Wargaming Vietnam using Vassal
A US Infantry squad counter
Vietnam Vassal is my attempt to document how I have used the Vassal Engine to recreate table-top wargaming of the Vietnam War using Pete Jones' Cold War Commander rules.
One of the first board wargames that I ever played was Avalon Hill's 'Panzerblitz' and probably the best board wargame that I ever played was Avalon Hill's Squad Leader (and later, 'Advanced Squad Leader' or ASL). That was over twenty years ago and the single most difficult thing to achieve at that time, apart from learning the rules for ASL, was to find opponents. It was this dearth of local opponents that eventually resulted in my eventually selling the games and giving up on board wargames themselves.
In August of 2005 I stumbled across what may be considered the Holy Grail of all board wargamers, the Vassal Engine. Finally, a computer programme that not only allowed for board wargames to be played against live opponents but also one that more or less completely emulated the original components of the game - map boards and counters - in rich and wonderfully rendered graphics. Unfortunately at the time I was unable to devote the time necessary to learn and understand how Vassal worked and I dropped the project after making some progress.
In April 2009 I returned to Vassal with a renewed determination and armed with a set of rules ideally suited to a Vassal project.
This part of the Broken Arrow site is intended to help those who are new to Vassal and hopefully will be of use in overcoming the learning curve that I first experienced. Although there is a great deal of expertise concerning Vassal (as exemplified by the threads on the Vassal Engine Yahoo discussion Group) there is very little of it actually documented. My hope is that this site will go some way to help remedy that situation.
Counters
Board wargames like Squad Leader use counters to represent the infantry squads, tanks, guns and vehicles of the forces involved. In table-top wargames we use stands of model infantry, tanks, guns and vehicles.
Using Vassal to reproduce a table-top game means creating counters to represent the stands. In effect, I need to reproduce the various stands of figures as counters.
Boards
Board games use precisely that, a board that represents the playing area with all the graphics of buildings and terrain incorporated into the artwork of the board itself.
In table-top wargaming our table-top is the board that represents the playing area incorporating actual models of buildings and terrain.
In order to use Vassal, it will be necessary to reproduce our table-top and all of its buildings and terrain features as a board.