I have written and thought more about Richard Berg’s Men of Iron than I have any other wargame I’ve ever played. The Men of Iron tri-pack was the game that brought me fully into wargaming. It was my first hex and counter game. While not my most played game if individual plays are measured, in terms of hours invested it almost certainly is. I have a relationship with this game series is what I’m saying. When I first bought that tri-pack I didn’t have any plans to write a review of the games therein. I’ve documented many of my individual plays of certain battles and that was my plan to continue going forward – not writing up literally every play but certainly every scenario that I thought I had something to say about. However, as I play more Men of Iron, I keep thinking about what I love about the system and what frustrates me about it, and I’m increasingly tempted towards making my own version of Men of Iron. That has nudged my thoughts more in the direction of what I think is the appeal of the system and what its failings are, and at a certain point that’s basically just a review so I thought I’d put that down on a page, and once I’ve done that I might as well share them with the world.
At this outset I do want to emphasize that this is far from my final thoughts on Men of Iron. I’ve played over a dozen games, so these are far from first impressions, but I also have no plans to stop playing and many more scenarios to try, so these are more like my thoughts midway through my journey. I believe them to be sufficiently robust that they won’t change much as I play more, but if they do then I suppose I’ll have to write a new review after thirty or forty plays. With that disclaimer, let’s get this thing under way!
What is Men of Iron?
For those of you who may be new here, Men of Iron is a tactical hex and counter system for medieval battles designed by legendary (and divisive) designer Richard Berg. A battle is playable in between one and four hours with most battles being in the one-to-two-hour area. It’s relatively low counter density, with no stacking, and I would say approximately mid-weight in terms of complexity. Definitely not heavy, but fiddly enough to not quite qualify as light either. There are currently four entries in the series (more on that below) with a fifth on the way from a different designer since Berg passed away a few years ago. While Men of Iron may share some qualities with other Richard Berg systems, it is also very much its own thing. Just because you like other Berg designs doesn’t mean you will like Men of Iron, and vice versa (I for one am no fan of Great Battles of the American Civil War and have not been very tempted by Great Battles of History, two flagship Berg designs). It was my entry into hex and counter wargaming, so I certainly think its suitable for that purpose, but I also wouldn’t say it is the best introduction to this side of the hobby. It’s great if medieval battles are your thing, less so if they’re not.
My first ever time playing the system, this takes me back. The little Agincourt scenario may not be my favorite, but it was a great way to learn the system.
What’s good about it?
Lots! But there’s also just a lot to the system, Berg was not a man to do something halfway, and I don’t want to dedicate hundreds of words to each and every little mechanic in Men of Iron. For me, the strength of Men of Irons is greater than the sum of its parts, so I’m going to highlight a few specific elements that stand out to me as distinctly Men of Iron and particularly good. After that I will move on to the reason I think Men of Iron is great, and the reason I keep opening up its box and setting up one more scenario.
The weapon’s matrix
This is a simple chart that you consult every time one of your units attacks an enemy unit in close combat. You find which column the attacking unit is in, then trace your way down to the row with the defender, and there you will find a dice roll modifier. It’s super simple and allows for a very quick calculation of the initial parameters for every combat. You then consult the armor value printed on the target counter and you’re most of the way towards resolving your close combat. It’s really intuitive and as I’ve played more hex and counter wargames, I’ve found few systems that I like as much as this. It helps keep the counters from getting too cluttered while also allowing for an interesting diversity of units in the battles. It’s great.
Victory Conditions
I am obsessed with victory conditions from a narrative perspective, i.e., what does victory mean? I often care more about the story of victory than I do the balance. By my metric, Men of Iron’s victory condition is near perfection. When units are eliminated or retired their controlling player will incur Flight Points, which are tracked on a sheet separate to the game map. At the start of each player’s activations, you both roll a d10 and (temporarily) add it to your current Flight Point total. If the result is greater than your flight threshold for that battle, you lose. If it is less, you ignore the die roll entirely and keep playing. I love this because it combines an easy to track victory condition with an element of randomness that means you’re never sure when you’ll lose, only that you’re close to it. I also love it because it captures what the key condition to winning a medieval battle was: not being the side that ran away. The moment an army breaks and runs, it is over, and they have lost. Many factors can contribute to why they would retreat, but fundamentally the point of the battle is to make your enemy run away and Men of Iron brings that to the fore. It’s excellent.
The Infidel flight track, you can see the relative position of the two markers. This was for Antioch, and the roll has put the Crusaders over their threshold of 20 but kept the Turks below their threshold of 35, yielding a Turkish victory.
Continuous Attack!
When you eliminate an enemy unit in close combat, most of the time you’re going to generate a Continue Attack result. This means that the unit in question must attack again at the end of this close combat phase, and with a penalty. This is not optional. When combined with the fact that you must advance into a vacated space in close combat, this can result in your units being way out of formation after an offensive. It can also allow for decisive and crushing attacks where one unit goes on a rampage and cleans up a series of disordered enemy archers or infantry. It can create thrills and anxiety in equal measure and it’s so far outside of your control that it can sometimes feel like rather than playing Men of Iron you’re just trying to desperately hold on while the game takes you on a rollercoaster of chaos. Some people may hate the sound of that, but to me it’s both extremely entertaining and really captures the limits on control that defined much of medieval warfare. These were not drilled and disciplined professional soldiers, and they didn’t act like it.
Robert the Bruce goes berserk, racking up a Continued Attack -2 as he carves his way through the center of the English lines at Bannockburn.
The Narrative
This is the big one, the thing that always drags me back to Men of Iron. Men of Iron tells great stories. The combat results table is punishingly random – I’ve set up so many careful attacks only to roll a zero and disorder my own King’s unit, but I’ve also seen Robert the Bruce cut through three English units in one turn. Men of Iron is full of interesting decisions around where to position units, how to structure your attacks, what order to move units in, but once you’ve done all that the game dumps a massive helping of chaos into those plans and throws them back at you. You then have a chance, via the Continuation system, to activate another group of units but that is again dictated by the dice. This level of randomness will absolutely rub people the wrong way, but for me chaos is essential to historical wargaming. History is a fickle beast and there’s no way for one person to entirely predict or control its flow. Men of Iron is a game that asks you to make the best strategy you can and then slaps you with results and asks you to just deal with it. This can be incredibly frustrating at times, but at the end of each game I feel like I experienced something. This game tells stories and while that story might be one of disastrous failure it is still incredibly memorable.
And that’s just the core system! Each battle throws a new twist at you. New circumstances, special rules, optional rules to examine hypotheticals or alternative historical interpretations, and new units and leaders. All of these elements ensure that each time you set up Men of Iron you’re going to be telling another story and experiencing a different kind of history. While not every scenario is created equal, I’ve found all of them to at least be interesting and the truly great ones to be utterly compelling. I think it’s hard to convey how I can get so excited about pushing cardboard chits around a map and then screaming at a couple of d10s, but it really works for me. I’m totally engaged and invested in what happens in a game of Men of Iron and that is down to an amazing alchemy that the system has.
The concluding position of my most recent game of Bosworth. Henry VII made an amazing series of Continuation rolls and was able to seize the initiative and launch a very effective flanking movement, collapsing the Yorkist position and threatening their rallying position.
I’ve been trying to unpick exactly what that alchemy is, and I think it comes down to the game’s flow. Men of Iron doesn’t have strict turns, instead players will intermittently alternate activations. Your first activation, either of the game or when play passes back to you, is called a Free Activation and it lets you pick one Battle (the medieval term for what in other games would be a brigade or corps of troops under one leader) and activate it. They move and, if they are archers, conduct missile fire and then, once all movement is finished, you conduct melee combat. Once that is resolved, you can attempt to activate another Battle by rolling under that Battle’s leader’s continuation value. If you succeed, you repeat that process with that Battle, if you fail play passes to your opponent. There’s a little more to it than that, but that’s the gist. What’s great is that this can create a really uneven tempo to the game, where maybe on one turn you just activate one Battle but on another you activate three. It’s impossible to know how many activations you’ll get before your opponent can go and this creates an interesting thought process as you decide what to prioritize and what can be ignored for now. It also naturally allows the system to create big Moments, where you get a key activation you needed, or your opponent fails to capitalize on a successful round of close combats. It’s that interplay of total control (picking a free activation, deciding where to move) with total chaos (continuation, combat results) that makes Men of Iron’s magic work. It does mean that the system is somewhat susceptible to failure – a run of bad luck can spoil it – but given how many dice rolls you’ll make in a single game it will generally balance out in the aggregate.
What’s not so good?
Lots, if I’m honest, but not enough to make me feel anything less than love for Men of Iron. I have many nitpicks with the system, things that hold it back from being truly amazing. I want to reemphasize that none of these complaints are enough to override what I like about Men of Iron, or to stop it from being one of my all-time favorite hex and counter systems, but they are absolutely problems with the game. My nitpicks are, ranked in approximate order of annoyance:
There are too many damn DRMs. My description of the combat matrix left out that once you’ve done those two steps there’s like a dozen more potential DRMs. A modifier for if you’re shooting into the flank of a horse unit, Richard? Really? The frustration of setting up a big attack only to roll a zero is significantly amplified if you just spent two minutes counting up DRMs on that combat. It’s too much, it should be simpler.
The rule for attacking when your unit is outnumbered is needlessly confusing. A unit is supposed to make every eligible attack they can, but also each enemy unit can only be targeted by one melee attack per combat round. In a one-on-one situation, this is fine, it makes sense. But when the defenders outnumber the attackers, things get very confusing very quickly and even after many plays, I’m still not sure I entirely understand it. I can see why Shields and Swords just went with each unit makes one attack in combat, it’s much easier to parse.
The rally mechanic kind of only serves to drag the game out without necessarily making it more exciting. When a unit suffers the Retire result, they are placed next to a standard, either for their Battle or for their overall side depending on scenario, and as a Free Activation you can rally all the Retired units. While they are Retired, they each count one point towards your side’s Flight total. The problem is that bringing Retired units back into the fight is so slow – they are all Disordered and usually far from the front lines plus you’ve spent an entire activation just un-Retiring them. In my experience using the Rally action rarely changes the outcome of a battle but it absolutely can make the game longer, and that’s a real bummer. Nobody wants a game to overstay it’s welcome and the Rally mechanic risks causing a game to overstay its welcome.
Archery is too damn powerful. I’ve written about this extensively in other pieces, so I won’t repeat myself here, but archery is just too strong and as a guy who wrote a whole book on the crossbow this annoys me.
Terrain is often secondary in the scenarios. This isn’t true of every battle, but in many of them the terrain is confined to the borders of where the action will take place, or there’s only a handful of terrain hexes to consider. Woods and hills weren’t invented in the modern era and medieval battles were not just fought on flat, open plains. I want to see more terrain in my battles.
The Antioch scenario has some lovely art on the map, but that camp is completely inaccessible and the entire battle is pretty much completely fought in the open plain.
Continuation just doesn’t quite work. When Continuation fires it’s amazing, but, in most battles, it is just too unlikely. I had a game where my opponent and I swapped about a dozen activations without either of us making a single Continuation roll. This becomes a big problem in battles where you have a lot of Battles (how’s that for a sentence). Often it makes more sense to keep activating one or, at most, two Battles over and over again than it does to risk activating a Battle near the rear of your lines and hope for a Continuation to allow you to push the offensive elsewhere. I think that Continuation would have benefited from being more likely in the first instance and then suffering a much steeper decline in likelihood (by default most leaders have a Continuation rating of 2-4 and each successful Continuation inflicts a cumulative -1 penalty on all subsequent ones). While I like that Men of Iron embraces randomness, I think the balance on Continuation is kind of off and it can create some very weird game experiences as some Battles just sit in the rear and never move because it’s not worth it to risk activating them first and you never succeed on a Continuation with them. In a scenario where you only have 2-3 Battles per side this is usually less of a problem, but in the huge scenarios with 4+ Battles you can end up just not activating units for the entire game and producing these really wonky looking formations and weird narratives. I do want to reiterate that I like the Continuation system, I just think that it could use a little more development to help it truly sing.
What’s the best one?
Well hypothetical straw-man version of myself, what a loaded question. They’re obviously all great, but I know that when you have a system with four published games there is a need to rank them. I won’t be doing that. However, I will meet you halfway, fictional self, and provide a brief rundown of my thoughts on each volume (so far).
Men of Iron
The original flavor covers battles from the late-13th through the 14th and into the early-15th century (if you have the tri-pack, which includes the Agincourt scenario originally published in C3i Magazine). Of the topics covered by Men of Iron games, this is the one closest to my heart. That’s why it pains me to say that this is probably the worst entry in the series. The battles lean towards one side holding a static formation while the other player attacks them, which largely reflects the historical combat of the period but can get a bit boring by the third or fourth time you experience it. Archery is also at its most overpowered in this entry and the scenario design as a whole is just not great. It’s not bad, but it’s also not great. There are a few standout battles, like Bannockburn, that are truly phenomenal but there are also battles like Falkirk that are a bit boring. Overall, a mixed bag.
Infidel
The second entry in the series covers the battles of the Crusades. There are more large-scale battles, with maps that cover twice as much space as those in Men of Iron original flavor. The big change here is the abundance of horse archers and the extreme asymmetry they bring to the two sides. Archery has also been toned down some, which is nice. Overall, I think Infidel is a better game than original Men of Iron, but I’m also not sure if I like it more. The scenario design is more interesting, but I find the many, many horse archers to be a bit tedious at times. Riding in wave after wave of mounted troops, shooting, and then running away is just really annoying – both as the person on the receiving end and as the one resolving it. To be fair, this tactic was incredibly irritating on purpose and so in that way the game kind of reflects history – it was in part intended to provoke a break in the Crusader’s ranks. That said, I don’t know how much I enjoy doing it as a player of a game. I think my fondness for the fourteenth-century battles of original Men of Iron means that I slightly prefer that entry even if Infidel is a better game.
The enormous Arsuf scenario from Infidel (apologies for the glare, my lighting set up wasn’t great here). Infidel has several scenarios of this scale, which allows for the greater mobility of the Muslim horse archers to shine (and annoy).
Blood & Roses
Men of Iron does the Wars of the Roses! I’m honestly not very interested in the Wars of the Roses; they just don’t do anything for me. I’m not sure why. This is too bad because Blood & Roses is a clear improvement to the system. It introduces Army Activations, that let you move but not fight with your whole army and thus help to fix the problem of totally neglecting some of your Battles for an entire scenario. It also has an improved CRT that introduces a Disorder or Retreat result – something that makes close formations less punishing (in previous entries being forced to Retreat could instantly eliminate a unit and so you had to unrealistically spread out your units) and allows players a bit more choice in how to respond to a combat result. Also, the archery table is great – longbows shoot super far but are way less effective. Mechanically this is the best entry in the tri-pack, but my ambivalence towards the Wars of the Roses makes it harder for me to get very excited about any of the battles no matter how well designed they may be.
Arquebus
Arquebus brings Men of Iron to the Italian Wars of the late-15th and early-16th centuries and is the only entry (so far) not in the tri-pack. This expands upon the developments of Blood & Roses and adds systems for units being trapped in melee engagements. It also introduces combined melee/ranged units with the early development of pike and shot tactics. I think this might be my favorite entry in Men of Iron. I’m fascinated by the Italian Wars and the gradual change in tactics that happened over the decades the conflict lasted. So already it’s a bump up above Blood & Roses there. It also has some truly excellent scenario design, particularly Fornovo, which is probably the single best scenario I’ve played. I can really see the refinement that went into the system for its fourth entry. I do have some reservations, though. So far, I’ve mostly only played the small and medium sized scenarios. I think Men of Iron struggles with larger battles, for the reasons I outlined above, and Arquebus has the biggest battles of any entry. Until I’ve played all these huge battles I won’t know if my fears are justified, but it is a small reservation I have.
Look at that river! Who wouldn’t want to desperately try and march an army across it? This is such a great scenario!
Conclusion
Men of Iron is a system that is defined by an agony of choice. You always have more you want to do than you can reasonably expect to achieve. You want to activate every Battle in your army, but you almost certainly won’t be able to, so who do you prioritize? When picking enemy targets, who do you go for first? Should you push more aggressively or try and make some space so some of your units can recover from being Disordered? Each moment is filled with tension, and I find every play of Men of Iron to be an exciting and engaging narrative. It also has an addictive gambling quality, because of that one time you will successfully make all those Continuation rolls and achieve all your hopes, but that will be such a rare event you’ll continue chasing it like an addict at a slot machine. For all of its Berg-ian excess and systems that just don’t quite work, I love it to pieces, and I will continue to play it for years to come. Do I recommend it? I don’t know honestly – I love it, but you may not. Decide for yourself, I’ve got another scenario to set up.