Iron & Steam is a rules system for playing out ironclad naval combat in the era of the American Civil War. Game play is relatively streamlined, while rules include a good amount of specific technical information to satisfy those wanting a greater degree of granularity and detail. As such, the rules contain pre-generated game statistics for historical vessels, but also provide guidelines for converting any vessel to in-game play statistics. Similarly, for simplicity identical gun ranges are suggested for any gun of a given type (e.g. smoothbore cannon), while for those players wishing to add more detail and realism an appendix is included with expanded gun statistics to differentiate historical guns of various manufacture.
The rules are designed to use a scale of 1:2400
Also included is a bibliography of suggested reading.