I was roped into buying a starter for yet another CCG while in the WotC outlet buying something entirely different. The last thing I want is another CCG to waste money on. So I was a little surprised to find the game simple enough to not hurt my head (unlike L5R) and enjoyable enough to make me keep playing (unlike Harry Potter).
So here's my first take on it.
1. Disclaimer
This is based on games played with two starter decks, the Stark and the Lannister decks. We don't have the cards to do any customization of our decks, so really this is a review of AGoT, Out Of The Box.
2. Aesthetics
The cards look and feel very much like L5R cards. They're colorful, with the three different Houses color coded for easy recognition. They are not as confusing at first glance as the L5R cards, though; there are typically only 2 numbers on a given card, and their locations make it easy to figure out their meanings from context.
Most of the art is pleasant; I can't make any claims as to how well it represents the characters from the series, as I don't remember enough of the series to be any sort of authority. Some of the art is bad, but none of it is as bad as the Justin Hampton M:TG art, so that's a plus. The text is generally readable, something that isn't clear from the PDFs at the publisher's website.
The bad news is that they've chosen icons to represent some basic game concepts -- the three types of attack and the three families. These icons are *hard* to parse. Maybe I just need more light in my playing area, but it's difficult to distinguish them at a glance. Also, the House icons don't match the House banners in the upper right hand corners of the cards. I kept looking at the unidentifiable blob on the cards, and eventually had to scan the rules for a similar blob to verify that it was, in fact, a 'wolf head' representing House Stark. I feel that it would have been just as easy to use the names of the Houses in the text of the cards.
Also, the card backs, while nice, are identical for Plot and House cards. These cards are never mixed in play, so there's no reason to have the same backs, and making them different would (like L5R) make it easier to seperate them out for play. I can understand that this would be more expensive to print, though, and might throw off their rarity scale, as the Plot cards seem to share rarity with the rest of the cards.
3. Basic Gameplay
During the course of the game, you are attempting to accumulate 15 Power points, and seize the throne. Power points can be accumulated by winning battles unopposed, by winning Power challenges, and by having untapped (not 'kneeling') characters at the end of each turn.
During a turn, you choose a Plot card simultaneously with your opponent. This card dictates your short-term strategy, in that it defines, for that turn, the resources you have available for card purchases, the amount of damage your attacks will do, and which player will get to act first. Plot cards can also have special effects, such as allowing you to draw additional cards, or allowing additional attacks, or destroying active character cards.
In our first game, we didn't realize you *choose* your plot cards each turn, and just drew them randomly. This was No Fun. Choosing your plot cards, and even customizing your stack of 7 Plot Cards available in that game, makes the game a whole lot more interesting. My girlfriend put the 'Wildfire Assault' card in, which kills off all but 3 of everyone's characters, and then promptly brought out a huge army of characters. Then she was faced with a choice: play the Wildfire plot now, and eat the huge loss and get it over with, or keep putting it off until it became unavoidable (until it was the last Plot card she had available) and potentially critically sabotage her endgame effort.
After that, you draw two cards. There is no hand size limit in the game, that we can see. This is nice, in that it lets you conserve resources for as long as possible, and there is never a penalty of card loss for playing a lot of 'draw more' cards. There's an inherent gameplay limitation on hand size, though, in the form of Intrigue attacks; more on that in a second.
You then 'marshal' your resources, playing locations which have a variety of effects that generally make it easier to bring new cards in, and playing Characters, who are the tools you'll use to launch attacks on your enemy. There may be a style of gameplay that works without Characters, like M:TG creature-less decks, but I can't imagine it, and the cards we have certainly don't support it.
Characters are rated in Cost and Strength; the Cost is subtracted from your income for that turn, as determined by your Plot card, and by any locations you have out that increase income. To enforce deck themes, it's cheaper to bring out Characters of your own House -- substantially cheaper. Strength seems to be rated from 2 to 5; higher and lower may exist but we haven't seen them.
Characters also have symbols showing the kinds of attacks and defenses they can participate in: Military, Intrigue, and Power. The more of these a Character has, the better; we haven't seen any with all three, although there are cards that can modify a Character to have all three.
Once you're done Marshalling, you move on to Challenges. The person whose Plot card has the highest Initiative score gets to choose who goes first. I generally found that letting the other person go first was a good strategy; my girlfriend, playing an Intrigue-heavy deck, preferred to go first in hopes of sabotaging my plans through hand destruction.
In the Challenges phase, you get the chance to make one of each kind of attack. You kneel the characters you're attacking with, and then the other player kneels the characters he or she is defending with, and their total Strengths are compared to determine the winner. This has no effect on the actual characters involved -- no-one is necessarily 'damaged' by participation in a challenge.
The interesting part about the Challenges is the three types, and their effects. First of all, you have decisions to make as to which characters to assign to which challenges -- if, for instance, Catelyn Stark is out, she can participate in either an Intrigue or a Power challenge, and can defend against either of those. I tend to play CCGs in 'turtle' mode, trying to build a seamless defense, and often would hold back cards with access to multiple types of challenge so that I could be as flexible as possible in responding to attacks.
The effects of Challenges vary by type. Winning a Military challenge causes your opponent to choose and kill one of their characters. Much like the series of books, Military challenges are suddenly and horrifically fatal. Even if you come very close to a successful defense, you *still* lose a character. It's extremely brutal. And 'Dead' means just that -- the character is *gone* from the game, in a special discard pile. If it was a Unique character, of which there are many, you can't even bring another copy of that character into the game. If you're holding a second copy in your hand, it becomes a dead and worthless card.
Winning an Intrigue challenge forces your opponent to randomly discard a card from their hand. Playing mostly against an Intrigue-heavy deck, I found that clearing important or useful cards out of my hand as quickly as possible was the only way to avoid being overrun by Intrigue attacks.
Winning a Power challenge allows you to take a Power counter from your opponent. Since Power counters are the way in which you win games, being able to at the least defend against Power attacks is critical for a successful deck. In the games I won, I won because she didn't have anyone that could defend against Power in play.
When you win a challenge unopposed -- which means your opponent didn't have any appropriate defenders, or didn't use them, or had their defenders' Strengths reduced to zero by another card -- you gain a point of Power. This seemed to be the primary source of Power income for our games.
After Challenges, you total up the Strength of any character that's not Kneeling. Whoever has the higher total wins the Dominance phase, and gains a point of Power. This is often important, but generally that point of power gets passed around during the next turn's Power phase, so a high Dominance turtle deck might be a viable construction strategy, but doesn't seem to be from our initial games. There are also locations which contribute to Dominance victories, and one that my girlfriend put into play ('The Iron Throne') which simply causes you to always win Dominance. Dominance really seems to exist to ensure that Power attacks have targets.
4. Analysis
The good parts of the game: Choosing Plot cards each turn allows you to very precisely manage your resource flow. Imagine it as being able to choose, each turn, how many M:TG lands you'd have in play, with various tradeoffs of more-lands-equals-less-flexibility. This means that you're rarely sitting on a hand of cards you can't use. Card flow is fast and the draw phase almost never leaves you swearing at your stupid shuffle.
The three types of attacks and defenses are fun, adding a level of complexity to an otherwise straightforward, almost Pokemon-simple combat. You often have weaknesses that are not immediately obvious, and you are forced to defend yourself on many levels, while probing for subtle weaknesses in your opponent's defenses.
The game's length seems about right. I initially thought that playing to 15 Power would be dull, and planned to up that number to 20, but a few games later, I think 15 is about right. It takes roughly 7 turns to get there, which is the time it takes your entire deck of Plot cards to recycle, so you can't really count on multiple uses of your 'good' Plot cards. It's far enough out, though, that it's pretty much impossible to blitz your opponent in a one or two turn win.
The flow of victory conditions seems fairly even. You generally know a turn in advance when someone is going to win, and at least with the cards we have, it's almost impossible to stop someone on the way to victory, but unlike the games of L5R I played, it doesn't feel like the winner is decided in the first turn. Extremely wide-ranging Plot cards seem to have the ability to turn the game around completely, and getting that one Character out who can do it all can really save the day suddenly.
The bad parts of the game: The Characters are your *only* tools for winning the game. There are 'Event' cards which act like Instants in M:TG, but they tend to only affect your characters, or your opponent's characters. Unfortunately, Characters are extremely fragile. In the game my gf played against a friend just now, as I was writing this, she completely wiped out her opponent's Characters in the first two turns. And the rules preventing you from bringing a Unique Character back into the game after they've died mean that a lot of your deck can suddenly turn to dead weight in a bad series of lost Military challenges and a flurry of nasty Event cards. You can defend your characters, somewhat, by playing duplicate copies of the same card onto them -- this essentially gives them an 'extra life' -- but the risk of having those cards in your deck, and then having them turn to duds when you screw up and lose someone important seems like it might outweigh the benefits of having spares.
There are only three Houses, which seems like it necessarily limits the number of interesting deck designs available. It's not as bad as Netrunner, which was fun for about 3 days before the blandness of possible decks became overwhelming, but I have to wonder how many variations of the 'Stark Deck' or the 'Lannister Deck' are really possible.
Since certain tools are absolutely required -- you *need* Characters, you *need* income-producing Locations -- gameplay is also very similar from game to game. There are few surprises; I enjoyed sneaking a Lannister into my Stark deck, and using a Lannister-only Event card, but I think that was an exception.
The theme enforcement (through increased cost for Characters of another House) means that there are few opportunities for crossover decks. I had a fun white/black deck in M:TG, and white/blue was a powerful combo for a long, long time, but that kind of mixing seems less viable in this game. THe Starter decks contain a lot of House-specific Characters, though, and possibly in the main set of cards available in boosters, there are more non-aligned Characters. I don't know. So far, I've only seen one non-aligned Character.
The rules seem light on specific timing guidelines. Old-school M:TG had way too many timing rules, but once you mastered them, it was simple to resolve any questions during gameplay. Possibly this game's timing rules are comprehensive, but an initial reading didn't tell us who got the first action after I won a Challenge, when we both had Event cards that we wanted to play in response to that -- and hers would have prevented mine from going off. Maybe we just missed it, but a section of the rules *just* for Timing would have been nice.
And, well, the comments I made about the art above also are a negative, though not a major one.
5. Summary
This has so far been a fun game -- fun enough that we're going to go out and buy a few boosters to tinker with deck construction soon. That's really the best endorsement I can give it: we're willing to blow more money on it.
Will you like it? It seems to be heavily inspired by L5R, so if you found L5R compelling, you might want to give this a try. And if you didn't like L5R because it was too arbitrarily complex, you might want to give this a try, as well. If you're a fan of Martin's series, you should definitely pick up a starter, just for the fun of sifting through the cards. If you're not so sure about Yet Another CCG, this is very playable with a $10 starter deck; we're on our 7th game of the evening. The three-attack-types mechanic is interesting and original enough that I'm still running through attack and defense plans in my head, and will at least prevent you from thinking, "Oh god, I'm playing another M:TG clone" -- that being what I thought when I played the Harry Potter game, for instance.
But if you hate CCGs, or you hate Martin, don't bother. There's nothing here that will change your life, and the art isn't ground-shakingly good.
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