I haven’t had much chance to play or paint anything over the last month. I’ve been away or sick or busy so it’s been a very quiet month for new games.
I did play a Darkest Africa game down at the club a few weeks back with Chris Peers’ “In the Heart of Africa” rules which I always enjoy immensely. The rules are pretty simple and harken back to the old days of wargaming where you roll a dice for every man and combat is short and deadly (none of this slowly wearing down a unit’s morale!). The only problem I have with DA games is getting the terrain balance right: if you make the terrain too open then the natives cannot get close enough before they are gunned down; too enclosed and the explorers are ambushed as they march through the jungle and before they can fire a shot.
We play around 600 points a side for an encounter game and I was playing Belgians so I took a small number of Soldiers (they don’t have to reload and are good in combat but very expensive), some heavily-armed askaris (again, don’t have to reload but crap in combat) and a couple of units of basic askaris (have to reload and are crap at combat). They were lead by a White leader with a gunbeaer (meaning he could fire twice in a round).
To top off the force, I took a gunboat as I always like using the scratch-built paddle-steamer I made a few years ago that never seems to get enough use!
The opposition were Azande and I was faced by hordes of warriors and musketeers.
In the end, the terrain seemed to be about right and I won the game fairly convincingly with only three Azande escaping. This was down to some very good shooting by the gunboat, a poor morale roll by my opponent (In the rules, as you lose figures you have to take morale checks. If you fail one check you are shaken (we use Vulture Markers to indicate this), fail another roll whilst shaken and you run) and poor movement dice rolling. The movement is random and the Azandes failed to roll high movement dice when they needed them to close, thus leaving them out in the open and vulnerable to firepower.
All in all, a very fun game and a ruleset I’d recommend. I’ll be putting a full review up on www.wargamereviews.com soon.