Your choices shape the past
P.A.T.H.: Vietnam — Tour of Duty
P.A.T.H. is a realistic historical role-playing game where players step into the pivotal crossroads of world history. Merging rigorous historical research and proven roleplaying mechanics, P.A.T.H. Vietnam takes you through your 365-day Tour of Duty — navigating the fog of guerrilla warfare from the summer of 1967 through TET and beyond. You can now take action with our groundbreaking narrative game based on the Vietnam War RPG PATH Vietnam.
You live one soldier’s year: 1 August 1967 to 1 August 1968, an individual replacement in Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion (Mechanized), 22nd Infantry — the Triple Deuce — 3rd Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, out of Dau Tieng Base Camp. It is not a shooter. It is a life: the long boredom and the sudden terror, the mail from home, and the small choices that turn out not to be small at all.
About the game
About P.A.T.H.: Vietnam — Tour of Duty
P.A.T.H. stands for Pivotal Actions Through History. It is a game, but it is also a learning tool and a history simulator: the dates, units, weapons, places and events are drawn from the record. You are playing on the eve of the 60th anniversary of these deployments; the men who lived this are in their late seventies and eighties now.
There is no score and no winning. The goal is to get through your tour — to survive it, and to find out who you become on the way to the Freedom Bird home. Some men come home whole, some wounded, some not at all.
It is adapted from the P.A.T.H.: Vietnam tabletop RPG, a deep, rules-complete role-playing game, and it is powered by the Year Zero Engine. Under every scene there is a real character sheet and a real dice engine, running silently. You never see a die roll; you see what it cost.
Historically grounded
Real operations on their real dates: the Michelin Rubber Plantation, the Iron Triangle, Route 26, the New Year’s night stand at Fire Support Base Burt, and Tet. Verified against the record, not invented.
A real character sheet
Year Zero Engine attributes, twelve skills, specialties, and Coolness Under Fire. Your background, education, moral code and the dream that keeps you going all change what you can do — and what the war does to you.
The men beside you
A squad of named soldiers with their own arcs, wounds, R&R and rotations. Bonds are earned slowly and cost something when they break. Nobody is safe because you like them.
The war under the war
Stress and morale, wounds and evacuation, malaria and the Monday pill, jungle rot, Agent Orange, and the things you can’t put down — which follow you home into the epilogue.
Your kit is yours
Draw it at the quartermaster, buy it at the PX truck, choose what rides on your webbing and what stays in the footlocker. Weight is real. Boots wear out. Gear only helps while you’re carrying it.
The record you keep
A journal that writes itself and that you can write in, a photo album, a medal rack, a service record, the calendar on the hooch wall, and AFVN on the radio. Proof, later, that any of it was real.
How to play
How to Play P.A.T.H.: Vietnam
Every day of your tour is four shifts — Dawn, Day, Dusk, Night. A morning event sets the tone, and then you choose how to spend your time from the action board. Pick with the mouse, a touch, or the number keys.
Actions come in two kinds:
- Major actions — the day’s real work: pull a work detail, stand a watch on the perimeter, or rest to recover. You get one major per day.
- Minor actions — the human moments: write home, sit with a squadmate, clean your weapon, mend your gear, read, take a photograph, hit the PX truck, tune the radio, work a trade. As you get seasoned, more of them open up.
Other days the war comes to you instead — a patrol, a road run, a night ambush — and that becomes the day. At dusk you sit with a man and hear his story; at night you stand a watch, then sleep, and the day’s journal entry writes itself.
1 · Build your soldier
Name, hometown, the year you were born. Then where you grew up, what you were before the Army, your moral code, and your Big Dream — the thing you mean to get home to.
2 · Live the day
Four shifts. One major action, a handful of minors. Choose what the day is for: the work, the men, or yourself. Nothing gets you all three.
3 · Go outside the wire
Patrols, road security on Route 26, night ambushes, cordon-and-search, and the multi-day battalion sweeps. It’s where a soldier learns — and where the tour costs you.
4 · Carry it
What you carry helps only while you carry it. Weight is real, rations run out, boots come apart, and your feet are a weapon system. Mend it, or draw new at the quartermaster.
5 · Answer for it
The dilemmas have no clean way through. Hold your moral code when it would be easier not to and it costs you something now; break it and it costs you later, in the epilogue.
6 · Come home — or don’t
DEROS on the Freedom Bird, an evacuation, captivity, or a name on a wall. Then the reckoning, which is its own ending and reads back everything you did.
Inside the tour
The game, as you’ll play it
Your field desk, your service record, your kit, your journal, and the war outside the wire. Click any of them to look closer.
The record
A real year, in a real unit
You fly in through Bien Hoa, hold at the 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh, pass through Cu Chi for the 25th Division’s reception and jungle school, and get trucked up to the battalion at Dau Tieng, on the Binh Duong / Tay Ninh border.
On 1 August 1967 — the day your tour starts — 3rd Brigade formally re-flagged from the 4th Infantry Division to the 25th, “Tropic Lightning.” You arrive as a replacement in exactly that turnover wave. What follows is mechanized search-and-destroy in M113s, rapid reaction, and convoy security on the Dau Tieng–Tay Ninh road.
Then New Year’s night at Fire Support Base Burt, where four enemy battalions came at the wire in the open and the tracks fought hull-down until dawn. Then Tet, and street fighting on the western edge of Saigon that looked nothing like the boonies.
