Oak & Iron – Sea Trials

By Tyler Stone

Images via Firelock Games

Stop me if this sounds familiar: reports state that an enemy fleet is forming for an impending attack. The reports are waved off; who would be audacious enough to attack a fleet in a sheltered harbor, especially when ambassadors are in peace negotiations? Even so, the attack materializes on the 7th day of the month, and confusion reigns. In the midst of the chaos, a heroic sailor mans a gun alone, while the ship burns around him. In the end, sixteen warships are left burning, capsized, or at the bottom of the harbor. Sunk along with them, is the pride of a nation.

You may have guessed that I was describing the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, but you’d be wrong. The ships that I described, burned in Chatham dockyard. The brave sailor manning his post was Scotsman Archibald Douglas. The date was June 7th, 1667 – the Dutch raid on the Medway. It is still considered the Royal Navy’s worst defeat in its home waters. These are the kinds of daring battles you can recreate with Oak & Iron. Last weekend, the crew at Firelock Games released a free, , ahead of a scheduled December release. So, let’s have a look at what makes ‘Oak & Iron’ stand out in a veritable sea of naval wargaming titles.

First, let’s address the Man’O’War in the room: Warlord Games is on track to release in October of 2019. I’ve already seen the debates over the merits of each game, and like Mr. Douglas, it’s going to come down to loyalty. For those already playing Blood & Plunder, the full Oak & Iron rulebook includes tie-in rules to connect both games. That compatibility brings us to our second point; the timeline.

[Editor note: there are other differences between O&I and Black Seas (see below). We’ll take a quick comparison check here, but we’ll also cover each system independent of the other. Our readers can then decide which system (or both) to play.]

Black Seas is set between the years 1770-1830, the height of the popular Napoleonic wars. It offers all the glory of Lord Nelson, and the fictional master Jack Aubrey (or Horatio Hornblower, if you’re some combination of grey or British).

By contrast, Oak & Iron is set a full 100 years prior, between 1660-1720. This is the era of Anglo-Dutch aggression, the Thirty Years War, and the War of Spanish Succession. It is a period of revolving naval dominance between the English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. Their wars raged in Europe, in the Caribbean, and on the far side of the world in Pacific and Indian oceans. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Firelock game without pirates. Blackbeard’s ‘Queen Anne’s Revenge’ and lawless compatriots form a fifth, Unaligned faction.

True to form, Firelock Games has written a game that packs tons of authenticity into a streamlined ruleset. The meat of the wonderfully presented rule-book clocks in at 28 pages. If you’re searching for dense, simulationist rules amid Lilian Figueroa’s beautiful layouts, Oak & Iron probably isn’t for you. If you’re looking for something you can play in an hour or less, over the kitchen table after dinner – then you’ve found your port of call.

To achieve that quick playability, the mechanics are simple but don’t sacrifice deep tactical play. Like Starwars: X-Wing, all measurements are tracked with templates. The cardboard movement templates come in varying lengths, and the end forms your turning gauge.

Each has a different angle. The further you move, the shallower the angle at the end, meaning that you cannot turn as sharply. It is an elegant way to handle the finer points of ship maneuverability. A range ruler marks off effect and weapon ranges from yardarm to cannon.

I like this approach to measurement, because no captain ever referred to distances at sea in feet or meters, but rather by what kind of weapon you could use to mess-up the other guy,
“When we were within musket-shot of them, we called out and inquired whence they came,” and so on.

Oak & Iron uses eight-sided (d8) dice, with marked faces rather than numbers. The rules inform you of the results required for a successful roll. Some mechanics call for a specific number of successes on a handful of dice, rather than hinging important moments on a single die. Once you’ve sat down at the table, there is no complicated math to keep track of. A quick reference chart for the entire game fits on an A4 sheet.

Sail settings and points of sail are similarly refined. The wind always blows in from a table edge, and the game only acknowledges 3 orientations to that wind. Like Blood & Plunder, sailing with your stern closer to the table edge means you are sailing Large. Sailing with your bow closer, means that you are sailing Windward while sailing directly at the table edge means you’re In the Wind’s Eye. A combination of your orientation to the wind, and one of three abstracted sail settings determine your ship’s speed. Firelock understands that most of us can’t tell a gallant from a royal, so they’ve simplified things down to Full Sail, Battle Sail, Minimal Sail, and Anchored.

The mechanic which most sets Oak & Iron apart from anything like it, however, is the Initiative Cards. The game launches with a full set of special Initiative Cards, and choosing a hand of 5-8 cards is part of preparing for battle. The initiative cards each have a special effect which lasts for the turn. Effects range from reducing incoming damage, to preparing to repel boarders. Each turn, the initiative card you’ve chosen affects your entire fleet. When you choose the card is where the strategy comes in to play.

To represent the difficulty of controlling large crews of men in the middle of a raging battle, you choose your initiative card a turn in advance. On your third turn, you choose the card that will be active on your fourth turn, and so on. Like the Activation Decks in Blood & Plunder, these cards are a simple mechanic that adds a lot of depth to the game. The card you choose affects every ship in your fleet, and you can only choose one card per turn. Some of the cards are even discarded after use rather than returned to hand, meaning that you can only use them once per battle.

The unfortunate side-effect of all these sleek components is that they make Oak & Iron Firelock’s first ‘proprietary’ game. You can play Blood & Plunder with a standard deck of playing cards, a handful of D10s from your last D&D session, and the tape measure from your toolbox.

The components of Oak & Iron are all unique, you can’t get them anywhere else. Luckily, everything that two players need to get through a game of Oak & Iron is available as part of the starter box.

Better still, every nationality shares the same pool of ships. You can field your Fluyt as a Dutch merchantman one day, and sail it under the Habsburg Cross of Spain the next. There is no need to choose a nationality. The templates do mean that your scale is set, and Firelock has chosen 1:600 for this game (Warlord’s Black Seas game uses 1/700 scale models). Unfortunately, my collection of 1:2400 ships from the days of WAB: Trafalgar won’t be usable for this set of rules. But, that segues nicely into my next point (funny how that works)…

The ship models are stunningly beautiful. I cannot make this clear enough, so I’ve been sure to include lots of pictures. The vessels are coming to us in 1:600 scale, and are Firelock’s first foray into plastic. The hulls are brown, and the single-piece masts and sails are in white. You don’t have to paint your ships, but Adam Horton’s beautifully rendered examples speak for themselves.

There are currently nine different ship models to enjoy, and all are available at launch. The ships come with ingenious clear acrylic bases, with reference lines marked for moving the ships, and figuring out the points of sail.

There is also an indentation for snapping in a small reference chit, with a color and number to tell your ships apart. If you somehow find yourself commanding six Sloops, you’ll have enough tokens to keep each one separate. Get to seven though, and you’re on your own.

Luckily, Oak & Iron is not meant for playing enormous sea encounters, unless you bring along some friends. The game plays best with each captain in control of a single squadron of ships. The starter itself gives you half a dozen ships, from the agile sloop to the enormous galleon. Additional ships come in packs of 2-3, with a theme. For example, you can pick up the ‘Ships of the Line’ pack and get gigantic ‘rated’ ships boasting 80 guns or more.

If the sea calls you, and you want to get your hands on these excellent models and rules ASAP, Firelock Games is still accepting late pledges . And as always, you can find Firelock Games on , as well as the I’ve been following this game since it was announced. This scale of naval wargaming has always appealed to me, and suspect that Oak & Iron will prove to be a popular game indeed. Here at NDNG, we’re hard at work on more articles covering even more details of this promising game. So, what is it that you’re most excited to see next from Oak & Iron, and the fine folks at Firelock Games??