Hello again! I hope you have all been keeping well since last we spoke. In this article I’m going to show you and give you my thoughts on the ships that came in the Oak & Iron core set.

In the box you get 6 ships: Light Galleon, Fluyt, Petit Frigate, Corvette, Brigantine and a Sloop. Along with each ship you also get a stat card and, in a change from the beta / pre-kickstarter version, you get sliders to attach to the card to move up and down to indicate fatigue and damage. There is also a base per ship included and 6 sheets of flags to ‘pimp your ride’.

This is nice mixture of various sizes, and a game where building your fleets according to points levels (to be discussed in a later article) you can top up the left over points from buying heavy hitters to give you some quick moving lighter options.

Ok, straight from the box … well … ok then … that’s them is it? The ships all come individually bagged alongside the required sails and masts, to be put together in seconds.

The plastic is of the softer variety, and due to the way the masts are sculpted complete with sails, they are very unlikely to break, especially as there is no real need to glue all the masts to the hull.

One exception would be the sprit topmast (and yes I had to Google that!) which is a bit more flimsy in its support, and this was my experience across all six ships.

In general the single piece masts and sails fit nicely into their appointed little holes really well, and, like hands in your pockets during winter, it takes some effort to remove them. There is very minimal flash, if any, to tidy up either.

One observation, though, is because they are a single piece mould, there is no clear space between the masts and sails. This, and the softer plastic, give much more of a ‘playing piece’ feel, rather than that of a scale model. This may put some people off the actual models, so it’s worth noting.

The most difficult ship to construct is the Sloop, and that is owing to the way in which the sails themselves require spot gluing to ensure they stay in the recesses against each other.

So yeah …. Time from breaking cellophane to being ready to play … 5 minutes? Very little effort required at all.

But this is Paint all the Minis, not ‘discuss the unpainted ones’. So here is how they look painted up in my hamfisted, homespun, tabletop standard style.

So then, I hear the masses cry, “tell us about them! Did you enjoy painting them?” Well yeah, I did enjoy painting them. They are however very much (in my tiny little mind) more playing pieces than scaled models. They are robust, characterful and easy to paint but do lack fine edge detail.

The elephant in the room is ‘how do they stack up against Warlord Games, and their Black Seas ships?’ …. Well … these are 1:600 scale, whereas Black Seas 1:700. So it may be appropriate to use BS for O&I but probably not the reverse.

The Black Sea ships are scaled miniatures, hard plastic and with options to add a tonne more detail (choice of sails, rat lines and rigging) but they are quite brittle in the way that all plastic minis are. The Oak and Iron ships are soft plastic as already mentioned and lack the same level of detail but provide a no lesser degree of satisfaction. Thematically I would expect to see them more in a Pirates of the Caribbean setting than fighting battles in the Channel and I’m ok with that.

I would firmly class the Oak and Iron ships as Tabletop Gaming Miniatures instead of Scale Miniatures, a very subtle difference that should in no way dissuade you from buying them. They can take a knock, stand being dropped and look great on the sea mat doing the job they are designed to do.

To expand the game there are options available from Blackbeard’s Queen Anne’s Revenge through to first rate Ships Of The Line and, even though if the pricing levels befuddle me, I don’t feel they are overpriced considering all that comes with them (base, ship, cards etc).

I’m happy with the ships. I don’t feel cheated or undersold. I think that for the job they are designed to do that they hold their own. There is enough detail to give you the flavour of what each vessel is supposed to be without overwhelming you with tedious detail.

Next time I intend to discuss the tokens and game mat which should leave us in a good position to look over the rules and get a battle report in (even if its just me and my trusty dog playing in this lockdown world we live in)

It quite literally took 5 minutes (apart from the Sloop) and the whole set of ships was assembled and ready to go on the tabletop.

The Ships of Oak & Iron