My Colonial Collection, Part 3: Central Africa

In addition to The African Wars, Chris Peers has also written a handful of interesting rulesets; I read his In the Heart of Africa decades ago when it was available on the Foundry website. I was alerted to the newer Death in the Dark Continent by Peter Dennis, the maker of Paperboys, who recently was inspired by Peers to create a new line of his beautiful paper figures. 

 

Heart of Africa is a skirmish game with a maximum of around sixty figures a side; Death in the Dark Continent has similarities but uses up to nine multi-bases per unit - perfect for Paperboys, of course. Both are focused on the era of exploration - ie, interfering European and American busybodies with, in Peers's words, "a mad obsession for lakes and the sources of rivers," and a bewildering mix of African tribes and Arabs who regarded these goings-on with bemusement and increasing alarm.

I first was introduced to this period by Larry Brom's classic The Sword and the Flame, 3rd edition, which includes a "reduced" variant called The Sword in Africa.

When I played Warhammer 40K, one of my favorite armies was the Catachan Jungle Fighters - basically WWII Australians with a touch of Vietnam movies. The 3rd-edition codexes for 40K were masterful examples of concision, compressing impressive amounts of backstory, pictures, rules and hobby ideas into 48 pages or less. Codex Catachan had a unique method of creating a jungle battlefield which I like to use even in non-40K games.

Basically, you place discrete features like hills, clearings and villages. Then you link them with trails. All the rest of the table is assumed to be jungle, and so long as you can tell where it starts there is no need to fill it with immovable tree models - just move the individual bits when figures must pass through them. There is also a useful mechanism for triggering ambushes and traps. I'll use this page to lay out the table for The Sword in Africa.

TSIA is basically a half-size variant of The Sword and the Flame - units number just ten men at maximum, with just half a dozen units a side in most scenarios. These figures (again, purchased from Ebay) are most of the available factions:

 

Left: Three dozen generic Askaris, such as those that accompanied explorers. Could also be Ruga Ruga?

Right: About forty Belgian Askaris.

Left: No idea. Tribal chiefs of some sort?

Right: About forty porters.

Left: Twenty German Schutzetruppe and two officers, though I'm not sure the African troops ever wore slouch hats.

Right: Fifty Zanzibaris.

The only faction I haven't got for this theater is, ironically, natives - Azande, Masai, etc. I'll probably proxy with Zulu.