"Gunboats in the Congo rules?" Topic

Hi Folks, I haven't yet seen these rules yet so was hoping the hive could tell me if there are any rules for water borne craft like dhow's, gunboats, steamers, row boats, canoes, etc.? There seems to be a huge hype over these rules, though I'm a huge The Sword And The Flame rules fan so we use The Sword in Africa, I'd like to give these a ago and would like to use my vessels in a game. Any assistance would be most appreciated.
Cheers,
JB
sgtguinness.blogspot.com

No boats, it is based on groups of 4 to 6 infantry and the odd lone animal.
A boat or train would be too powerful but a scenario could be worked around one with the model being basically very fancy terrain.

gbowen, thank you for your rapid reply. As stated I've not seen the rules yet. I hadn't realised the game scale was that small. It sounds as if boats would be limited to terrain or objectives. I guess I will stick with TSATF & TSIA.

Cheers,
JB
sgtguinness.blogspot.com

The groups are organized into 'columns' with your force having around 30 figures in total.

Congo is about civilian exploring expeditions in the pre-conquest period. As such, there's every reason small boats and canoes should feature in games as centrally as they did in many historical expeditions. Maybe Studio Tomahawk will produce an aquatic-flavoured supplement at some point that will also give all those crocodile and hippo miniatures we Darkest Africa gamers invariably possess a more central role.

As far as the level of play at which it's pitched goes, it's a unit-based game that tries to straddle the ludic gap between detailed skirmish games with a handful of individually characterised figures on each side and grand skirmish games with units composed of figures all adhering to a standard profile, conforming more to the latter format.

Figures perform actions by the unit rather than the individual figure, so actions are of the typical wargame-style move, shoot, rally etc. variety, rather than individual acts of heroic derring-do. This means that any perceived pulp flavour derives from the scenario and whatever narrative the players' imaginations impose on the proceedings.

You also need to be very marker-tolerant, because over the course of a game units can end up dragging several around the table with them.

I'll say the same thing I said on the other forum where this question was asked. It would be very easy to create a scenario with gunboats using the given game mechanics. The author of the rules already responded that they didn't include a gunboat scenario in the initial rules because they wanted to keep the game accessible to beginners, and not that many gamers have 28mm gunboats. That doesn't mean you might not see something in the future supplement or article. I don't mind the markers personally, but you can easily keep them off the table by having a few cards to the side to represent your units and place the markers there.