A Clash of Cards: A Review/Intro of the Game of Thrones LCG

So I recently was lucky enough to receive a generous gift of the Games of Thrones Living Card game from a friend for Christmas, with the footnote that he wanted to try it out and hear what my impressions were. This post will serve two purposes. The first is that I expect I will be playing the game with a lot of you in the next couple weeks, so I wish to give an overview of how the game functions. The second is to give that review, and my impressions of the game overall.

First then, some background. The game is designed to be played with 4 people, although it has some variants that include 3 or 2 player set-ups. My first full game was, however, played with four people. It consisted of myself, a complete novice to competitive card games, and two MtG veterans, and all of us had never played the GoT LCG before. We played using the four stock decks, no additions or variations, using the standard ruleset. Overall I think it took about 2 hours to play to completion, although a large part of the time was looking up rules, figuring out powers, etc, and I suspect a regular game with people who know what they're doing would take much closer to 1 hour, if not less.
The gameplay is somewhat complex, but relatively easy to learn in my opinion. Each player takes control of a deck representing one of the 6 Great Houses (Targaryen, Stark, Lannister, and Baratheon come in the stock game, and I plan on purchasing Greyjoy and Martell ASAP) and no two people may play the same house. Each player has two decks: a regular draw deck, and a 7-card Plot deck. After performing set-up of the initial cards, each always runs as follows with the rounds always in the same order:

The types of cards are as follows: plot (see below), land (which functions like land in MtG), characters (straightforward), events (like Instants), and attachments (like enchantments).

Plot. Each player picks a plot card from his deck, and reveals it simultaneously. Plot cards have some effect that usually lasts the entire turn, in addition to determining play order (through initiative), income (through gold), and your claim value (which effects challenges later). The effects can be personal, such as boosting your characters; they can be targeted, like preventing another player from attacking you; or they can be global, such as killing all characters in play. You can't reuse a plot card until all others have been used. Obviously this can have a huge effect on a game, and sometimes other players plot cards interact in unexpected ways (in my game, we had an entire round's worth of income destroyed since the Baratheon player stopped all non-plot card income, and the Lannister player stopped all plot card income).
The player that wins initiative gets to choose who goes first for all following rounds. After the first player goes, it always proceeds to the next player clockwise.

Title-choosing: There is a total of 6 titles, and each player chooses one in order, which has some kind of turn-long effect. Master of the Coin increases income, for instance, while Commander of the Kingsguard increases your military strength and lets you intercept one attack that would otherwise be undefended. Whatever title you choose remains in effect for the rest of the turn, and obviously can have a big impact on your gameplay style.

Draw: All players draw two cards

Marshalling: Players determine their income in gold, and can spend as much as they want to put cards into play. Alternately, they can save gold to spend later for card abilities and/or for use in Dominance (see below).

Challenges: All character cards have some combination of the following three symbols: military, intrigue, and power. Each player may, on his turn, initiate one of each of these types of challenges, in any order (as in they can make up to but no more than 3 challenges, and no duplicates of the type). To participate in a challenge, either as a defender or attacker, the character cards must have the appropriate symbol. Attacking or defending "kneels" (a.k.a. taps) the card, and they can't be used again that round.
Military challenges, if won, result in the defending player having to kill a character equal to the claim value.
Intrigue challenges, if won, result in the defending player having to randomly discard a number of cards from his hand equal to the claim value.
Power challenges, if won, result in the attacking player taking a number of Power tokens from the defending player equal to the claim value.
If the defending player wins, nothing happens.
If a player ever wins a challenge undefended, he gains one extra Power token.

Dominance: The player with the largest strength of standing (a.k.a. untapped) characters wins dominance and gains a Power token. If you have gold remaining, each piece counts as 1 extra strength for calculations.

Standing: A.k.a. untap all cards

Taxation: Return all unspent gold to the treasury, return Titles to the board.

And that's a turn, at which point you return to the Plot round. Play continues until a player has 15 Power tokens, at which point they automatically win. Obviously, like any CCG, there are lots of exceptions to the rules (for instance, the Lannisters have a plot card that lets them skip the Taxation round) but that's the general flow of the game, so hopefully it makes sense. If you think you're going to want to play, FFG has the rules on their website, so I'd highly encourage you to read them over to make it easier later: AGoT LCG™ Core Set Rules (PDF, 3.3 MB)

In terms of my impressions... I'm very impressed :-P The game manages to feel very very true to the source material. The turns are long, but super eventful: our game only took 6 turns, so like the books they take forever but a ton of stuff happens in each of them. Whether by design or on purpose, each of us played very appropriate to our house. I, as the Targaryen player, had a super strong lead till all my characters got wiped, and I probably ruined my chance of victory to instead keep killing and wrecking the player who angered me early in the game. The Stark player had a ton of land and no power early on, but eventually became super defensive. The Lannister had a ton of gold and lots of special abilities and tricks. The Baratheon player, who ended up winning, had a lot of unique characters with a lot of special powers. Overall it seemed surprisingly balanced, and I probably could have put up a better fight if I hadn't been so intent on wrecking vengeance, "fire and blood" style. All the cards felt thematically appropriate to their source material, as well.

The element of the suspicion, backstabbing, and negotiation was also alive and well. As I said, I ended up in a blood feud with the Lannister player that ended up with us focusing almost entirely on ourselves, while I formed a mutual pact of trust with the Stark player by granting him bonuses from my plot cards he felt obligated to repay. There was a lot of plotting and open negotiation, trying to convince people to change targets, attack a different way, etc., and there are plenty of cards that allow you to suddenly swing things around, spring traps, and all that nifty stuff, which feels incredibly appropriate for ASoIaF. The system of titles also tacitly encourages this, since many of them "oppose" or "support" each other, granting bonuses for helping or attacking certain players each round.

Also, as you'd expect, turn order can make a huge difference. A well-thought out turn plan can come crashing to a halt from a simple move from an opponent, whether planned or not. As said before, different powers can interact in weird ways, and what your opponent chooses to do before you can have a huge impact on your choices. Fortunes can quickly change, armies can be suddenly decimated, and all overall you definitely have to keep on your toes.

Overall, the rules are surprisingly simple once you learn the turn order and all of the key words. What instead is the challenge of constantly keeping in mind all of the effects, potential responses from the opponents, and modifiers that are in play. I think for me it was a perfect level of challenge, and felt like you were juggling the weight of a kingdom on yourself. This can run the hazard of forgetting about an important power you had to play, but I expect this would become more rare as you learn the game and/or your own deck.

Obviously this is still just an early impression, since I've only played the game to completion yet and I haven't even touched the deck-building aspect, but the game seems incredibly well-done, fun to play, and true to the source material, which I think is a pretty rare trifecta. I definitely look forward to more games using the system and to see how wildly they can vary with different players. More updates likely to come!

-HTMC