Angola! deals with just a brief portion (July 1975 through April 1976) of the decades-long Angolan civil war that began in the 1970’s with the fall of Portugal in the area as a colonial power. The civil war was fueled by the tension of the Cold War era as both the United States and Soviet Union backed different factions providing them with weapons and equipment. The war was a power struggle between two former anti-colonial guerrilla movements, including the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the turned anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) with the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (FAPLA). FAPLA and MPLA make up the Soviet-backed horses in this race while the UNITA and FNLA are Western-backed. And this is a very important aspect of the game and will reveal itself at the end of each turn as players who are losing will have to make the key choice about how much aid to accept from their allies.

I wrote a First Impressions post on the game and you can read that at the following link: https://theplayersaid.com/2022/09/20/first-impressions-angola-from-multi-man-publishing/

-Grant