Malta Month

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[Malta Month Bonus] Malta Besieged: 1940-1942 by Steve Carey

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[Malta Month Bonus] Malta Besieged: 1940-1942 by Steve Carey

The States of Siege games from Victory Point Games are some of the most widely recommended solitaire only wargames. Unfortunately for people like me who have recently taken up wargaming they can be quite hard to find since Victory Point Games shut down. All is not lost, though, as Worthington Publishing has recently taken to publishing deluxe editions of some of these classic games, and I thought now was a good time to finally try one. Malta Besieged is about the other famous siege of Malta, the attempt by the Axis to seize it during World War II. I have to admit I’m not much of a WWII buff and I wasn’t very familiar with the history for this one, but I thought since I’m doing a month of games about Malta why not try something a little more modern to mix things up?

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[Malta Month] Playing the Siege of Malta

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[Malta Month] Playing the Siege of Malta

aving now played multiple games on the 1565 Siege of Malta I wanted to take a minute to think about what I’m looking for in a game about the siege and to reflect a bit on how each of the games I played portrays this historical event. I’ve tried to outline several of the key elements or events of the historical siege that I want a game to incorporate in some form. I will discuss why I think they’re important and how each game approaches them. This is not meant to be a critique of the games – if you want my opinions on playing them you should check out the individual posts on each game (easily found via this linke: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/category/Malta+Month) –instead it is more of a (highly subjective) study of how the siege is portrayed in wargaming.

I should also put as a disclaimer here that there is one game about the Siege of Malta that I haven’t played: Knights of Justice a magazine game published in Wargamer Magazine #50 in 1986. Copies of this are hard to come by so I wasn’t able to play it this month. However, I have found someone who can share their copy with me, but not until they have access to their storage in a few months’ time. When I do get a chance to play it, I’ll write up some general thoughts for a much belated Malta Month post and I may revisit this post then to incorporate the final Malta game.

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[Malta Month] Preview: Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross by Andy Loakes

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[Malta Month] Preview: Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross by Andy Loakes

Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross (WCSC) is by far the most complex game about the Siege of Malta that I’ve played. This is not a light game to be played in less than an hour. Instead, it is nothing less than the full siege in all its violent glory to be re-enacted over hours of gameplay. WCSC is still in development and Legion Wargames helpfully put me in touch with designer Andy Loakes. Andy kindly shared the draft rules and Cyberboard module being used for playtesting and was even more generous by spending four hours across two weekends to walk me through the game. In that time, we played approximately three weeks of the siege. A full game can last for twenty. That should give some indication of the scale of this experience. I have to say, though, that I had a blast and was engaged the entire time. This is a fascinating game, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out in its final published form.

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[Malta Month] 1565: St Elmo’s Pay by Tristan Hall

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[Malta Month] 1565: St Elmo’s Pay by Tristan Hall

1565: St Elmo’s Pay is the second game in Hall or Nothing Production’s Historic Epic Battle System. The first game was 1066: Tears to Many Mothers, a game about the Battle of Hastings. Both games are relatively quick playing, 30-40 minutes, card games for 1-2 players. While I haven’t played 1066 there are certainly ways in which this system feels like it originated as a model for a battle rather than a large scale siege like Malta. Capturing the epic scope of the Siege of Malta in just a few decks of cards is a daunting task, but despite its limitations I think St Elmo’s Pay does an admirable (if not exactly perfect) job at representing the siege. Before we get to deep into my thoughts about how well it models the siege, let’s talk about the game some.

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[Malta Month] The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen

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[Malta Month] The Great Siege of Malta by Bruce Ware Allen

I am enthralled by the Great Siege of Malta. It is one of the most engaging historical narratives I’ve ever come across, the kind of story that feels too exciting to be even remotely true. Too long to really work as a movie, it feels perfectly suited to a high drama HBO series – except probably lacking in sufficient opportunities for gratuitous female nudity. It is a story full of sudden dramatic changes in fortune, deaths, betrayals, desperation, and dramatic last stands against all odds. An underdog story of resistance against an unstoppable foe that somehow also manages to show how much that massive foe is struggling against their own difficulties. It is easy to see why it captured imaginations at the time and within months of its conclusion some commentators described it as the greatest siege that ever was.

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[Malta Month] 1565 Siege of Malta by Maurice Suckling

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[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.

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

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[Malta Month] Cutting Room Floor - The Great Siege of Malta

The Great Siege of Malta in 1565 was not the first time that the Knight’s Hospitaller clashed with the Ottoman Empire, nor even the first time they had fought against the sultan Suleiman I, The Magnificent. Forty years earlier in the winter of 1522-3, at the very start of the sultan’s reign, he had driven the knights from their previous home on the island of Rhodes. The 1522 Siege of Rhodes is just one in a series of famous Ottoman sieges, starting with the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, then the less talked about 1480 Siege of Rhodes during which the Hospitallers drove off the forces of Suleiman’s father, and the later Siege of Malta in 1565. Suleiman opened his reign by driving the hated Knights Hospitaller, a military order with its roots in the eleventh century and which had participated in nearly every major crusading conflict, from the eastern Mediterranean and opened the sea for future Turkish expansion.