This expansion changes a lot of things. Our group has played the original Game of Throne four times before, and when we open up A Storm of Sword and placed out all the pieces, were rather overwhelmed by all the new options, like moving to a new operating system or a new game. The choices we have to make increased by at least two or three times.
The expansion consists of two components:
1. A 4-players variant of the original game which plays quicker and more aggressively than the original one.
2. Various "plug-ins" that you can use with a Game of Throne (along with the Clash of King expansion, if you have it). They allow you to add leaders to the board, build alliances and choose a tactic for each turn of the game.
All right, let's get on to the meat of the meal then!
The 4-players variant
The 4-player variant (House Tyrell is out of the picture), I believe, is designed for much quicker and aggressive play. There are a lot of changes and additions in this variant, so let me go through them one by one. By the way, the 4-player variant includes all the "plug-ins" from the expansion.The new board and victory system Included with the expansion is a new board which is a "zoomed in version" of the original board. There are no more ships in the picture, strongholds and cities become a separate area by themselves and you have arrows which allows you to cross seas and large distance in a single turn (pretty much like Risk). Some arrows can only be usable by certain Houses. For instance, there is an arrow linking Dragonstone to King's Landing, but only the House Baratheon player can use it.
Strongholds and cities basically sit at the borders of many other areas - so they are vulnerable to attacks from many directions. For example, Riverrun is smacked in the middle of Ashemark, Whispering Wood, OldStones and Banefort.
The biggest surprise of the board is the starting position of Lannister - you get King's Landing and Lannisport at the same time. King's Landing is at the rightmost side of the board while Lannisport is all the way to the left. The Lannister player practically has to fight a war on two front from the beginning.
Wildings play no part in this variant. There were some confusion because the expansion introduces a "plug-in" for wildings' attacks but actually, the 4-player variant has no track for wildings and wildings never attacked (I guess we have to thank Lord Snow for that).
To win this variant, you need to gather eight "claims" (think of them as Victory Points). You get them from strongholds and cities and now strongholds are worth 2 claims and cities are worth 1, which is different from the core game. You also attempt to bid for claims during when the "Bid for Westeros" card turns up. Allies (one of the new plug ins) allow you to get claims too.
There is a claim track which you used to keep track of your influence throughout Westeros, and it works something like a queue. When you gets a number of claims, you put power tokens at the highest number position on the track and continue towards the lowest one. When the track is full, you kick out the power token at last position, moves every body's else up one and place yours at the first position.
So at any time when you total claims from cities and strongholds, plus that on the claim track, reaches eight, then you have won!
Garrisons The next new addition is that all starting players have a free 2-point worth Garrison at their starting stronghold - save for King's Landing, where you get a gigantic 6-point garrison. Those garrisons do not count towards supply limit, cannot be issued orders and cannot be mustered when destroyed.
Fords and Weather The next big thing in the board are that there are fords which can be used to cross rivers -- but the weather must be fine too. There are 4 types of weather -- sunny, stormy, rainy and cloudy -- and there is a track on the board for you to do weather forecast. In the Westeros Phase, whenever you turn up a card with the weather icon,you advance the weather marker by one step.
The thing which really catches us off guard is the progression. It's literally sunny -> stormy -> rainy -> cloudy.
The New Westeros Deck A completely new set of Westeros Deck is introduced and some comes with the weather icons. Some examples of the new cards introduced - The Iron Throne let you decides whether it is a supply, mustering or nothing at all (one of the playtest players exclaim, "Finally, the Iron Throne is useful!"). The other card is "Swing the Sword", which allows players to execute hostages if they have any. (Interestingly, the Swing the Sword card changes the weather. I suppose it is for the dramatic effect)
The new Westeros Deck is less "wishy-washy" and action-oriented. For example, Deck I has nothing but Supply and Mustering -- so shuffle the cards well at the beginning! Our first five turns were all mustering! The frill cards like "Rain of Autumn", "Last Days of Summer" and "Winter is Coming" from the original games are all gone.
Towns Dotted around the map are towns which serve as a 1-point mustering source but cannot upgrade footmen to knights.
So how is it? The doing away of ships simplified a lot of things for us, but makes the game somewhat less interesting. However, our first turn took about 20 minutes! The Lannister player was bewildered about his starting position. Greyjoy and Stark felt uncomfortably starting so close to each other.
One big thing to look out for is the printing of the map is not of a very high quality, at least when compared to the core game's. The new board is, how should I put it, grainy and rough to the feel. The details are very vague too, something like when you take a picture in JPEG and resize it to make it bigger.
The biggest criticism lies in the borders of the areas. They formed some weird shapes at time and sometimes you think two areas are connected, but are not. One instance is Hornvale, Acorn Hall and Stoney Sept. Their borders run so close together that we thought they were connected (especially when you have markers, knights and footmen covering them).
Sometimes the decorative part of the map looks like borders and you think two areas are not adjacent when they actually are. One example is the two areas The Crag and Goldroad. One player thought both of them wasn't connected and neglected his defense and was totally surprised when I attacked him.
There is also something inherently strange about the balance. Lannister, I afraid, will always find himself in trouble because Baratheon has no one to fend off besides Lannister and Greyjoy can easily march southward towards Lannisport.
And with the insane amount of mustering cards, there is simply not enough knights to go around. There are also so many areas with barrels that it is easy to get up to 6 of them; and with so many mustering cards, the game should move at a faster pace once you retrain yourself to think on the new board.
Style: 3 (better printing of the board please!) Style: 4 (new weather elements, fords and making strongholds and cities more vulnerable make for quicker play)
The Plug-ins
Actually, the above sub-review doesn't do the 4-player variant enough justice because it was designed to play with most of the plug-ins for the game. So here they are in a nutshell.Leaders Leaders are one of the other juicy additions to the game and even better, they can be used in the original game! (Leaders for House Tyrell and Martell have been included so that you can use them on the original board and the A Clash of King expansion).
Those are essentially "hero units" which does not count towards supply and must always be attached to units. They bestow combat strength when in battle and there is an interesting mechanic called "triggering". Each of the leader is associated with a "trigger order" - Raid, March or Consolidate Power. When you play an order in an area with a leader, and it matches his/her trigger order, you can choose to use that order to trigger the leader, allowing him to march immediately along with other troops. So yes, you can now attack during the Raid and Consolidate Power phase!
Some leaders have different stats when triggered. For instance, Myr the rebel leader has a combat strength of zero normally. But when triggered by a Raid, his combat strength becomes 2.
We don't have enough time to explore what this mechanic can do, but it has allowed me to quickly mobilize troops (for example, Asha Greyjoy is triggered by a Raid order. So use a Raid order to march her into an area with a March order, and during the March phase, use the March to move into another area. Moving through two areas in one turn!)
Leaders can also be taken hostages - if you lose a battle and suffer causalities, the winner can choose to your leader to be the causality and then imprison him. There are ways you can save and negotiate for hostages (using power tokens and trading prisoners) and of course, when the "Swing the Sword" card turns up you can ...gasp... execute them!
However, this neat addition's presentation leaves much to be desired. The leader tokens are flat rectangular tiles with a portrait painted on it -- and sometimes you have to do some guessing as to who is who.
Tactics Now at the start of each planning phase, you get to choose one tactic. The tactic persists throughout the entire turn and they are global orders which gives you some benefits. For example, the "Control Westeros" tactic gives you a 2 to combat strength when attacking strongholds and cities and the "Forge Alliance" tactic allows you to pay 2 power tokens to get an ally (see the next section). Those are the usual "attack and defend buffs" - some are specially developed with hostages, claims and alliances in mind, though. On the whole, they score quite a 'meh' in my opinion. They don't change the game really much.
This is the number one time-killer in the game. There are about six (plus one special tactic) tactics to choose from, and each has an influence on how we play our orders. Some tactics include additional logistics, for instance "Manage Troops" which allow you to swap troops from one area with another adjacent area.
All tactics are recyclable unless stated otherwise. You can stick to the same tactic for all the 10 turns if you want to.
Allies The next other addition is that of the ally cards. There are four allies - the Freys, Tyrell, Arryns and Outlaws & Sellswords. At the start of each planning phase, the top four cards are revealed and you can use the "Forge Alliance" tactics to get any of those 4 cards. Allies give a large variety of effects. Some gives you additional claim. Some gives you allied units (use the Tyrell units instead). All in all those are mixed stack and the prudent player is wise to know which allies his opponent has.
For instance, on a certain turn one of my areas is going to get attacked, and my opponent is higher on the Iron Throne track. He has two big armies attacking me - about combat strength 5 each and one is attacking and one is supporting. He has Renly in the main army and I have Balon in my. They both triggered in response to the Raid order - so even if I play Raid on Balon, my opponent will go first due the Iron Throne track.
However, luck was on my side because one of the allies for that turn is the Arryn Outpost, which allows me to automatically raid an enemy support order in the Call for Support phase irregardless of where it is and the Iron Throne track. So I play Forge Alliance, put up that card and nullify my opponent's attack (who haven't grasped what was going on. I didn't either. I did this on the advice of my friend!)
New House Cards Each of the house receives a set of new house cards; possibly also because there are no ships in the game. Frankly speaking, the new house cards are more exciting than the original one - Balon gains power tokens just by winning battles and if you dare to attack Ceresi, you lose two power tokens immediately. The "footman killer" Knights of Flower loses that ability for some impressive stats.
The New Wildings Attack This "plug-in" is not for the 4-player variant, but rather for the original game (or A Clash of Kings). There are now five Wilding Cards and whenever there is a wilding attack, one will be picked at random. There are different consequences for the lowest bidder and the other players if the Night Watch failed and a new prize for the highest bidder if the Night Watch wins. Some effects include losing a house card or to downgrading all your knights to footmen! (ouch) The prizes for victors range from gaining house cards to sometimes, nothing (boo).
How are the new plug-ins? It is note worthing that all the new plug-ins work with the original board game and the Clash of King expansion. There's one whole page of rules indicating how you can mix them together.
The leader adds a new dimension to the game though some mechanic aren't well explained (can a leader be triggered twice? Once triggered, when is he revert to normal?). Leaders and tactics card also add a new lot of addition to the game as well.
All in all, the Storm of Swords is a rather neat expansion pack. However, for the money, I rather go for a Clash of King (which, unfortunately, was out of stock) as ships are really interesting to play with but needs port to balance them (IMHO!). The main thing going for a Storm of Swords it the new board and the leaders. The rest, I feel, are just icing on the cake.
Final Verdict
Style: 3- Some of the new artwork are not really good looking
- Borders are unclear on the map
- Lower quality of printing for the components
- The Leader tokens look practically unstylish and ugly
Substance: 5
New board opens up new way of playing
Leaders add a totally different dimension
The new House Cards are exciting!
Faster-paced Westeros phase
Allies allow one to pull off unconventional tricks
Most new stuff can be used with the previous two products.
- No more ships on the 4-player variant
- No wilding attacks on the 4-player variant
- Tactics are a mixed bag. They can drag the game out but are needed for forging allies. Most of them are pretty conventional (buff defense, offense and etc.)
