"Playing Congo or using Congo rules" Topic

Multi player games are important for me because I participate in a club with a dozen plus players. I cannot see us doing 5-6 one on one games. It is too bad that creative game creators cannot consider both the club and convention situation when they design a game.

I developed an African safari adventure style game some 20 years age, when the Foundry Darkest Africa figures were first released. It had columns, and characters but not all of the useful Congo components.

link

I never found rules that worked for this.

Having read the Congo book quite closely and watched some nice Youtube videos, I now can see the difference between playing Congo and using the Congo rules. I think that it should be quite easy to apply the rules of Congo to large scenarios such as I have done in the past. Moving, shooting, melee, stress, totems, terror, and all the very innovative rules and game mechanics of Congo can be used, without reference to the "adventures" appended to the book.

It is easy to make cards using blank ones available from Amazon. Tokens and movers are available, or easily made. I wonder how many stress tokens are needed. A number equal to the original number times every two players?

I think I will start the club off with teams playing the included adventures. They can collectively play a side as a team. Maybe each member of the team runs one action phase. This way they learn to play, and create columns. After some such experience, I can devise large scenarios with each club member with his own column exploring around Africa.

if you can find a reasonable priced copy of Source of the Nile that might provide a frame work and if your explorer bands find unfriendly natives or other explorer you switch to the tactical rules and duke it out

"I wonder how many stress tokens are needed. A number equal to the original number times every two players?"

This is how we've played it when doing 4-player games; we use two sets of stress tokens.

Jim,
I love SOTN. I have a few copies, both original and Avalon Hill. Have played many times but never got out alive.

I did make a miniatures version of this. 4 Safaris starting out from different corners and following a map, with preset terrain, not completely random like the game. The players do not know what they will find, but the game master has it all mapped.

Here is a picture of the table

Here is one party. You can see the hexes. Looks a lot like a Congo column, but done in 2005.

small pigmy party

leopard men

Bob, we played Congo at flintcon and there are some local guys playing now. It seems to be a reasonable game for 4-6 players at a table.

I think it might get a little slow (as any game might with more than that at a single table). Plus I am not sure how you would handle the stress tokens.

However it might work well as a compartmentalized game i.e. sectors or tables that are connected, but not connected. 4 players on a table playing at their own pace and if a player takes his adventurers off one table he enters another. where there may be an adventure already in progress.

We used to do this with our Star Wars fleet battle to keep a lot of people going but on two different tables to keep the speed of the game from bogging down.

"It is too bad that creative game creators cannot consider both the club and convention situation when they design a game."

I personally fault both the designers of Chess and Checkers for not creating these games in a way that I can play it with at least ten people.

Geez.

Yogi, Who are those guys, I'm going to write them a letter and complain. After all they should know about wargame clubs and conventions if they're going to write rules for war games.

I think Congo works just fine with multiple players – it is no different to any game, e.g. Sharp Practice, where the initiative system requires one player to act before moving on to another. SP does it by activating Leaders/Units, Congo does it with the Card system….yes, there are times when players may be waiting for their turn, but both work!

I played in a 6 player game at Fall In 2017 and it worked well, no real long waits to have your turn – a lot depends on the gamemaster keeping things moving.