A roleplaying game designed for the Vietnam War should be extremely my jam. Patrol is a 21st century spiritual successor to the Recon games, with modern mechanics designed to support a style of psychological realism in the vein of Platoon or Herr's Dispatches, rather than pure simulationist tactics.

The core of the game is a d6 dice-pool system. Characters have three attributes (Fortitude, Vigilance, Proficiency) which range between 5 and 10 and may be modified by equipment and situational bonuses. When you make a check, roll a number of d6s. 6s are successes (along with 5s, if you have a relevant skill), and if you beat the difficulty you succeed. If you get more 1s than successes, the result includes a FUBAR, something bad happening. Some basic probability shows that you need a lot of dice for reasonable odds of success on anything harder than about 2, and that unskilled characters can be expected to FUBAR about half the time.

Where this game gets innovative is that each character has one of four psychological profiles (idealistic, pragmatic, righteous, and egocentric), which describe the Doubt that your character takes doing or witnessing common situations, and the Victory Points gained for accomplishing tasks that represent winning your own, personal war. Every profile wants different things for the game, naturally pushing intraparty conflict. Turns are about 30 minutes long, representing a substantial chunk of activity, and each one pushes you further along various condition tracks. There's interplay between high levels of fatigue, which are required to unlock the highest VP generating conditions, and the ways in which fatigue becomes trauma as your characters wear down over the course of the tour.

The GMing section has some really good advice for getting the feel of the war, especially the barriers of communication. American NPCs speak in first person and have multilayered personalities. Vietnamese are narrated in third person, and should be described in stereotypes. This is not your country, GI, and you don't belong. The rules include a variety of weapons, vehicles, and opposing forces and allies. Anyone can show up, from Viet Cong guerrillas to Australian Special Forces and Korean Marines.

That said, this is a reading review, and there are some parts that I'm fuzzy on, and some areas where I think this game falls short of its ambitions. The interplay of personality, doubt, fatigue, victory points, XP, and trauma is not particularly elegant. This is an aggressively non-tactical game, but it still military-centric, and more could have been done to distinguish the options in a firefight and add some real weight to the choices. Finally, I think there should have been better or more explicit support for the idea that you're part of unit beyond your characters, and that individuals come and go, but the unit remains.

Patrol is a good game, but it falls short compared to truly great games like Night Witches and Blades in the Dark