Upon announcement that GMT would be publishing BAYONETS AND TOMAWAWKS, several people’s initial response was “Why ? They’ve already got WILDERNESS WAR”. While that may be true, it’s not unheard of for multiple games on similar subject matter – GMT has four operational level Bulge games for instance. Each offers a different perspective on the subject matter and in the case of B&T, that is the case here. Comparisons to WILDERNESS WAR are inevitable – it is one of my all time favorite CDGs, and I think it portrays the historic period quite well with a minimum of rules overhead . So while I’ll be talking about this game, I’ll try to offer some comparisons to WW as I think fans of that game will naturally be curious about this one as well.
BAYONETS AND TOMAHAKS has cards and features a point to point map. That will be familiar to CDG fans. But upon reading the rules players will be quick to discover that this game is not a traditional CDG ; rather its probably closer to “card assisted” than pure driven by cards. Sure, you play a card each turn, but the usual OPS or event trade off is not present. The reason I say that is while a traditional CDG often keys on leaders to activate units, this one has no such limitations. Some cards have no event, I’d say about half. The others are blank in the event portion but have icons. Each card has 1-4 icons, either squares ( regular troops ) or triangles ( light troops/Indians ) . There is also no “hand” of cards per se. Each year players start by drawing two cards, holding one in reserve and discarding the other. Then each round they draw one card, decide which of the two to play, and holds the other. So hand management isn’t prevalent as in other games, nor long term forward planning. This may be appealing to some. 993
The icons on the cards each allow a player to activate one stack of that unit type – triangles can activate stacks of Indians/lights, or can activate a single such unit to Raid ( more of which below ) .
There are other twists. Events on cards happen IN ADDITION to the icons which trigger activations. Most interesting is that each round, players pick a card to play and reveal them; whoever has the card with the higher initiative ( a die symbol on the bottom ) decides who goes first in the turn. Going first allows you to act first of course. But it also allows you to hold one activation icon “in reserve” to be used after the second play take his turn. This can be crucial, in that battles are only resolved AFTER both players move in a round. The other implication of course is that players can generate back to back moves if the initiative is in their favor.
Each year ( the game starts in 1755 and goes thru 1760, with shorter scenarios as well as sudden death after each year possible ) has 9 action rounds. The year progresses somewhat seasonally. Each of the first three rounds, players use cards from a “Buildup” deck. These tend to have fewer activation icons . After round 2, players draw reinforcements from a bag. Each player has a pool of both units and chits that either grant special units, or in some cases “ no effect” that may or may not be put back in the pool for future turns. These units are then put onto the map, along with naval units that are also drawn. For the latter, the British have more naval units than the French, but they are drawn from a common pool so the exact ratio of units drawn will vary. Later in the game, the French may draw a marker which removes one of their fleets reflecting losses overseas or off map .
The reinforcement procedure is clever, simple and offers what may be a welcome departure from many CDGs. Whereas in WW players had to rely on pure luck of the draw for cards granting reinforcements, here they appear not only in a fairly historic tempo , they appear each spring, as they tended to so historically. Furthermore, players are not forced to make the choice of OPS or taking the reinforcement event, forgoing a round of doing something on map.
After the third round, the British player draws their Colonial reinforcements and places them on the map. Since they “go home” each winter, this means the first two rounds the French have some opportunity, unless the Colonials had some cozy forts to hunker down in over the winter.
Rounds 4-9 use cards from the Campaign Deck which tend to have more activation icons than the Buildup deck. 597