Muskets and Assegai is a new ruleset from aptly named Studio Tomahawk , A French company. Luckily it's been translated to English, since I can't even order a beer in French let alone play a wargame.
Not that playing this wargame is harder than drinking beer and pretty much as fun.
First Impression
Muskets and Assegai is actually Studio Tomahawk's earlier effort, now translated following SAGA's big success. However, it is a completely different game and doesn't really share any mechanics with SAGA (unless you count rolling D6's).
Muskets and Assegai is presented as a staple-bound book mostly in black and white. You also get a deck of special cards required to play the game and a hard plastic case for the cards. Nice, except the cards don't fit in the box if you put card sleeves on them (well, this is pretty much universal problem).
It is very much a skirmish game, forces consist of maybe 20-60 figures, and the mechanics are based on D6. The card deck is used for activations.
In Use
The game uses a simple point system to construct opposing forces. It's not quite as streamlined as in SAGA, basically each figure has a point cost and maybe some separately costed options. Standard game sizes are 200, 400 and 600 points, while typical troopers cost 5-10 points a piece and units are 4-12 figures strong.
Your forces consist of individual officers and units of troopers. Everyone has an assigned unit type, which is important for unit activation.
The mechanics for moving, shooting and melee are pretty much what you've seen in similar games. Nothing wrong there, but nothing spectacular either. Where the game shines is the stuff it does differently.
Unit activation is based on the card deck, but with a twist I've yet to see. Every unit type for both sides has 2-4 activation cards in the deck. When your card comes up, all your units of that type get to perform one or two actions, depending on the card (regulars have 2 action cards, making their performance more, well, regular while most of the other cards are one action each).
I quite liked this variant. I doesn't bog down like the variations where every unit has their own card in the deck, each unit has multiple actions spread through the turn and it doesn't degenerate into "I'll use this card to move some useless rear echelon unit in effort to force you to commit" some other variants suffer from. It's use it or lose it...
Melee is a special consideration. Unlike moving and shooting, it's not a separate action. If you end your move in base-to-base contact with the enemy, a melee is resolved automatically. Melee is immediately played to the end -- it goes on with "pile-in" moves until one side breaks or dies. Normal play resumes only after melee is resolved. This makes melee very bloody, decisive and neatly sidesteps all those "can I shoot into melee" questions.
The other thing that makes this different is the reaction roll. In most other games you are ok until you've taken a set limit of casualties. In this game you're making a reaction (morale) roll basically every time you take casualties. The results range from complete rout (not possible without negative modifiers) to various degrees of retreating and naturally just passing with flying colors.
This mechanic makes it possible to introduce troops like the natives, who are really fearsome fighters but suffer from the proverbial glass jaw. Almost any losses will push them back, breaking their attack and forcing them to spend actions getting back into position.
There are also rules for hidden movement, spotting (no dice), artillery, boats, random events, special talents for the officers etc. In addition, the game comes with a scenario generator. The fun thing about the scenario generator is that it's not just rolling your mission randomly like in most games. Both sides roll for their mission objectives separately, meaning conflicting objectives are quite likely. In addition there is an option to use randomly determined side missions to spice things up.
It should be noted that the game is firmly in the black powder period and most weapons will have to be reloaded after shooting. Tracking spent weapons could be cumbersome in larger games.
Verdict
I've played many colonial rulesets and this is the most fun I've had with the period. It's fast, it's fun and filled with twists.
You could argue about the historical accuracy, but I liked the portrayal of the native troops. They play very differently from their more organized opponents, but individually they are roughly similarly capable. Thus you don't need 20:1 odds to give a game, 1:1 works just fine. And if you really want to field hordes of them, there are options to downgrade them to next to useless (and very cheap) troops.
One minor nitpick is the editing. The rushed production shows a bit: there are a few words in French sprinkled through the text and some things could have been spelled out a bit clearer.
P.S. Actually, it's called Muskets and Tomahawks and it's set in 18th century America (French and Indian War, American War of Independence and all that stuff).
Muskets and Assegai variation
The game was transferred to 19th century Africa with surprising ease. I used the Indians pretty much as is for the natives, emphasizing savage close combat fighters.
For the colonial expedition, I used the British list, approximating each unit type to closest equivalent. Thus the Sikhs were played as irregulars while the askari were provincials.
I costed breechloaders as rifles, they shot with musket stats but didn't have to reload. Initially I feared they would be too powerful but that wasn't really a factor.
The biggest problem actually were the bearers, who I statted out as unarmed civilians. They were just too slow to get across the board during any reasonable amount of game turns. In the original game the civilians mostly spend their time holed up in some building and don't really need to move.
Sucks!
