Review: Fire and Stone: Siege of Vienna 1683

  

 

Nominee: Best Gunpowder Game, Charles S. Roberts Awards, 2022

Siege games have always been a popular topic for wargames. I haven’t done the research to back this up, but I think it’s likely that siege games were the earliest examples of asymmetric conflicts in board wargames. The earliest siege-themed game I could track down was Asalto (also known as Assault and Citadel, among others), a variation of Fox and Geese dating back to the early nineteenth century. It characterised the asymmetric nature of siege warfare simply and effectively and is still worthy of consideration. 

Fire & Stone: The Siege of Vienna, 1683 (Capstone Games, 2022) is game of deep strategy based on one of the most famous sieges of the Early-Modern era. In 1682, Sultan Mehmed IV broke a twenty-year peace with the neighbouring Habsburg Empire. After some successes, the Ottoman army ventured deep into Habsburg territory to lay siege to the Empire’s capital, Vienna. The siege of Vienna lasted sixty days, from mid-July to Mid-September 1683, and if relief hadn’t arrived in the form of a joint column of troops from Poland and the Holy Roman Empire arrived within a day of the breach of its walls, the city would have almost certainly fallen. A near-run thing, and a worthy subject for a game treatment.

 

Appearance

The first thing to mention is Fire and Stone is a really gorgeous game. Capstone Games is better known as a producer of English-language versions of popular Eurogames like Ark Nova (Feuerland Spiele, 2021), Maracaibo (Game's Up, 2019), and Weimar: The Fight for Democracy (Spielworxx, 2023). There is a strong graphic theme that runs through every single aspect of Fire and Stone, from the constrained colour palette to the modest expediency of the map-board, the component illustrations (the ornate Soldiery of the Troop cards down to the simplicity of the spades on the Mining tokens). The artist on the project was Domhnall Hegarty, an Art Director by trade who also handled the graphics on a several of my favourite boards, including Navajo Wars (GMT Games, 2013) and Versailles 1919 (GMT Games, 2022), so it’s no surprise the game has such a solid and thoughtful presentation. More than simply looking good, every aspect of the visual and tactile design lifts the experience of the game to a higher level.

Set up and ready to play (Ottoman's POV).

Fire and Stone is a siege game. The action is localised, and the board reflects this. At one end is the edge of the Ottoman camp. After surveying Vienna’s fortifications, Ottoman engineers decided the most promising place to breach was the curtain wall between the Löbl and Burg bastions. Before this wall lay strata of outer defences – earthworks, redoubts, and trenches. Between the outer defences and the city walls lay the glacis, a clear field set at a gradient to the wall to slow the progress of an attack and give the defenders a free field of fire to wreak havoc on their assailants.

The board-side components of the game are made of wood, rendered in red for the Ottoman aggressors and yellow for the Viennese defenders. These include simple matchsticks representing improvised protective earthworks, corner-sets for structural fortifications, and more ornate cannon meeples in two styles for the Habsburgs’ defensive cannons and the Ottomans’ siege artillery.

Sample Strategy cards.

The cards are all of excellent quality, printed on a good weight of cardstock, and present in a good, readable font. There are three kinds of cards in play, and the two sides get their own decks of each. The Strategy cards are the most numerous; these are what you will play though for your actions each turn, either spending them to perform an action or triggering the card’s event.

Sample Tactics cards.

The smaller deck is made up of tactics cards, of which there are about a dozen. Each player will only draw five of these for the whole game (another nod to building replayability into the game). These, played at the right moment, can change the fortunes of a particular play, but will be unlikely to win the game outright. Three or for changes of fortune added together will nudge your cause further ahead.

Sample Army cards, Habsburgs (top) and Ottomans.

Finally, there are the Army cards. These represent the forces each side has at their disposal. Ton both sides, the cards are a spread of values between one and three points. Each time you get into a fight, you will pull out three army cards of your choice. Some events may push a card or two back to a second rank (these won’t participate in the fighting for that round), and some troops may not make it through the battle (these are removed from the game altogether). The ones that survive are exhausted for the current turn; these will return to the deck at the start of the next turn, but attrition is a danger to both sides.

On top of a formidably presented game, the publishers have included a twelve-page booklet offering a potted history of the lead-up to the siege and a reckoning of the particular events that unfolded over the months of the conflict, indicating those events reflected in the tactical and strategic cards but their deck prefix and card number. This also includes a brief Designer Notes article to finish off an immersive and informative read.

 

Play

Fire and Stone wears its Euro credentials on its sleeve but in its heart, it is an asymmetric historical conflict game of deep strategy. This is no system dressed up in historical garb. Every mechanical device put into service in Fire and Stone approximates an element of the complex and multifaceted story of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683.

The game is played out over five turns (or possibly less) – if the Ottomans have not managed to take the city by the end of the fifth turn, a relief army arrives, headed by the famous Winged Hussars (a sixth space marked on the turn track).

At the start of the game each player draws five Strategy cards. These are your currency for taking action (up to five in a turn). At the beginning of the first turn, each player also draws five Tactics cards. These are often powerful adjuncts to actions in the game, usually spent during battles, but they are a finite resource, these five are all you will have for the entire game, and each can only be used once. They can tip the scales in a crucial battle, but the trick is recognising which battles are crucial (spoiler alert: they’re ALL crucial). There is a danger in saving these for later use in the game; like a person found dead from thirst in the desert with half a canteen of water, there is no value in hording them when they can be of use in the moment.

Habsburg and Ottoman cannons face off.

A turn involves each player (starting with the Ottoman player) taking turns to play a Strategy Card from their hand. When playing a Strategy card, the payer may choose to conduct and action or play the card’s Event. The actions each side may conduct vary a little; Ottomans can Bombard Habsburg fortifications, while Habsburgs can Barrage the Ottoman troops, potentially thinning the herd; the Ottomans – as the aggressors – can Assault a Habsburg-controlled hex, leading to a battle, while the Habsburgs can Sortie into an Ottoman-controlled hex adjacent to one of their own. Many of these actions can achieve an increase in your side’s morale, or conversely a drop in the other’s, sometimes both. This is important, because morale, like everything else in the game, is a limited currency, and one more way to defeat your opponent; when a side’s morale drops to zero, the other side claims victory.

Much of the game’s action is abstracted; Troops are represented by a deck of slender cards selected from a pool (deck) by each side for each discrete engagement. When a battle is instigated by either side, each chooses up to three cards from their troop deck. Each player has a selection of troops with values of one through three points. The Ottomans have a selection of twenty cards, the Habsburgs only twelve. These will be the troops deployed for this battle and are placed face-down in a row in front of the owning player (there are circumstances where the Ottoman player can increase the number of troops committed to battle, but for this illustration we’ll keep it simple). Each player may also play a Tactic card, also face-down, thought they are not obligated to do so. Once the cards have all been chosen, both sides reveal their hands and Tactics cards, and the effects of the revealed Tactics cards are applied.

Next, the attacking side must move one of his armies back to a second line for each enemy fortification in the hex where the battle is taking place (two for a structural fortification); the attacking player decides which troops to withdraw. Only front-line troops are tallied for the final resolution of the battle.

The fickle hand of Fate. Every round, you’ll want or need to do two or three things,
and have to respond to whatever the other side just did, which always leads
to challenging decision points in every card-play.

Finally, dice are rolled by each side; the Ottoman rolls one die for each of his cannons either in or adjacent to the attacked hex, while the Habsburg player rolls a die for every cannon still on the board. Each six rolled will eliminate a troop from the front line, and if there are more sixes than troops remaining on the front line, second-line troops are then eliminated. Eliminated troops are removed for the remainder of the game.

Resolution of a battle involves adding the values of any remaining troops on each player’s front line and comparing the results. The highest total wins, while draws go to the defender.

 The progress of the game is a slow creep for the Ottoman forces forward to the outer defences, then the glacis, and finally to the last defensive line. The final aim for the Ottoman player is to gain control of either the curtain wall hex or the two redoubts to either side of the curtain wall, and control is gained through combat, the exchange of lives for a few yards of ground. In this respect, Fire and Stone may well be compared to a World War I Western Front game, that both the actual siege and the action of the game are forgivingly shorter in duration.

 

The top of the Third.

Appraisal

Some will argue that Fire and Stone isn’t really a war game. I’m not going to jump into that particular briar patch; one can’t shift opinions already fully formed. I will posit that Fire and Stone is a deep historical simulation – dressed in the trappings of a Eurogame – the requires from its players particular consideration and careful resource husbandry. Fire and Stone is a conundrum. It’s a challenge whichever side you fight. After more than a dozen plays, I’m no closer to fathoming a clear course to a happy outcome for either side, which is, of course, a part of this game’s charm. Every game has had a similar beginning, but a radically different middle and end. A couple of games have played out to the final round (one to the penultimate card-play) for an eleventh-hour Ottoman win; in three the Habsburgs managed to hold out by the skin of their teeth to the arrival of reinforcements. Two victories to one side and another one to the other came from exhausting the opposition’s morale. Pasha Mustafa was strangled by the the Sultan's executioner for his failure at the Vienna siege and subsequent battle. Of the scores of ways to die in Fire and Stone, the one never mentioned is “old age.”

Habsburg defeat at the bottom of the fourth turn, with the Ottoman player breaching
the Curtain Wall and placing their Control marker.

The game is very well balanced, though it may not feel it at times, whichever side you are playing. The Ottoman player has more men at his disposal – more meat for the grinder – than the Habsburg player. In the beginning, at least, the Habsburg player has more artillery at his disposal, though this number will inevitably reduce with the press of the Ottoman’s advance.

For the Habsburgs, the situation can seem like a waiting game, trying to delay the progress of the Ottomans’ efforts until reinforcements arrive. This is deceptive. If they simply wait for help, the game will be over before the Fifth turn.

Fire and Stone is an immersive experience. What makes the game such a challenge is the sparse resources available to each side. I don’t think it’s possible to pick a plan at the beginning of the game and see it through to a successful end. Each turn of the card is a challenge. For both sides, each turn requires all of your attention to marshal your resources and survive well enough to function in the next turn. Victories in Fire and Stone are piquant, while defeats carry a familiar taste of inevitability. This game demands al your attention, all your resourcefulness and cunning, and may still find you wanting. All this makes for an extraordinary experience.