Good evening. You're listening to Three Moves Ahead and I'm your host, Bruce Garrick. Today I have a special guest, the designer of Hearts and Mines from Worthington Games. John Pinnisky. John, welcome to the show. Thank you, Bruce. Good to be here. So, John, you know, in talking to designers about, you know, the games about Vietnam, I haven't

ever talked to anybody who has a personal experience of Vietnam.

And I bring that up because in your playbook, the game comes with a rulebook and a playbook,

and the playbook has the scenarios in it and some descriptions of the cards

and it's led into by your introduction which says that you're interested I'll just quote

from the playbook it says my interest in America's withdrawal from Vietnam runs deep as a marine

corporal I participated in the 1975 evacuation of Saigon and Phnom Penh.

Tell me about that and how that led you to design a board game about Vietnam.

Sure.

I joined the Marines after high school in 1973 and ended up getting out in 1977.

While I was overseas in April of 1975, I was involved in the operations frequent wind and

eagle pool, and these were the evacuations of civilians from Phnom Penh and Saigon.

And interestingly enough, I just recently found out that we were eligible for awards. I often

wondered about that. So some 20-odd years later, I learned that I am eligible.

Interesting.

It was pretty tense at that particular juncture because right after the evacuations

occurred, we had, actually, my memory may not serve me properly, but within a week or two, either before or after,

the axe killings occurred on the DMZ in Korea.

And we were on hold to go in case that blew up anymore.

And then shortly thereafter that was the Kotaing incident in which the Khmer Rouge

captured the American shipmired west and Marines entered into what was the final combat

incident in the war.

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