A short review of Muskets and Tomahawks

Our group will play most any game as shown by the diverse bat raps and reviews on this blog. Our latest foray is into 18^th century skirmish battles.  One of our group, Jim Wonacott scored some Indian and line soldiers.  He picked them up at the flea market at the Advance the Colors convention .

 I believe he paid 25 cents a piece for them. And a pretty decent paint jobs as you can see in the photos. So Jim had to find himself a new rule set. The rules he decided upon was Muskets and Tomahawks published by Northstar Games. 

 http://www.northstarfigures.com/prod.php?prod=4309

It has come to my attention that it is actually Studio Tomahawk's game, the people who brought you Saga. Northstar Games just have a very close relationship with each other.  I was informed by Nick of Northstar Games.  Sorry about the confusion

It is a straight forward rule set. Initiative and actions are determined by cards which seems to be what a lot of rule sets are using now. I like a card based initiative/action system as it gives the game a bit of mystery and excitement. If one is getting their tail handed to them and all you need is two or three actions in a row.  And you get those three actions. It can be a great moment in a game.

When a card for the player side and troop type is pulled they have a certain amount of actions that their units can perform. We had British Allied Indians, French Allied Indians and French Line troops. Indians could only preform one action per phase and line troops could perform two. These actions include firing, loading weapons and movement. Individuals within the unit could split actions. For example if an Indian unit had muskets and bows. The bows can fire every turn and muskets need to be reloaded. So an Indian unit would fire their bows and reload their muskets. Another neat feature about the this game is the scenario generator. It gives you a chance to have random victory conditions and some of them are brilliant.

The combat is straight forward. One uses 6 sided die to determine the hits, each miniature gets a dice. Then a saving throw  determines if the miniature goes to the Happy Hunting ground or to the Kingdom of Heaven. I will not give a turn by turn narrative of the game-play, it was a typical first run through. Half way through one realizes that is not exactly how we should have been doing that. There is one observation about the game play that I will pass on. Getting in  hand to hand fight with Indians is not best choice for a line unit. It turns ugly quickly 

We played out this game in a couple of hours. It was not a complex scenario so the time to complete the game was about right. I believe it would be a great convention game. The card based action sequence keeps players interest level high. Overall our group really enjoyed and I suspect it will show up at a local convention soon. 

As always when we play at Ted's house I show a few of the items he is working on.  He bought a few Wargames Factory AWI miniatures at Advance the Colors.  He really likes them, 

And for you Warhammer 40K fans.

As always thank you for reading



Mike