[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?

In Malta Besieged you have to manage the defence of the island of Malta and a stretch of North Africa from a range of threats, represented by tracks on the board. The game is divided into three different eras, each represented by its own deck of cards. On your turn you flip the top card of the deck and do what it tells you. Usually it advances some enemy units on their tracks, tells you if you gain/lose any resources, lists what dice role modifiers (DRMs) you have on the various actions available to you on your turn, and most importantly tells you how many actions you get to take this turn. Sometimes he card will also indicate that a relief convoy is on its way to you with supplies and you have to resolve the Axis attempts to sink it – at the start of you turn you determine how many hits it suffers and then only at the end do you determine whether those hits damaged the convoy or not.

The stage is set, let the siege begin! This is my third game where I decided to play with the cards in historic order to see if it made me feel the history that bit more.

On your turn you have a wide selection of actions available to you. You can attack any of the various forces marching slowly towards you on their various tracks. You do this by rolling a d6 and if you roll greater than the number printed on the chit representing that army you push it back one space. Alternatively, you can increase one of your resources, this is resolved the same way but if you succeed you push the resource up the track. Military and Morale give you a bonus if they are at their maximum point on the track or a penalty if they’re at their lowest while Supply can allow you to take extra actions but punishes you if you run out of it. From the second era on you can conduct Raids which make it easier to attack Rommel and his Afrika Corps. There are a few other actions, such as activating ULTRA or constructing Forts, but those are the main ones you’ll be doing most of the game.

I want to take a moment to mention that the rulebook for Malta Besieged is terrible. This is not a very complicated game, but it manages to make it seem substantially more confusing than it is. I had a miserable time learning to play Malta Besieged, so be aware of that if you decide it sounds interesting to you. The best advice I received was to just read about the actions and then start trying to play. The sequence of play is printed on the board, start drawing cards and only look up rules as you encounter them.

Dearing the end of the first phase of the war (represented by the first of three decks of event cards) and things are going okay. Supply is down but Malta isn’t in any great danger..yet.

Once I got through the misery of the rulebook and started playing Malta Besieged, I could immediately see the appeal of this series. It’s a very light game, perfect for passing the time on a quiet evening, but it also manages to keep you engaged throughout. The decisions you make on your turn are all very similar but the ever-shifting landscape of the game, the new enemy positions and DRMs, helps to keep it from feeling repetitive. I really like how the card flips at the start of your turn, presenting you with a set of challenges you have to react to. You need to balance trying to undo the immediate effects of this latest card with the need to maintain an overall strategy for how to achieve victory. It’s not enough to just triage, you have to actively push your enemies back. This was a much more enjoyable system to me than other solitaire games I’d played where you pick an action and then a random element, dice roll or card draw, determines what the game’s response to that action is. Those felt random and like I lacked control, sort of like the game was playing me, whereas this meant I had plenty to do every round and I was trying to solve the latest puzzle the game through at me.

I pushed the North African front as far back as I could in preparation for Rommel’s arrival, but I have somewhat neglected the Luftwaffe who are now breathing down my neck right next to Malta.

Overall, I really enjoyed my first experience with the States of Siege series, but there are a few reasons why I probably won’t be keeping Malta Besieged long term. My issues with the system are few, but I do have some. I found tracking all the DRM modifiers a little too fiddly. On rounds when there were only 2-3 DRMs to track it was fine, but there would be rounds where I had 4-5 DRMs and only two actions and it felt like I spent more time putting out counters than I did taking actions. This isn’t a major flaw, but it was something I found a little exhausting. I would prefer to see a smaller number of DRMs each round.

The U-Boats have arrived and honestly I’m already on the ropes a bit. The Luftwaffe have been pushed back but Rommel bypassed Tobruk and is threatening Alexandria while the Italian air force is attempting to bomb Malta.

Another issue I had was that assuming you make it to the end, you see every card in the game every game. Sure, the order is different, but you can eventually learn the deck pretty well and eventually plays begin to feel a little same-y. This could be the result of me playing it several times in rapid succession, if I let it rest on my shelf only getting it once over other month or so I suspect this wouldn’t be much of a problem.

My real issue with the game, and the reason I won’t be keeping it, is in the theme and how it captures the history. As I said at the start, I’m not a big WWII buff and so I didn’t know anything about the defense of Malta before I played this. After having played it several times I don’t feel like I know all that much more than I did. Each card represents an event during the conflict and even includes a little bit of historical text, but if I’m honest I basically never read them. There was enough book-keeping to be done every round without reading the tiny text on every card. This game already takes a couple of hours to play, I didn’t feel any strong desire to lengthen it by reading short summaries of the events of 1940-1942 out of their historical order.

I want to make something very clear - I pushed Rommel back to before Tobruk and he bypassed Tobruk for a second time! It’s the end of the second deck and things are looking dire for Malta and North Africa in general.

The way Malta Besieged represented history felt like it was targeted mostly at people who already knew the history and wanted to experience it through a game. If you already recognise these major events, I bet it’s exciting when you draw one from the deck, and the randomised order of events probably makes for an interesting “What If” experience. I am not one of those people, though, so for me while I did get a little bit of the historical flavour – I may not be very up on my WWII history, but I did recognise the various military units that were attacking me – it didn’t really capture me enough that I can imagine myself playing this game more than a handful of times.

I made it maybe a quarter of the way through the final deck. I just about managed to keep Malta but the North African campaign has been decisively lost, triggering an automatic defeat for me - my first loss playing the game.

I enjoyed my time with Malta Besieged and if the WWII defense of Malta is more your speed than the 1565 siege you should check it out. For me, I think I’m going to see if another States of Siege game on a different topic might appeal to me more.