STEEL SHIPS AND IRON HEARTS
This is the original set of Pre-Dreadnought Naval rules put together by Dick Larsen in 1982 and played by our group, the Olympic Wargaming league (OWLs). There are a few glitches in the rules with regard to number of dice per gun to roll. Subsequently, we added a rule, which can be seen penciled in on the play sheet. This fixed the number of roles per gun, and so you simply counted up the number of gun barrels firing, multiplied by rounds per turn and rolled that many dice. For some smaller batteries this got to be a lot of dice. The original version had one roll for each battery, however, battery wasn?t defined very well. I think we had at one time a table for how many guns in a battery which was the same as the number of rounds per turn per gun so the final effect was as follows:

Type of battery Number of Dice to roll
10" to 13" 1 die for each gun
8" to 10" 1 die for each 2 guns
4" to 8" 1 die for each 3 guns
0 (zero) Battery 1 die for each 4 guns

With this correction the rules are playable and were a lot of fun. We went through several later editions, which I hope to also post here and eventually arrive at a final version, which will fix all the problems. While the above worked well, it wasn?t detailed enough for some of us who wanted to better represent the unique characteristics of each ship. Later versions tended to add more detail such as the individual armor and gun characteristics of each ship. The rules are in jpeg format in order to include the graphics on each sheet. To print out you will have to download each individual page and print out with your graphics program. Click on each thumbnail below to get the full jpeg.




Cover Sheet Sheet 1 Sheet 2 Sheet 3
Sheet 4 Sheet 5 Ship Log Sheet Play Sheet