From: Roberto Chiavini Subject: Two reviews for September Siege of Constantinople (SPI) Twenty five years have passed since the apparition of this Strategy & Tactics game on the Siege of Constastinople, one of the ephocal event of Medieval history, the End of the Ancient world and the beginning of a new era. Richard Berg, always a daring designer and full of innovative ideas even in his botched designs, has tried to give the simulation field a new way to play siege warfare, making it fun for both players or even for a solitaire attempt, but it has not hit the target, and other than for several stimulating ideas on how to recreate a few of the situations of siege warfare, this game could be considered a failure (and as a game it is so without any doubt). Made in the standard format for a S&T of that era (with so-so graphics and the contraption of the rules due to the size of the rulebook - the naval rules where published in a Moves issue, not with the game), Siege of Constantinople is a game divided in two parts: the bombardment phase, that may last for several turns, in which the Turk player try to deceive the Byzantine opponent in where is going to make is push against the wall, pointed by an avalanche of dice rolls to see if the walls may be breached somewhere (while the Byzantine player try to fill the eventual gaps in his defenses). For this, there are several tables to check, with a lot of interesting material and new ideas. But it all sounds good only on the paper, as after a couple of turns of real play this become mortally boring. The second phase of the game, the assault, is the most interesting in theory, but it reveals its flaws early in the field, when, after a dozens or so dice rolls you see, as the Turks, that yours units have achieved nothing in the first impulse, they are massed against a small part of the wall (where your guns have make perhaps a small breach) and in the next nine impulses (each assault phase is divided in ten impulses) you have to roll perhaps 100 hundred dice (as the first step of the melee sequence requires a check on a two dice table simply to see if the attacker may have scored a hit!!) to see one of the damned Byzantine defenders become ineffective for a turn... Then you realize that you have probably other things to make in that day (perhaps simply stare at the blank screen of your television) and its better if the fall of Constantinople is postponed a few more decades. In between, you have read a nice rulebook, full of stimulating ideas on how to breach walls, how to fill the foss, have looked to a very detailed map of the capital of the Byzantine Empire, have placed more Byzantine leaders than units on the map, have found a lot of interesting points in the rules to use in other future designs (if you are a wargame designer or want to become one - reading any of Berg's rulebook is first of all normally really fun and, most of all, a real forge of gaming ideas for the daring minds out there), but for playing this one is almost a vain effort. I've played a few others siege wargames in the last 20 years or so, and this one is not one of the worst: as it stands, siege warfare is totally unplayable, in my opinion, it's only a boring way to pass several hours, without any real insights on what a real siege simulation was for both sides involved. Perhaps, the correct way to make a siege situation playable is still to be invented (but I'm not too eager to see it found, anyway). I rate the game 4 in 1-10 scale