[Malta Month] 1565 Siege of Malta by Maurice Suckling

Making a game about a siege is challenging. Sieges are often by their very nature filled with long stretches of time where one side has little to do but endure. A siege like the Great Siege of Malta, which lasted most of a year, can be a long, slow, tortuous, and brutal event that doesn’t lend itself immediately to being turned into a game. Capturing the scale of a siege while also giving players plenty of choices and things to do to keep them engaged is a challenge. Even when you do find an element to gamify, if the game is multiplayer, you will need something for both sides to do. It’s not very exciting if one player is taking lots of actions and the other player just has to wait until something happens. You can design the best system ever for the attacker to try and topple his opponent’s walls, but if the defender has nothing to do you haven’t made much of a game. This may be why many wargames about sieges seem to be solitaire games. When you only have to create a game for one side and can entirely abstract the other it simplifies the challenge of making a game from the history.

Opening set up for the Hospitaller player - I did forget to put the bridge between Senglea and Birgu because I’m an idiot. In my defense, it didn’t really come up in my game.

1565 Siege of Malta is a solitaire game, but it doesn’t entirely benefit from this simplification because players can choose to play either side of the siege. This means that its systems need to work for both the attacking Ottomans and the defending Knights. I like this decision because the siege is fascinating from both perspectives, and it has the potential to let you view a single event through very different lenses. Too often solitaire games can make the opposing faction feel faceless, a series of mechanics without empathy, and I think this a good way to minimise that. That said, it also puts a significant strain on the game since it needs to be interesting to play both sides and with a game as simple as this one there isn’t much room for added complexity to adapt the specific circumstances that either side faced.

The Ottoman attack is not going well and they are burning through ammunition very quickly.

Probably my favourite part of the game, and the place where I think it best succeeds at adapting a shared mechanic to both sides, is in how the event deck affects victory conditions. The deck acts as a clock, roughly approximating how the siege could not be maintained over the winter and victory was as much about time as it was about supplies and resources. The Hospitallers automatically win if the deck runs out, whereas the Ottomans automatically lose in that same event. This is really elegant and at a high level I think does a good job of creating different kinds of pressure for the two sides. It takes one mechanic that is functionally identical no matter what side you play but makes your relationship to it very different in a way that is thematic to the circumstances of the siege. I generally have mixed feelings about event decks as a mechanic, and I have my issues with this one, but this overall idea is great.

Reinforcements are ready in Sicily. They have suffered some casualties but the Ottoman’s are still fairing worse.

That all having been said, I’m not particularly enamoured with this game system. In theory I like games where you have a pool of actions, but every time you take an action you cannot take it again until you meet a requirement that allows you to refresh your available actions. One of my favourite games is Concordia, a relatively simple trading in the Roman Mediterranean Eurogame where you have a hand of cards, and each turn you plan one card from your hand. However, you can only pick your cards back up by playing a card that lets you do that, and only that, on your turn. You need to balance when exactly you want to reset your strategy and when you should push on with what you have – it’s simple but it’s good.

The Ottomans manage to bring all their ships into the Grand Harbour, but the attacks on St. Elmo and Senglea have collapsed despite their favourable position.

However, this same mechanism doesn’t really work for me in 1565 Siege of Malta. In Malta you have a menu of actions, and you can only pick each one once until you’ve used all of them or you play one of your limited Aggressive Commander or Inspirational Speech cards alongside another action. As a mechanic I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t feel like it fits the theme of the Siege of Malta very well. As the Ottomans you can’t repeatedly smash your troops against St. Elmo, instead for every time you attack there you must also attack each of the other Hospitaller strongholds before you can attack St. Elmo again. It doesn’t feel like it captures the brutal grind as the Ottoman army turned its attention on one aspect of the siege to prosecute it with extreme prejudice - ignoring other elements as much as possible until this victory was achieved.

The Ottoman command sheet including results tables and the cards used to denote which orders have been used

It is this that really underpins my problem with this game – it doesn’t feel to me like it really evokes the Great Siege of Malta. There’s no need, in terms of satisfying a victory condition, for the Ottomans to take St. Elmo. As the Ottoman player the goal is to eradicate Hospitallers wherever you can find them and to slowly erode their morale. To this end, an attack on one Hospitaller fortification is much the same as an attack on any other. Seizing territory contributes very little to victory – which is sort of good because taking a fort is very hard, especially since you may only be able to attack St. Elmo 3 or 4 times over the course of a game.

While historically the Ottomans did succeed at degrading Hospitaller morale, and morale was a crucial element of the conflict, they lost in the end because they failed to take control of the island. There are plenty of other nit-picks I have, such as Mdina being too difficult to take – historically it was not prepared to endure an Ottoman bombardment had they turned their full attention to it – but the core issue I have is with how it models an Ottoman victory. The Ottomans should need to seize fortresses to win, it is not enough to simply kill Hospitallers. The historical Ottomans killed plenty of Hospitallers and Maltese defenders, and in the process degraded their morale to near rock bottom, and they still lost.

I won my first game as the Ottomans, but most of my games looked like this - total disasters with very poor rolls (high is bad)

I also don’t particularly like how what historically were major one-time events are gamified such that they can just keep happening over and over again. I don’t mind the fact that the Ottomans can repeatedly build and lose their siege tower, that’s okay if a little strange. Siege equipment could be rebuilt even if the game does engage in some remarkable temporal flexibility when it comes to how long it would take to do so. I’m thinking more of things like the cavalry raid on the Ottoman Camp out of Mdina or the dragging of Ottoman ships over Mount Scibberas to launch a naval attack on Senglea. Both of these were very consequential events, but they also only happened once. It kind of ruined my sense of narrative that they can happen at least as often as an attack on St. Elmo over the course of a single game.

My problem with this isn’t that the game is not totally historically accurate. No game is, and levels of abstraction in gaming are expected. My problem is that when I play a historical wargame, on at least some level I want to feel like I’m living the story of that historical event. I want to be sweating over the fight in St. Elmo, the constant carnage and desperation of that battle causing me distress and anxiety. As La Valette I want to be weighing the cost and benefits of sending yet more soldiers into the carnage at St. Elmo – if it can hold out a bit longer that could save me, but I only have so many troops to spare! I didn’t feel the story of the Siege of Malta while playing this game, I felt like I was playing an entertaining if a bit too random boardgame. I appreciate that this won’t bother other people as much – if you like the gameplay and are not nearly as obsessed with the Great Siege as I am then it probably doesn’t matter to you if playing the game doesn’t exactly conjure the specific events you’ve read and written about. For me, though, if I’m playing a game about the Siege of the Century, I really want to feel like I’m playing that siege and 1565 Siege of Malta doesn’t give me that.

Unlike historically, the Sicilian reinforcements had a habit of showing up very early on during my games as the Ottomans.

I think the game is more fun playing as the Ottomans than as the Hospitallers. The Hospitaller actions are a little underwhelming. I frequently found myself needing to take the Move Troops action to refresh my pool but I wasn’t actually missing any troops so I had no spaces to move anyone into, which leads to another issue: playing as the Hospitallers is kind of easy. I didn’t play them as many times, but the Hospitallers didn’t seem to face very much of a challenge. Certainly, I didn’t feel harried to the point of despair like I would have expected. There is a challenge in modelling historical events where you have to decide how important is it for the game to accurately repeat history. As a model that generates the historical result, a Hospitaller victory, this works very well. However, historically it was a close-run thing and the Hospitaller victory felt a bit like a miracle, and the game difficulty doesn’t really conjure that feeling. In contrast, winning as the Ottomans is much more challenging and I found myself much more engaged in trying to work out an optimal strategy to succeed at reversing the historic outcome.

I also don’t love the choice of terminology for the factions. The game uses Turks to refer to the Ottomans, and while the ruling elite of the Ottoman Empire were largely Turkish the actual army was a diverse collection of people who were subjects of the vast empire. Many soldiers, and even some commanders, at the 1565 siege would not have been Turkish and I think using this term erases some of that diversity. I also think the Hospitaller descriptions don’t give enough credit to the Maltese and various (mostly Spanish) mercenaries, who vastly outnumbered the Hospitallers were instrumental in the defence of the island. In total there were only a few hundred Hospitallers in the siege, a minority of the defenders by far.

My final game as the Ottomans ends in total disaster - like most of my Ottoman games did.

The production was a bit much for my taste, but that is a highly subjective statement (as is pretty much all of this post if we’re honest). I think I would have preferred this game more if it was a small box with cubes, cards, and a smaller board. As a light €20 game I could fit in my bag I might have kept it in my collection, but as a big box experience taking up precious shelf space I think I’ll see if I can find a new home for it with someone who will appreciate it for what it is instead of wishing it was something different, like I so clearly do.

In the end I don’t think I would play 1565 Siege of Malta again, which is a little disappointing. I am fascinated by the Great Siege, and this just didn’t evoke the history for me. I also don’t think I’m a huge fan of this series and its mechanics, so it probably wasn’t the game for me regardless. I might have enjoyed it more as a two-player game, but I’m not sure. Not every game is for every person, and this clearly just wasn’t a game for me. Luckily, it’s not the only game about the 1565 Siege of Malta, so stay tuned to see how I got on with some of the other attempts to model The Siege of the Century. Hopefully one of them is exactly what I’m looking for!