Gorilla Warfare and Monkeying About

Pierre and I played some more Black Ops last Friday.  Following a great suggestion from Pierre, we spontaneously started a mini campaign, the background is as follows.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Ancestors came to planet Earth. Something went terribly wrong however, and these highly advanced beings, instead of spreading their great sapience to Homo Erectus, themselves regressed into primitive forms, devolving into the gorillas of our modern world.

Somewhere round about right now, space-travelling apes have come from the Ancestors' planet to seek out their Elders whom, legends say, are the depositaries of an astounding lost secret.  Imagine their surprise when they came across holiday hunters tracking and then shooting dead a silver-backed gorilla !  This was considered to be a declaration of war.  A Space-Ape craft laid waste to significant parts of inner Congo.  However as it flew over the warehouse-barracks of Colonel Mbungo, hero of the anti-French resistance (see previous Black Ops battle reports…), the vessel was hit by a shoulder-launched SAM missile and damaged.

The Space Apes, already considerably hyped up, were really peeved by this and decided to wipe out Mbungo and his men !

We played the Assault scenario, no sneaking around this time !  Pierre's Space Apes used the "Five Minutes From Now" options, with Exoskeletons and Jump Packs, and their mini-lasers firing as PDWs.  They also had a Minigun and a Rail Gun (which we gave some home brewed auto-reload). Seven Space Apes in total, of which two beamed in (HALO insertion).

For this ungentlemanly First Contact, Colonel Mbunga, played by yours truly, could rely on the usual suspects : 8 militiamen with AK47s, 8 with bolt action rifles, 2 GPMGs, 1 RPG and himself.

A great game was had by all. The Space Apes were lethal with their exoskeleton-PDW combination, skirting round cover to strafe the Congolese.  The hardy defenders, however, used their local savvy [aka. I got dead lucky with my saves].  The two Apes that had beamed in were driven back under heavy fire, and two other Space Apes were quickly taken out.  The rail gun was turning grown men into microwaved ketchup until it was KO'd by a most unlikely rifle shot, to my great joy, especially as other rifle-armed men had killed another enemy in the brush.  Hey, who needs assault rifles ?

The Space Ape Leader got into the warehouse, dozens of shots bouncing off his powerful alien armour.  A fierce combat ensued between him and Colonel Mbungo.  The heroic veteran of the anti-French resistance amazingly survived and pulled back to a new defensive position [aka ran for it]

The battle had really heated up, the Congolese had taken out four Space Apes now, which would force a morale test at the end of each turn.  The simian space invaders passed one such test, and on the fourth turn the tide of battle suddenly turned.  The Colonel's militia were killed almost to a man, and he himself heavily wounded.

The Space Apes failed their morale test at the end of the fourth turn, but with only one man standing, I felt it only fair to concede narrow defeat.

The Simians acquired two INTEL for the Campaign, but decided not to try the final battle yet.  Pierre is working on the follow up scenario, which may involve the decimated Space Apes having to drag the unconscious Mbungo back to their spaceship, just as the rest of the African militia turn up.  Yup, this is heading towards Space Ship vs Technicals….