![[Malta Month] Playing the Siege of Malta](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/620919b2fcf26676329427ee/1658950444722-85ND1JT0L01HGZUQ6171/Dimostrazione+di+Tutte+le+batterie+by+Mattia+Perez+d%27Aleccio%2C+1581%2C+Grand+hall+of+the+Palace+of+the+Grand+Masters%2C+Valletta.png)
Having 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.
With the context all settled, let’s jump into the history of the siege and what elements I think are important to capture in a game about it. If you haven’t already, I would definitely recommend reading my summary of the events of the siege I posted at the start of the month. It will provide valuable context and can be read here: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/cutting-room-floor-malta
Ottoman Leadership
Throughout the Siege of Malta the Ottoman leadership was seriously fragmented. Mustapha Pasha was commander of the ground forces while Piali Pasha commanded the navy – in theory anyway. Mustapha had been placed in overall command by Suleiman, but Piali had married into the Sultan’s family and had a more powerful position in the Ottoman court, making for an awkward balance of power from the start. At the same time, they had both been instructed to listen to what Turgut, the lord of Tripoli and an effective Barbary pirate with a notorious reputation, had to say in all matters. Turgut was also in direct command of the Barbary corsairs, since they would only listen to him, and had the most experience and prestige, making him a third potential commander. The disputes between the three commanders, two after Turgut was killed by a misfired cannon, created plenty of tension during the campaign.
The first, and to my mind most important, point of contention was how to start the siege. Piali Pasha proposed the plan that was eventually implemented, which was to take Fort St Elmo first and then attack Birgu and Senglea. This was because Piali wanted to moor his fleet in the bay north of Mount Scibberas which wasn’t possible as long as Fort St. Elmo still stood. Mustapha wanted to secure the small island of Gozo and then the capitol city of Mdina before turning on the Hospitaller positions around the Grand Harbour. Turgut preferred Mustapha’s plan but was too late to support his argument, Piali’s plan having already been implemented by the time Turgut arrived.
Mustapha’s plan may have succeeded where Piali’s failed so one of the things I’m interested in is how a game can model the counterfactual of what if the Ottomans had chosen a different course of action.
1565 St Elmo’s Pay doesn’t include this at all – there is no option for battling over Mdina so the only plan to enact is Piali’s.
1565 Siege of Malta kind of forces you into a hybrid plan through its action menu. As the Ottoman player you’ll be attacking both Mdina and St Elmo pretty regularly. The mechanics do push you a little towards focusing on one of those two first before going for the harder to capture Senglea and Birgu, but in general you’re forced to spread your actions so wide that it never quite captures the specific focus of the main Ottoman army on one position at a time.
Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross has the most robust version of this challenge with its small deck of Ottoman strategy cards – definitely my favourite solution to this challenge.
None of the games include Gozo as a playable space, so the control of the smaller island is entirely ignored.
The second aspect of Ottoman leadership is the conflict between the main leaders throughout the siege. None of the games really capture this clash of personalities, but it would also be hard to do it without making the Ottoman side more than one player. It’s very hard to force a single player into debating with themself what to do next. St Elmo’s Pay does make the decision to single out Mustapha as the clear leader since he is the permanent leader whose death causes the Ottoman player to lose while Piali is just a card in the deck. I think this works against the history of the siege a bit; I think I would have preferred if instead the Ottomans had two Leader cards they had to juggle somehow. This bothers me less as something missing from the games, though, since many games have to abstract away conflicts in leadership and present a more unified front than was historically the case for ease of play.
Valette’s Resource Management
The Hospitallers and their allies were desperately outnumbered in the siege and relied upon their superior defensive position to resist the might of the Ottoman army. They also had to spread their forces over four main locations: Fort St Elmo, Birgu, Senglea, and Mdina. This created a significant strategic challenge in terms of deciding how to distribute their forces. In particular, during the siege of Fort St Elmo Valette had to decide how many soldiers he could afford to send over to the fort knowing that most if not all of them would not return. As the siege dragged on and became more desperate the need to retain control for as long as possible had to be weighed against the limited supply of troops that had to last for the whole siege. This is something I desperately want to see portrayed in any game where I control the Hospitallers – to my mind it is one of the essential decisions facing the defenders of Malta.
To a degree all three games include this decision. Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross as the most complex game unsurprisingly includes the most elaborate and robust version of troop positioning and movement between the locations. 1565 Siege of Malta includes movement of troops between locations as one of the Hospitaller actions but with the relatively low difficulty of playing as the Christians I didn’t feel like I was under pressure to use it all that often.
St Elmo’s Pay has a system for moving units between the three locations, but it doesn’t capture that feeling of being outnumbered as the Christians and having to spread limited resources between the locations. The Ottomans are slightly better at putting out more cards, but with the limit of three cards per a frontier and the generally greater strength of the Christian cards you don’t feel like you’re outnumbered two to one. The fact that strength values at all three Frontiers are resolved simultaneously every round makes it harder to ask the Christian player to prioritise one Frontier the other two. It’s understandable, but again it feels like a legacy of the fact that the system was originally designed for a battle not a siege. In a battle all three wings would fight simultaneously while at a siege like Malta the Ottomans had to prioritise where they were putting their main attack.
The Weight of Time
The Siege of Malta had a massive clock hanging over it the entire time. Unlike with the earlier Siege of Rhodes the Ottomans couldn’t realistically spend the winter in Malta – resupplying by sea would be too difficult and there was nowhere near enough food on the island. They would also be much more exposed, and in the spring a Christian relief force could easily arrive from Sicily well before any reinforcements could come from Constantinople. That meant that they had to take the island before the weather turned and prevented a return voyage to Constantinople. This gave a realistic end date to the siege as sometime in September. Every delay and each setback created more tension for the Ottoman commanders – they may have had more resources, but they didn’t have more time.
The second ticking clock was the Christian relief force. An army was slowly mustering in Sicily throughout 1565. Don Garcia, the commander appointed by Spanish King Philip II, refused to sail for Malta until he had a large enough force to present overwhelming opposition to the Ottomans. He needed a large enough fleet to guarantee that he could break through the Ottoman blockade and then once he landed, he needed a large enough army that it could drive the Ottoman’s off the island. Landing a small force ran the risk of it being entirely wiped out, providing supplies and a morale boost to the Ottomans instead of helping the besieged Christians. Don Garcia also had to weigh the fears Philip II had of an Ottoman or Barbary attack elsewhere in the Mediterranean – if he committed his army to Malta would he expose himself to attack somewhere else? What if he lost is fleet trying to relieve Malta, crippling his kingdoms defences for no gain?
This relief force was a clock for both sides – the Christians were desperate for it to muster and sail while the Ottomans needed it to hit as many delays as possible and to keep up their strength to oppose it should it land. Historically Don Garcia didn’t recruit an army equal in size to the Ottoman’s but by the time he arrived at the start of autumn the Ottomans were so tired and demoralised, and had lost many of their best soldiers, that his smaller but well rested army was more than up to the task of driving them off.
St Elmo’s Pay doesn’t really include any of the temporal elements. There’s no separate tracking of the Sicilian relief force and no clock ticking away forcing the Ottomans to be more aggressive.
1565 Siege of Malta does quite a good job at both of these clocks. The Sicilian Relief arguably arrives a little too quickly – or at least potentially can since it’s based on random card draws – but it certainly includes a system for the slow mustering and then eventual arrival of the relief. One of the things I liked most about 1565 Siege of Malta was how the event deck was used to track victory, the Ottomans lose if it runs out while the Christians win, making the experience of playing the Ottomans a race against the deck while the Christians just want to survive until the last card is done.
Unsurprisingly, Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross has the most complex systems for modelling both of these. It includes 20 individual weeks, and near the end the Ottomans must roll to see if they leave the island. Similarly, there are rules for the eventual arrival of the Sicilian relief force (although I did not get far enough in my game to play with them), and the game can end in a Final Battle phase where both players see if the relief was enough or if the Ottoman’s can emerge victorious despite the strain of the siege. This is by far the most elaborate representation of the clock, and I love it, but it of course comes a the cost of many more rules and a much longer game.
Dramatic Events
The final element I think is essential to capturing the Siege of Malta is some way to incorporate the dramatic events that marked certain points in the siege. To me there are four specific moments and three more generic, recurring events that should be included in some form in the game.
The four specific events are:
1. The dragging of Ottoman ships over Mount Scibberas to launch a combined assault on Birgu and Senglea – and then the dramatic defence against the odds in the face of the combined assault.
2. The death of Turgut and the threat to the lives of the other leaders
3. The piccolo soccorso, or “small relief”, the force of approximately six hundred soldiers who snuck across Malta in the wake of the Ottoman capture of St Elmo and were ferried into Birgu in the nick of time.
4. The cavalry raid out of Mdina into the Ottoman camp during one of the last dramatic assaults on Birgu and Senglea, which was mistaken for the arrival of the main relief force and caused the collapse of the Ottoman attack just when it might finally have succeeded.
In addition to the four above I would like for the game to capture the attempts to undermine the walls, particularly Birgu and Senglea, the endless barrages of the Christians by Ottoman artillery, and the many dramatic last stands where Christian forces who should have been wiped out somehow survived to fight another day.
1565 Siege of Malta has most of the above elements, although I did complain in my review that it felt like the big one-off events (specifically boats over Mt Scibberas and cavalry raid out of Mdina) happened far too often. It doesn’t really have leader death, it’s not that granular in its representation of the two sides, and there’s no piccolo soccorso. It does have bombardment and dramatic attacks on the Christian positions, but not really any system for mining.
St Elmo’s Pay doesn’t do this particularly well. It has artillery cards which represent the bombardment in an interesting way, but you aren’t guaranteed that they’ll show up and play a major role in your game. Same thing with cards for miners. Lots of cards represent characters who can die, but Turgut may never show up (he hasn’t in my games) so his death can hardly be a major event in the siege in most games. It does have the auto-loss if Mustapha or Valette die but that’s kind of the opposite of what I want since it ends the game. I want to see the fallout of that death and have to cope with it. Things like the dragging of the boats, Mdina cavalry attack, and piccolo soccorso don’t fit into the games structure. There are cards for Mdina cavalry and Ottoman ships, but they persist until killed, not as one dramatic attack.
As the most complex and granular game, it’s no surprise that Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross has the most detail for all of these. There are rules for the piccolo soccorso and event cards can cause the dragging ships over Mt Scibberas and the cavalry attack from Mdina. All of the leaders run the risk of death, although interestingly only through Christian card play. Christian events can be used to try and kill all the Muslim leaders, but Valette can only be killed by dramatically coming to the defence against an Ottoman attack, a choice the Christian player makes. Bombardment and dramatic pitched fights play a major role in the game and there are rules for mining, although they are quite simple, and they didn’t come up in my short demo game.
Conclusion
This post isn’t intended to be a review, I already wrote what I thought about each of the individual games. Instead, it is an exploration of the historic siege and what I, in my humble opinion, think are the most important and interesting elements to convey in a game about the siege. These opinions are what have led me to preferring Waning Crescent, Shattered Cross to the other two, but obviously the designers of 1565 Siege of Malta and St Elmo’s Pay have different ideas of what is important when portraying the siege. Which is fine! Hopefully this has been at least an interesting exploration of the topic. If you have different opinions about what you want to see of the siege represented in games, then hopefully it has also provided you some guidance in picking a game for you.