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Answered by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood
Q: What’s the game about?
A: Leaving aside the subject matter (it’s ‘about’ the Vietnam air war over Hanoi, of course!) the game focuses on two things:
For the American player it’s about managing a strike package. The strike package is a high-tech, quintessentially American way of making war in which different types of aircraft operate in a mutually supporting team.
For the Vietnamese player it’s about fighting an asymmetric battle – trying to beat a superior enemy by means other than direct confrontation. It’s about harrassing the foe and playing cat and mouse with them.
Q: I’ve never seen an air wargame at this scale. What scale do you call this?
A: Downtown is best described as a ‘grand tactical’ game or 'raid scale' game. The focus is not on individual aircraft but large formations of them. The battles aren’t fought over a few miles of airspace but fifty or sixty or more miles. Time isn’t measured in seconds but minutes. Downtown is a game of massed air combat.
Q: So it’s an operational game?
A: Not quite. To game air operations would mean managing logistic elements outside the scope of the game, such as air refueling or aircraft maintenance. But the focus of Downtown is not on operations, which implies days and weeks of combat, but on the individual air raid. Scenarios start at the edge of the North Vietnamese air defense system. The US player has to penetrate the air defense zone with a ‘package’ of aircraft, strike the target and extract them in one piece. This 'raid scale' game is tactical rather than operational.
Q: No tankers?
A: Sorry. As someone pointed out during development, that’s not a whole lot of fun to play. The map and scale were chosen to keep the game a crucible of combat.
Q: So do I get to manage an American air wing?
A: You manage wing-sized packages in combat. That’s more than sixty aircraft for a Linebacker-era USAF day strike. What you don’t get to do is manage the aircraft, logistics and crews on the ground.
A Navy strike package arrows toward Haiphong as the SAM defences start picking out targets
Q: So what’s the unit size?
A: Air units are flight-sized formations of one to four aircraft. You track each aircraft in a flight and casualties are assessed in terms of individual airplanes.
Q: Does Downtown recreate the whole of the Vietnam air campaign?
A: Downtown concentrates on the big air strikes into Route Package 6. In terms of bomb tonnage this was a fraction of the overall American air effort . But 'Route Pack Six' encompassed Hanoi and can be regarded as the political fulcrum of the war. Also, it was the heart of the most heavily defended airspace in the world. It is there that the fighting was toughest.
Q: The focus of the game appears to be the single raid, but there is also a campaign format?
A: Yes, there's a campaign system which permits players to play several days' worth of raids. Five days of Rolling Thunder translates into some twenty raid scenarios (ten USAF and ten USN). The American player gets to decide their day-to-day targeting from a master target list while the DRV have to marshal their meagre resources over the days.
Q: Having read some after action reports posted on your site, I wonder if the US player can also mount more complicated raids, attacking many different targets at once?
A: Many of the scenarios have single raid targets, as the US rarely mounted strikes on multiple targets except on special occasions. However, there are a number of scenarios which feature these multiple target raids. In particular the Linebacker II scenarios and the 10 May 1972 scenario do this.
Q. Will be possible to play the massive B-52 strikes of the '11 Day War'?
A: Oh yes, we cover the Linebacker II night raids involving the B-52s. The biggest scenario - simulating 26 December 1972 - allows the US player to control almost 120 BUFFs and try and get them on and off their targets in under 15 minutes!
S-75 Dvina batteries light up their radars as the first wave of B-52s approach Hanoi on the night of 18 December 1972
Q: How can the game be any fun for the Vietnamese player? Surely it’s a drag to get your butt kicked raid after raid?
A: Historically, the raids over North Vietnam were no cakewalk for either side. The same is true in the game. The test team recently debated which player gets more enjoyment out of the game: American or Vietnamese? The Americans have the best aircraft, the integrated support for their strike packages, the cool technology, the better weapons, the quality pilots and get to choose where and how they attack. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese fight the classic asymmetric battle. They don’t have to smash the raiding force, merely disrupt it. So they get to play hit-and-run with their MiGs, play shell games with their SAM units, and spring all sorts of nasty surprises with flak. The jury’s still out on which player has the most enjoyment. (Though of the two sides I really prefer playing the DRV.)
Q: Can you dogfight in the game?
A: Dogfighting is abstracted in Downtown. You don’t get to fight individual airplanes against each other. But the game is not about what happens after ‘the merge’, but what happens before it. The air combat side of the game is a very different experience to anything published before. We’ve had both an AWACS fighter controller and a Spanish F-18 pilot playtest the game and give it a big thumbs up.
Q: Is Downtown inspired by GTG's Rolling Thunder game?
A: Downtown may superficially resemble Stephen F. Weiss’s game, published by Group Three Games back in the ‘80s, but it’s really a whole different animal. Weiss’s wargame is a dogfight game. Its ‘operational’ map is a simple scenario generator for setting up dogfights and is not really a concerted effort at a large-scale air game. Downtown is the game I imagined Rolling Thunder to be before I opened the box.
Q: How complex is Downtown?
A: The game is near the complex end of the spectrum, but very playable. Much of the complexity is due to ‘chrome’ rules that are necessary in a game covering a long war in which many technological and tactical advances were made. The core game mechanics – movement and combat – are fairly simple and a lot of effort has been expended to make the gameplay fast. An entire air raid will probably take four to five hours to play end-to-end, including set-up.
Q: Is book-keeping required? Many air games in my collection require a big amount of paperwork and I don't like that.
A: Yes, you are required totrack the status of flights on a logsheet. However, I've put a lot of effort into the book-keeping systems to keep the workload low. Basically, once the logsheet is set up, you don't have to check a flight's status from turn-to-turn, only when it changes (such as when a flight takes casualties or depletes weapons). In practice, book-keeping has had a negligible effect on the speed of Face-to-Face play. You rarely need to refer to your logsheets.
Q: Can I play by e-mail?
A: Some of our testers have been playing by e-mail and Antonio Pinar has developed a superb Cyberboard game box for the game.
Q: Can I play solo?
A: A team of playtesters are working on developing a separate solitaire module for the game, in which enemy forces are controlled by charts and tables.
Q: Is there any intention to expand Downtown to other eras?
A: The core game system is robust enough to make the basis for a whole game series. A follow-on Arab-Israel game, Elusive Victory, is entering the design phase.
Q: This jet stuff is okay, but are we going to see a World War Two version?
A: Work has already begun on a WWII adaptation using a slightly different scale. The first prop-era game, The Burning Blue, will cover the air defence of Great Britain during the Battle of Britain. Playtest has begun and we will preview the early release materials here.
End FAQ
If you have any further questions, Lee Brimmicombe-Wood may be contacted by e-mail at:
Downtown game and materials are copyright © GMT Games LLC, 2004. These pages copyright © Lee Brimmicombe-Wood, 2001-2004. All rights reserved.
Look at the Game | Summary of Play | Example of Play
History | The Combatants | Weapons | Tactics
Downloads | Play by e-Mail | FAQ | Forum