GNN 2005.05 Session Report

From GTF

Game Night North v2005.05

Aug 10th, 2005
Host: DanD
Guests: DaveF, JimG, JeffL, Troy and BobN

DanD hosted this month. He and his wife, Kelly, were wonderful hosts. We had the usual pizza and pregame chatter. Later in the evening Kelly brought a platter of brownies around for us to enjoy. And we did!

A Game of Thrones

DanD, DaveF, JimG, JeffL, Troy and BobN

This was a learning game. We played with the base game and added bits from the expansion, A Clash of Kings, for the sixth player. It took about 30 minutes to setup the board and explain the rules. The basic gameplay and mechanics of this game are very easy to learn. There are only 3 steps to every turn:

• Reveal and resolve the Westeros cards
• Place orders
• Execute orders

That's it! The complexity, of course, derives from the options you have in placing your orders and the all the potential interaction once the orders are placed on the board. The main orders are:

• Raid - You weaken other players positions by 'stealing' from them. When executing a raid, you remove an order from an neighboring area -- either a support, consolidate power or another raid order.
• March - Movement and battle. You use march orders to move units into neighboring areas. If an opposing force is present, a battle occurs. Defense orders in the contested area apply to the defender and forces adjacent to the contested with support orders can support either side in the battle.
• Consilidate Power - Collect income. Use this order to collect power tokens that can be used for bidding and defending against the wildlings.

We fumbled our way through the first couple of turns. Everybody made a mistake or two along the way and we figured out many of the little details about the game during play. At the end of six turns, we called the game because it was getting late. At the end of six it was:

• DaveF(Tyrell) - 4
• JimG (Lannister) - 4
• Troy (Stark) - 3
• JeffL (Baratheon) - 3
• DanD (Martel) - 3
• BobN (Greyjoy) - 2

The scores are the number of cities and strongholds each player held at the end of turn 6. The win condition in a 6 player game is the first player to 6 cities and strongholds or the leader after 10 turns. DaveF and JimG were tied at 4 each. The tie breakers are who is higher on the supply track and who has the most available power. At this point in the game, both were tied in both of these areas too.

Overall, the group really enjoyed this game even with the rough start early on. The game evokes the theme very well. The mechanics keep everyone involved and the game didn't seem to drag at all. There were large swings in power and players that appeared to be out of the game were able reestablish themselves with decent play on following turns. That may become more difficult to do as players become more experienced with the game.