Game of Thrones the boardgame review

[Anatoli]

This game is really bad. It is riddled with bad design decisions that leave every single piece of the gameplay somewhat broken or at the very least really unbalanced. The limiting factor of how large the armies can be, the maximum amount of troops you can have, the low lethality of combat, the weak attacks of armies, the randomness of how often you can adjust the amount of resources you have in your kingdom, the randomness of when you are allowed to recruit new troops.

The almost complete lack of any theme connected to the Song of Ice and Fire world, unbalanced geographical regions and starting positions. Just weird combat design where you have house cards that give you a bonus, but can only be used once and not again before all your crap cards have been spent rendering your initial successful attack to be followed up by a certain defeat.

This game has a decent score on BoardGameGeek, and it has been out of print for some time so the price for this game has sky rocketed as the TV show Game of Thrones is really popular. Don't fall for the hype surrounding the name of this game, it is a pretty bad game all round and you will be disappointed.

Check the full review of the game mechanics and the explanation of why stuff don't work well in the full review on my blog:

http://anatolisgameroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/game-of-thrones-boardgame.html

[AndrewBeasley]

Strange how it rates fine on BBG with these flaws 

I do like the board though - I'll keep an eye open to pick the board up cheap 

Thanks for the reveiw - most enlightening.

[Anatoli]

Yeah I can't really understand that either. But there seem to be people who like it, just had a very long but pretty stimulating discussion over at The Miniature Page about this game with 2 people who liked it for all the reasons me and my group disliked it.

I actually think it depends on what games you use as reference, and what games you've played in the past. I just kept thinking of lots of other games that did each and every aspect (maybe not in the same game though) much better. For instance the resource handling and random event cards - and a hybrid of the order tokens - is made much butter in Runewars.

It's just a very odd game. Considering we're not a casual group of boardgamers and we've given this game 6 tries without really finding it to our liking and everyone having the same opinion about what was wrong.
What seems to be needed is to "meta game" with diplomacy which isn't featured in any rules. But just thinking about it I can’t see how it would work within the framework of this game. You can't trust anyone to begin worth since you have nonexistent margins. One mistake and your kingdom is dead. Going into a meta-alliance outside of the rules with no game mechanics to support an agreement and punish a break of diplomacy would be meaningless.

If you could have diplomatical agreements, that you invested political points into - it could maybe work. You would still be able to break an agreement but it would punish you in some way even though you would have the element of surprise.  But again, there is nothing wrong with a single element of this game imo. There is something wrong with pretty much all elements of this game. It's not like we bought it to bash it, my friend shelled out roughly 600SEK for this game (roughly 55£) and we've wanted to like it and even tried to apply fixes from the expansion rules.

[Gibby]

For a minute there I got this mixed up with the Battles of Westeros game and thought "Whaaat? I thought he loved this game?"

Silly me! This game never seemed to get much attention in the 'gaming' media.

[Anatoli]

Haha no  , Battles of Westeros is a really good and fun 2-player game that know's what it’s doing and what it wants to do and does it well