State of Play: Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna, 1683 (2/6)

 

This week T asked if I minded meeting at his place for a game. We’ve both really been enjoying burrowing into Napoleon 1806 (Shakos, 2917), but it takes a bit of time to set up, with the two army boards, the pre-set block placement, and such. So, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to introduce my partner in crime (crimes against rules as written sometimes) to the enigma that is Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022). It’s my most recent sub-in for my 6x6 list (if you missed it, you can catch the third quarter progress report here). I’ve played it about four times now, but only once with another person. The other times were learning games, and I don’t feel like I’ve learnt much so far.

In case you missed it, Fire and Stone came out last year, the first wargame release by Capstone Games, a company best known for family games like Terra Mystica, (Capstone Games, 2012), Orleans (Capstone, 2014), and Ark Nova (Capstone, 2021). There is some debate over whether Fire and Stone should be classified as a wargame; I try not to get in the middle of these sorts of arguments, neither being an Owl or a Rooster, a Jet or a Shark, or whatever. Granted, it’s unconventional; the game plays out on a hex-grid (tick for the wargame camp), but said hex-grid is ten hexes long and only three columns wide. It has wooden pieces for the fortifications and cannon, but the opposing armies are asymmetric decks of cards. In this question, I’m going to defer to those presumably more knowledgeable on these matters than me – the Charles S. Roberts Awards board, which accepted a nomination for the game to be considered for the Best Gunpowder Wargame category this year. It didn’t win, but it was in very good company*.

Teaching a game is good (with a forgiving audience) because it highlights any misunderstandings you have or patches in the game that you’re not quite across. There was a few of those in this game. But honestly, I was surprised I remembered as much as I did of how the game plays. I don’t have enough experience with the game to be able to say this with any authority, but I suspect the Ottoman player has the ore straight-forward role in the game, that of pushing ever forward and eventually controlling the Curtain Wall hex at the Habsburg’s baseline, so I gave that faction to T to play. After going through the turn structure and the options available – each layer deals themselves off five Strategy cards, then take turns either playing a card for its event or discarding a card to do an action – we got into it and learned by doing.

Fire and Stone looks like a difficult game out of the box. The way it’s put together challenges your expectations of what a wargame should be. But at its heart, it’s a game of simple parameters but deep strategy. It’s actually rather easy to teach. Each of the five rounds consist of five cards each, played consecutively, starting with the Ottomans. You play a card for event or as an action, then your opponent does the same. You have five tactics cards that give you a bit of a leg-up, but you can’t just blow through them because you only have five of them for twenty-five (or possibly more) event/action plays, and some of them might be reaction cards, only playable on the other player’s action.

The game ran fairly smoothly for a first go with a new player. T picked it up surprisingly quickly (more quickly than I did on my first couple of two-handed solo forays). Like Worthington’s Great Sieges games, if the last card is played and the Ottomans haven’t gained control of the Curtain Wall hex, it’s a default win for the Habsburgs. This wasn’t an issue for T; he laid his control marker on the Curtain Wall on the fifth card of round four. I have to put it down to some luck, but mostly having the nerve to commit his troops heavily to the battle actions that won him successive hexes in the second and third rounds (this can be risky – commit your best troops early and you run the risk of them being lost to enemy cannon fire for the rest of the game).

Defeat in the fourth round

This AAR feels a little shallow to me; Fire and Stone is a nuanced game, and I’m still feeling out how everything operates withing the game. But T’s game was like a bettering ram. That may have come down to the card selection on the night. Nearly all of T’s card events were aggressive ones. Mine tended to win back some troops of raise morale a notch (I’ll talk more about morale in the next report). I’m not angry or annoyed T won his first game. I’m just surprised at the sense of inevitability it carried.

We’ll probably come back to Napoleon 1806 over the next couple of weeks, to draw a line under that, and get started on the review (spoiler alert: it will be positive). But game three of Fire and Stone won’t be too far away.

* Charles S Roberts Award for Best Gunpowder Wargame: 

1565: Siege of Malta, Worthington Publishing, designer Maurice Suckling

Fire & Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683, Capstone Games, designer Robert DeLeskie

Nagashino 1575 & Shizugatake 1583, Serious Historical Games, designer Phillipe Hardy

WINNER: No Peace Without Honor, Compass Games, designer David Meyler

Wars of Religion, France 1562-1598, Fellowship of Simulations, designer Jerome Lefrancq