The game was designed to represent a Vietnam type guerrilla war to train American officers and to develop tactics.
As such it includes elements that a modern wargamer can easily ignore in using these rules for a wargame.
The rules placed great emphasis on the order codes and order formats. This was necessary to allow each game to be
reconstructed and analysed move by move by the operational analysts after the players had finished gaming. T
he analysts might spend days replaying a game for the purposes of study. Typically, they would spend 3 days work looking at just one day played out on the map. A modern wargamer can greatly speed up the game by dispensing with all the order codes and simply record which unit should move to where to do what.
The game was designed to be played with a blue team (the American and the South Vietnamese Army's) and the
red team (the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army NRA) in separate rooms. The two teams would study their maps and
issue written orders based on what they knew. The umpires would interpret these orders on the central map and then
tell the players what they could now see. It is very practical to run the game for wargamers with all the players on
one side, presumably the American one, against a pre-planned umpire controlled guerrilla force.
The players need to have a clear chain of command, with each player having their own responsibilities in the game.
Typically, you might have a battalion commander with company commanders and a support commander.
It must be said that a game played using Tacspiel for Counter Guerilla Operations is not your typical wargame.
There is rarely a decisive finish to game. More often, each side inflicts some casualties and one side or the other has maneuvered into an arguably better position by the end of a game. However, if you want to have some idea what it was like for junior commander in the Vietnam War, then playing Tacspiel gives you a strong idea about the operational problems they faced.
