Back in October I had a weekend of visitors and gaming. I decided to use my captive audience to test out some games I had on the bookshelf but hadn't played yet.
Studio Tomahawks CONGO was one of these. They are, largely, a pulpy darkest africa mission based game with small units.
There are about 10 different missions provided with the base game, which come in the form of 'newspaper' publications. While it's fun and looks good, the oversized loose sheets do irritate me for storage purposes. I do wish they have been included in a condensed format as well. Forces are based on points buying, and there are 4 factions/armies (white man's expedition, sultanate of zanzibar, forest tribes, and african kingdoms).
This particular mission has one side recently acquiring/excavating/discovering a treasure. The other side is trying to prevent them from leaving the table. A classic breakout scenario. Turn order and player alternation is interesting, each side selects 3 cards (from a total of 9 or so) which will given them 1-3 specific actions (move/no charge, shoot, rally/terrify, move/charge) but also a priority number. So if you really want to go early, you may choose a less optimal card (which accomplishes less). Each player flips one card at a time in 3 rounds, with higher priority going first for that round. After 3 rounds a turn is complete and end of turn stuff happens (reinforcements, some table cleanup, etc). 
The treasure had to be carried by a unit with a leader (only 1 per side in our setup) or with an auxillary porter. I spread my porters around so that it wasn't clear with unit was carrying the treasure and everyone largely split up.
Having never played with had no idea how combat and shooting would pan out, and a technical idea for movement (but not yet any intuition).
Spear armed units are able to throw their spears at short range. Muskets (med range) caused morale effects, but had to be reloaded. Bows were also med range. Jezzail muskets and modern rifles had long range.
It quickly became clear that while smaller more elite units (which had larger dice to roll to achieve successes [always on a 4+]) were more reliable they were super brittle. Large units of low competency units were solid in both soaking up hits as well as being able to get good results at times (lots of dice with 50% odds can sometimes swing nicely in your favor).
My initial build/purchase for the sultanate was a bit too elite and suffered for it. I was quite handily creamed and no invader managed to escape the territory of the defending forest tribe. I don't remember the victory point totals but it was embarrasingly not in my favour.
We talked a bit about things we learned and setup for a second game with our commands reversed (Doug taking the sultanate trying for a break out). Those pictures and results will be forth coming in the next post.
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