Game of Thrones the boardgame

For a change I will review a game not to endorse it but rather to keep anyone I can away from this boardgame. Especially since it is out of print and demand for this imo poorly written game is driven up by the excellent HBO tv series Game of Thrones.

To my knowledge there are currently two A song of Ice and Fire inspired boardgames out there. Game of Thrones and Battles of Westeros. Both games were released before the TV series was aired, and while Battles of Westeros is a phenomenal 2-player tactical combat gameplay Game of Thrones aimed to be a game of strategy for 3-5 players. It is also the older game by a couple of years.

It should be noted that this game has a pretty good BoardGameGeek score with 7.5. In terms of boardgame geek games rarely get to 9/10. So most games hang around with the 8-8.5 crowd. 7.5 in comparison makes most games pretty good. Don't let yourselves be deceived by this score!

So why should any reasonable person of good taste keep himself away from this game?

Let's start with a brief rundown of the game, it is quite simple.

Game of Thrones has 5 royal families named after families in the books of Song of Ice and Fire. We have the Lannisters, Baratheon, Greyjoy, Tyrell and house Stark. Each have a starting position on the board, you get a couple of starting units as well. Every player starts out with 5 power tokens which are used for bidding on the 3 political positions available.

These political positions are "The Iron Throne", the player holding this position goes first during each turn. This is quite an advantage as you can resolve your actions before anyone else, hit enemy regions before they attack yours - and in biddings you always decide the winner if the bidding becomes a tie.

The other position is "Fiefdoms", basically the same as above but focused on combat. The person with the 1st position always win against all other players in combat should it be a Draw. The winner of this position also gets a Valyrian blade icon giving him/her +1 in all combat situations once per turn.

Last position is "Kings Court".  The person holding the first position may change one of his order tokens when the orders for all players are revealed at the start of each turn.

Depending on how you fared in each bidding you will receive one of five places in each of these 3 categories. The further away from the 1st place you are the worse your situation becomes. You can end up going last after all other players, becoming the punching bag. You can end up last and always lose combat during Draws against all other players, and if you end up last in the kings court you will be very limited with the amount of orders you can place on the board..

The goal for all players is to capture as many castles and fortress regions as possible. A player with 7 such regions wins at the end of the turn automatically. Otherwise the game has a 10 turn limit, and the person holding most castle/fortress regions will win. If there is a draw you also take the amount of supply available to each player to determine the winner. if still a draw you go after the amount of political power each player has. Quite a simple setup.

What's next is probably the engine that drives the game forward. There are 3 event cards flipped each turn. These range from "Mustering" where you receive new troops up to your supply limit. "Supply" cards that allow you to adjust the amount of supply you have according to the supply markers printed on the regions you hold and cards that give a bonus or penalty to some actions during the remainder of the turn.
The actual fighting is done using 3 types of units - Footmen, Ships and Cavalry (costs twice as much but fights twice as good as a Footman while only taking up 1 unit slot in each army). To your aid you also have "house cards" with a printed combat value, and additional bonus to your combat information. These cards range in combat value from 3 to 0 but each card has some kind of impact on the outcome. You also have the order tokens placed at the start of each turn face down - the order tokens are turned up at the same time and then the players take turns to resolve each phase (raids/march order/political support) until all tokens have been resolved.

An example of combat could be something like this:

House Lannister wants to attack house Tyrell. Lannister have 1 Footman and 1 Cavalry. House Tyrell has 1 Footman. Lannister place an march order that gives +1 to combat. House Tyrell had prepared their region with a Defence +2 order.

Lannister total 1+2+1 : Tyrell total 1+2, this would Lannister have the upper hand by 2 combat points. Now both players pick one of their house cards and play it out. Let’s say house Lannister pick a card with the value 3 and Tyrell with the value 2. This would make the Lannister player win, and the Tyrell player must retreat his troops to a friendly adjacent region or have his troops destroyed. You very rarely actually kill any units in combat.

You can also support your attack/defense from adjacent regions (land or sea) by placing support tokens in those regions. Your attacks will  then take into account all troops supporting you as well.

That pretty much sums up the game, you bid for the positions on the 3 tracks and then try to take regions on the map.

Now let me explain why this game is completely broken and stupid.

1) Geography.
Depending on how many players you play the experience may vary BUT house Tyrell and house Stark located on the bottom and top of the map have a much more favorable position in all respects due to not being completely surrounded by enemies. They can simply focus all their stuff along ONE front. While Lannister, Greyjoy and Baratheon are always surrounded by enemies and will have to place many more troops in defense creating a bad balance. While Stark and Tyrell can allocate more troops to fighting the other houses will be hard pressed to even let one single Footman be at the wrong place to weaken their kingdom.
The way the borders of some regions are drawn makes the game extremely unbalanced for some factions. The Westeros continent isn't perfect BUT if the borders of all regions were to be redrawn with game balance in mind it would have worked better. As it is now it seems the regions were just drawn without any thought process put into it.

2) Randomness of the event cards.
Usually I don't mind random events, in some games it is meant to add a layer of uncertainty. However, this is a strategy game - where you can't plan shit because you don't know what lies in wake for you. For instance the adjustment of supply and recruiting new units is completely random. You can play 5 turns without adjusting supply which means that all your conquered regions with lots of supply remain WORTHLESS until a supply card appears.
Likewise you can be stuck in endless defense due to the lack of troops as no recruitment card appears.

3) Combat.
Combat falls apart for many reasons. First of all there is a limit of markers, you get 4 cavalry, 6 ships and 10-12 footmen. When you have built 4 cavalry you can't have any more.  What's worse is that the supply limit cripples combat even further by making the maximum army stack be 4 units large. Most "armies" are just 2 often not more than 3 units large. Take into account the support order tokens in the "right" place and you can safely guard the entire frontline with 1 piece of cavalry . Breaking through a region is hard as hell, winning combat is hard as hell, killing units is almost impossible and the house cards once used cannot be used again until your entire hand has been used up at which point you are allowed to pick up all used cards and start over. This part means that you may spend your best combat card during turn 3 to win a region, only to lose the same region in turn 4 since you now only have cards with the value of 2 or less on your hand while the enemy still has his/her 3-value card!

How it all falls apart like a house of cards.
The humongous problem of this game is that every single thing is broken in either a small or a big way. You can't fix the game by simply rewrite or change one single thing. I doubt this game was beta tested anywhere near as much as most FFG usually are. Let's face it Fantasy Flight Games logo is a brand of quality more often than not. This game however suffers from really stupid design choices.

With the randomness of troop recruitment, with the extremely limiting army size and supply values (also given to you randomly), the few troop markers available, the very crappy and inefficient combat this game is extremely frustrating. We have played this game a couple of times in our boardgame group, we picked it up again yesterday after over a year and added a few changes from the expansion (adding harbors and redrawing the coastal line of house Lannister in one sea region. The game was pretty much as we all remembered it.

Broken/badly balanced, pretty boring, completely lacks anything that I would call a "theme" and in no way allowing you to make a proper long term battle plan. The only thing that has to do with the book series this game was based on are the names of the houses and you get some familiar faces on the house cards. However, the house cards don't relate in any way to how those characters work in the book series - you can have sea captains affect a combat situation on land and vice versa. There is one game mechanic called "Wildlings attack" in which the players have to make a bidding to overcome the threat value with their political points. At the end of the day though, this barely adds anything of thematic value and actually cripples the game even more since you have to spend your valuable political tokens on this crap bidding, if players lose the bidding against the threat value each player will lose 2 units, the person that bid the lowest will lose an astounding 4. Imagine the insane impact in a limited game like this!

Diplomacy was raised as one counterpoint, but there is no game mechanic for diplomacy, that is purely something between the people playing this game. There are no guarantees about holding a promise or anything locking 2 players in a non aggression pact like in other games where diplomacy is an integral part of the rules.

I don't mind the unit markers being as simple as they are - but - taking into account how expensive this game was/is it doesn't make any sense. It's not like they add any flavor at all either.The visual connection with the books is only on the house cards and the board itself.

My advice is to stay clear of this game, don't fall for the hype of the tv series just because this game bears the name of the show. It is bad, and doesn't convey anything of the Song of Ice and Fire world in the gameplay. It is broken and frustrating, and damn expensive on top of that.


Our group just can't understand how this game is supposed to be any good, we discussed at length last night all the improvements it would need and such, but we all agreed this just didn't work in its current state.