TIDE OF IRON places you in command of a division of fighting men and machines in the most important conflict in the world's history. Your brave soldiers will capture and hold objectives, lay down covering fire, and under your command they will emerge victorious ... you hope.

PLAYERS
2-4 players on two teams. TIDE OF IRON includes American and German forces, and armies are divided into two divisions to support two players on a side.

SCENARIOS
TIDE OF IRON is a Scenario-based game, with the available forces, objectives, map, and victory conditions being set by each given scenario. The rulebook includes a variety of scenarios, and you can find more at the "Scenarios" link to your left, as well as create your own!

The twelve double-sided map tiles, plus the dozens of included terrain hexes, allow for limitless potential combinations, and each scenario can be enhanced by special rules, objective markers, troop allotments, and other variations. The only limiting factor is your imagination!

FORCES
Once the scenario has been selected, each player must assemble his forces. Each squad of infantry will be comprised of several individual soldiers, each with their own statistics and game rules, and may be further defined by a specialization. The soldiers, whether they are officers, regular infantry, elite infantry, mortar crews, or machine gun crews, each take up a slot on a squad base (or two, in the case of the mortar and machine gun crews), and you can mix and match your available soldiers to construct the squads best suited to your strategy. You can further specialize some squads with anti-tank weaponry, engineering or medical training, or flamethrower capability.

Once you've done so and collected your vehicles, you must deploy your forces according to the scenario's instructions.

GAMEPLAY
TIDE OF IRON is played over a series of turns; how many turns is determined by the scenario. Each turn is divided up into three main phases.

The Action Phase
Predictably, this is where the bulk of the action of TIDE OF IRON takes place. Players each take action turns, with each action turn including a number of actions specified by the scenario.

These are some of the actions available to players:

	Prepare Op Fire: Places a unit into Opportunity Fire mode, where it can fire on moving units during enemy actions.
	Concentrated Fire: Activates a unit to fire on the opposing forces, potentially with the combined fire support of several other units.
	Advance: Moving units a distance determined by the unit's movement speed and accounting for various terrain features.
	Fire and Movement: Allows a unit to move some portion of its speed and to make an attack at reduced strength in the same action.
	Assault: Assaulting units may attack only adjacent hexes, but they receive several powerful bonuses to their attack as compared to Concentrated Fire.
	Activate Strategy Card: Many Strategy Cards are activated during the Action Phase and count as an action.

Each unit, once it is activated by an action, is fatigued and is unavailable for future actions. Once both players have activated all of their units, the Action Phase is over.

The Command Phase
During the Command Phase, overall control of the board and the battle are determined and influenced by each player. The various objectives (on- or off-board) determined by the scenario may generate victory points during this phase, as well as a resource called Command. In turn, players will spend this Command to either power their strategy cards or to increase their Initiative value.

Strategy Cards
Each player will have access to one or more Strategy decks as determined by the scenario. From these decks, commanders will draw cards with a wide variety of useful abilities. Some may represent calling in air support, while others may indicate increased morale or training for your infantry.

Some Strategy cards are played during the Action phase as an action. Others may be triggered during the Command phase. In each case, Strategy cards cost Command to activate, and so Command objectives will be particularly desireable locations on the board to hold, whether or not they are associated with victory points.

Strategy cards are held face up in their owner's HQ area, so while which strategies your opponent draws may be a surprise a clever commander will always know what tricks the enemy has up his sleeve.

The Status Phase
During this phase, players draw strategy cards, refresh their units, place units in Op Fire mode to prepare for the upcoming Action phase, transfer soldiers between squads, and generally perform the clean-up to prepare for the next turn. This is an excellent time to re-evaluate your strategy and plan your moves for the coming turn.

COMBAT
Eventually, some of your soldiers are going to shoot at some of your opponent's soldiers. At this point, TIDE OF IRON's simple but satisfyingly deep combat system is employed.

TIDE OF IRON uses a single roll of the dice to resolve each attack. Once the Firepower and Cover or Armor of the units involved has been determined, the attacking player picks up one black die per point of firepower and one red die per point of armor or cover, then rolls them all together. Red dice score hits on fives or sixes, and the black dice score hits on either fours or better (for close range), fives and sixes (for normal range), or sixes only (for long range). Red successes cancel out black hits, and any remaining black dice that score hits inflict damage on their target (either removing individual soldiers from squads or lightly damaging, heavily damaging, or destroying vehicles, as appropriate).

For attacks against squads, players have the option of making a suppressive attack. Rather than dealing damage, these attacks can pin, disrupt, our outright rout a squad. While not killing soldiers, suppressive attacks have the potential to more seriously disrupt the squad's ability to contribute to your opponent's battle plan than many normal attacks. Squads with officers are more resistant to being pinned, disrupted, and routed.

Of course, certain units feature a variety of special rules - whether it's a mortar crew's ability to launch indirect fire without tracing line of sight or the additional boost granted by anti-tank capability to a squad, the streamlined combat system of TIDE OF IRON strives to faithfully replicate the actual soldiers and weapons of World War II.

VICTORY!
Each scenario will have its own victory conditions, whether it's a race to a certain victory point total, a check for victory after a certain number of turns, or a specific objective-based victory condition inherent in the scenario. TIDE OF IRON's scenarios are so varied and so flexible, it's almost like a new game each time!