Thanks for the review. I've been getting up to speed with Song of Drums and Tomahawks, which I think uses similar game mechanics to the other Song rules. SODT is a lot of fun, but is engineered for two players, one war party of 6 to 12 figures per side. Mike Demana runs multi-player games at conventions with one war-party per player, and they work well, but he's pushing his rules past their original design parameters with lots of hands-on tweaking and micro-management during the game.
I ran an SODT 'attack the Smurf village' scenario in my basement a few weeks ago, with the designed small number of warriors on each side, but there were more than a dozen women and children in the game, whose main function was to run away or be captured. It made for a *lot* of activation dice rolls, until most of the dependents got out of the cornfield and inside the stockade.
My point is, I'm looking for a way to run bigger games, in a North American frontier setting, using the Song engine. It looks like Drums and Shakos supports several small units, 6 to 12 figures, per side. Is that so? How many figures in how many units make a good sized game? What are the practical limits? How many players can it accommodate?