Hearts of Iron: Designer Preview
By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
July 2007

Our Classic Wargames have provided a wonderful platform for launching games that otherwise would never have seen daylight — and for stroking designer egos. Ego is the most destructive force in the known universe, but hopefully we've found a means by which to channel it constructively. Classic Wargames let us make the games we've always wanted to make, and not lose enormous amounts of money. And I know an awful lot about piles of money taking flight on ego-driven game projects.

And so we have Ironclads: Hearts of Iron, a game on the campaigns of Lissa and Helgoland that I've always wanted to design, but always been pretty sure would be another well of sales despair. The game is somewhat derived from Great War at Sea, especially in its operational concepts, but has a very different tactical game.

	Admiral's flag of Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, flown during the Battle of Lissa.

Fleets move on the operational map, carrying out missions. Movement is plotted, just like Great War at Sea, but there is more "lag time" between the current turn and the plotted turn — without radios, command at sea is much harder to coordinate. There is some flexibility, as reports from passing fishing vessels and merchant ships played a major role in this era (leading directly to the confrontation at Helgoland, for example). Prevailing winds have a slight effect on movement, and though every ship present in the game has a steam engine, almost all of them have auxiliary sail capability as well. Scouting by fast ships is very important; there is utterly no air power in the game.

When the fleets make contact, play moves to the Naval Tactical Map. It's the exact same map as that issued in Great War at Sea games, and it was labeled that way for this very purpose (it was also supposed to be the tactical map for Second World War at Sea, but that's another story). On the tactical map, ships move and fire in sequence, but there are a number of wrinkles. Only some ships have armor, and it is difficult to penetrate. Contrary to popular opinion, an ironclad warship is not invulnerable to gunfire and a large number of hits will weaken its armor even if none of them penetrate it — as happened to the Italian ironclads Palestro and Affondatore at Lissa, with the first exploding following a serious battering by the ship-of-the-line Kaiser and the second sinking in harbor some days later, her structure damaged by a large number of hits.

Austrian wooden ships have improvised armor protection around their engines and magazines, created in the weeks before the war from heavy chains and railroad iron. Most other wooden ships are naked, but it still takes a great deal of damage to put a warship out of action — they have not turned into eggshells since Nelson's day, and the effect of the shell gun is not quite as great as contemporary popular accounts claimed.

Damage can accumulate or can sink a ship in sudden, spectacular fashion. Fires can sink a ship, and they of course can succumb to ramming (though ramming a moving target is very, very difficult and may do more damage to your own ship). Each ship has its own hit record where damage is recorded, and shows their armor status, fuel load and so on.

Gunnery is either rifled (most ships) or smoothbore (some Austrians and a few Danes). Rifled guns have an easier time penetrating armor. Unlike the game's modern-era sisters, arcs of fire play an important role. Most ships can only fire through their broadside arcs; the few with turrets have much greater flexibility.

But what about the toys? We discovered long ago the real reason grown men buy our naval games — for the toys. Great War at Sea and Second World War at Sea have become extremely popular thanks to their detailed, one-inch-long ship pieces. For Hearts of Iron, we're moving to our larger counter size, seen in Rome at War and in the recent Great War at Sea supplement, Zeppelins. These do just fit on the Naval Tactical Map, and are one and one-third inch long and two-thirds of an inch wide. They are huge. That provides Beth Donahue a wonderful canvas for ships plus game information. There are 88 of these oversized ships, plus a set of 2/3-inch square pieces for fleets, smaller ships, leaders and some game markers.

In terms of the game's historical basis, Hearts of Iron can claim something often boasted but rarely actually delivered — serious research in archival records. Lawrence Sondhaus, now the dean of Austrian naval historians, was on my dissertation committee at Emory as one of the outside experts. On Larry's well-placed advice I excised the naval chapters from the finished work, which was supposedly about the Army's fascination with historical examples. It's not uncommon for grad students to lose focus, and the finished work is much better for keeping to its supposed topic, even if the writing is fairly atrocious academese. However, I did research the Austrian Navy's approach very thoroughly (using its new thinking as a contrast to the Army's old thinking) and wrote most of the chapters associated with it.

The Austrian armored frigate Juan d'Austria, before the battle.

This will be, as far as I know, the only game ever published on the Battle of Lissa, but that's no reason for it not to be the definitive one. The archives yielded all sorts of detail (like that extra Austrian armor), much of which I haven't seen in print anywhere. The American squadron that the Austrians expected to fight in the Adriatic is present, as is the Turkish one they hoped would intervene on their side. There are scenarios for all of the Austrian sorties, not merely the Battle of Lissa, and of course battle scenarios including the main event.

Had I really thought this through, I would have broken out the North Sea/Baltic segment into a separate game. When I first sketched out Hearts of Iron, I worked for another game company and then spent a brief period as a freelance game designer. I did not expect that a game on Helgoland would ever be printed (though why I thought one on Lissa could be, I can't rationally explain). If I wanted to do a Helgoland game, then I'd have to sneak it into the Lissa game on the rationale that the Austrian ships appear already at Lissa. And once I had the Danes in, then it was perfectly reasonable to add the Baltic and the Battle of Swinemunde between the Prussians and Danes. So when the game went on the Classic Wargames proposal list, I used the same design brief I'd written in the early 1990s and never thought to revise it. So you get Helgoland and Swinemunde, Danes and Prussians, and the fearsome Rolf Krake. Plus extra ships planned but never built, and some French warships for hypothetical scenarios based on Austrian Capt. Wilhelm von Tegetthoff's plans to break their blockade of Austrian ports during the 1859 war.

It's a wonderful package, one that does a fine job stroking my monstrous ego. As soon as Beth returns from her maternity leave, we'll wrap the last bits of this and get it off to press.

Prove Dr. Bennighof's ego right — pre-order Ironclads today!