Dress Rehearsals Congo

So after a long wait I was finally ready to give Congo a try out, the first thing I'd like to say is how elegant the whole thing feels as your transported back in time to what was a very different world.

Now the first thing I'd like to point out about Congo is there are no rules for solo play & because of how the game works is going to suffer by playing solo, just as with Pulp Alley or I'd guess any other game that card driven, half of the fun is in not known what the other guy might or might not be able to do.

Anyway I had the set ready & the cast assembled & wanted to give it a try out & see if I could work out away of going solo as I really like the idea of going off to explore the unknown of the heart of darkness, in other words the Congo.

The set above is for The Clearing of MBE scenario & pitches 70pts of the White Mans Expedition against 70pts  of the Sultanate of Zanzibar, there's a buried treasure in center of the table there are also 4 clues which are in some of the lager pieces of terrain, these give the corner of the table that any side that have then can leave by if they have the treasure.
The two columns enter the table from diagonally opposite corners, in this case the WME will enter from the bottom left & the SOZ will enter from the top right.

At the start of each turn both sides  pick 3 of 7 cards from their deck, these like the ones above are called action cards & are meant to be taken looked at & placed face down secretly, these cards allow players to do different things, like move of shoot with different units, also on these cards is a number at the top this number decides which side act first when the cards are played.

Also taken is a Totem card (first card on the left above) these give you bonus's & may be played at the start or end of when you use an action card, now I'm sure you see the problem in trying to play Congo solo, to try & over come this problem after the first turn I changed the way this works & what I did was instead of taking 3 action cards for each side I took 4 without looking at them & placed them face down so the cards were played blind, but to try & balance that a bit either side could replace one of the cards once, so each side still only got to use the 3 action cards that make up a turn, but if say in the second round of cards you got a card that only let you shoot but had no enemy to shoot at you could play another card in the hope of getting one that might suit you better.

Movement is done using the short makers, you can use just one or pick up the pace & use both but there are restrictions on when you can pick up the pace, in the pictures above a unit from the WME is entering the table & picks up the pace so I lay down the two short markers & place a model at the end of the second one, I then place the rest of the unit around him in base to base making sure non of them move beyond the first model I placed.

Again in the pictures above the unit picks up the pace but have to do so in away to move around the foliage of the terrain piece.

Shooting is very straight forward, in the pictures above a unit from the WME which has been joined by the expeditions leader wants to shoot at the Fanatical warriors who are the guardians of the treasure, so I check that there in range & have line of sight, I then get the dice for that units shooting, in this case its D8 & there are 5 of them, to this I add the a dice for the leader if he has a shooting skill which in this case is a D10, anyone from what we'll call the leaders list will always count as having the same weapon as the unit he joined, in this case muskets.
I then roll the dice, in Congo you always need a 5+ for any roll to be a success, I get two hits the 8 & the 10.

The guardians are in terrain which gives them a cover save of D8, I roll 3 D8's getting two success's so one model is removed.

 

 To get into combat all one has to do is end a movement with you picked to be the lead model to move with making base to base with an enemy model, now I want to show a few more of the game mechanics while I'm doing this, so in the first picture above I place one of the movement markers as I have to go around the blocking terrain, I'm going to pick up the pace, now as I said above there are some restrictions on when you can do this & one of them is if an enemy unit is with in the range of the movement marker after you've placed the first one.

Now as I'm going to end in combat this restriction wouldn't come into effect but I wanted to show how it works, so in the second picture I remove the bit of terrain & use the other small marker to make sure their not stopping me from picking up the pace, in the third picture you can see I now have both makers placed to take me around the terrain but I'm still not in combat.

So I play one of the totem cards which give me extra movement, forth picture to bring me into base to base.

The attacking side has 5 models in the unit & is combat D8 the defend unit has 3 models at combat D6 plus the leader who is also a D6 in combat picture two, but the defenders also have a stress token of the combat kind so are -1D in combat,picture three shows the dice both sides will roll, picture shows the result & shows the attackers have scored one hit to the defender none, remember only 5+ counts as a hit.

The chart above show me what the result means, which in this case see both sides take a stress token, the defenders lose a model & fall back,I should also point out that a unit can only ever be in combat with one unit at any time.

The last thing I'll cover is terror which you can see on the card above that has drums on it, with this card you can either remove stress tokens from you own units or make the other players unit take a terror test, to do this you pick a unit & that unit rolls a bravery test, roll the bravery D given for the unit, if you roll a 5+ nothing happens if you fail the unit takes a stress token.

That is just the basic of the game there are a lot of other thing to it but to cover it all would need a very word heavy post, so sorry if your disappointed :)

If anyone reading this has tried playing Congo solo & has come up with a good way of working the cards or has read a report of how someone done so or even has any idea's of away of doing so if you'd be so kind as to leave a comment I'd be very grateful.


That's a rap for this post, as always my thanks for dropping in & if you'd care to leave a comment it would be welcomed :)