Dien Bien Phu The Final Game 2nd Edition

"Dien Bien Phu" depicts the decisive battle which took place in a distant jungle valley in northern Vietnam. It was a battle where both sides knew from start would be a final showdown. The French were desperately seeking for an opportunity to bring the Viet Minh main battle force into battle on French terms. Dien Bien Phu was a trap where superior units and weapons would crush the Viet Minh onslaught. Viet Minh felt they could not win the war unless they managed to upgrade their mode of fighting into a full scale war. The French were too strong in the delta but in a distant valley they had gathered almost all their best units without whom France would lose their will to continue. Dien Bien Phu was the place where France would be dealt a crushing defeat.

It was a battle of preparation, assault and reaction. Viet Minh dug approaching trenches before assaulting the French strongpoints. The overwhelmed French defenders were forced to react by throwing reserve battalions into the pyre in order to save their position. The game will be fast and furious. The Viet Minh player will try to make the French defense collapse, and the French player will try to make the Viet Minh steam run dry and force them to stop.



"Dien Bien Phu - The Final Gamble" is a two player game about the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 that not only ended the French Indochina war, but also had political repercussions far outside the region itself. One player represents France and her colonial troops. The other player represents the armed force of Viet Minh, the communist/nationalist independence movement of Vietnam. This is a cage fight. There are no victory points, there is no marginal victory and there is no draw. Viet Minh wins by forcing the French troops to surrender. France wins by not surrendering.

Map and scale: The map covers the former village of Dien Bien Phu and surrounding areas. There is a small sub map of the French strongpoint "Isabelle" further south in the valley. There are several groups of French strongpoints scattered around the map, each one with a female name (all named after the commander - de Castries� - mistresses, according to lore). The map is divided into three divisional sectors (plus a fourth one facing the sub map "Isabelle"). Each sector has several zones that that represent Viet Minh trenches winding from the map edge towards the center of the map. Each hex represents 150 meters and each game turn covers three days. There are 21 turns in the game, but historically, it ended after 19 game turns with a Viet Minh victory. The scale allows a stacking of three French units (usually infantry companies) in a hex, but there are no stacking limits for Viet Minh battalions, which creates a chess feeling.

Three Viet Minh battalions form a regiment and three regiments become a division and there were almost four full divisions in the valley, as well as a full artillery division off map. There was also an equivalent of another three divisions in a replacement pool outside the valley. The French troops were a colorful array of colonial paras, Vietnamese troops, units from French Algeria and Morocco, and, of course, the French Foreign Legion. Some units are of average quality, some are outright terrible, but some are the very best that could be mustered...anywhere. A French battalion consisted of four companies and there were 12 battalions together with 11 auxiliary light companies at the start of the siege, as well as 16 artillery and mortar batteries, and three tank platoons. Waiting in Hanoi were another five para battalions together with an expected replacement pool of about 14 companies. In