How does this game work?
Here's a little idea of what this game is all about.
First, it's a card game, so it deals with cards. If you're familiar with Magic the Gathering and all the other emulators of its success over the years, from the excellent Vtes to the amusing Gashbell, from the enjoyable Netrunner to the frustrating Spellfire, A Game of Thrones is categorized in this family of very inspiring game genre.
Secondly, though it is playable as a one-on-one game known as "Joust", A Game of Thrones is best played as a multi-player game, and best with 4 players. Any less, and some game mechanics' beauty cannot be fully materialized, any more and you'll probably go home with a headache due to stress and brain overheating. (This did not take into account the variant in the King of the Sea deluxe expansion for 5-6 players, though I doubt it is going to make much of a difference)
Thirdly, this game is deep in strategy, and demanding on skill. It requires a good table-reading skill, negotiations, planning ahead, and a good grasp of general resource management, perhaps even more so than the already demanding Vtes. Why so? Because even in Vtes, you primarily deal offensively against one player, defensively against another, and all others are natural allies (most of the time, and no, Danz, you're not one of them, regardless of where you sit~ heehee); whereas in AGOT, you're forced to deal with all your opponents at the same time. There may be one that you need not deal with in every particular round in terms of defense because he supports your Title, but that's about it. The game then forces you to strategically attack the player who's leading (and therefore usually the most threatening), and to defend (almost always) against everybody who can when you're near victory. This requires a lot of careful planning - look too comfortable and you'll be pounded to pieces as you attract all the ballistic missiles the world can offer, misread the table and go after the wrong player and you'll give some other guy the victory. Not an easy game if you ask me.
Lastly, the game is long, when compared to many of the other more fast paced two player games, like Magic for example. This is of course common amongst multi-player game - even Risk would take an hour or two to play out when you have 4 guys rolling a lot of d6s. A typical AGOT game with 4 players should take about 2 hours or so when the players generally know what they're doing. This leads to intense and very enjoyable hours of game play if you like intrigue and challenge and a whole lot of excitement. If you don't really like to trouble your brains, perhaps it's prudent to stay away from AGOT that night. That doesn't mean that there are no simple decks to play, but unlike Vtes, where sneak bleeds are generally just "played like that", AGOT, no matter how simple your deck can be, the larger number of concurrent opponents does make it harder, even for simplistic and straightforward decks.
Now let me come to what this game is about and how it works.
In AGOT, you play the leader of a Great House in the world created by George Martin in a Song of Ice and Fire, somehow the title of the first book - A Game of Thrones kinda stick better than even the series' title. It is a fantasy world with a political situation more volatile than the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years War. You have Great Houses vying to become the one true king of the continent of Westeros after the previous king died, and each had declared themselves the rightful fella to own the place. Of course, as with every era, the true claim usually goes to the ones with the biggest guns and the largest army - no difference here - though spies and covert operations, and in the case of AGOT, powerful creatures, allies and magic all do play a part in this rush to become the next boss.
The objective of the game is to accumulate 15 Power, either on your House card (which is the card you put on the table to indicate the faction that you're working with, think of it as the Stronghold of the Legend of the Five Rings CCG, or the Terran Headquarters if you're playing Terran in Starcraft), or on your characters, or a combination of both. Just think of these "Power Tokens" as victory points.
There are several ways to get those victory points, most of the time your characters go get it for you, and these Power Tokens of yours can also be stolen by your opponents, reducing your chance of winning and increasing theirs.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
To begin an AGOT game you need 2 decks. One is called a PLOT DECK, consisting of EXACTLY 7 PLOT cards. This deck is not random, you select the exact plot card to use during every PLOT phase - which is the beginning of each round. The Plot cards, gives you your basic Gold Income for that round, indicate your Initiative to fight for strategic advantage, the Claim value which is the damage that your guys will do in that round, and usually comes with an effect that affects the game, not necessarily in a good way.
The Plot phase is a very interesting aspect of the game, since you have 7 cards to choose from, and cannot use them repeatedly until all have been used at least once, the decision to choose when to use which, and to predict what may be coming out from your enemies (once one is familiar with the opponents' Plots, that is) becomes a sort of planning that is integral to the game. In the simplest sense, the decision to sacrifice income for initiative could be the driving factor for a particular round, and the need to cause maximum damage at the expense of going last might follow. All these is then complicated by the fact that most plot cards have varying impacts on the game, ranging from allowing you to search for a character in your deck, to the famous Valar Morghulis which wipes out every character in play that don't have any ability to save themselves (that's a lot of them)
Once the Plots are revealed, the player with the highest Initiative on the plot card, adjusted by all the Initiative enhancing cards in play will then have the right to decide who will be the first player. Again this is a very interesting aspect of the game - giving the Initiative winner the right to choose (in a way), how he thinks he wants the game round to proceed - to become the first player for the early bird access to Titles, or to be the last player and grab the strategic advantage of knowing what's going on?
That brings me to the Titles - which is the last part of the Plot phase. There are 6 unique Titles in the game, and during Plot phase, starting from the first player, and then proceeding clockwise, players get to choose one each. Every Title confers an advantage and a love-hate relationship with some others. For example, the Master of Coins will give you +2 Income that round, opposes the Hand of the King and supports the Master of Law. This choice is not a simple asset management decision, as it also has impact on victory, since a supporting Title cannot attack you - giving you a temporary lull in defense against a particular player, and an opposing Title awards extra Power Tokens when you beat him up. All these, of course, are considerations when one is selecting a Title.
Still with me?
Now we come to the other deck that we need for the game - the House deck. This is like the Destiny deck of L5R, the playing deck of Vtes and so on. This is where the assets are, the stuff you buy and use and pretty much wins you the game. The minimum size of this deck is 60, which appears to be the norm, and no more than 3 of a single card of the same name can be included in the deck.
You draw a hand of seven at the beginning of the game. There is no hand size limit.
There are several kinds of cards.
Characters are probably the most important of them all - like the creatures in Magic, the vampires in Vtes and Agents in Spycraft - these are the guys whom are primarily responsible for winning you the game. All these characters have a House affiliation, and out-of-house characters cost you more gold to play (something like the penalty of out-of-clan characters in L5R). Characters have a Strength rating, indicating how powerful they are, the higher the better; a Gold cost, which is how much you need to spend to recruit them into play. They also have up to 3 challenge icon - Red for Military, Green for Intrigue and Blue for Power. These icons indicate their ability to participate in attacking or defending in the relevant challenges, which is the primary method of harassing your opponents. Many characters have exciting abilities to make the life of your opponents difficult.
Locations and Attachments (and Kingdom) are similar to characters, with a Gold cost and a House affiliation. These give extra gold, extra Influence and special powers and so on.
Events are instant cards that gives one-shot benefits, like Giant Strength kinda thing.
These cards make up your House deck. Generally we look at a standard composition of 50% Characters, 25% Income Location, and 25% Events and other special stuff. (That's what I read, will test it out a lot more before committing, but it sounds like a good start)
Every player gets to draw 2 cards after the Plot phase, and then proceed to the Marshalling phase to recruit and buy their assets. Gold are awarded at the beginning of the phase, which is a sum total of all your existing Income generating cards plus your plot's gold income stat. These are then spent to put characters and other stuff into play from your hand.
After every player is done with this, the meat of the game, defined as the Challenge phase, begins. Each player takes turn to declare up to 3 kinds of attack against ANY eligible opponent, in any order. Military challenges kills off the opponent's characters, Intrigue drop their cards in hand and Power steals their Power Tokens. A mix of the three usually happens with every player. Characters then "kneel" to attack and/or defend, so one must think of minion management during this phase.
The Dominance phase follows, which allows the player with the highest strength, calculated by adding up all the standing (untapped) characters' strength, plus any unused gold, to win Dominance for that round, and claim 1 Power Token.
When any player gets 15 Power Token, the game ends immediately.
The round restarts after everybody returns all unused gold, Titles that they're holding, and stand (untap) all their cards that could.
As you can see, this is no easy game to play. But though the strategic implication may be deep, the game is surprisingly intuitive and easy to catch in terms of rules. It is easier to teach someone to play AGOT than Vtes (somehow), and easier to get them interested, especially if they've read the novels. The game is very well themed to the setting.
The game has many other options to make it even more interesting - for example, Agenda cards allow the great Houses to play with tweaks - for example, the Knights of the Realm accelerates card draws if you control more Knight characters than everyone else, and punishes you when you don't and so on. There are enough cards, and the Houses are well balanced enough for deck building to be varied and interesting. Definitely going to keep you busy for a good long time - not to mention you're going to get a new chapter pack of 20 new cards pretty much every month.
All in all this is a great game. Financially viable to maintain, varied enough to keep you challenged, and deep enough to keep you interested. Pick it up, you will not regret it.
(o.o)
