Ironmask — how to play
Forty companies a side, every rank turned away, won by reading the other line.
How to begin
Open the game and choose how the Corvel house will play: Recruit, Officer or Spymaster. Take the field and the deployment opens with a staff deployment already laid out. Change anything you dislike, then begin the action. If you saved an action earlier, the title sheet offers to resume it instead.
Controls
Click a rank in the tray and then a home square to place a company; click a placed company to lift it. In the action, click one of your companies and then a lit square. Click any Corvel counter, at any time, to open its dossier card — reading the papers is not a move and is allowed while the machine is thinking and after the action has closed.
By keyboard: ←↑↓→ move the cursor, Enter picks up and puts down, Esc lets go, D opens the Dossier, L the Ledger, J the Journal.
On a desktop, information stays in the left sidebar and commands stay in the right sidebar, leaving the field centered between them. On a smaller screen the panels stack below the field; use Show information in the header to open or close the information panel.
Turn order
Vane moves first, then Corvel, one move each, until the action ends. There are no phases inside a turn and nothing to confirm: the move is the turn. While the machine considers, the strip under the board says so.
Movement
- One square up, down, left or right. Never diagonally, never onto your own company.
- An Outrider runs any number of empty squares down a rank or file and may strike at the end of the run.
- Charges and the Standard never move.
- The two patches of water are impassable and block a run.
- No company may shuttle between the same two squares more than three times running.
Combat
Move onto an enemy company to strike it. Both ranks are shown to both houses; the lower rank is removed and equal ranks remove each other. The table below is the whole of it.
| Mark | Rank | Number | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Marshal | 1 | Beats everything except a Charge, and loses to the Assassin that strikes it. |
| 9 | General | 1 | Second only to the Marshal. |
| 8 | Colonel | 2 | |
| 7 | Major | 3 | |
| 6 | Captain | 4 | |
| 5 | Lieutenant | 4 | |
| 4 | Sergeant | 4 | |
| 3 | Sapper | 5 | The only rank that lifts a Charge instead of dying on it. |
| 2 | Outrider | 8 | Runs any distance down an open rank or file and may strike at the end of the run. |
| 1 | Assassin | 1 | Loses to everything, but takes the Marshal if it strikes first. |
| X | Charge | 6 | Never moves. Destroys any company that strikes it except a Sapper. |
| S | Standard | 1 | Never moves. Lose it and the action is over. |
Winning
Walk a company onto the Corvel standard. That ends the action at once. If every Corvel company that could march is gone, the standard falls by default and the field is yours.
Losing
The same two ways, in the other direction. If neither standard falls and no strike happens for a long while, the action is adjudged on the weight of what each house has left, or drawn if the two are close.
Saving and restarting
The action saves itself after every Corvel move, and Save writes it
out at once. One saved action is kept, under a single browser key
(tronsoft_ironmask_save). Resume it from the title sheet. Finishing
an action clears the save; Fresh action returns to the title sheet, and
Concede ends the current action and shows the account.
Reading the field
The Dossier does the bookkeeping. It knows which ranks are still unaccounted for, and it knows what each Corvel counter has done: a company that has marched is neither a Charge nor the Standard; one that ran a whole file is an Outrider; one that has never left the back rows, with the ranks running out, is very probably a Charge. When it has narrowed a counter to something worth saying, it prints the band on the counter itself — X?, S?, 6–10. Nothing is printed while nothing is known, which is the honest state of the opening. Open any card for the full spread and, with one of your own companies selected, the odds it faces.
Your own counters can be read as well. An eye marker appears on a Vane company when Corvel has discovered its exact rank, whether through combat, an Outrider's long run or deduction from the ranks still unaccounted for. The information sidebar keeps a running count of surviving Vane ranks Corvel knows.