Is Nam as an wargame era dying?

Hi Folks,
I curious for peoples views. I game as part of very large gaming club. Over 100 members. Yet, only two of us have any interest in the Vietnam conflict and gaming it.
To me the period has a lot of aspects of differing forces, terrain, tactics and political motivations. All of which mean you can game in a variety of ways. Yet, it seems, the period isn't being played.
Is it because historical gaming full stop is dying out?
Is it because of the so call politics of it the period?
I am genuinely curious to find out what peoples thoughts are and if anyone sees any hope for improving things?

I was hoping then BF brought out tropic lightning etc it would spark some interest, but in the UK it is certainly safe to say the period appears dead.

Views and opinions appreciated.. Cheers

all depends on location in the uk it seems .. and scale.

I suspect that historical gaming is more or less a constant, maybe with slight growth, relative to to growth of the broader gaming market place.

Regarding politics, I tend to think that politics within the gaming community tends to matter less as the conflict or gaming subject matter fades into history. The more present the political issues in living memory, the more impact the politics has in the playing of the period. There are hiccups to this, but generally, I think this is trues.

Also, generally, I suspect that if a nation is involved in a conflict, that there is a higher frequency of interest in the resident gaming population. So the frequency of Vietnam gamers in the UK, or Mexico is probably less than that of Australia or Vietnam.

All of that aside, Vietnam is a subset of a subset even here in the States, a proxy(ish) war within the Cold War. Of my old gaming group which was heavily into 20h century mechanized warfare, only 4 of 13 members had an interest in Vietnam, 5 in Arab/Israeli wars, 6 in the NATO/WarPac, and 12 in WWII.

I'd be surprised to find that it is dying.

In my gaming group we have some people who were about to be drafted and they don't have much interest in the war, let alone anything post 1900. Those who would game it are more skirmish gamers, me included, so anything larger than a platoon doesn't get played much. I find that as the years progress from 1939 my scale of choice gets smaller, 6mm for most modern gaming if not skirmish scale. My personal interest is small skirmish, like a few minis per person, so that puts me into the spec ops end of Vietnam or patrols. Talking to buddies the impression is that Vietnam gaming is just stumbling patrols fighting unseen foes who disappear, right or wrong.

"Yet, it seems, the period isn't being played.
Is it because historical gaming full stop is dying out?"

My impression is that historical gaming is bigger than ever, judging from the huge amount of stuff now available for all sorts of periods.

"Is it because of the so call politics of it the period?"

This was only a factor in the 1970s: the generation of wargamers who were of age to be called up for Vietnam steered clear of it, particularly when there were still accusations like "warmonger", "imperialist" and even "baby killer" being floated around. It wasn't till Gen-Xers came along in the 80s and adopted the period that it really took off; being the punk rock generation, we didn't really care what names old hippies called us. Even then it was a minority pursuit. There were far more Cold War gamers gaming the Fulda Gap using micro-scale armour in the 1980s than there were Vietnam wargamers. And, frankly, I found wargaming WWIII and the end of civilization as we know it far more ghoulish than the Vietnam conflict.

And, as mentioned above, Vietnam wargaming was always a very particular sub-set of modern wargaming; one that required a lot of terrain and a large and varied amount of military hardware to cover the whole conflict. Its overall complexity means that most wargamers only play entry-level "rumbles in the jungle" and never get beyond that, which is a shame because the period has so much more to offer.

I see a growing community of modern gamers and Vietnam is starting to show up in those circles, especially figures. Usually these gamers aren't doing more than a platoon in the modern games or even fireteams. Maybe the new crowd isn't so much into company+ size games? There's the FoW crowd but the two groups don't seem to mix (just observation, absolutely no data on it).

A fair observation. There doesn't seem to be much of a tradition of wargaming large-scale modern battles in larger scales. The modern FoW crowd are a prominent exception, but most modern wargamers do platoon-level actions.  I think it is because micro armour (1/300th scale) has tended to dominate in this period. It does make me wonder, because the Roco Minitanks 1/87th range has been around since the 60s and there is no shortage of compatible model railway terrain, and there is a good range of 1/72nd scale plastic figures available now too for things like the Arab-Israeli wars etc. When I see pics on-line of modern games, they tend to be 28 mm skirmish games.

I'm a fan of 6mm and that is my scale of choice for lots of armor, 28mm is platoon or less. To my eye armor looks better in 6mm and the FoW "parking lot of tanks" I've played in didn't help. I love the look of the Battlefront modern vehicles in 15mm plastic but the look on the tabletop is not appealing. Ranges and room to maneuver are the biggest factors. I would do Vietnam in 6mm but painting the figures would be a chore; I would contemplate counters.

The fact that four manufactuers have, within the past three or four years, put their money where their mouths are and are producing extensive 28mm ranges would suggest that Vietnam as a wargaming genre is far from dead. One of those manufacturers, Rubicon, has made the considerable investment in tooling for plastic moulds. That they have continued to do so beyond initial releases, which even they said was testing the waters, suggests that there is sufficient demand to make that investment worthwhile.

So, at least on a skirmish level, it seems pretty much alive. Personally speaking, I think that given the nature of the war much of the period is best played at platoon (+) to company (-) levels.