Muskets & Tomahawks

by Derek · June 19, 2012

Reviews of of this game can be found at Mike Hobbs’ blog, The Life and Times of a Wargames Butterfly, or at Rick Jones’ Surfshack Games . Episode 88 of the Meeples and Miniatures podcast has Neil Shuck, Rich Jones and Mike Hobbs discussing the rules in depth.

I really don’t have much to add to what they’ve all said except that it’s fantastic fun and works really well for the type of game the friends I play with like. It’s scenario driven with a strong narrative element and it works really well with multiple players on each side. We’ve been playing this game a lot recently at the South East Scotland Wargames Club. There are a number of battle reports from our games on Bartosz Zynda’s Asienieboje – wargaming blog

We’ve been using the End of Turn optional rule, which ends a game turn after three event cards are drawn. This means that some units will usually not get to carry out all the actions they could expect if we were playing until all the cards were drawn. This adds an element of uncertainty, there’s a one in eight chance that any given card won’t come into play in any given turn, which some people do not like, but which suits me just fine.

At the moment we’re playing with 28mm figures but some of us are planning on building large forces using the 15/18mm French Indian Wars miniatures available from Blue Moon Manufacturing. These are available from Old Glory UK and, at 30 miniatures for just over £12 (inc p&p) offer a considerable saving over 28mm.

And here’s my starting force, 200 points of French.

Unit	Notes	Points
French Officer	Light Troop Officer, random Talent	27
12 Compagnies Franches de la Marine	Light troops used as regulars, Firing Line.	96
8 Canadian Militia	Irregular, Scouts	72
	Total	200

Compagnies Franches de la Marine: Possibly the most versatile troops in the game. A unit of 8-12 figures can be used as either regular infantry or as light infantry . They cost eight points each, same as British or French regular infantry but they can move 5” rather than 4” (their stats are otherwise identical, though they have different options). You can also use the figures as Canadian militia.