Congo at the club!

We had five guys out at the club on Tuesday and Bruce hosted his Congo game that he'll be running at Fallcon this weekend. Four groups arrive in different corners and must gain points to win. Points come from killing figures, finding the treasure, and getting it off the board. 

To find the treasure and your exit point, players needed to contact various features (figures and other thematic models such as below, generally located in treacherous terrain) to gain clues--moving into the terrain where the clues were triggered random (usually bad) events.

Some units (such as my scouts below) could evade the terrain effect, in this case, grabbing the bananas without encountering the panther.

The game ran 8 turns or until the store closed (which were both within about 30 minutes on one another as it turned out). The first few turns saw players move to acquire various clues to the treasure's location.

Then the Nazi's showed up (art imitating life?).

Then the Nazi rocket men showed up and everyone started hammer Richard's troops wth terror cards, which is a great way to have players interact without engaging in combat. The rocketmen spent a lot of time freaked out by various noises in the jungle and basically played no further meaningful role. But it cost the rest of us some initiative to keep these guys pinned down.

Chen and Terry mixed it up on the far side of the board and the cannibals appeared in the village. Chen inflicted a lot of damage which would help him in point total in the end.

By this point, I collected enough clues to figure out that the treasure was in the village. Chen helpfully whittled down the cannibals and I managed to grab the treasure. Then the long flight across the board began. Sigh.

Chen and Terry continued to fight while Terry's film crew recorded things. At this point, store closing time was approaching so all of these distractions helped me run down the clock.

I had to run off Richard's corner of the board so I raced towards his troops. There was lots of general mayhem. As things were looking bad, I intentionally entered bad terrain twice in order to try and trigger an event that I could use to my advantage. This worked out pretty well (some chaos allowed extra shots) but eventually I got run to the ground.

At this point, Terry ended up grabbing the treasure and we called the game. The point totals in the end favoured Chen (he killed an alarming number of guys!).

A great game by Bruce (Congo is fun and the scenario was a hoot. His table set-up was also amazing.