Forgotten Heroes - Vietnam (1st Edition)

Fast-paced, engaging, exciting. Sound like what you’ve been playing? If not, it’s time to try something new, something fresh.

Squad-level gaming has always occupied a soft spot in most grognard's hearts. Unlike the grand strategy genre, tactical gaming allows the players a chance to get down and dirty and feel an emotional connection to the forces they command. While it may be hard to feel much for 3rd Division losing half a step, when Captain Ringwald gets popped by a sniper, it actually means something.

Unfortunately, over the years many in the industry have decided that what the world of tactical gaming needed was hundreds of pages of rules for gamers to memorize. With a lot of games just trying to figure out if you killed the other guy turned into an exercise in tedium. "Wait, now we have to roll under the Factory Production chart to see the percentage of ammunition manufactured there that are duds. Don't forget to modify the roll by time of year, number of sick employees, and how long between visits of the vending machine guy." Blech.

Tired of spending more time looking up rules than playing? Do you find it shocking that a game's turn scale may represent a couple of minutes of time and yet it takes you hours to play those couple of minutes? Are you ready for a tactical level system that combines realism and fun into one easy to comprehend package? Then you're ready for Mark H. Walker's Lock 'N Load!

Lock 'N Load is a new tactical series created by Mark H. Walker, well known for his writings on the world of computer gaming. Designed primarily for the modern era, the series will eventually include settings from World War II to Mark's upcoming science-fiction novel. Each game in the series is a complete game, yet wholly compatible with the others. You'll never be burned by being forced to buy a game that you aren't interested in just to play another game in the series.

The rules are easily picked up and within an hour of cracking the box you can start playing using the basic infantry rules. The total page count of the rulebook weighs in at 27 pages, with many full blown examples of play. While definitely streamlined from other tactical systems by no means is the Lock 'N Load system a featherweight. You'll find everything you should expect to find in terms of chrome, but kept in terms that avoid bogging down the player in minutiae.

The first game in the series, Forgotten Heroes: Vietnam, focuses on the conflict pre-1970, with scenarios taking place in the mid to late '60s. North Vietnamese regular army units, Viet Cong, ARVN, and United States Army and Marine units are all represented, along with weapon teams and vehicles.