If the fact that I spent a month playing every game I could find on the 1565 Siege of Malta didn’t give it away, I have a bit of a thing for games about sieges. I think siege warfare is a fascinating and often underrepresented aspect of military history. In my own topic of study sieges were far more numerous and more important than set piece battles but it is the battles that most people have heard of. When it comes to game design battles again dominate, with siege games being relatively few and far between, but I am sympathetic to designers faced with the challenge of making a truly engaging siege game. It is precisely because it is so challenging, though, that I am interested in seeing how game designers approach siege games My fascination with siege games meant that naturally I would be interested in Fire and Stone Siege of Vienna, and it definitely didn’t hurt that the game is gorgeous. That’s why I was very pleased to be invited to be taught the game by the designer and play against Fred Serval on the Homo Ludens YouTube channel. The full video is embedded below and I would recommend watching it, but I also thought I’d give some of my thoughts now that I’ve had time to meditate on my first play of Fire and Stone.
Live teach and play of Fire and Stone on the Homo Ludens YouTube channel featuring yours truly and the designer of the game as guests
One of the most striking aspects of Fire and Stone is it’s focus. Rather than looking at the siege as a whole it zooms in on just one breach and puts you in the shoes of the commanders trying to defend just that section of the Austrian walls. If the Ottomans can succeed at breaking through here they can take the city and so it is up to the Hapsburg commander to hold them back at all costs. I think this is a really smart decision given the kind of game Fire and Stone is intended to be. While I think games can portray the full history of a large scale siege in a very effective way - I’m particularly partial to how the upcoming game Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross, represents all of the 1565 Siege of Malta - doings so generally requires making a very large game. This means large both in terms of rules to capture the many elements of the siege and large in scale, particularly in terms of game length, to fit all that detail in. Fire and Stone is not intended to be a monster of a game, instead it’s meant to be playable in under two hours with relatively easy to understand rules.
To successfully deliver a simple game with a short play time about a large siege like Vienna you have basically two options: strip down the conflict to its barest parts, or consider just covering part of it. While I bet there are games that do the former well, for the most part my experience with games that try to cover an entire siege in a short game have left me feeling a little underwhelmed. Fire and Stone opts for the latter choice and is all the better for it I think. By just giving us one breach it limits the geography we have to contend with and while this does remove some choices from the game - there are no rules for supply or where troops are positioned on the various sections of the wall - this perspective lets it focus on the real meat of the siege: taking fortifications, pushing back assaults, and the brutal attrition of early modern sieges. I think this is an inspired choice and it really makes the game for me.
If it’s not apparent already, I’m really impressed with Fire and Stone. I was intrigued by what it had to offer but I went in to my first game unsure of how I would feel about it. I’m fascinated by siege games but I’m also honestly often underwhelmed by them. As Robert DeLeskie, the game’s designer, says in the video many siege games try and use the language of maneuver in their design when that is really better suited to a set piece battle. I feel like we’re probably on the same page in terms of what we want out of a siege game and that is probably why I like Fire and Stone so much.
Fire and Stone at it’s core is a relatively simple card driven wargame, probably not much more complicated than something like The Shores of Tripoli. On your turn you can play a card from your hand for its event - which are generally very powerful but also quite situational - or discard it for one of several actions. These actions are slightly asymmetrical but in general they are: bombard the enemy with your guns, launch an attack on one of the board’s few hexes, dig a mine, or build temporary fortifications. There’s a little more to it than that, but not by much. This allows the game to strike a really nice balance between each decision feeling important while also not bogging down as players are paralysed with indecision. The decisions are small, so they’re easy to make, but they’re important so you feel invested in making the right one.
One thing that Fire and Stone does with its deck of cards that I really like is that it has a relatively small deck of events but also you won’t see every card in a given game. A similar structure is true of its small deck of Tactics Cards. This means that it will be beneficial to players to learn their decks, something you can do naturally over a game, but it doesn’t feel like it requires you to learn off what cards will be played in a game. You can be certain that most cards you know will show up in a game, but not every card, and that little bit of uncertainty is an excellent bit of spice to the deck management aspect of the game. While hardly a unique feature of Fire and Stone it’s something a like in the CDGs that I play and it is nice to see it here.
However, the element of the game I like the most is how it represents the attrition of early modern siege warfare. Sieges like this were grueling contests of slowly grinding down your opponent until they couldn’t resist any long. There are no daring feints or dramatic charges that deliver a swift victory at a key moment. This is brutal, slow, grimy siege warfare - no glory to be found! In my game I won - thanks in no small part to some good luck - by grinding down the deck of Ottoman soldiers to the point where my opponent’s ability to launch further assaults was severely diminished. He was making progress, and had even taken the ravelin, but lacked the resources to close the final distance. This felt exactly like how a siege of this period would go and was a really satisfying play experience - for me at least!
In terms of negatives, I suspect for some people the amount of dice rolling might seem objectionable (not me, I love dice) but I do think it is worth considering how low the randomness actually is. Yes you roll fistfuls of dice every time your guns fire but the hits are capped at two for each roll. So having a larger pool of dice does not guarantee you the ability to inflict more hits, it just means that you will reach those two hits more often on average than you would with a smaller pool. This is actually a relatively low luck system, one designed to regress towards the mean much faster than some CRTs I’ve used, disguised as a big dice fest because you’re rolling a large pool of d6s. I think this is really clever, and once again a little reminiscent of The Shores of Tripoli although less random than that game which didn’t cap successful results at all. The satisfaction of rolling lots of dice with less random outcomes, the best of both worlds!
I’ve only played Fire and Stone once so these are really just my very early impressions of the game but I am very impressed with what I’ve seen and I want to play it more because I can tell that there is more depth to the game to be explored. I also have a vacancy in my game collection for an engaging but short siege game which Fire and Stone seems perfectly suited to filling. From my first play I don’t really have any meaningful negatives to mention. It is possible that the Hapsburgs have a more static strategy and maybe if I play the game five or six more times I might grow weary of defending Vienna, but I had a blast playing them this time and if I got another six plays before getting bored that would be a very good return on investment. I’m really excited to explore this game some more and I think I need to try some of Robert DeLeskie’s other games as well.