Muskets and Assegai is our variant of Muskets and
Tomahawks. The reason for this is twofold. First of all we had a
bit of craving to have some colonial Africa gaming but we had no real
preference for rules. Second, I had heard good things about the
Muskets and Tomahawks rules and I wanted to try them out but I didn't
have any French and Indian War figures.
Thus I adapted the rules for colonial Africa gaming.
There isn't really a whole added to the rules. All I really did was give some troops breechloaders. These were defined basically as muskets that did not need to be reloaded and cost 2 extra points. For spotting purposes, the smoke cloud would remain until the unit's next activation, but it would be automatically removed. Initially I feared they would prove too powerful, but the price really limits them. In the end weight of fire from cheaper troops prevailed every time.
Otherwise all the troop types and stats are directly from the rulebook. I simply renamed them.
Since all the forces in the scenarios are pretty small, I allowed the overall commander to act as an officer for the troops with auxiliaries trait because it was difficult to fit another officer in the rosters.
You could argue that these rules make the natives too powerful and
realistically speaking that is probably true. However, I think this
is a failing with most colonial era games -- they require inordinate
amounts of native troops who are substantially inferior to the
redcoats in every imaginable way and tend to get mowed down in
troves. Try to build player motivation with that...
I did not want a realistic portrayal of a major colonial military expedition. I wanted a fun adventure game with explorers where most of even the "colonial" troops were actually local recruits. Stanley did not travel with a battalion of redcoats. This gives some plausibility to the relative parity between troop types.
During the course of play, we tried different optional rules. They are not specifically tied to the African setting, I would probably come to the same conclusions even in the original setting.
The game is built around individual figures being able to do
different things. However, with army sizes of 50 figures or more we
found this to be extremely tedious and house ruled that the entire
unit counts as doing the same thing even if some of them as actually
unable to perform the action. Thus if someone shoots, the entire unit
counts as having shot and needs to reload etc.
In addition we started using the excellent zombie bases from Warbases. I do not want to measure movement for 50 figures individually! This did require some fudging with figure facing, formations and close combat, but overall I think it was an improvement.
We quickly found that the standard rules for the card deck easily lead to card counting when the deck is almost exhausted. Thus we adopted the random turn end rule and really liked it. Possibly because we really didn't have regular troops, which can suffer badly with the random turn length.
We did try the "overwatch" rule called Vigilance, but found that it tends to bog down gameplay. With the card activation you can take a gamble crossing open spaces. With vigilance in play you know for a fact that you'll be eating musket balls if you move so you tend to stay put.
We quickly stopped using this rule.
It is immediately evident that this game is built for light troops
skirmishing. Moving all the other troop types is painfully slow,
especially if any terrain is involved. In the first scenario I tried
to task the explorers with moving the bearers (civilians) across the
board in a variation of the standard defend mission, but they move so
painfully slow it was quickly obvious that they'd never make it across
the table before the mission ended -- regardless of enemy action.
I think the game uses too many negative modifiers for a D6 system. When shooting you are easily faced with impossible shots. This tends to favor cheap troops since you can have more dice looking for those elusive sixes that actually have any chance of doing something.
I'm not sure if it's the translation or what, but the spotting rules are confusing and illogical. At the very least more examples would have been nice. An important distinction between this game and many others is that you can see through area terrain -- which also increases the rifles' power substantially. A squad of riflemen will easily wipe out an artillery crew before they can really have any effect on the game.
Here are the roster sheets for the games we played.
P.S. The Albino Hippo was simply a native chief with the savage trait and warrior talent. The queen was the same with 3 "wounds".
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Copyright 2003-2021 Mikko Kurki-Suonio
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