In the course of several expeditions, the science of exploration has been put back many years. Eating the food has been a big issue, especially the horrible jungle food. One bold fellow (Hello Phillip!) dug into the latter with abandon after all the other players had gingerly picked out a bean and was observed shoveling a mouthful, replete with an obvious black insect aboard, into his mouth. I was helpless with laughter, pounding the floor with my fists and disturbing games all around me. Alas, after manfully chewing for what seemed like several minutes, he spat out the plastic ant. Aside from the food, we have had rampaging elephants (one stepped on Stanley’s leg, but he’s a tough old coot), pygmy poison (cured by drinking “an infusion of bark,” a vile concoction of Pepsi, beer, and stale black coffee) and a demented old woman who hurled Pythonesque insults at the column (“Take your white bottoms away!”) which fair demoralised ‘em. In another game she became enamoured of one character and had hopes of marriage! Then there were the villainous Arab slavers and their cannibal employees who scandalised the players by being polite and generous to them (“We white men must stick together against these savages”) while perpetrating all kinds of vile barbarities on the unfortunate locals. One particularly annoying player was killed by hippos - a terrible shame, that. Eventually all parties have reached Lake Albert, in rags and having lost most of their supplies. One team of players got into a marvelous dispute when one of them, who had carried half a steel boat all the way through the rainforest, casting aside loads of food and ammo to bear it, only to learn that another player had inexplicably lost the bead representing the other half. Very authentic, actually. They gave the surviving half to a village headman as a gift, which was a good move given the circumstances. There is no real enemy beyond a few pygmy archers, some irate hippos, and the elephant. The slavers can actually be helpful in a grasping, morally bankrupt sort of way. The expeditions nevertheless have lost 50% of their effective men in four to five months of marching an average of four miles per day. Lucky there ‘ain’t nobody actually trying to stop them, what? To the Mountains of the Moon: A Campaign Game An Expedition with Mr. Henry Morton Stanley, the Famous Explorer Introduction and Background Stanley's Party and Knowledge Rules Events Battle Report Historical Expedition and Bibliography Back to Table of Contents -- Courier # 90 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com