[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.

The initial set up for the solitaire scenario playing as the Ottomans. I have decided that despite Mustapha’s historic preferences I’ve assigned him to take St Elmo first.

In a game of St Elmo’s Pay each player starts by taking their side’s respective decks which include cards representing characters, generic units, events, and tactics used during the siege. Cards are played into one of three rows, each associated with one of the Hospitaller fortresses on Malta: Birgu, Senglea, and St Elmo. Initially players will be trying to resolve objectives in their separate objective decks. These represent key events that occurred during the build up to the siege. Once both players have completed their objective decks the siege begins in earnest. Only at this point do players begin comparing the combat stats in each row. Each unit has two combat stats: Might and Zeal. The player with the higher Might value adds the difference in damage markers to the location in that row, while the player with more Zeal adds just one damage marker. Each of the three fortresses in the middle has a health value and the first player to reach that number wins the location. First player to win two locations wins the game. Players can also win by killing the other player’s leader or if their opponent’s deck runs out. For what it’s worth, while I’ve seen some leaders take significant damage, I’ve never seen much more than half the deck be used over the course of the game. Winning two of the three locations was by far the most consistent victory condition.

I got an early opportunity to kill Francisco Balbi di Correggio and I took it, because without his one Resource the Christians won’t be able to do very much for the first few turns.

The core gameplay is pretty straightforward if you’ve played card games before. Cards have a cost you must pay to play them. You can generate resources to purchase cards by discarding cards from your hand at a one-to-one exchange. Some cards when in play can also be used to generate resources at the cost of not making any other contribution that round. The gameplay of discarding most of your hand to take just a few actions is a great decision space. I liked it back when I played Race for the Galaxy in college, and I like it now. It’s even more intense in St Elmo’s Pay because you won’t ever shuffle your discard into your deck, so any card you use for resources won’t be coming back later. Some cards come in multiple copies, so discarding a card you want won’t necessarily mean that option is gone forever but it’s possible you’ll never see the other copy of that card in your game.

St Elmo’s Pay also comes with a very good solitaire mode. The rules for solitaire play are easy to interpret and play very smoothly – which is not often the case in my experience. A dial is used to track the AI bot’s resources. The slow ticking up of enemy resources gives the game an increasing intensity as the solitaire bot plays better and better cards as the game progresses. Unlike a normal opponent the AI cycles its deck regularly looking for cards to play with its available resources. It makes the game feel a bit more like a race than carefully planned duel of two equal powers, but it’s still a fun experience and plays relatively quickly. I rarely found myself having to check the rulebook for what decision the AI would make, which is always good to see in a solitaire system.

Siege preparations are now very much underway, we’re clearing objectives and filling out our respective forces.

But how does St Elmo’s Pay do at replicating the siege? St Elmo’s Pay takes a very different approach to 1565 Siege of Malta, which I covered last week (link: https://www.stuartellisgorman.com/blog/1565-siege-of-malta-by-maurice-suckling). Instead of a zoomed out strategic view of the siege, St Elmo’s Pay is focused on the characters of the siege and makes it more of a clash of personalities than a game of grand strategy. This has benefits and drawbacks in terms of depicting an event like the Siege of Malta.  

St Elmo’s Pay does manage to evoke one strategic element well: the emphasis initially on the taking of St Elmo. St Elmo is by far the weakest of the frontiers in the game, and since all frontiers are equal when it comes to victory it naturally encourages players to prioritise it. Do you try and grab St Elmo quickly to get a leg up on overall victory, or do you sacrifice it to try and win the other two even if they’re more challenging overall? It manages to capture some of the strategic push and pull with very little rules overhead. That said, it is far from perfect. There is no representation of Mdina in the game, so the game has no capacity to portray the alternative Ottoman strategy of taking Mdina first before focusing on the Grand Harbour.

The Ottoman’s reach the Great Siege objective which allows me to start engaging in Zeal combat and slowly chipping away at the locations for a turn or two before battle begins in earnest. Might combat only begins when both sides reach the Siege objective. This is interesting in terms of gameplay, but doesn’t feel like it makes much sense as an abstraction of the siege..

What St Elmo’s Pay does well is capture the characters of the siege. The Great Siege of Malta was brimming with larger-than-life individuals and in St Elmo’s Pay they are evocatively portrayed in portraits on their respective cards. Valette and Mustapha face off the entire game, while a rotating cast of characters comes in to support them. Cards can also eliminate characters almost as quickly as they are brought to the fight, which normally I find frustrating but here it captures the extreme violence and luck of the siege. After all, the historic Turgut was killed by the random misfortune of a misfiring gun, so why not capture some of that chaos? It also makes more room for new cards to come into play. I do kind of wish there wasn’t an automatic victory for killing the enemy leader, though. That feels more fitting to a clash of potential monarchs like Hastings than to the Siege of Malta. If either Mustapha or Valette had died their side still would have fought on, it just would have done so without an essential leadership figure to manage them. I think loss of the leader should be a significant disadvantage but not necessarily an instant loss. It also fails to capture the divided command of the Ottoman side - Mustapha is clearly the important leader and it’s very possible that Piali and Turgut will never appear in your game.

The siege begins in earnest! I’m badly losing in Senglea, but the other two are going much better (I foolishly stacked the tokens at St Elmo so it’s hard to see how many there are). The Christian arquebuses are hurting me in Birgu, though, which may limit my ability to hold out there. The choice of red and green for the damage tokens isn’t very color blind friendly.

I like how St Elmo’s Pay captures the build up to the siege. The opening rounds are carefully planning your strategy before the lines clash, and the objectives are snapshots of what happened between the fall of Rhodes and the siege. The one critique I would have is that this feels like it takes up too large a proportion of the game – once the siege itself begins things can move very quickly and the game can be over in a matter of turns. This feels more appropriate to a game about a battle like Hastings, where months of campaign preparation can be decided in a matter of hours. For an event like the Siege of Malta it feels like the siege part should take longer. It also means the temporal stress of the siege, where the Ottomans were worried about running out of time and the Christians just had to hold out until reinforcements came, is completely absent from the game which is a pity because it is such an important part of the story of the Siege of Malta.

I won in St Elmo but lost at Senglea (I should have tracked that with tokens, I should also have done something about that sun glare on the lower right). Some lucky card draws let me relocate Mustapha to the front by swapping him for some already damaged artillery. Can he help me get it over the line?

The story of the siege as shown in St Elmo’s Pay is very abstracted. There are no chronological or plausibility restrictions on when and where cards can be played. As the Hospitallers you could play a unit from the Spanish Relief Force on the first turn, no matter how absurd that is from a historical perspective. The individual spaces are also conceptually confusing. The Ottomans can play ships into the Frontiers, but what exactly does that represent, and more importantly what does it mean if my cavalry are behind my ships and why would that give them a bonus? When playing the game this doesn’t exactly bother me as long as I’m engaged in my individual decisions, but if I zoom out and try to reconstruct the story I’m telling it’s very odd. Similarly, while the event cards reference specific moments in the story of the siege they don’t do very much to conjure the extreme drama or excitement of some of the siege’s turning points. They can go off just about whenever as long as you have enough resources regardless of plausibility.

The game is chronologically and narratively kind of a mess, which makes sense given how the decks are shuffled and randomised every game. The game’s mechanics can create an interesting narrative as each player builds their forces, suffers losses, and clash for control of the central frontiers, but this feels abstracted from the historical narrative the game is about. The cards you play are an essential part of this narrative, but the characters portrayed on those cards don’t line up with their historic roles well at all. This has the effect of making the character and event cards feel more like cameos – a fun historic easter egg to recognise if you already know the history – rather than a means of conveying the greater history of the siege.

A last Ottoman push lets me just barely squeeze out a victory at Birgu thanks to my greater Zeal. My initial impression is that the Ottoman’s might be slightly easier to win with, but even at Normal difficultly my solitaire games have all been pretty close.

I don’t want to sound too negative. St. Elmo’s Pay does a lot with being a card game that is played in 30-40 minutes. It’s not a detailed simulation and it doesn’t attempt to be and there are certainly mechanics in the game that evoke some of the siege’s dynamics. The asymmetry in how the two factions play is also really interesting and provides a lot of potential strategic depth to be explored through multiple plays. On the whole I’m reasonably fond of St. Elmo’s Pay. It does a good job scratching the card gamer itch I’ve been trying to ignore since I stopped playing Magic the Gathering as a teenager. It’s not my favourite game, and I don’t know if it will stay in my collection for years to come (especially given the size of its box), but I’ve had fun playing it and it’s definitely a game I can see myself periodically coaxing a friend into playing with me.