Wooden Ships & Iron Men: The Readers Built the Reputation, Not the Reviewers

A game that earned its canon one fan-written scenario at a time, for twenty years, in the same magazine.

Quick Reference point: Last time, Fast Carriers turned out to be a game that couldn’t reproduce the war its own magazine described. Here’s its opposite number the age-of-sail classic that held up for twenty years where Fast Carriers needed a patch on arrival. Same question I asked of the carriers; a very different answer. The two meet in a third piece, cominglater this week if all goes well.

No single review made Wooden Ships & Iron Men’s reputation. Battleline’s 1974 original got a solid trade review; Avalon Hill’s 1975 relaunch got a warm but hedged one. What actually built the game’s standing was two decades of Avalon Hill’s house magazine, The General, running reader-submitted scenarios, solitaire systems, and play-balance columns on it, an accumulatyion, not a verdict per se. The record is long enough to check whether the rules actually earned that accretion, and mostly, they do.

Starting with the relaunch review, because it’s more cautious than the game’s later reputation suggests. Fire & Movement #2’s 1976 “Spectrum” piece four contributors weighing in together, suggest a magazine hedging its bets on a new AH title called the simultaneous-movement system “as near to perfection as one could possibly hope for” and rated historical accuracy and playability “good.” But play balance, “depending on the particular scenario, is bearable” , talk about damned by faint praise i.e. not good, bearable (F&M #2, p.16). Contributor Michael W. McGuire is even more careful, comparing it to SPI’s Frigate and warning readers explicitly: “there is no doubt in my mind that Wooden Ships & Iron Men is the finest board wargame simulation of ‘Fighting Ships in the Age of Sail,’ [but] ‘best’ isn’t necessarily ‘best for you’” (F&M #2, p.18). That’s a contemporary witness recommending the game while declining to call it beyond argument ,a real distance from the “MUST OWN” verdict the game would carry decades later.

The reputation is built on player polls, not a review. Avalon Hill ran its own “RBG” (Reader’s Buyer’s Guide) rating system, and in 1976 the game’s first full year under the AH banner Wooden Ships & Iron Men entered the survey as “the 26th game under analysis” and immediately shot to the top: it beat Blitzkrieg for Play Balance by .18, beat 1914 for Realism by .10, and beat Third Reich for Excitement Level by .07, while placing 3rd and 4th for Overall Value and Completeness of Rules (General 13.1, p.34).

AH’s own writeup calls the play-balance result “a big surprise,” since “we made no attempt to balance many of the historical scenarios” crediting the strong showing to the game’s Design Your Own Scenarios system, which let players build balanced mythical engagements even when the historical ones weren’t.

Now those results tell a clear story for all of us, the survey wasn’t rating a fixed product, it was rating a system players could already reshape to their own satisfaction. The game’s one weak spot in that same survey was Ease of Understanding, where it placed a middling 14th the rules-complexity complaint that runs through every witness from all the magazine archives, contemporary and retrospective alike, without ever seriously denting the game’s standing. Which to my mind these days with just 12 pages of rules I find hard to appreciate. I ad a friend teach me this game. It took 5-10 minutes. So this is an odd result.

What follows in The General over the next twenty-plus years is the reputation being built, article by article, almost entirely by people who already loved the game enough to do what wargamers do – unpaid extra work tweaking building sceanrios and campaigns. In 1976, Robert D. Harmon filled a historical gap the base scenarios skipped: the 1790s French Revolutionary Wars with new scenarios built on the existing rules (General 13.2, p.6).

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In 1979, Michael Turner proposed pirate scenarios (General 17.6, p.15). In 1989, Thomas M. Kane extended the system to Chinese vessels ! (General 27.2, p.43). That same year, Mark Hunter published a full solitaire system for the game (General 27.6, p.51) and it wasn’t just published, it won: The General’s readers voted it “Best Overall” article of that entire volume, the magazine confirming the award four issues later (General 28.6, p.26). Fifteen years after the game’s release, its own fan base was still ranking new work built on it above everything else the magazine ran that year.

Add a 1982 piece arguing the game is uniquely suited to play-by-mail because its simultaneous movement compresses naturally into a single mailed exchange (General 18.3, p.37), tournament listings at HMGS conventions running WS&IM demos into the early ’80s (General 21.5, p.53), and AvalonCon tournament brackets still fielding it in 1994 and 1998, by then alongside a PC adaptation (General 29.1, p.66; General 32.2, p.34) and you have a genuinely unbroken record of active play and active writing spanning at least a quarter century. That’s what we call a classic. It is a game that kept giving people reasons to write about it.

Does the design earn that?

The most useful adjudication in the magazine rack is a direct, contemporary, mechanics-level comparison: Fire & Movement #13 (1978) put Wooden Ships side by side with SPI’s Frigate and delivered, testable verdict: “Combat is very realistic in Wooden Ships, while movement… [is] very realistic in Frigate” (F&M #13, p.49–51). That’s precisely the shape the later record confirms. Nobody in these magazines, not The General’s own contributors, not the outside critics ever tries to fix Wooden Ships’ movement system. Everybody adds scenarios, because it works well enough and is playable to boot.

Twenty years of fan output aimed entirely at the side of the game F&M #13 had already identified as its strength, and left the side it flagged as comparatively weaker alone.

That said, the game’s rules-level critics are worth taking seriously rather than waving off, because their complaints are specific. Phoenix #34’s Doug Davies a peer reviewer working the rulebook directly against Battleline’s own Beat to Quarters notes there’s no way to fire bow or stern chasers separately, no way to fire a multi-decker’s gun-decks independently, and that “the scale of Wooden Ships and Iron Men is cutely concealed” (Phoenix #34, p.29). He’s right about that last point. The rulebook’s own Introduction never states a hex-to-distance scale, so Davies reverse-engineers one from ship-length assumptions and lands on roughly 125 feet per hex about 42 yards.

Jim’s 2010 “Design Characteristics” summary, drawn from Avalon Hill’s box copy rather than the rules text itself, states flatly: “Map Scale: 100 yards per hex” (Jim, Tahgc Wooden Ships Iron Men 1975). Those two figures don’t agree, and nothing in the magazines I own reconciles them.  So its a guess at best. Avalon Hill’s marketing copy stated one anyway. Whichever number is right, Davies’s complaint that the rules leave you to hunt for it stands confirmed by its absence from the text I could find.

Jim’s retrospective is the outlier witness here, and not because he disagrees with anyone. He owned the game, calls it a “long-time favorite among my circle of regular wargaming opponents,” and admits he “may have only played one or two scenarios” himself a personal gap he attributes to his own preference for carrier games and his dislike of record-keeping, not to any flaw in the design.

He explicitly places his own ambivalence in the minority: “my personal ambivalence towards the game seems to put me into the minority when it comes to other players who generally like ‘blue water’ games.” He closes by citing the game’s BoardGameGeek rating of 6.94 as evidence the reputation had held thirty-five years on (Jim, Tahgc Wooden Ships Iron Men 1975). Unlike Fast Carriers’ retrospective treatment, there’s no revisionism here as the modern witness ratifies the record The General spent two decades building rather than complicating it.

Wooden Ships & Iron Men’s canon wasn’t handed down by critics, it was built by a community. The rules were specifically engineered to let playerskeep building.  The game rightly focused on the combat system. It just worked right. Standing still against the strongest contemporary critique and with the strongest contemporary praise are both aimed at the same, target: the combat system, not the movement system everyone quietly agreed was the weaker portion, but playable. This for me is another sign of a great system or rule set. When a community rallie to keep ‘going’ with it. Reminds me of Jim  Days current series – Panzer & MBT, a healthy community of expansionists exists for those games.

Sources used

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Appendix — Jim’s original review, in full

The retrospective witness this piece is built around. Reproduced in full, with respect, from Map & Counters by Jim — 2010-03-01. Original: https://mapandcounters.blogspot.com/2010/03/tahgc-wooden-ships-iron-men-1975.html

Tahgc Wooden Ships Iron Men 1975

WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN is a tactical simulation of naval combat during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. The game — which uses a multi-staged, simultaneous movement and combat system — was designed by S. Craig Taylor and originally published by Battleline Publications. However, after Battleline closed its doors, the game received some additional refinement at the hands of its original designer and was reissued by The Avalon Hill Game Company (TAHGC) in 1975.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

On 21 October, 1805, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson led a British fleet of twenty-seven ships of the line and four frigates against a combined French-Spanish fleet, under Admiral Villeneuve, of some thirty-three sails of the line and eight frigates at Trafalgar. Nelson divided his smaller fleet into two lines of battle and then, in a surprising break with the naval tactics of the day, struck the French and Spanish line at right angles completely disrupting the enemy formation. Although Nelson — whose flag ship, the Victory, was at the head of one of the British lines — was mortally wounded, the enemy fleet was virtually destroyed. Twenty enemy vessels struck their colors, the Spanish admiral was killed, and Admiral Villeneuve was himself captured during the action. The destruction of the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar did not come without cost. Over 1,500 English seamen and marines were killed or wounded; French and Spanish losses, not surprisingly, were much greater; with some estimates placing them as high as 14,000 killed, wounded, and captured. However, England’s lop-sided victory was largely offset, at least in the eyes of the British public, by the loss of England’s greatest naval commander. Nelson’s death was a terrible, if temporary, blow both to the British navy and to national morale. Nonetheless his triumph at Trafalgar ended any prospect of a French invasion of the British Isles, and guaranteed British naval supremacy for the next one hundred years.

DESCRIPTION

WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN is a tactical simulation of naval warfare during the period 1776 to 1815. The game uses a simultaneous movement and combat system to represent the unique character of combat during the ‘Age of Sail’. The two piece hexagonal grid game map is a surprisingly eye-catching, multi-toned blue rendition of a generic patch of ocean. The counters represent individual ships and range in size from the powerful 74 gun ships-of-the-line to the much smaller gunboats and merchantmen of the era. In addition, each counter carries three numerical values: the ship’s turning ability; its ‘battle sail’ speed; and its ‘full sail’ speed. Interestingly, despite the fact that the designer uses a number of novel game concepts in order to bring his simulation of sail-powered ship-to-ship combat to life, learning the game is actually comparatively painless.

The rules to WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN are offered in both a ‘Basic’ and an ‘Advanced’ version. However, because the ‘Basic’ rules are intended primarily as a way to introduce the essential concepts of the game system, this description will mainly focus on the ‘Advanced’ version of the game. Moreover, it should be noted that before either version of the game can actually start, all players must prepare a ship’s log sheet noting all information pertinent to the game for each vessel that they control. Once this preparatory step is out of the way, regular action can begin. The game is played in turns, and each game turn represents approximately three minutes of real time.

A single game turn is divided into a sequence of rigidly ordered but simultaneous player actions. This sequence of player actions proceeds as follows: Wind Phase; Unfouling Phase; Movement Notation Phase; Movement Execution Phase; Grappling and Ungrappling Phase; Boarding Preparation Phase; Combat Phase; Melee Phase; Load Phase; and Full Sail Phase. Unlike most hex and counter game systems, the vast majority of the ship counters in WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN straddle two adjacent hexes, and the speed and scope of movement for individual ships is based on a variety of different factors; these can include: a ship’s draft (how much water it draws), any damage sustained, volume of sail, and the direction (gauge) and speed (velocity) of the wind during a particular game turn. Players will quickly discover, for example, the tremendous advantage conferred by having the right amount of sail (battle versus full), and of having the wind with them, rather than against them.

Combat in WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN, as the earlier game turn description should suggest, will take one of two basic forms: fire (whether shot, double shot, grape shot, or chain) and melee (crew versus crew). In the case of fire attacks, the type of gun loading that a player selects will be based on the expected range between the opposing vessels; and whether he is seeking to bring down an enemy’s rigging, or, alternatively, is firing to inflict damage to the enemy ship’s hull and/or crew. Not surprisingly, allowing one’s vessel to receive fire from the stern (the dreaded ‘rake’), as was the case historically, is lethal. In the case of ‘melee’ attacks, these crew-versus-crew actions occur during boarding. This brings us to another interesting aspect of the game: the clever but reasonable way in which the designer has woven ‘morale’ into the various elements of the simulation. Each ship’s crew will begin the game rated for ‘morale’; hence, each crew compliment will be classified as elite, crack, average, green, or poor. What this means is that, while ship size is important, crew quality is at least as important, if not more so, when it comes to virtually every element of the play of the game. In fact, the signal advantage of almost always having a better quality crew than his opponent is the British player’s main ‘ace in the hole’; particularly, when it comes to fire effectiveness and melee combat. The ultimate object of ship-to-ship combat, of course, is to either sink or capture the enemy vessel. However, an intervening step in this process will virtually always be the infliction of damage on the opposing player’s ship or ships. Damage, as it occurs, is recorded on the affected ship’s log sheet, and will take one of three basic forms: hull damage, rigging damage, or crew casualties.

The victory conditions in WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN vary depending on the number of ships involved and the type of action being simulated. In most ship-to-ship actions, a player wins when the other side either surrenders (strikes his colors) or is sunk. In multi-ship battles, the opposing players receive ‘victory’ points for any enemy vessels sunk or captured; the player with the greatest number of victory points at the end of the action wins. It is also possible for an action to end in a draw.

WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN offers players twenty-three different scenarios beginning with the American Revolution and ending with the Napoleonic Wars. These scenarios range from simple ship-to-ship engagements to complex, multi-ship naval battles. In virtually all cases, the scenarios are open-ended. That is: the opposing players blast away at each other until one or the other wins, or until a draw becomes obvious. To show the breadth of the different types of naval actions covered in the game, the scenarios have all been listed; they are: Scenario 1, Valcour Island, October 11, 1776; Scenario 2, Ranger vs. Drake, May 2, 1776; Scenario 3, Battle of Ushant, July 27, 1778; Scenario 4, Battle of Flamborough Head, September 23, 1779; Scenario 5, Arbuthnot and Des Touches, March 16, 1781; Scenario 6, The Battle of the Chesapeake, September 5, 1781; ‘Campaign Game’ Scenario 7A, Suffren and Hughes (same opponents in all Scenario 7 actions), February 17, 1782; Scenario 7B, April 12, 1782; Scenario 7C, July 6, 1782; Scenario 7D, September 3, 1782; Scenario 7E, June 30, 1783; Scenario 8, Battle of the Saintes, April 12, 1782; Scenario 9, Nymphe vs. Cleopatre, June 17, 1793; Scenario 10, Mars vs. Hercule, April 21, 1798; Scenario 11, Battle of the Nile, August 1, 1798; Scenario 12, Ambuscade vs. Baionnaise, December 14, 1798; Scenario 13, Constellation vs. Insurgent, February 5, 1799; Scenario 14, Constellation vs. Vengeance, February 1, 1800; Scenario 15, Trafalgar, October 21, 1805; Scenario 16, The Battle of Lissa, March 13, 1811; Scenario 17, Constitution vs. Guerriere, August 19, 1812; Scenario 18, United States vs. Macedonian, October 25, 1812; Scenario 19, Constitution vs. Java, December 29, 1812; Scenario 20, Chesapeake vs. Shannon, June 1, 1813; Scenario 21, Battle of lake Erie, September 10, 1813; Scenario 22, Wasp vs. Reindeer, June 28, 1814; and Scenario 23, Constitution vs. Cyane and Levant, February 20, 1815. It should be noted that most of the game’s scenarios can easily be played on a one-on-one basis; however, some of the larger actions — Trafalgar, for example, calls for a total of sixty vessels — are best played by teams. In addition, along with the regular historical engagements offered with the game, the designer also includes instructions so that players may design their own scenarios. Finally, for those players who want to increase realism at the expense of playability, the game also includes one-and-a-half pages of ‘optional’ rules that cover everything from Timed Moves to Copper Bottomed hulls.

A PERSONAL OBSERVATION

In the end, the game design of WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN, is much more detailed and richly-textured than this short description might suggest. Almost every aspect of naval combat that took place during the ‘Age of Sail’ is at least touched upon in this game. Thus, for those players (like me) who are fans of ‘lucky’ Jack Aubrey, or of the Hornblower series of novels, suffice to say that if you encountered a particular type of sea-going action in one of Patrick O’Brian’s or C.S. Forester’s many fine books, then you will probably be able to duplicate that action on the WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN game map. Nonetheless, despite my fondness for Aubrey and Hornblower, and despite the fact that WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN was a long-time favorite among my circle of regular wargaming opponents, I personally never really invested much time in the game. I think, in fact, that I may have only played one or two scenarios in all the time that I’ve owned WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN. In retrospect, given my broad-based tastes in a variety of different simulation topics, this lapse is a little hard to explain. I just don’t know why I never played the game more frequently, except perhaps that I have always had a preference for carrier operations when it comes to naval games; that, and I didn’t then, and still don’t care much for record-keeping. Still, my personal ambivalence towards the game seems to put me into the minority when it comes to other players who generally like ‘blue water’ games. In any case, whatever my personal feelings, I have to admit that WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN certainly appears to deliver in both the excitement and historical ‘chrome’ department. S. Craig Taylor seems to have done a superb job of creating a realistic, but not overly cumbersome simultaneous movement-action system. Moreover, the game — at least, so its many fans tell me — just plays well, time after time. This challenging, but manageable mix of action, ‘fog of war’, and period ‘feel’ probably accounts for why, even after thirty-five years, the game still remains surprisingly popular with a large number of enthusiastic players and still shows up at major tournament events. As proof of this, by the way, WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN currently enjoys an impressive ‘Geek’ rating of 6.94 over at http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/237/wooden-ships-iron-men. Thus, for this and the other reasons that I have enumerated, I believe that this game would probably make a very good choice for the novice or casual gamer (assuming that they don’t mind keeping a few written notes as the game progresses), but is probably a MUST OWN for anyone with a genuine interest in naval combat during the ‘Age of square-rigged Fighting Ships’.

Design Characteristics:

Time Scale: 3 minutes per game turn Map Scale: 100 yards per hex Unit Size: individual ships Unit Types: ship-of-the-line, frigate/corvette, brig/sloop/schooner, gondola/galley/radeau, gunboat, privateer, merchantman, fireship, bomb ketch, and information counters Number of Players: two Complexity: average Solitaire Suitability: below average Average Playing Time: 2-10 + hours (depending on scenario and number of ships involved in the action)

Game Components: One two-piece 22” x 28” hard-backed hexagonal grid Map Board 40 ½” cardboard Counters 135 ½” x 1” oversized cardboard ‘ship’ Counters One 8½” x 11” WOODEN SHIPS & IRON MEN Rules Booklet (with Scenario Instructions, Critical Hit Table, and various ‘Basic’ Game Combat Tables incorporated) One 8½” x 11” back-printed ‘Advanced’ Game Tables (with Hit Determination, Hit, Wind Effects, Melee, Fouled Rigging, Grappling, and Critical Hit Tables incorporated) One 8½” x 11” pad of Ship’s Log Sheets One six-sided Die One 5½” x 6½” Avalon Hill Customer Reply Card One 11¼” x 14½” x 1¼” flat cardboard Game Box