From: "Brad Fallon" Subject: Re: Clash of Arms - Great Customer Service!!!! Jim wrote: >I made some suggestions about more future expansion of the game to include >the African campaigns as this front never experienced the stalemate of >trench warfare on a grand scale. This was based on my reading of "The Great >War in Africa" by Byron Farwell (ISBN 0-393-30564-3). Which is one of the >reasons I need more counters. The thought of WWI in the jungles and streams >of Africa is entirely too enticing. Jim, I am unfamiliar with Landships but I have played Richard Berg's Sideshow a few times solitaire. The map for Sideshow is strikingly beautiful and covers all of Tanganyka as far north as Nairobi and Lake Victoria and as far west as the border with Uganda and Ruanda-Urundi. In the south, Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia as well as the north part of Portuguese East AFrica is portrayed. There are lots of steaming jungles to the south and the to the west as well as the wide open savannah lands of the Masai Steppe. The Entente's objective is to drive the Germans out of Tanganyka, the Germans, merely to hold on and drain as many men from the western front as possible. Players add their overall Field Commander ratings to a die roll to see who gets the initiative each turn, the winner deciding whether he wants to go first or second. Players then roll for Ops Points to determine how many units can move that turn. I found the game to play well although in the early stages, the British player tends not to be too aggressive, prefering to wait for more reinforcements to arrive. Disease and attrition play a huge role in this game. Berg writes, It is virtually impossible to overstate how difficult it was to campaign in East Africa. There were diseases, bugs, bugs with diseases, bugs that ate your feet, worms, more bugs, snakes, fatigue, starvation, lions, charging rhinos, hippos, more fatigue, crocodiles and then more bugs with more diseases. Berg also states that the enviroment to combat losses were 31-1 where some units had a 90 percent loss rate from a month march. It was a war that was better fought by native Africans, than by Europeans. The Germans faired much better in this regard as they had done a lot of research into tropical disease. As per most Berg games, this game has a lot of chrome with Random events for the Konigsberg, entry of the Belgians and Portuguese, Ojo Risings, Ba-HololHolo Revolts and even an African Queen event. Until Perry does a Swampships module for Landships, Sideshow is a great alternative with a wonderful map. All the best, Brad Fallon