It isn’t often that two games on the same subject get released in the same month. Unless that subject is zombies, in which case there were two games released each day last week. But my mailbox presented me with MMP’s Storm Over Dien Bien Phu as well as Legion Wargames’ Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble in the same month last fall. If you went to the guy next door and asked him to tell you what Dien Bien Phu was or you’d shoot him, you’d already be in jail. And for good reason, too. I mean, who does that?

In my lifetime I’ve witnessed the passing of many historical episodes into the relevance attic that marks the transition of collective consciousness to something no longer shared by large part of society. When I was growing up, Pearl Harbor and Vietnam were instant points of connection with anyone you might meet, regardless of their education or experience. Those places are probably now taken by 9/11 and Iraq/Afghanistan. Before 1914, the Franco-Prussian War was a ubiquitous psychological phantom for the entire French Republic. The events of 1914-18 provided an entirely new touchstone, and 1940-44 essentially buried 1870 forever. Later came Algeria and Dien Bien Phu.

I’m not sure Dien Bien Phu was ever in the American collective consciousness, although I’d be happily corrected by any cultural historians that might take issue with my understanding of the trans-Atlantic relevance of the end of the French empire. It’s hard to remember the breadth of the collapse of colonialism except as a historical record, rather than the remarkable fact that within my own living memory, a nation like Portugal was messily divesting itself of its claims to a significant portion of Africa. It’s this historical moment that has passed, and with it our familiarity with certain issues, and the way they shaped the world.

But these games aren’t about the post-colonial period. They are about a single battle. As such, they lack that very context. Which is why we read books.

There are basically two books (in English) about Dien Bien Phu that you need to read to say that you’re at least moderately informed about that whole thing. One of them is Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall, a French-Jewish journalist of Austrian birth who was killed in Vietnam in 1967 and whose access to French records a decade after the battle did much to illuminate a dark place of French military history. He’s also a fantastic writer. His Street Without Joy should be an extra bonus book for you about “the French debacle in Indochina.” Everyone knows Bernard Fall, and everyone cites him, and he is unfortunately no longer living.

Your second book needs to be The Last Valley by the British journalist/editor Martin Windrow, published in 2004 on the 50th anniversary of the battle. Windrow states in his preface that he is “not an academically trained historian,” which originally gave me pause when combined with his admission that the book was “a synthesis of secondary sources.” However, those secondary sources were at least French. There are historical moments that seem not just temporally but also linguistically isolated from English speakers. One such example is the northern crusades in the Baltic and the history of the Teutonic Knights, exhaustively documented in German historiography, less so in Polish, Baltic, and Russian, and almost not at all in English.* Another example might be Dien Bien Phu. So if Windrow wants to synthesize the French literature on the subject to which my high school command of the language doesn’t give me access, I’m grateful.

The Last Valley does a great job above all of explaining the stakes of the French commitment to this remote outpost in Southeast Asia. Furthermore, in his preface, Windrow places it squarely in context.

It is perhaps Britain’s greatest historical blessing that since 1689 the continuity of our institutions has saved the British Army from making political choices. By contrast, France’s 200 troubled years as a serial republic, interspersed with brief periods of less than constitutional monarchy and of foreign occupation, have confronted her army on at least six occasions with disputed claims to the legitimate leadership of the state. Like a human personality, a country’s and an army’s sense of itself at any particular moment is the product of the memories of the past, and the choices it makes in moments of crisis will be dictated to a great extent by its particular tribal myths. Every generation in France’s military history between at least 1870 and 1962 was connected, by chains which have been held up to the light for English readers by Alistair Horne** in his several fascinating books. Dien Bien Phu was an important link in one of those chains.

None of that has anything to do with Dien Bien Phu games, except that it explains why the events on the board had the repercussions they did. Which is important, because the absence of this context is what I think deprives many good games of the satisfaction of closure. At least games about a single battle.

“Battle games” used to be a lot more popular than they are now, probably because campaign games suddenly got a lot more manageable. That’s almost entirely due to technological advancement, I think: Gary Grigsby’s War in Russia stretched the limits of what interfaces could do in 1993, but the only limitations on 2011’s War in the East interface are the designer’s own. When forced to make a choice between a battle and a war, the fact remains that it’s a lot less satisfying from a wargaming perspective to decisively win the battle of Borodino as Napoleon than it is to force Russia to surrender in 1812. Once upon a time we played games about Gettysburg and Waterloo, and now we play games about the whole course of European and American history. Thanks, Philippe Thibaut. Thanks, Paradox.

Kim Kanger, who designed Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble, also designed a game called Tonkin: The First Indochina War, or La Guerre d’Indochine. Maybe at some point in the future, I’ll review that. But the sense you get from an operational game about four years of war is very different from that you see in a game about 57 days of siege. And I submit that the focus you get by concentrating on one mountain valley in 1954 gives you a different, but equally satisfying, sense of finality.

I wanted to do a comparative review of Kim Kanger’s and Nick Richardson’s Dien Bien Phu games. One way would have been to spend three thousand words and twenty screenshots to do it. But I thought that in these days of video and streaming, that seemed kind of archaic, and who knows how many people would have gotten past word five hundred. So I decided to try the video route as an experiment. Once I started, I realized I could include more than just those two games, since there really aren’t that many Dien Bien Phu games in general. I’m pretty lukewarm on the current format of video reviews (“Hi, here is the game box, here are the counters, oh what a nice map …”) so I thought I’d take a different approach. Consider it the first “wargaming documentary” if you will. And please let me know if it was worth it via the comments section. I have a lot of ideas about what I could do next, but if this isn’t interesting then it could be a very short-lived experiment. The five videos in this series will be:

Citadel – Frank Chadwick/GDW (1977)

La vallee de la mort – Paul Rohrbaugh/Against the Odds (2006)

Storm Over Dien Bien Phu – Nick Richardson/MMP (2014)

Dien Bien Phu: The Final Gamble – Kim Kanger/Legion Wargames (2014)

Dien Bien Phu scenario of Operational Art of War – Norm Koger/TalonSoft (1998); Dien Bien Phu – John Tiller/HPS (2009)

I hope you enjoy the first video.

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*If you want to read about this, find Eric Christiansen’s The Northern Crusades, and then any of the books by William Urban. And then learn German.

**Thanks to @RobZacny for lending me Horne’s outstanding The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916.