Bill Ramsay  - Jun 23, 2005 6:28 am (#25801 Total: 25801)  
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a 
warning to others 	 

Out of the Wrapper and on to the table at Chez Ron last night was
Richard H. Berg's latest GMT game, Men of Iron. The game includes the
battles of Falkirk, Bannockburn, Courtrai, Crécy, Poitiers and Najera.
We played Falkirk as a warmup, followed by getting started with
Bannockburn. 

The game system is similar to RHB's "turnless" game system used in his
BSO games. Units are grouped into Commands, with a leader. The leader
has an activation rating that is used to activate his Command. When the
initiative passes to a player, he gets one free activation with any one
group. The units of that group can move, fire, shock attack or rally.
When that group's activation is complete, the player can attempt to
activate a different group by rolling against the group commander's
activation rating. If they succeed, they activate that group, otherwise
the initiative passes to the other player, and they get one free
activation (followed by possible continuation as above), and so on. 

Fire combat and shock combat are pretty straightforward. For fire
combat, there are four types of missile troops - Longbows, Wooden
Crossbows, Genitors and Slingers. Longbows and Crossbows have a range of
3 hexes, while the Genitors and Slingers have a range of 1 hex. Roll a
10 sided die, add a few modifiers, and compare to the table, which has
columns for Foot and Mounted, disordered and not. Results are Disorder,
Retreat, Retire (which means they flee to their Standard), and
Eliminated. For Mounted targets, there's also an Unhorsed result (more
below on this). Shock combat consists of cross-referencing the
attacker's unit type with the defender to get a modifier, adding in the
defender's Defense modifier, any other modifiers, then rolling on a
table (Shock or Charge, depending on the type). Results are Disorder,
Retreat, Retire and/or Eliminated. There's also the possibility of
Continued Attack, which forces the attacker to move into the vacated
hex, without changing facing, and attacking all units in its Frontal
hexes. 

Falkirk is pretty much a solitaire exercise, as the Scots haven't really
got a prayer. They're outnumbered in Cavalry 10-2, and bows about 30-6.
Their pikes are in a static schiltron "square", and can't move. The nice
thing was that it gave Don and I the opportunity to learn the rules in a
fairly simple scenario. Once we figured we had it down, we moved on to
Bannockburn. 

Bannockburn seems like a very interesting battle so far. The English are
pretty much in disarray (all their pikes start disordered and
scattered), while the Scots have virtually no cavalry. Don won the toss,
so he went first, and began advancing his troops towards the scattered
and disorganized English. On his left, I was able to organize my
longbows in time to blunt an attack by Moray, while on his right, I
attempted to use Clifford with about half of the English mounted Men at
Arms to clear his bowmen. Unfortunately, I ran into a wall of Scots
arrows which succeeded in unhorsing all three of the men-at-arms units I
charged with. So.. next time I'll try to soften them up first. 

We're still in the middle of Bannockburn, and we'll finish next
Wednesday. 

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I did the original
Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt maps when RHB published these battles for
BSO Games, but had nothing else to do with the game design and/or
development. For what it's worth, Knut Grünitz did a much better job
than I.