Muster

How to Play Muster

Muster is a turn-based auto-battler played on a green felt tabletop grid. You and an AI opponent each command a force of toy soldiers, drafting units before each round and watching automated combat resolve on the board. The goal is to field the right combination of units in the right formation, adapting each round based on what survived — yours and theirs.

Each match proceeds in up to eight rounds. At the start of every round you enter the draft phase: a point budget is displayed and the unit roster appears at the bottom of the screen. Click any unit card to select it, then click a cell on your half of the grid (the left three columns) to place it there. Units have wildly different costs and roles — a Grunt costs just 1 point and acts as cheap fodder, while a Cannon costs 5 but fires across five columns and splashes damage onto the enemies directly above and below its target. Place as many units as your budget allows, anywhere on your half of the board. Right-click any placed unit to sell it back for a full refund if you change your mind. When your formation is set, click Muster! to lock it in and trigger combat.

During the auto-resolve phase, you watch rather than act. Units advance toward the nearest opponent one step at a time until it falls inside their range, then attack from where they stand — a Cannon with five columns of reach opens fire long before a Grunt has closed. Units lose HP when hit and fall over with a short tipping animation when eliminated. Health bars above each unit show the current state of the battle. Combat continues until one side's units are all eliminated, at which point the round ends and scores are tallied.

Surviving Units and Counter-Picking

Any unit left standing at the end of a round carries over to the next round and recovers half its maximum HP, capped at full. This creates a snowball incentive — a surviving Cavalry unit that rampaged through your opponent's back row and limped out on 2 HP lines up for the next round on 5, ready to do it again. The counter-pick window exists precisely to answer this: your budget refills each round (minus the cost of units you chose to keep from the last round), and you can draft entirely new units in response to what the AI held back.

This is where the real strategy in Muster lives. You are not building one formation and holding it — you are adapting every round to the specific units you face. A Pike deals bonus attack against Cavalry, so if the AI kept a Cavalry unit, your answer is a Pike. An Archer ignores Shield's absorb ability, so if the AI is stacking Shields, switch to a bow-heavy line. The longer the match runs, the more information both sides accumulate, and the more the counter-pick exchanges resemble a tactical argument rather than random chance.

Unit Roster and Special Abilities

Eight unit types give the game its strategic texture. The Grunt is pure budget — low HP and attack, but free with the D1 Drill upgrade. The Shield has the most HP of any starting unit and shrugs 1 damage off every incoming hit (never below 1 damage), making it a front-line anchor; Archers bypass this absorb, which is why Shield walls alone never hold indefinitely. The Archer fires across three columns, ignores Shield absorb, and is lightly built — prioritise placing them in the back rank. The Pike punishes Cavalry with a damage bonus and is the cheapest melee anti-cavalry answer. The Cavalry unit moves twice per combat step, closing the gap and reaching ranged units before they expect it. The Cannon fires across five columns and splashes onto the enemies directly above and below its target, turning a stacked column into a liability. The Medic never attacks; on every combat step it restores 1 HP to whichever wounded ally is lowest on health — invisible in a fast battle but decisive in a long attritional fight. The Scout costs 2 points and fires across four columns — the cheapest long reach on the board, though it hits for only 1.

The Barracks: Drill and Doctrine

Winning rounds and matches earns you Commission, a persistent currency stored in your browser. Between matches you spend it in the Barracks on two upgrade branches that permanently improve your army.

The Drill branch improves your unit roster. D1 makes Grunts free so you can flood the board with filler while saving budget for power units. D2 gives all Shields an extra 4 HP, turning them from mid-tier tanks into dominant anchors. D3 unlocks the Captain — an elite unit that buffs every adjacent ally by +1 Attack at the start of each round. A well-placed Captain in the middle of your formation effectively upgrades every surrounding unit, making the formation as a whole more dangerous than its point cost suggests.

The Doctrine branch unlocks formation mechanics. F1 adds a flanking bonus (+1 Attack) for your units fighting from the board's outermost columns — the back column you draft into, or the far column if a unit punches all the way through. F2 grants a reserve slot: once you own it, right-clicking a placed unit lifts it into reserve instead of selling it, and Deploy Reserve sets it back down on any free cell in the same draft phase. The slot empties when the round does, so never press Muster! with a unit still held back. F3 places two trench cells on the board each round; any unit occupying a trench cell at combat start gains +2 HP, rewarding careful positional play.

Each branch charges 5, 12 and 25 Commission for its three tiers, and the tiers must be bought in order. The third tier alone costs more than the first two combined, so early Commission goes further spread across both branches, and the expensive top tiers are where you finally commit to an army identity — aggressive Cannon-and-Archer firepower with Doctrine flanking, or tanky Shield-and-Medic lines with Drill upgrades — across multiple sessions.

Difficulty and Replay Value

Three difficulty settings shape how the AI opponent drafts. Skirmish drafts randomly, making it the right setting for experimenting with new unit combinations without punishment. Campaign reads your board from round two onward and drafts the answer — Pikes when you field Cavalry, Shields when you lean on Archers or Scouts, Cannons when you flood the board with Grunts. General ignores what you drafted and commits to a fixed aggressive bias instead, weighting Archers, Cavalry and Cannons above everything else. All three settings scatter their units at random across their own three columns, so what separates them is what they buy, not where they put it.

The leaderboard records your Commission balance at the end of each match. Because Commission carries across sessions and only ever drops when you spend it in the Barracks, the board rewards banking earnings across many matches rather than grinding one perfect run.