Historicals: Oak & Iron – Interview with the Rules Designer Part 2
Oak & Iron continues to sail incredibly well on Kickstarter. This week, I had the pleasure to discuss through email the new Oak & Iron Kickstarter with Mike Tunez of Firelock Games.
For those not yet familiar with Oak & Iron, it is a naval combat game set in the age of pirates. Firelock Games set the scale of these miniatures to 1/600, and it looks very exciting. During this interview, I learned even more about what to expect when the game comes out. I hope you enjoy this interview too. If you missed part one of this interview, you can read that here.
Below I posted the email interview between myself (Jacob Stauttener) and Mike Tunez. Mike designed the rules of the games Oak & Iron and Blood & Plunder. Most of the content is straight out of the email, but I added pictures and section titles to break up the content a bit for better readability. All pictures in this post are from Firelock Games and used with their permission.
Your Kickstarter Page discusses how victory is determined by strike points. When a Fleet has more strike points than remaining ships, it will sail away to cut its loses. Can you discuss what strike points are and how they are achieved? Will players want larger fleets because of this rule?
Sure! There are three primary ways to get strike points, when your ships become distressed, when your ships are captured, and when your ships become disabled. A ship becomes distressed when it receives (usually) 5-10 points of damage. Ships become disabled when they suffer critical damage while distressed and a ship is captured when it is crew becomes shaken and it either boarded or unsupported by friendly ships. Constructing a fleet will always be a balance between tough, hard hitting ships and numbers and somewhere in the middle is usually your best best. A first rate ship of the line can be squeezed into a 100 point game, but will probably be outmaneuvered and overwhelmed by a balanced list made up of mostly rated frigates.
A lone Galleon bristling with guns. Perhaps smaller ships could swarm it.
How many ships would be in a typical Oak and Iron Fleet?
It depends on the type of gaming your playing, but I think 4-6 is what an average game will consist of.
The image of the core box shows 2 to 6 players. Would 6 players be a possibility using only what is in the core box?
Not really, but the rules for doing so are in there and we will be sure to make that clear on the final box. When playing with multiple players, each player controls their own squadron of at least two ships.
A preview image of ship movement.
I am thinking this might make for a fun participation game at conventions if it can bring 6 players to the table.
Definitely! You can probably do double that number if you have a big table with really big squadrons where each one is shared by two players.
The ship makes a turn. Another Oak and Iron preview image.
Wrapping it up…
Hopefully you enjoyed this part two of our four part Interview series about Oak & Iron. I am really looking forward to learning more about this game!
To see this interview in its entirety, be sure to visit my personal website (Must Contain Minis). We have information about Oak & Iron as well as a host of other games.
Read more about great Indy and Historical games on my site!
Aside from writing great gaming related articles, I am also working on compiling a list of all Miniature Gaming Conventions in Ontario (Canada). If you are in Ontario, this list should be of interest to you!
