Oak & Iron Tabletop Simulator Review and “How To” Basics

Tabletop Simulator is the leading virtual tabletop gaming application.   The app has literally tens of thousands of custom games available on its platform.  You can play anything from simple games like checkers or chess to complex RPGs and wargames.    Firelock Games has joined the virtual tabletop community developed Workshop module that adds the Oak & Iron game to Tabletop Simulator. 

The Oak & Iron Tabletop Simulator game is a FREE module available for download on Steam.  It contains all of the basic ships and components available in the original Core Rules boxed set.

How to Get the Oak & Iron Game for Tabletop Simulator

Purchase and download Tabletop Simulator

Tabletop Simulator is a software app available for purchase on Steam. A single copy of the game is required per player.  You can purchase the game in single or 4-pack sets.

Get Tabletop Simulator from Steam

Download the FREE Oak & Iron Workshop Module

Once you have a copy of Tabletop Simulator you will need to download a “Workshop” module that is the addon to the software for Oak & Iron.

• Open the Oak & Iron Workshop Module for Tabletop Simulator
• Click the “Subscribe” button to download the module

Tabletop Simulator System Requirements

How To Play Oak & Iron on Tabletop Simulator

Playing the game of Oak and Iron in Tabletop Simulator is nearly identical to the standard tabletop board game.  All of the miniatures, tokens, and cards should look extremely familiar.  If you’ve not played the miniatures game in person I recommend you first read the did you know PDF rulebook for the game.

Getting Started with Tabletop Simulator

I’m not going to go into the initial setup and configuration or core components of how to use Tabletop Simulator. If you’d like more information on those items you can check out their Knowledge Base and help guide.

When you open Tabletop Simulator you can “Create Game” and select the “Oak & Iron Starter Set” button under the “Workshop” section. If you are playing with another player you can click “Join Game” and follow the steps to join an existing game.

Basic Controls and Keyboard Commands

The following are the top-used and most important commands for the game.

Mouse controls

• To pan your camera around, press and hold the left mouse button while moving the mouse
• Scrolling the mouse wheel will Zoom in and out
• To rotate your view hold the right mouse button anywhere on the table (not on an object)
• To temporarily zoom in quickly where your mouse is pointing, press the middle mouse button. Press it again to zoom back out.
• Clicking once on a stack of cards will pick up the top card. Long pressing the left click will highlight and select the entire stack of cards.
• You can click an open table location and drag/draw a square around multiple objects to select them all at once. This is useful for things like selecting the dice to roll.

Keyboard controls

• W, A, S, D = Like most 1st Person Shooters you can use the W-A-S-D keys to pan the camera around the table.
• Q, E = Rotate the currently selected object left or right. This is super useful for rotating your ships, movement tools, and range ruler.
• Spacebar = Resets the camera to the starting position.
• ALT = This will zoom in to the current object the mouse is hovering over. This is useful for reading card text.
• Z = This will zoom the camera into the mouse pointer area. Press Z again to zoom back out.
• F = Flip an object. Useful for your Initiative cards
• R = Roll. Highlight the dice you want and hit R to roll.
• U = Place Under. This is helpful for putting ships under tokens or vice versa.
• P = Toggles the camera between 3rd Person / 1st Person / Top-down. Top-down mode can be helpful during the movement phase of the game.
• CTRL+C, CTRL+P = You can copy and paste the currently selected object(s). This is useful for cloning things like dice or ships, stat cards & tokens during the initial game setup.
• TAB = TAB will drop a temporary arrow indicator on the map that will auto-fade away. This is useful for teaching other players or signaling them with a visual cue.
• G = Groups the selected items. This is occasionally useful on cards to return them all back to a neat stack.

Special Tools for Oak & Iron

There are a couple of special control tools that have been coded specifically for the Oak & Iron game. These are meant to help players navigate the virtual table environment.

Ship States

If you highlight a ship there is a quick select option to add Reload and Wake Tokens to a ship. Using the number pad you can set a ship to the following states to help keep up with Tokens. You can also right-click on a ship to set the ship state. This solution isn’t a perfect case scenario though as you can’t set a Reload and Wake token on the same model. I like the tool for Reloads only and then keeping up with Wake Tokens separately.

• 1 = No Tokens
• 2 = Wake Token
• 3 = Right Side Reload Marker
• 4= Left Side Reload Marker
• 5 = Reload Markers on both side

Movement Panel

This panel has 5 buttons, one for each Movement Speed. If you select a ship and click the appropriate Move speed it will shift the model straight forward the appropriate distance. This definitely helps speed up movement and removes some of the work in moving and aligning the appropriate tool and shifting the ships. If your ship is going to collide with another object, it’s best to do things manually as the collisions this can cause can have some unexpected results on occasion. Be sure to keep the tokens, dice, and other items out of the path before moving.

Rotation Panel

The Rotation panel is an attempt to allow you to rotate a ship in a more nuanced way than the 15° increments in the default game setup. Unfortunately, this is still an extremely tedious process as you have to click once per degree of change. This means that a 13° change is a 13-click process. A future update that had some sort of slider or ability to type in a specific value in would be nice. As is, we rarely use this tool in our online games.

For more controls and tools to interact with the core app, check out the game’s Knowledge Base documentation.

Tips and tricks for Oak & Iron in Tabletop Simulator

Here are a few things we’ve learned and come up with to make your online Oak & Iron game experience a little better.

Pregame Setup for Oak & Iron

• Adjust the “Lift Strength” settings to be as low as possible. The button for this is located in the top toolbar of the game. The Lift Strength setting controls how high an object lifts from the table when it is selected. When setting it to the lowest possible value, it is much, MUCH easier to align the movement tools and determine a ship’s position when it is to be dragged and dropped.

• Change the default “Rotation Degrees” setting to 15°. The button for this is located in the top toolbar of the game. This setting determines how far an object rotates when you press Q or E. As you will see, movement in the game isn’t super elegant, but that definitely helps make things a little easier.
• Lock your terrain (islands, shoals, rocks, etc) to your game board by pressing “L” or right-clicking, going to “Toggles” and then checking off “Lock”. In doing so, it is excellent for avoiding the frustration of accidentally selecting the wrong item once the game starts.
• To track the turn number, put a token in one corner of the board or type it in chat (speech bubble button in the bottom left corner) so you don’t lose track.
• You can assign colors to the hulls & sails of your ships. This allows you to quickly recognize friends and foes on the board. To do this select a ship model

Dealing with Initiative Cards

The initiative system of Oak & Iron is one of the vital elements of the game. It not only helps to determine initiative, it also plays a vital role in the strategic aspect of the game. The secrecy aspect and having to pick a card the round prior to its actual use is a fun challenge. There are a few steps and suggestions for helping you deal with Initiative in Tabletop Simulator.

Building Your Player Initiative Deck

1. It’s easiest to select the 5-8 cards for your deck and just drag them to an open bit of the table.
2. Secondly, after you’ve finalized your choices, you can either select a box around them with the mouse highlighting them all or hold CTRL while selecting your cards.
3. Right-click and select “Group” or press G. This will stack the cards neatly in a small pile.
4. Drag the deck to your player boxes at the edge of the table. This box limits the view of the cards from the player.
5. Once in the box, you can select card group and right-click and select “Spread” to view the cards side-by-side. Remember you can press ALT when hovering over a card to temporarily zoom into it.

Playing Your Initiative Cards

During the game, when you need to select an Initiative card. Hover over the one you want to play. Press F to flip it face down. Then drag the card onto the table. When you’re both ready to reveal the current card, select it and press F to reveal it. After the round ends, drag the card back into the pile.

One minor “trick” I’ve adopted is copying and pasting a deck of cards once they are spread out. I then arrange them so there is a set of face-down cards above a row of face-up cards. When I’m ready to play, I select the face-down version of the card. Do a quick Copy & Paste (CTRL+C, CTRL+P) and drag it to the playable area. At the end of the round, I just delete the card at the top and repeat the Copy & Paste method with the next card. For me, it’s a way to keep the cards neat and orderly without them shifting around and getting out of alignment as they are drug back and forth.

General Tips, Tricks, and Suggestions

• You can link a faction and unit number token to a ship to move them as a single unit. This is SUPER useful since tokens do not stack on the ship bases well. Because of that, I recommend you link them to the rear of your ships so they follow you around as you move. Tutorial with more info on creating Joints.
• The game loads with 6 dice by default. You can copy and paste dice to add more to the table.
• You can save your ship, the unit card, the markers for fatigue & damage, and your most frequent upgrades as a single object. Then when starting a new game in the future you can load that saved object. This allows you faster setup by loading the card with the little marker tokens already on it saving some clicking and dragging.
• If you and your opponents are willing to agree to it, you can generate your forces in the online Oak & Iron Force Builder tool for the normal board game. Then rather than tracking things in the game, just print paper sheets to keep track of Fatigue and Damage on paper.  It doesn’t allow your opponent to see the current damage on your ship from the virtual table, but it is less fiddly and can speed up your gameplay. If you’ve lost track of a ship’s status, you can simply ask your opponents for a status update. If you’re playing with voice chat that’s still faster than repeatedly moving tokens.
• Be willing to show your opponent some grace. If you’ve played the regular game, switching to Tabletop Simulator has a little bit of a learning curve.  There is also a higher level of difficulty and lack of precision in moving. It’s ok to “fudge” things for the sake of the game, but be fair and ask before you do it. And be willing to extend the same courtesy to your opponent(s).
• The Ship State tool (above) doesn’t work great for Wake Tokens. If you want to use Wake Tokens, put them next to your ships or on your ship cards rather than trying to perfectly align them behind the ship. This keeps the board clean and leaves fewer items to cause collisions or tilted ships.

Oak & Iron Tabletop Simulator Review

The Tabletop Simulator version of Oak & Iron Is an interesting addition to the mix. At its core, Oak & Iron is already a unique game to start with, because in my opinion, it’s half board game and half miniatures game.   It’s self-contained and playable with a small set of rules fitting in a single box like a board game. But it also has lots of expansion sets that can turn it into a full-blown miniatures war game.  Now with Tabletop Simulator, it pushes Oak & Iron into the video game world.

Personally, I don’t think that Tabletop Simulator will ever fully replace the standard physical game for me. I LOVE miniatures games and have played them for almost 30 years. There is just something about having that tangible 3D model on the table that brings me Inner joy.  However, Tabletop Simulator has allowed me to play games with people that I can’t meet up with due to busy schedules or the sheer distance between us.  It also offers a unique ability over a miniatures game to just hit save close it down put it away and then take it back out and be ready to play in an instant. Whereas a miniatures game takes time to set up and put away, plus find space to store the box.

Conclusion

There are still a lot of buggy aspects in the game and the movement in particular can be clunky and frustrating at first. That being said, after a half dozen games or so though, you’ll start to get the hang of it. I will typically look for a local game over a virtual one. Overall I have enjoyed being able to play from a long distance and to meet new players, particularly from overseas, via the game. I look forward to being able to use the app more in the future.

Pro and Con Analysis of Oak & Iron for Tabletop Simulator 

Here’s a quick rundown of the strengths and weaknesses of the app.

Additional Content of Interest

• New to Oak & Iron? Checkout the Oak & Iron Rulebook (PDF) & Glossary / Quick Reference Sheet,
• Use the Online Oak & Iron Force Builder to prep your Forces for the game.