Siege of Rhodes 1522

Russell produced this interesting "Postcard" game covering the Siege of Rhodes in 1522. There are actually several games in postcard format (the board, rules and counters all fit on a postcard) including one on the Battle of Westerplatte in 1939 that I'm very keen to play. 

Anyway, the Siege of Rhodes was a new one on me. Ottomans vs Knights Hospitaller, and I gather Rhodes had been besieged many times before. 

Russell converted the board and pieces into PowerPoint so we could play remotely. It is also a handy way of playing the game anyway. Who needs VASSAL. 

The Knights are in the big fortress, with one unit holding each section of wall and one in reserve. The Ottomans are outside trying to breach the walls and force the knights to surrender. The game covers four months of the siege in eight turns each of two weeks, starting in July 1522.

This was a excuse to wear a very silly range of hats. Pete, Mark and I were the Ottomans, John and Tim the Christians. 

Each game turn is divided into a variable number of phases. The phases and actions for both sides  are determined by card draws from a normal deck of cards. Generally each side will get one action, sometimes two and on average (we did the sums) there will be fifteen phases per turn. 

This allows for some of the more laborious type siege activities, like mining, counter mining and bombarding. Coupled with sort lived but exciting stuff like sallies and assaults. 

The whole thing is very attritional, as the Ottomans try to breach the walls, and the Christians shore them up again. Both sides have a 'resistance level', which is increased or decreased by various things, and to win the Ottomans have to get the Christians RL down to 0, which is actually very hard. The variable number of phases each turn keep the game quite unpredictable, but not random, so you can actually plan around mining and breaching. 

At this stage, the Ottomans have several breaches, and have even managed to storm one section of wall in the south. The defenders have concentrated around the big cluster of breaches in the North, as each breach can be used for an assault. 

The Ottoman artillery is a vanishing asset, it is powerful early on, but is rapidly reduced by counterbattery fire and the odd heroic sally.  We used it as much as possible to create breaches, but were soon reduced to mining, which is much slower. The Christians can countermine to block them up again, or to reduce our mining activity. 

A mass assault on the French gate! Combat is differential, so it really pays to get a marginal superiority. We figured out the best assault tactic was to get a breach (or two), then on a 'two actions' phase, blow the mine you'd spent six turns preparing, and launch an immediate assault before the defenders can react and move more units up. 

The Christians do have one unit which can act as a fire brigade, if placed in reserve, but it is a die roll to activate. Sadly for us the Fire Brigade reacted, so it 9 v 9 in terms of combat strength, however our earlier success in storming one of the walls had reduced the enemy resistance level so our attack succeeded on a 3 or more. We duly knocked a step off one of the defenders, and more important, the fire brigade was committed now. 

The cycle of breach and assault continued, interrupted by counter mining etc. We were slowly wearing the defenders down and several of the defenders in this picture have lost a step and have been flipped. 

Although we'd lost most our guns, our resistance level stayed high as it could only be reduced by failed mining attacks, failed assaults or if the Christians managed to remove two breaches in a turn. We were careful to put a lot of effort into mines so they had at least an 87% chance of success and the Christians never quite had the impetus to close two breaches in a turn. The dodgy thing was the assaults, but once we had begun to weaken the defence, they became less likely to fail. 

The main problem was that all this stuff took time, lots of time, and reducing Christian morale to zero essentially required us to have cleared the bulk of the walls by turn 5, and for the enemy to fail a series of morale tests. 

After two sessions, we'd got about halfway through (it started going much faster once we'd figured out the rules and interplay of options) and the plan was to finish it off the following week. 

That was a very interesting game, well worth the price, and an entertaining take on gaming that most challenging of subjects, a siege.