From: "Andrew Walters" <andreww@farallon.com>
Subject: RE: AH Reviews R-S:Source of the Nile

Source of the Nile - 

I still have the Discovery Games version of this.  As much as I love and
will never give up board wargaming, I believe there are some types of
games, like air-to-air combat, that will be best done on computer, and
exploration & exepdition management is one of those.

Each player plays an African explorer with a pile of cash. You buy
canoes, camels, food, gifts, guns, hire bearers, guides and Askaris
(warriors), then set out to map Africa and deal with Random events.
There's a clever, but quite involved, algorhthym for determining what
type of terrain you find in each hex (erasable mapboard), and some
clever random events.  Run into natives?  Its diplomacy with gifts or
Askari's with guns, etc.  

You try to get back to England (whereever) alive, having racked up the
most points for discovery of new hexes, tribes, peaks, and cataracts,
the higher the better.  I believe there are some nice bonuses for making
a trans-African trek, or, of course, discovering the actual source of
the Nile.

With several players its essentially a simultaneous solitaire game.
Similar to Conquistador.  Except that in Conquistador the different
countries *can* shoot at each other, if they want to. In SotN you're not
likely to even see each other, but even if you do you can't shoot
anyone.  

Since the basic game structure is making decisions and then going
through the tables to see what happens, plus the bookkeeping of your
remaining food, bearers, Askari, etc, this might as well be a computer
game.  Computers are good at table lookups and book keeping.

There's a moderate amount of Chrome(tm), but in a solitaire game you
need to have a bunch to ensure replay value.

I like Conquistador and Source of the Nile.  They've got good systems,
if you like systems, which I do, and they are good historical works. But
I don't expect to play them again.