This design is completed, but it has not yet been successfully crowdfunded and produced. All photos are of the prototype. The Battle for Hamburger Hill lasts 11 turn-pair game-days (with a night turn each game-day also). Each turn, players alternate moving and attacking each other's forces on the game map, which is divided into hexes. Combat can include small arms firefights between adjacent units or fire missions that target hexes with artillery, air-strikes, helicopter gunships and mortars. At the end of each combat phase, once all fire combat is complete, adjacent units may conduct close quarters combat (CQC) to decide which force will occupy contested hexes. Both sides may get reinforcements and replacements according to card events, history and the roll of the dice. Each day, after all movement and combat is completed, both sides draw cards to determine special actions for the future day's turns.
Here's the latest "Player's Aid" Interview on the game: https://theplayersaid.com/2025/04/14/interview-with-kevin-talley-developer-for-the-battle-for-hamburger-hill-operation-apache-snow-may-10-20-1969-from-cadet-games-currently-on-gamefound/
At 08:01 A.M. on the morning of May 10th, 1969, the first helicopter-lift of soldiers from the 3rd Battalion of the U.S. 187th Airborne Infantry Regiment set down into a small Landing Zone (LZ) along a ridgeline near the Laotian border. The ridge ran southeast towards the summit of a hill marked on the American maps as “Dong Ap Bia.” Ap Bia mountain. The local Montagnard tribes in the area called it “The Mountain of the Crouching Beast.” The Americans from the famous 101st Airborne Division had landed in the middle of the base area for the 29th North Vietnamese Army (NVA) Regiment - one of the best in the NVA - known as “The Pride of Ho Chi Minh.” It was the beginning of an operation to clear the northern A-Shau valley of the NVA and their supply base - Operation Apache Snow.
Meanwhile, the 1/506th - another Airborne battalion from the 101st - had landed about 4 kilometers south at another LZ. Over the next 11 days, two more allied battalions and hundreds of reinforcements from NVA camps across the border in Laos would join the battle for a mountain that would come to be known as “Hamburger Hill” - so named for high losses of the soldiers involved.
The battle for the summit of hill 937 (the mountain’s height in meters - also noted on the American maps) would be the one of the best-known and most costly of the Vietnam War. In the end, the Americans captured the hill and inflicted high losses on the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) soldiers they faced. The NVA also claimed victory - they had held the hill through 10 days of infantry assaults, an incredible volume of air and artillery strikes, and inflicted punishing losses on the Americans.
This game challenges the players to re-fight the Battle for Hamburger Hill. Can you, as the U.S. player, destroy the NVA, capture the hill and deny the enemy their base area? Or will the NVA player triumph and hold their ground? Get ready to re-live or re-write history in the battle for Hamburger Hill!
