Congo: The treasure of Makoko Mbe (game 3)

I was going to write up our second game, but it was simply a reversed players version of the 1st game. Not that new or exciting. Instead this is our 3rd game (2nd mission type). We played this the next day and another nerd came down island to join us. Rob/Codsticker took up the mantle of the opposing forces, with Doug kibbitzing and offering advice. 

 

 The mission this time is to get to treasure buried in the centre of the map. Inconveniently, the opposing forces are racing you AND there are fanatical warrior guardians protecting the treasure. Which is buried/hidden. Both sides march on from different corners and need to get to the centre mound, and spend some time trying to dig up the treasure. There is a time limit. VP's are awarded for defeating enemy units, getting the treasure, and (I think) escaping with the treasure. Everyone is in the deep jungle so they need to find some clue tokens which will tell them where they need to exit the table. It's a lot to do in a short period of time.  

This time the sultanate of Zanzibar slavers (boo hiss) are facing off against the white mans expedition (partially painted....boo hiss). Having learned my lesson the day before I tried for a mix of larger worse units, and smaller elite units (high-low mix I believe they call it when applied to jets). Unlike the previous mission where there was action almost immediately, there was a lot of movement initially. 

 

 

 

 Moving into terrain requires a roll on a hazard table unless there is already a FRIENDLY unit in there, or unless you have scouts. I think we were both pretty scared of the table....and rightly so, there's some situations where nasty predators drop onto the table to give you grief. This probably slowed us down a bit though. 

 

 

 

The 'fanatical guardians' also sounded a bit fierce so we tried to shoot them off the table, and we were both trying to get the other side to do our dirty work for us. Weaken the guardians so we could swoop in and poach the treasure. Needless to say when given an opportunity to fire at the enemy vs the neutral guardians we opted for the former. 

 

Once again it was interesting to see how the elite units could seriously dish out the hurt, but were glass cannons. The white man's expedition has some crack troops with ranged weapons, but they are only 3 and 4 models...so a single loss is notable. Then you ruminate about the value of using an activation on a reduced unit. The action economy is one of the main decisions in this game. 

 

 Once the guardians were worn down we started to charge in. Unusually, if you didn't destroy them you'd be thrown back (normally the victor drives the loser off); fanatical indeed. My trained zanzibaris, with a leader, try going in again while their flank is held with covering fire from the slightly larger unit to their left flank. The sikh soldiers in the background are coming off a bit worse for wear. 

 

It's not all roses for the zanzibaris though. The trained askaris of the expedition close aggressively with their enemies and had some incredible luck, managing to vaporize them. I set up a photo to remind me as they bayonet the last one standing.  

 

 

 

 

 

Blood spatter/dead markers show where the conflict has been most intense. There has been some lulls as the lead elements managed to destroy themselves, and sometime enough activations had been focused on them that the trailing forces still took time to get into combat. 

On the right flank the expedition and slavers had been playing cat and mouse around a cluster of jungles with their larger spear armed units. But now they are driving in on the slavers. Numerous 'stress' tokens (in white) have been accrued which debuff your units. If you get more than 3 or 4 (I forget) then each additional one simply removes a model instead. The spear unit (dark because they are only partially painted) is pretty brittle, but could definitely mess up a unit of, say, 4 figures purely armed with ranged weapon. Ah yes, the one in the bottom middle. This is there the card playing with initiative rank starts getting interesting. There is a 'priority' token that gets handed back and forth when their initiative rank is tied/matches. Player holding it can decide whether to go first and hand over the token, or go second and retain. 

The expedition goes in with a hail mary charge to try and edge out the slavers. Bow armed locals don't fair well against even 2 fanatical warriors and are thrown back. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'Thank you for your service gentlemen' I cackle as I go in immediately after and destroy the defenders. The treasure is mine.....er....where is it? Start digging you fools!

 

 

 

 

 

Alas, darkness falls quickly in the deep jungle. The slavers are unable to locate the treasure, and the increased hubbub of the noctural animals and predators encourages them to leave. 

The turn limit being hit we count up points and discover the slavers have edged out the expedition by a couple of points. There was some big points to be had if they had another turn to find the treasure.  

I think the game was generally well received and Doug suggested that I should keep these minis and rules (I'm trying to thin things out these days). So that's a good sign. Not sure when CONGO will hit the table again, but I imagine that it will at some point. 

Congo: The Last Queen of Aksoum (Game 1)

 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. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congo: Forest Tribes (Foundry Figures) - part 2 (of 2)

 Continuing on my showcase of the forest tribes for CONGO (studio tomahawk). If you are interested in the 'official' pictures of minis there is a handy pdf with cards of all the units here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First up is the pygmy king (a leader required if you want a pygmy unit). He has a unit of spearmen, and archers.  I tried to use some consistent colours across the whole force as, to be honest, there is a lot of replication across the 4 armies (like everyone gets young warriors, archers, scouts, and porters). My forest tribes have blue, red, orange, turqoise.

 

 

 

 

 

The pgymies may be overpowered based on the game we played. The archers, conveniently, are 2 separate units but activate on a single card/token/thingum. Small units are SUPER brittle, but the extra mobility was pretty awesome. There is, functionally, some march blocking which allows you to slow down your opponent if you are close to them. 

 

 

 

 Speaking of small units, we have a group of 3 scouts. They have an ability to enter terrain and NOT trigger a dangerous terrain test (there's a d66 table which can include some wild animals showing up on the table). Once a piece of terrain is occupied, it won't generate a test when another unit enters (but if it gets unoccupied and then return, you need to test again)

 

 

 

 Bundukis are another fairly common unit (warriors with muskets). Muskets and rifles have similar ranges, and attack dice are more about the troop competence than weapon. The difference is that muskets inflict a 'stress' token on a unit taking fire....but then they need to reload on another fire action. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last unit to be shown is the archers. I should probably base everyone, but I'm undecided on what to use. I'll probably just wait to finish my 3rd army/force and then base everyone the same way. Though there are arguments for having slightly different basing for each force I suppose to create some additional visual elements that differentiate them (makes it harder to steal/share the units between forces though). 

 




 

Congo: Forest Tribes (Foundry Figures) - part 1 (of 2)

I decided to pull out some figures I'd previously painted (years ago) for some photos. Painted but not yet documented. The impetus to get them out was a weekend visit by Doug, and the fact I was going to force him to play some games that have been on my shelf for a while, but not yet hit the table top. 

Congo was one of these games. A local gamer said he was interested, and I saw a screaming deal on figs on TMP (many years ago) so I bought a lot of three forces. I believe most/all of these figures are foudry. The zanzibari's have previously been photographed.  

First up are the leader types. I think I'm missing one or two for the game and possibly over subscribed for one or two. I think it will be tricky to fill in the gaps, as they are pretty niche (drummers, a newspaper ma for the white mans expedition, zanzibari slaver,etc). 

 

Next up we have some young warriors, (blue shields) and warriors (with the head dressings. Missing from my stock are the cannibals....which is mostly differentiated by painting. So that may not be too hard to fill in if I want to expand. 

 

Congo! Sultanate of Zanzibar (3) - 28mm wargames foundry

The final elements in the Sultanate column are the local african hirelings. No doubt these guys are cannon fodder for the more 'valuable' troops. Also, I expect these guys desert often as the groups pass into different tribal areas and get too far from home.

 East coast Africans were in a drier area so that the shields could be solid wood. The forest tribes tend to use wicker as jungles rot everything pretty fast.

We see some basic muskets, spear troops, and those poor poor porters.



Strangely for the Zanzibari's the white robes denoted a higher socio economic class, whereas for the Africans, having a piece of colored cloth to cover your junk was an aspiration.

I could have 'dirtied' up the loin clothes, but I felt it's more visually pleasing to have crisp colors on the wargaming table.

Congo! Sultanate of Zanzibar (2) - 28mm wargames foundry

Following in the column of the Zanzibari sultanate we find some hirelings. The Baluchis (as per wargame foundry) were a somewhat hereditary warrior caste. They could come from Africa but Arabs and Indians were common as well. These guys struck me as fairly Indian in flavour, although the colouration of robes followed the zanibar theme (yellows and whites).



Once again there was some challenge making visually cohesive units. I don't think these guys suceeded, though luckily the sculpts are fairly unifying (swords/shields and extra long muskets) and the unit sufficiently different from some of the other units.

The Ruga Ruga were bandit mercenaries. They smoked drugs, wore 'fancy' clothes and acted tough. I imagine their direct spiritual successors are fairly prevalent in bush war africa of the modern era.

These guys were pretty fun to paint, and despite having individualized fashion sense, I think the unit is obvious that it belongs together.  It did take a longer time to paint for all the extra colours and the hemming and hawing about how to paint them.

Congo! Sultanate of Zanzibar (1) - 28mm wargames foundry

Leadership Team

One of our local gamers mentioned collecting a force for Congo. In one of those strange series of events, I ended up spotting a wicked deal for a copious amount of lead on TMP, and then needed to buff up an order to get free shipping so ended up ordering the rules. Neither the other local gamer or myself have made much progress past that. No longer! The Sultanate has stolen a march and woe be those fools who stand against them!

Trained Troops

 The figures are 28mm wargames foundry darkest africa range. They have a lot of character. I ended up with way too many and fobbed off the lot of africans with looted european gear (and carrying heads etc) to a buddy to return a gift of ancients. Fun stuff hiding there.

Zanzibaris

The "trained troops" have a better looking rifle; A repeater I suspect. The zanzibari's have slightly shoddier weaponry. Given the zanibari national dress was lots of white gowns it was a bit tricky to add colour and maintain 'unit' groupings. I hazard that I have succeeded.

My one clanger is the eyes are probably a bit too white, though it's less noticeable in person, on the table, at 3 feet.