Players: 3-5*
Playing Time: 3-4 hours
Difficulty: 5 (of 10)
* Really designed for 5.
The Components
A Game of Thrones comes with a box stuffed full of beautiful components:
- 1 Map
- House Units:
- 50 Footmen
- 20 Knights
- 30 Ships
- House Tokens:
- 75 Action Counters
- 100 Power Tokens
- 15 Influence Tokens
- 5 Supply Tokens
- Assorted Other Tokens:
- 1 Wildling Token
- 1 Turn Order Token
- 3 Neutral Army Tokens
- 3 Influence Tokens
- House Cards:
- 5 House Start Cards
- 35 House Character Cards
- 30 Westeros Cards
- 1 Rulebook
Map: The map is a full-color depiction of Westeros printed on sturdy cardboard. It's attractive and clearly incorporates all the information needed about the map territories (e.g., cities, strongholds, power markers, supply barrels). The borders of the board are printed with a number of important tracks: wildling strength, areas of influence, current turn, and supplies. These tracks are generally well-designed, with pertinent information readily available (e.g., the army limits for each supply size are printed on the supply track and the number of starred actions available at each level of incluence in the court are likewise reflected on the appropriate track).
House Units: These wood pieces are available in the five player colors (white, yellow, green, black, and red). The knights and footmen are represented by heads rather than the typical full-figure pawns that most games use, which is interesting and makes the pieces stand out. Overall, these are exactly what you would expect for wood pieces in a game.
House Tokens: Each house has a number of color-coded tokens used in the game. A supply token marks current level on the supply track and an influence token marks current level of influence on each of the three influence tracks. Power counters are used for bidding and to mark map control, while action ("order") counters are used to give orders to armies in the game. (A nice addition would have been a victory marker which denoted each players current level of cities and strongholds, since they can be somewhat hidden on the map.)
All of these counters are printed full color on sturdy cardboard and are generally intuitive and attractive. Some care has been taken to make the various tokens different shapes, which helps ensure they won't be mixed up during play.
The action counters depend upon wordless icons, but their use was obvious by the second round. My one complaint with them is that the March Action counters had negative values (e.g., "-1") that are very similar to other positive values (e.g., "+1"), and those two tokens got mixed up by a couple of players in the game. Red text or something on the negative token would have made it stand out better.
Assorted Other Tokens: The Wildling and Turn Order Tokens are fairly unnotable. They go on the appropriate sections in the board and help keep track of the related value. The neutral armies are rectangular tokens that are set on the board to protect certain valuable regions. They're all printed full color on the same cardboard as the house tokens.
The three influence tokens are items given to the current leaders of each of the three influence tracks. They represent the iron throne, the Valyrian steel blade, and the messenger raven. They're huge and printed on an extremely thick cardboard. Really, they're overproduced in my opinion, but it's nice to have them to mark who's leading the various influence tracks, and thus has access to special powers.
The Cards: There are a total of 65 cards, all printed on sturdy cardstock in four-color with rounded corners.
The House Start cards give all the starting information for one of the five houses via text and graphics. They're also used to randomize the houses at game start, and are overall a cool idea and well-executed.
Each house also gets a pack of 7 character cards which they use to add a small arbitrary element to the battles, and which also allow for a bit of bluffing. They've got nice full-color artwork of characters related to the house. Numbers (0-3) and icons (swords and castles) describe most of the cards powers, but some have special powers explained in text. Overall, they're easy to use.
The Westeros cards are divided into 3 decks ("I", "II", and "III"). They allow for various special events to occur within the game (e.g., mustering, supplies, influence). Overall, they represent a very nice compromise, because they introduce randomness into the game, but at the same time control it by lowering variance through the introduction of three different card decks.
Rulebook: Printed in full-color, and rife with pictures and examples, the rulebook does an excellent job of concisely and simply explaining the rules.
Box & Tray: The box is nice enough; pretty much what you'd expect. The tray, on the other hand, is perhaps the nicest tray I've ever seen for a board game. Besides a couple of large compartments, it also has individual slots for each of the different types of house markers for each of the different houses. Yeah, that does mean there are more than 20 slots. Boy does that speed setup!
Overall, A Game of Thrones' pieces are beautiful and well designed. The game earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.
The Game Play
A Game of Thrones is a wargame of expansion, conquest, and consolidation. A player wins by taking the most cities and strongholds in Westeros before the end of the game.
The game of thrones is fought upon two battlefields: armies fight physical battles upon the map of Westeros; and power is wielded to control three areas of influence during The Clash of Kings.
A Storm of Swords: Upon the physical battlefield, armies of footmen and knights wage battle across the face of Westeros.
Troops. There are three types of house units: footmen, knights, and ships. Ships lie upon the oceans surrounding Westeros and footmen and knights wander across the face of the continent itself. Each player starts out with a handful of troops described on his House Start Card and will gain more troops when mustering cards are drawn in The Westeros Phase.
Each individual troop has a combat value: 1 for footmen and ships; 2 for knights. How these values affect battles is described in The Action Phase.
Singular troops are totally unrestricted; you can have one on every single space on the board if you like. However, when you get two or more of your own troops together in the same space, you have an army, and your army totals and sizes are restricted by your supply. Your supply is measured in barrels, and is occasionally updated during the Westeros Phase. A chart to the side of the map helpfully shows your limits. For example, if your supply was last measured at "3", then you are limited to four armies, of size "3", "2", "2", and "2". Conversely, if you've maxed out at supply 6 you can five armies of size "4", "3", "2", "2", and "2". Yeah, these are all small army sizes, compared to a Risk-like game.
Your current supply total is always a limit. You can't muster troops in excess of it, you can't retreat to form an illegally sized army, etc.
The Map. Troops move across a map depicting Westeros, moving 1 or more spaces each turn, as described in The Action Phase. There are sea hexes and land hexes. Land hexes may contain a number of different icons: barrels increase supply; cities and strongholds are used for both mustering and victory conditions; and crowns (power) are used during the Consolidate Power action. Each player has different advantages and disadvantages in his starting position based on what icons are nearby.
The abilities of a map space's icons are available only when a player has left troops on the space, or when he has marked the space with a power marker, as discussed below under the March action.
A Clash of Kings: At the same time as the physical battle is ongoing, players will be battling for control over three areas of influence.
Power Tokens. Each player will start the game off with a handful of Power tokens from their total pool of 20. As the game proceeds they will be able to gather more Power tokens via the Consolidate Power action. These Power tokens are used for three purposes: to hold off the Wildlings during the Westeros Phase; to mark control of territories during a March action; and to vie for influence during a Clash of Kings in the Westeros Phase. In the last instance Power tokens are bid using a closed-fist auction, as described more further below.
Areas of Influence: There are three areas of influence which players will be able to vie for during a Clash of Kings: The Iron Throne; the Fiefdoms; and the King's Court. Each area gives a special power to the victor in the auction. The other 2-4 players are ranked below the winner on the appropriate influence track and other gameplay is based upon that order of ranking:
- The Iron Throne: Victor gets to break all bidding ties (for influence positions and for Wildling attack results). Ranking of players determines order of play throughout the game.
- The Fiefdoms: Victor holds the Valyrian Steel Blade, which he can use once during a turn to give him a +1 combat value in a battle after all characters are revealed. Ranking of players determines result of ties in battle.
- The King's Court: Victor holds the Messenger Raven, which he can use once during a turn to change an action token after all actions have been revealed. Ranking of players determines how many starred actions can be used during the Planning Phase, from 0 to 3.
The Sequence of Play: The game runs in rounds of three phases:
- The Westeros Phase
- The Planning Phase
- The Action Phase
The Westeros Phase is actually skipped the first round.
After 10 rounds the game ends if no one has achieved the full victory conditions yet.
The Westeros Phase: During the Westeros Phase, three cards are flipped phase-up, one each from decks marked "I", "II", and "III". There are a number of minor cards which can have an immediate or turn-long result (e.g. "Winter is Coming" forces its deck to be reshuffled; "Game of Thrones" allows each player to collect a number of Power tokens equal to the crowns they control on the board; and "Feast for Crows" disallows the Consolidate Power action). However four cards have a more important affect on the game: Supply, Mustering, Clash of Kings, and Wildling Attack.
Supply. Each player counts up his currently controlled barrels on the board and adjusts his space on the Supply track appropriately. If his supplies are reduced, a player may immediately have to downsize his armies.
Mustering. Each player may build 1 power of troops at each city and 2 power at each stronghold (e.g., 1 knight or 2 footmen). Footmen may be upgraded to knights for cost 1. Ships may be built off-shore in empty or owned sea areas. Supply limits army sizes, which can sometimes prevent units rfom being built.
Clash of Kings. All players bid anew on the three Areas of Influence. All of the bids are closed fist and each player spends all the Power he bids.
Wildling Attack. Certain of the Westeros cards have mammoth symbols on them, which require the Wildling token to be advanced by two value on the Wildling Attack track. When this card comes up, the Wildlings Attack with power equal to their current value. All of the players make a closed-fist bid of Power tokens. When they're all revealed, if the bids equal or exceed the Wildling power, the Wildlings are defeated and the highest bidder gets one of his character cards back. If the bids total less than the Wildling's power, the Wildlings swarm over the wall and ravage Westeros. Each player loses 2 power of troops except the player who bid the least, who loses 4. (Note that the holder of the Iron Throne gets to break ties for both who bid the most and the least.)
The Planning Phase: After all the Westeros Cards are resolved, the Planning Phase begins. Each player has 15 action tokens, 3 each of 5 different types: Raid, March, Defend, Support, and Consolidate Power. Two tokens of each type are "normal" while the third is special and marked with a star. Some tokens are better than others (e.g., the special march token is a "+1" while the normals are "+0" and "-1").
Each player must place one action token in a territory with each unit or army that he wants to take an action, with only one action allowed per territory. A player may use at maximum somewhere between 0 and 3 special starred tokens, based on his position in the King's Court influence track.
The Action Phase: After all tokens are placed face-down all players reveal them simultaneously. At this poin the player with the Messenger Raven gets to switch out one of his tokens if he so desires. Thereafter, actions are resolved in three main segments: raids; marches; and power consolidation. During each segment, actions are taken one at a time, with the first player on the Iron Throne influence track taking one of the appropriate actions shown on the board, then the second player taking an action, etc., looping through until all players have taken all their displayed actions.
Raids. Each player may have played up to three raid tokens, two normal raids and a special starred raid which allows the units in that space to raid twice. When a player conducts a raid he may remove a raid, support, or consolidate power action token in an adjacent space. Afterward the raid token is also removed.
Marches. Each player may have played up to three march tokens, a "-1", a "+0" or a special starred "+1". Related, each player may have played up to three defense tokens, two "+1"s and a starred "+2" and up to three support tokens, two "+0"s and a starred "+1". These are come into play during the March action phase.
When there is a march token in a space you can move none, some, or all of the troops in that space to any adjacent spaces, with the one restriction being that you can't move troops into more than one space containing enemy troops. If you evacuate all of the troops from a space, you may choose to leave a Power Token behind, which will allow you to continue making use of supplies, cities, and strongholds in that space.
If you move into a space containing enemy troops, a battle immediately begins. It's fought in the following phases:
- Call for Support
- Announce Combat Strengths
- Play Cards
- Play Blade
- Resolve Battle
In call for support each player can ask adjacent troops showing a Support action for help. These troops might be the player's own, or they might belong to another player. A supporter can support any number of battles during a round, so if there's a benefit, people will often do so.
In announce combat strengths each player figures out his combat total. This is equal to the values of the units (1 for footmen and ships, 2 for knights) plus the values of the supporting units plus the value of the march, defense, and/or support action token (e.g., a combat strength for 1 footmen + 2 knights + a +1 attack token would be 1 + 4 + 1 or 6).
In play cards each player selects a character card from his hand. This are characters from the books, each of which has a +0 to a +3 on it. Some also have 1-2 swords or castles, and some also have special powers. After cards are secretly selected, they're flipped up and a new combat total is arrived at.
The player with the Valyrian Steel Blade may now play blade if he's the attacker or of the defender. It just gives a +1, but is quite powerful because it's used after all the other numbers are figured out.
Now you resolve battle. The higher total wins, or in the case of a tie, the player with more influence on the Fiefdoms track wins. Then compare the winner's sword icons on his character card to the loser's castle icons on the same. For every sword icon that's not blocked by a castle, the defender automatically loses one troop. The rest of the troops must retreat to an adjacent, unoccupied territory. If they can't, they're eliminated. These troops are also routed. If they're attacked again they have 0 value and are destroyed if they lose the battle.
A few special rules on Marches: there are a couple of rivers which prevent Marches and a couple of bridges which allow them; ships act as bridges, treating all adjacent land territories as adjacent with each other for the purposes of friendly movement (which is important because sea territories are much larger than land territories); these ships can be strung together to convoy land troops long distances all for one move. In a slightly different manner land movements can be strung together allowing land-bound troops to move multiple territories if action tokens are laid out appropriately (e.g., use a March to move a troop into a territory, then a second March to move all the troops out of that territory).
Power Consolidation. After all Marches, and thus combat, are carried out players may not take their Consolidate Power actions. Each player may have up to three Consolidate Power tokens, one of which is starred, but serves no extra purpose other than being an extra token to use. A player collects 1 Power token for each Consolidae Power action, plus 1 extra Power token per crown in the territory with the action token.
Winning the Game: The game goes until 1 player controls 7 cities and strongholds or until the tenth round of the game ends, at which point the player with the most cities and strongholds wins, with Supply and current Power being used as tie-breakers.
Relationships to Other Games
There used to be a fairly prominently Anglo-American game design paradigm. These games, coming out of England and the United States, tended to be huge war games, with hundreds of pieces, that took many, many hours to play. It had its origins in games like Risk (1959) and Diplomacy (1959) , but I personally think it really hit its stride in the 1980s with the Milton Bradley Gamemaster series and publications like Axis and Allies (1984) and at the same time over at Avalon Hill with games like Britannia (1986). At the start of the 1990s we had History of the World (1991) and then the focus on Anglo-American design seemed to fade as German design came to the fore with The Settlers of Catan (1995) and later Carcassonne (2000).
In the last couple of years that seems to have changed again with two companies putting out high-quality big-box war games, Eagle Games--the publisher of Attack! (2003) and many others--and Fantasy Flight Games, who of course published the currently reviewed The Game of Thrones (2003).
A Game of Thrones matches the trend of these new Anglo-American games by allowing for a much shorter game--just 3 to 4 hours rather than 8 to 10. It also makes the decision to minimize pieces, though in all honesty this is a pure aesthetic decision that dates back to Diplomacy.
More interesting, however, is the fact that A Game of Thrones incorporates a number of subsidiary types of gameplay which add quite a bit to the depth of the game, and in doing so draw upon many of the lessons learned during the German invasion. There are, for example, a number of closed-fist auctions, a game subsystem strong enough in itself that it was the basis of Bruno Faidutti and Michael Schacht's Fist of Dragonstones (2002). Auctions, of course, have been a favorite topic in European games, with Bruno Faidutti and Reiner Knizia being two of their primary proponents. Other systems centering around bluffing, scarcity, and limited resources show how far board game design has come in the last 10 years, and how well A Game of Thrones takes advantage of all these possibilities.
The Game Design
As you may have surmised from the immediately preceding section, I like the game design of A Game of Thrones. It brings together a lot of threads of game design and from them creates a very pleasing and coherent whole. I think it represents an excellent entry in a new, more user-friendly generation of Anglo-American big box wargames.
Here's some of the best game design:
Use of Auctions & Bluffing Superb: As just mentioned, A Game of Thrones makes very good use of auctions and bluffing. The auctions allow for a whole subgame where you're collecting and spending auction tokens. Bluffing, meanwhile, comes into the game not just through the auctions but also through the action tokens. Many times during our playtest game I sat thinking about what I wanted to do, what I thought my opponents would do, what my opponents might be thinking I would do ... etc.
Good Scarcity: Scarcity is a heavy force in this game, though supply limitations, piece limitations, character card limitations, etc. This adds more strategic complexity to the game.
Timed Actions Very Elegant: The mechanic used for actions in the game is very elegant, with players pre-selecting their actions, but then getting some opportunity to specify them upon seeing their opponents' plans. On the one hand it nicely simulates the "fog of battle", while on the other hand it allows players to maintain some tactical control of their forces. The phasing of the various actions (raid/combat/consolidate) was also nicely done, and made it very easy to step through all the players' directives.
Victory Points Well Placed: In any game it's a bit of a trial to figure out where the victory points should lie. Put them too early and you declare a winner in an unsettled game, but put them too late and you have several rounds of bored players. This has seemed to be a particularly notable problem in Anglo-American war game designs, which most offer err too long. A Game of Thrones seems to get it about right, with victory feeling "real", but not stretching too far. In addition the two different victory conditions (timed and sufficient cities) seem well balanced with each other.
Complexity Well Contained: There's a lot of complexity in this game, between fighting, maintaining supplies, controlling areas of influence, mustering troops, etc. This is nicely controlled in the game by separating out the various potential actions, and in many cases making them dependent upon a card flip.
Evocative of Books: Finally, A Game of Thrones is very evocative of George R. R. Martin's related books. After finishing the game I immediately wanted to reread them, to remind myself of who all these folks were, and to compare the game board to my understanding of the battles in the novels. I think this is largely a result of the richness of Martin's world, but the also game does do a good job of including lots of color and a real feeling of a realm at war. The scarcity mechanisms already discussed were one of the many things that really reflected the books well, with the whole feeling that "Winter is Coming".
Here's a few game design elements that I can't comment on positively or negatively:
Heavily Interpersonal Play Required: This is no Diplomacy, but nonetheless you need a fairly high level of personal interaction to succeed at this game. You'll need to support and get support from nearby troops. But, also, because of the tight boundaries of the map you'll need to constantly negotiate peace treaties to avoid fighting a multiple front war. Personally, I enjoy a game that involves manipulating and conniving, but I draw the line at a game that requires betrayal to achieve success, and feel that the implicit constraints and diplomacy of this game point in that direction. In fact the winner of our playtest achieved victory by betraying his treaty with me to take his final city, and I suspect that's not uncommon. Some groups seem to have addressed this problem by explicitly making all treaties short-term (1-2 rounds). I haven't listed this as an issue with the game, because I understand it's purely a personal playing style preference.
Questions on Randomness and Balance: I've seen quite a few people, including some of our players, question issues of randomness and balance in this game. The randomness of course centers around the Westeros Cards and the fact that important events such as resupply and mustering might not come up for many rounds. Personally, I liked this mechanic because it added to the whole feeling of claustrophic need, with there always being some card you really wanted to come up. However, players who prefer a pure strategic game might find this troublesome. The balance issues have to do with the starting powers of the various kingdoms, since they're implicitly not exactly the same. It relates to starting characters, starting troops, starting influence, map location, etc. Obviously, there's no way that they're exactly balanced, but at a rough level they seem pretty good, and I'd expect low-level issues to work out through cooperative gameplay. Fantasy Flight has been very responsive about answering higher-level issues with official errata (there's one official change for the five-player game, involving slightly changing around two influence markers on the King's Court track).
Here's the fairly small problems I had with game design:
Raven Power Easy to Forget: Talk about minor. The "raven" power to switch out one of your action tokens is a classic out-of-turn action that's easy to forget.
Typical War Game Problems: A Game of Thrones also suffers from a couple of very typical war game problems. First, it's potentially possible to get utterly knocked out of the game, and it's definitely possible to get into an untenable position where you can't win. This was the case for Stark in our 5-player playtest. Second, losing players can act as kingmakers, deciding who will win among multiple leaders. This also happened in our 5-player playtest, with our attacks against Greyjoy giving Baratheon the victory. I'm not certain I've seen a war game that avoids these problems, but they're still problems.
Overall, A Game of Thrones is one of the best designed war games released in years. Despite niggles over randomness and balance, and some typical war game problems, its originality, smooth play, and great use of subsystems clearly earn it a full "5" out of "5" for Substance. My only real concerns have to do with its emphasis on diplomacy and interpersonal communication, and each player can decide on his own whether that's his prefered style of play or not.
Conclusion
A Game of Thrones is an excellent example of a modern war game that incorporates many types of gameplay beyond just moving troops around. If you're OK with a diplomatic war game with lots of interpersonal communication and the inevitable backstabs, this is one of the best choices to come along in years.
