the heck!

Got them home aaaaaand, they fit perfect! In the pic below, note the four bigger rings I was using, which were hard plastic and a bit tough to move with the mini (not to mention, being BIG!). I have no idea to what they came with, but they served the purpose of testing out my theory of using such a design element.



…that little food saver box is where I currently store the minis, but I’ll be moving them to a nice storage box I found online recently…just gotta order it. Anyway, the Key Cap Covers (which is apparently what they are called) are a soft rubber, having a grooved inside diameter. The minis’ fender washers fit into them snug as a bug! The bottom is actually raising the mini up a snudge, which is an added bonus… the American units apparantly did not need the felt in the end, but the VC still do.



The whole point, as you may recall was to differentiate between the four American soldiers (characters in the game), especially when writing up After Action Reports (AARs).



I sent a pic to a gaming buddy, who was so intrigued, he looked up some bulk examples on Amazon; turns out you can get over 60 of these for under ten bucks! Man… ACE is worse than McDonald’s dollar menu! He’d mentioned he was looking to buy some, for some of his various minis.

Next up on the project is four Character Cards for each of the American soldiers, with a small bio, stats and charts. I’ll work on some sort of graphic color cue for each team member on the cards, to match their rubber bases.

[Whiterook]

After my success with colored key cap covers for the Americans, I decided to try black ones for the Vietnamese soldiers! I ordered these today, which are scheduled for delivery on Monday.







So, I guess the VC didn’t need the felt under the washer bases either, but oh well… part of a design process! Also, I noticed that, I wanted to make more Viet Cong without the rocket propelled bazookas (sculpted as bazookas, but probably meant as RPG-2’s) so, this is a good opportunity for that, as well.

[mikeh]

Sweet! Don't you just love it when a plan works out!

[Whiterook]

Those black key cap covers came in and they fit my VC minis perfectly! …a lot cheaper cost for them, too. Had some issues with the felt bottoms I’d put on them, peeling at the edges while placing the covers on, which I was able to smooth back down… but those felt bottoms were indeed unnecessary   

The VC could have actually done without rubber base caps, but this ties everything together nicely. The added benefit is, they don’t slide on the tiles, either.



…that’s a lot of potential prisoners the team rounded up! (…kidding!)



Now that they are all done, I decided to place them in the aforementioned (earlier post) better storage solution I’d bought from Amazon; this in place of the plastic sandwich container they’ve been inhabiting in for months now   It’s nice to have VC that don’t smell like ham! (…KIDDING!!!)



…two ministers fit standing up, per well, very nicely… a few extra fit in the upper most layer, with my Gladiators for another game under design.






…it’s very well designed.

[mikeh]

They look great, very professional finish!