Monday 4 February 2013

Muskets and Tomahawks at Plymouth 2013

Every year the Berkeley Vale Wargames club head south to the Plymouth Association of Wargamers show - PAW - to take part in their Field of Glory competition. Because I could not be bothered to learn FOG V2 I decided to put on a 15mm Muskets & Tomahawks participation game instead.

I had picked up Muskets & Tomahawks (M&T) from Caliver Books at the Reading show in November together with some Indians and Militia from Peter Pig's AWI range.

The project was extremely quick from "initial purchase to first game" for me. I'd bought the figures in November and did the head swaps, Shaun from Dreamholme painted them up for Christmas while I got the terrain sorted. We had our first club game in early January.

The laser-cut buildings people 4Ground very kindly gave me their 15mm Russian log cabins and wooden fences to use in the game. These buildings are excellent – I assembled 3 of the cabins in just over an hour and because they are pre-painted then they are ready to play with straight away. They are currently producing some fantastic 25mm buildings for the FIW and I hear that they will be doing the same in 15mm shortly.

Mrs Miggins outside her cabin

The cabins can easily accommodate 6 people

The forces were all from Peter Pig's AWI range


New Plymouth Militia

Rogers Rangers

Abenaki War Party

Both forces were 200 points in M&T terms

The British had 2 Irregular Officers, 2 units of 5 Militia and 2 units of 6 Rangers and their objective was Defence. This meant that no enemy had to be within 4" of the two buildings in the centre of the table.

The Indians had 2 Sachem, and 4 units of 5 Indians and their objective was Raid, which required the two buildings in the centre of the table to be burnt down.

For the participations games I left out Officer Talents and in some games I also left so left out the side plots

Over the two days there were 7 games played with the overall honours going to the British. For me the highlight of the games was when Event 33: Weapons Cache was discovered by a unit of 3 Indians who then proceeded to take long range pot shots with their new found rifles at the fiancée of the Rangers Officer (Side Plot 11: Romance). Sadly the young lady is no longer with us.

I was pleased at how well M&T worked as a participation game. In every game the players had got a handle on the rules by the half way point of Turn 1.

I was delighted that the game was judged to be the Best Participation Game at the show as there were several other excellent participation games on offer. As I was running M&T on my own I didn't get a chance to try them out.


I must apologise for the green tinge to some of the photographs - I really should check my camera settings.

More photos can be found here at photobucket

There is an active M&T forum here