In this article I will talk about the game engine behind Iron Storm, the main mechanics of this system that I have invented. Some time ago there were not so many strategic World War I games, but in the last few years there have been a number of them released. Many people interested in Iron Storm ask how is this game different from the others? I would say that, apart from the fact that the entire war can be played realistically in one session, what is different is the game system. I think the system is innovative enough that it doesn’t look too much like any other published wargame.

Games like Hannibal, Twilight Struggle, or Paths of Glory popularised a system where cards have operation points and an associated event. In those games the player in their action round chooses a card and decides whether to play it as an operation point or as an event. Well, you can forget all that when playing Iron Storm! Not only do the cards have no operation points, but when our action round comes around we don’t play just one card, we can play the whole hand if we want, card after card until we decide to stop!

The basic idea is that the cards in Iron Storm have a certain resemblance to a pool of chits, from those games where you draw tokens from a cup and see which units can be activated at that moment. Normally we will have 8 cards in our hand, and most of the cards will correspond to specific armies. Those are the units we will have fresh and available at that moment to activate during the action round, while the rest will come in subsequent draws until the deck is exhausted, shuffled, and we get all the cards back. We will also have some support cards for combat, operations, and as the war progresses, attrition cards that clog up our hand.

Let’s explain the types of cards in the deck in a little more detail:

Army cards: Each army card represents a single army unit that has its counter on the map. Army cards allow us to activate that particular army for different actions (initiating offensives, moving, recruiting, and digging trenches).

Combat cards: These cards and their use were discussed in the previous article on the combat system. Combat cards are played during offensives and have a big impact on the outcome.

Operation cards: Operation cards are similar to event cards in other games. They all have text that allows us to perform some special action that we would not otherwise be able to do. For example, initiating more powerful offensives if we meet certain conditions or increasing the level of submarine warfare to try to damage the opponent’s economy.

Attrition cards: Attrition is a rather innovative mechanic in this game that will be discussed in the next article, but for the moment I will tell you that these are cards that are useless and annoy us in our hand, and will be added to the deck as a consequence of the war effort of the different nations.

So, each time it is our turn, we will have to decide what the best thing to do is with the hand we have. We are not forced to play all the cards, so we can keep as many as we want in our hand for a later round. However, at the end of our action round, we will refill our hand to 8 cards, so the more cards we keep, the fewer new cards we draw from the deck. We must find the balance between playing aggressively, using a lot of cards and taking a lot of actions, or playing more cautiously, saving important combat cards to surprise the opponent and plan better offensives, at the cost of taking fewer actions in the action round.

Sometimes we will come across cards that we can’t currently use effectively but also don’t want to keep. For example, an army that is well positioned and entrenched in a key position and we don’t want it to move from there. In that case, we can discard any card from our hand and in return we get a resource.

Resources (black wooden cubes) represent raw materials, ammunition, fuel, food, medicine, or specialised equipment that the different sides can accumulate for a logistical or diplomatic effort at a future point in time. They are used for a variety of things during the game, including strategic and naval movements, being a requirement for some operations, and for diplomacy to attract more nations to our side (which also requires an army card matching that neutral nation).

But one of the most important things we can do with resources are Emergency Actions. During our action round we can spend 4 resources to activate any army (provided we haven’t already activated it). In a way it’s like having a wildcard in your hand that is equivalent to any army. This is very important to have more control of where we want to direct our efforts, and not depend on having the specific card in hand. An Emergency Action can reinforce a key point just as it was about to fall, close a gap in our lines, or mobilise an army to a space where we want to launch a huge offensive in the future.

As you can imagine, as the war progresses, new cards will be added to the decks, including new armies, new warring nations, and increasingly advanced weapons, aircraft, gas weapons and even tanks. These offer more opportunities to players, but can also make it increasingly hard for them to focus their plans in one specific area, especially as their deck also begins to fill with attrition cards.

There are still a lot of things to explain, but I hope you have got an idea of the kind of decisions and hand management we have in Iron Storm. Thank you very much to all of you who are supporting this project. I’m really looking forward to getting it out there, so everyone can try it out and have their opinions on the system and the way it’s implemented in a WW1 game. In the next article I will talk about attrition (which is another very important mechanic in the game), recruitment, economic warfare, and the events that will come up during the game.

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