What the magazines said in 1972, what Joe said in 2010, and what the whole record can — and can’t — tell us

2026-06-19

The Year of the Rat: A Game 304 People Rated and Almost No One Replayed

In December 1971 a reader picked up Strategy & Tactics #35, punched the counters out of the insert game, and — in his own words — “got back into wargaming in a furious manner” (Moves #44). The game was The Year of the Rat: Combat in Vietnam, Spring 1972, John Prados’s simulation of the Communist Easter Offensive. It was reviewed, rated, errata’d, polled, profiled, defended, and quietly forgotten. Three hundred and four people scored it for Moves. A Vietnam veteran writing in Fire & Movement refused to dignify it. Forty years later a careful retrospective critic recommended it “highly” while calling one of its core design choices “arbitrary and wrong-headed.”

They cannot all be right. That disagreement — not any one verdict — is the reason to put it back on the table.

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My take — up front (and you can watch it). I played this one solo, and straight up: as a solitaire game it didn’t grab me. The hidden-counter mechanic is teh heart of the design which naturally only really beats with an opponent across the table. But as an artifact it’s something worth trying: a game designed in 1972 about a war still being fought in 1972, and that is a rare thing in this hobby. Although we have seen a few serious efforts on the current Ukraine conflict, and a couple of sad ‘smash and grab’ efforts that largely failed thankfully. If you’re an S&T grognard, a Vietnam buff, or you want the fog-of-war intelligence duel played opposed, it has earned a spot in the collection. ▶ Watch the post play comments

What it is

Year of the Rat runs thirteen weekly turns, 30 March to 28 June 1972, on a 22×34-inch map of South Vietnam (and slices of Cambodia, Laos, and the North) at 10 km to the hex. The contemporary Fire & Movement review (#18) lays out the shape of it cleanly:

“U.S. forces are located in three bases — Danang, Vung Tau, and Long Binh (they are restricted from moving). The battle is principally left in the hands of the ARVN troops… The ARVN’s greatest direct support comes from strong U.S. airpower (which nearly doubles in strength by game’s end)… The game is normally nip and tuck with the Communists seizing a great deal of real estate, but hard pressed to ‘hold on’ to it.” — F&M #18

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The signature is limited intelligence: the Communist player’s units sit inverted, salted with dummy counters “to keep the ARVN guessing” (F&M #18), and his offensive is on a clock — supply runs down, dummies get exposed, and US air points climb every turn. The PAVN must overrun fast and then survive. That engine is the one thing nobody argues about. Everything else, they argued about for years.

The magazines never could keep the credit line straight — Moves #13 printed “Dunnigan / Prados,” the S&T index even invented a nonexistent “Champer” — but the game’s own DESIGN CREDITS box settles it: Game Design: John Prados; Game-System Design: James F. Dunnigan; Development: John Young & John Prados; Physical Systems & Graphics: Redmond A. Simonsen. Prados designed the game on Dunnigan’s system — and that distinction matters, because the system itself (the hidden units, the air-and-supply clock) is doing much of the work the reviewers go on to credit or blame.

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The witnesses

The house (1972). The game arrived as the issue feature in S&T #35, Prados writing his own historical brief and Designer’s Notes — the origin document and, necessarily, the friendliest one. And Prados doesn’t hedge. He stakes the simulation claim in the first breath:

“Simulate means a game that can re-create things as they happened, in the same manner that they happened. This is what we have tried to do with The Year of the Rat game. We think it has been quite successful.” — Prados, Designer’s Notes, S&T #35

He also tells you, plainly, how the offensive is supposed to feel: the NVA, he writes, “has not made a ‘do or die’ attempt to capture South Vietnamese cities. Instead their ultimate strategy seems to be to hurt the South Vietnamese army as much as possible while taking over as much territory as possible.” Hold that sentence — it is the designer pre-loading the answer to the argument his game would spend the rest of the decade provoking.

The crowd (1973–74). Moves did what Moves did: it ran the numbers. Its reader poll (#13) collected 304 reviews and reported an overall 6.49 — “average” on its own scale, with balance the weakest category at 6.15 and realism at 6.47. The prose around the numbers is more interesting than the numbers:

“72% would still buy it knowing what they do now, while 85% felt they received their money’s worth. The Year of the Rat was a rather successful game, although the situation apparently didn’t excite all that many people. As an exercise in portraying current events through the use of the game, it was extremely successful. Some people felt that the balance wasn’t all that it should be, but at the same time admitted that it was probably quite realistic.” — Moves #13

There it is in one paragraph: respected, not loved; doubted on balance, conceded on realism. Moves also did the unglamorous maintenance — consolidated errata for #35 (#9) and a structured reader-rating questionnaire (#11) — the contemporary QA apparatus that modern reviews never bother with.

The trade press (1976–79). Fire & Movement treated Prados as a marquee designer — “a member in good standing of the Order of the Hexagon” (#9), credited everywhere with “Year of the Rat for SPI and Third Reich for AH” (#1, #4). But F&M also hosted the two sharpest dissents.

The skeptic (F&M #3). In an essay on whether any of this is “honest” history, the line lands hard:

“Nor is the young vet from Vietnam going to endorse Hue, Year of the Rat or any similar games as honest simulations of the frustrating war he fought in Southeast Asia.” — F&M #3

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The defender (F&M #6). Against the common complaint that the game sags, F&M #6 argues the sag is the point:

“A number of gamers felt that SPI’s Year of the Rat also ‘tended to bog down in mid-game.’ They didn’t seem to realize that it was inherent to the game that the VC drive eventually bogs down, followed by a SVN counter[offensive].” — F&M #6

The retrospective critic (Joe, 2010). Joe, at Map and Counters, plays the game and reviews it cold, decades later. He recommends it “highly” — and then files the most specific complaint anyone ever made about it.

The afterlife. The game kept generating play: Moves #27 printed a fan “Year of the Rat: The 1975 Offensive” variant with an alternate order of battle, and Greg Costikyan sat Prados down for a “Debriefing Prados” interview in Moves #48 (1979). Battleplan, searched cover to cover, never mentions it — by the 1980s the conversation had moved on.

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“How could he possibly know?” — the game built inside the fog

Here is the fact that ought to frame every argument that follows, and rarely does: Prados designed Year of the Rat while the offensive was still being fought. The NVA crossed the DMZ on 30 March 1972; S&T #35 shipped that November. Design and development happened in the gap — months when the campaign was live, the orders of battle were classified or guessed at, and the records historians would later use did not yet exist. The game’s thirteen turns stop at 28 June 1972; the real fighting ground on for months after. Year of the Rat doesn’t end where the war ended. It ends where Prados’s knowledge ran out.

To his credit, he says so in the first line of his Designer’s Notes:

“Making games about events still ‘in progress’ is a chancey business.” — Prados, S&T #35

And when he reaches the two things that actually decide the campaign — South Vietnam’s internal politics and the NVA’s real strategy — he admits the wall outright: it is “a rather hazy situation which no one seems to be able to unravel.” A Moves reviewer put it more bluntly: “no one could have gamed out Year of the Rat in advance… no one would have believed that American intelligence could have been so bad” (Moves #13).

This reframes the whole fidelity fight. The veteran in F&M #3 isn’t only saying the game is unrealistic — he’s pointing at something structural: you cannot honestly simulate a war you are still inside of. And it casts Joe’s sharpest criticism in a different light. When Joe says the division-scale PAVN order of battle “ignores PAVN doctrine,” he’s right — but Prados in 1972 had no reliable picture of PAVN doctrine to ignore. The crude resolution may be less a design failure than a confession: this is the resolution at which the enemy was actually knowable in real time.

Which raises the genuinely interesting possibility — that the most-praised feature of the game is the designer’s ignorance, dressed as a mechanic. The inverted units and dummy counters everyone admires don’t only model the ARVN’s fog of war; they model Prados’s. Not knowing the true order of battle, he built a game in which no one knows the true order of battle. The limited-information system that makes Year of the Rat sing is the same limitation that makes its claim to be an “honest simulation” so contestable. The fog isn’t only on the map — it’s in the design. (This is also the cleanest rebuttal to anyone parroting “it’s a quite-realistic simulation”: realistic against what baseline, established when?)

What we now know about 1972 — and what the game caught anyway

Year of the Rat froze the campaign at its midpoint. Here is that campaign as the later record has it — drawn from Andrew Wiest’s The Vietnam War 1956–1975, the kind of settled account that did not exist when Prados was designing:

The offensive — the Nguyen Hue Offensive to Hanoi, the Easter Offensive to Washington — was the North’s gamble on conventional war. Giap “committed twelve divisions totaling some 150,000 men.” On 30 March 1972, “30,000 NVA soldiers, supported by tanks and artillery, crossed the DMZ and slammed into the vastly outnumbered ARVN defenders of Quang Tri Province.” The ARVN “crumbled,” lost Quang Tri City, and only — “aided by massive amounts of US air support” — counterattacked in June and “reclaimed Quang Tri City in savage street fighting in September.” Two further fronts opened: the road-junction town of An Loc in the south (“street fighting raged… as US air power obliterated entire NVA units”) and Kontum in the Central Highlands. Wiest’s verdict is flat: “the decisive factor in the failure of the Nguyen Hue Offensive had been American air power.”

Lay that over the game, and two things jump out — both cutting for the design everyone spent the decade picking at.

The game stops where the history was still unwritten. Its thirteen turns end 28 June 1972 — at the NVA high-water mark, before the ARVN’s September reconquest of Quang Tri. That is not a scope choice; it is a knowledge boundary. Prados could design the offensive’s first act because the second act had not been performed yet. The game ends in June for the same reason the Designer’s Notes call the politics “a hazy situation no one can unravel”: June was the edge of the known.

And yet it caught the two structural truths. Wiest confirms what a 1972 designer could only intuit. First, US airpower was decisive — the very dominance Joe reads as a distortion bred by the division-scale OOB is, on the record, the single most important fact of the campaign. Second, the Easter Offensive was a conventional, division-scale invasion — tanks across the DMZ, twelve divisions, fixed objectives — the moment the war stopped being a guerrilla war. So representing the PAVN as divisions, the choice Joe calls “arbitrary and wrong-headed,” is arguably the right resolution for this offensive, whatever it flattens about 1968 or 1965. The retrospective critic, with the better library, files the sharper indictment; the better library, read one chapter further, partly acquits the defendant.

That is the deepest thing the documentary record returns: a game built blind, inside an unfinished war, that nonetheless fixed on the two facts the historians would later agree mattered most. Whether the rest of it rings true — the balance, the texture, the feel of those thirteen weeks — is still the question the page can’t answer. But on the structure, the fog-bound design and the finished history are looking at the same war.

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Where they actually disagree

Strip away the agreement (the hidden-units/air-escalation engine is good; the game is worth playing) and three real fights remain.

1. Is it an honest simulation?

The designer planted his flag first — “re-create things as they happened… quite successful” (Designer’s Notes, above). Everything after is people arguing with that claim, across two generations:

“The choice by the designers to represent the PAVN units only as divisions… is arbitrary and wrong-headed. First, it greatly magnifies the effect of US airpower and makes clear terrain a virtual deathtrap for PAVN units. Second, it ignores both the flexibility of PAVN doctrine and the sophisticated types of ground operations actually conducted by the PAVN.” — Joe, mapandcounters

Notice what that does to Moves’ poll. The crowd scored realism 6.47 and conceded it was “probably quite realistic.” Joe, with forty more years of historiography, says the realism is structurally compromised by a scale decision — and that the same decision is why US airpower feels so dominant (the very feature F&M #18 highlighted approvingly). The retrospective critic names a flaw the 304 contemporary reviewers rated right past. That is the whole case for re-examining these games instead of citing their old scores.

2. Does it bog down — flaw, or feature?

Everyone agrees the middle game slows. They disagree on what that means. – Prados (Designer’s Notes): by design — the NVA was never meant to make a “do or die” lunge for cities, only to “hurt the South Vietnamese army… while taking over as much territory as possible.” A drive that culminates is the historical point, not a bug. – F&M #6: agrees — intentional; the offensive is supposed to culminate, then the ARVN strikes back. – Joe: not a problem at all — the game is “rarely decided before the last turn or two.” – The crowd: enough players felt it sagged that F&M #6 had to answer them.

So: is the late game a deliberate culmination (#6), a nail-biter (Joe), or a slog (the complainers)? Three serious observers, three readings — and the disagreement is itself the finding. A game whose pacing can be read three incompatible ways is not a solved object; it is one the record argues about and never closes.

3. The balance question that won’t die

Moves’ lowest category was balance (6.15). Joe adds a mechanism: the ARVN airmobile restriction (units may only air-transfer town-to-town) is, he says, “historically wrong, and looks suspiciously like a rule included specifically for purposes of game balance.” If he’s right, the contemporary balance gripe and his fidelity gripe are the same gripe — a balance patch bought at the cost of realism.

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What the record can — and can’t — conclude

Strip out the dice no one in this article rolled, and the documentary record still returns a verdict — three of them, in fact, one each for the design, the reviews, and the magazines that carried the argument.

On the design. Year of the Rat’s central virtue and its central limitation are the same fact. The hidden units and dummy counters every voice admires are not only a model of the ARVN’s fog of war; they are a model of Prados’s. Designing inside an unfinished campaign, with no reliable order of battle, he built a system in which the order of battle is unreliable by rule — genuinely clever, and a quiet conversion of a research problem into a design feature. The choices that later draw fire (PAVN as divisions, the airmobile leash) read less as errors of craft than as the resolution at which 1972 was actually knowable. So the design is honest in its mechanics and overclaiming in its prose: the game admits its uncertainty on the map while the Designer’s Notes insist it “re-create[s] things as they happened.”

On the reviews. They converge on the engine and split on the history — and the split is structural, not a matter of taste. Every contemporary reviewer judged the game’s realism from inside the same fog the designer was. Moves’ 304-person poll is the whole story in three numbers: realism conceded (6.47), balance doubted (6.15), overall merely “average” (6.49) — respect without conviction. When that poll calls the game “probably quite realistic,” it is recording an act of faith, not a finding; there was no settled account of the Easter Offensive in 1973 to measure it against. The reviews can tell you the game was respected, argued-over, and worth the money to most who bought it. They cannot tell you whether it is true — and, made when they were, they never could.

On the articles. The magazine record’s value is documentary, not evaluative — and on that score it is rich. An “average” game generated consolidated errata, a structured 304-reader poll, a multi-issue argument over whether it “bogs down,” a fan re-imagining (the 1975-Offensive variant), and a sit-down interview with its designer. That is not the paper trail of a forgettable title; it is the paper trail of a test case. What the hobby was really arguing about, through Year of the Rat, was the proposition Prados put on the table in his first sentence — that you can usefully simulate an event still in progress. The game is the hobby thinking out loud about gaming the present.

The one firm conclusion. Put the three together and a single claim survives without a die ever being rolled: Year of the Rat’s reputation as a realistic simulation rested, in its own day, on a baseline that did not yet exist. Its durable achievement is a mechanic that turns the designer’s ignorance into the player’s tension; its durable importance is as an artifact of how the hobby reasoned about simulating the unfinished. And where the later historiography can reach — the structure of the campaign — it returns a verdict more generous than the game’s own reviewers managed: the fog-bound design fixed on the two facts that came to matter most, the decisiveness of US airpower and the conventional, division-scale character of the 1972 offensive. What the record still cannot settle is the rest — the balance, the texture, the feel of those thirteen weeks — and that was always going to need either a deeper account than the hobby’s or a game played with everything we now know. The documents take you to the edge of the fog; on the structure of the war, for once, it clears.

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From the Map Room — the table’s verdict

The documentary record ends at the edge of the fog. A game does not. So I finally put Year of the Rat on the table — and it answered the one question fifty years of magazines couldn’t, by failing in a way none of the reviews ever quite named.

The celebrated engine needs an opponent to exist. Prados, the Moves poll, Joe — every witness agrees the hidden units and dummy counters are the heart of the design. They’re right, and that is precisely the problem solo. You end up “either constantly flipping counters over or leaving everything exposed,” and the whole point — you don’t know where the punch is coming from, you don’t know where the dummies are — evaporates the moment one person runs both sides. The fog that makes this game isn’t on the map; it’s between two players. Remove the second player and the engine doesn’t idle, it stops. I played a handful of turns and wrapped it around turn four or five — not because it “bogged down” (the old F&M #6 complaint) but because solo it had nothing left to hide. Going through the motions, not engrossed.

What the turns I did play confirmed. The air. The contemporary reviewers said US airpower dominates; Wiest’s history calls it the decisive factor; and at the table the game collapses toward exactly that optimization — when can I pile on enough air to disrupt or kill this stack? With the NVA divisions strong enough to pile onto the US forces, and a blind US attack liable to go in at 1:1 — a one-in-six chance of losing your own attacker — you cannot afford to swing without intelligence. So it becomes cautious cat-and-mouse, which drives it right back to the two-player table where intelligence actually means something. The thing everyone praises and the thing that frustrated me solo are the same thing.

The honest bottom line. It does pull some real narrative — genuine uncertainty as the US player, a crafty feeling (I imagine) as the North — and the regional, capture-and-recapture objective structure carries flavour. Components are what you’d expect of 1972 SPI: serviceable, Spartan, counters that at least pop on the map. A four-turn solo is no definitive verdict and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the table delivered the one finding the page could not: Year of the Rat is not an “average” game that merely plays poorly solo. It is a two-player intelligence game whose every celebrated virtue is inert without a human on the far side of the fog — and whose real, durable worth, for the S&T grognard or the student of how the hobby gamed the present, is exactly the designed-in-the-moment artifact the documentary record already showed it to be. Best played opposed. Worth owning if 1972 is your war.

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Sources

All magazine passages quoted here were taken from in-session full-text extraction of the named issues; long quotes should be proof-checked against the issue PDFs (OCR garble risk) before publication.