Cheese and Cheek: Game of Thrones LCG 2nd Edtion Review

Game of Thrones LCG Second Edition Core Review

Overview -

Game of Thrones the LCG is a card game brought to us by Fantasy Flight Games. Now in its second edition, many players are picking it up for the first time with a nice blank slate of not needing to buy a bucket load of expansions. GoT LCG can be played 2 players in duel mode (called Joust) or multiplayer in a free for all battle royale (called Melee). Players battle till they get to 15 power and the first to achieve this is declared the winner.

Components -

Living up-to the usual high standards of fantasy flight, GoT 2nd ed doesn’t disappoint. There are essentially 3 components to the game, the cards you use to play, the cardboard tokens to use to mark and keep track of things and the rulebooks. The cards are all very nicely printed, quality card with excellent graphics on them, the cards use the images envisioned from the books themselves not the TV series. This means you wont see Sean Bean, Peter Dinklidge or Emilia Clarke here for example. Instead are some very well drawn pieces of artwork depicting characters you will likely not recognise what so ever just by the pictures.

The tokens are from the usual high-grade card that Fantasy Flight uses for all their games and are very much the same as the tokens you might see in X-wing, conquest or a multitude of other FF board games. Thankfully as the game isn’t overly complicated there aren’t too many of these, there are tokens to act as gold, first player tokens and a few others, all are designed well with excellent graphics on them.

Finally the rulebook, as with Warhammer Conquest another new ish game from Fantasy Flight there are 2 rulebooks on offer here. You get a quick start guide to help you with he basic rules and a full rulebook that reads more like a glossary of terms/dictionary than a rulebook for those more detailed rule moments. Both of these books have artwork as good as the box and cards and are printed to a high standard as you would expect. They are very clear in their rules descriptions to a point where the game is very easy to pick up and play in a short time.

Gameplay/how it plays -

Firstly I'll cover the deck building aspect of the game, as it kind of needs its own section. Each player has a pre made set of cards divided by house in the core set, you have the option if you like to mix your house with a different house as well. This I assume to act as a sort of ally for your chosen throne chasers mirroring the alliances seen in the show/book.

Now the core set only comes with 1 set of each card and that can make it quite hard to make a complete deck of the 60 cards the game recommends for play. It's not essential to have more than 1 core, there are rules in the book for making pre made decks with just 1 core set, but 2 core sets are usually recommended if you want a better gameplay experience. 2 core's by most is meant to be the sweet spot.

Each army follows a banner, either teaming them with another faction or showing they stand alone

The way it usually goes based on general consensus is this, though it isn't set in stone (some have reported multiplayer with 1 core can be quite fun if not a bit limiting) -

Casual games - 1 Core set

Friendly but competitive or multiplayer games - 2 Core sets

Tournament play fully hardcore battles with full option varied multiplayer - 3 core sets

Core set box in all its glory

Once you have your deck built (and probably sleeved since it will need shuffling and taking care of!). You also need to setup a plot deck, this is a mini deck of sorts with a selection of 7 plot cards from the large pool of plot cards available. Plot cards are sort of mini boost cards for your army that only work on that turn, they will have a value to say how much gold you have that round, what your initiative bid is and how many cards you can end the turn with. On top of that they usually have some sort of buffing effect like extra gold or kill an enemy etc.

A Plot card

There is a small pre game phase where each player draws 7 cards and plays cards equal or less than 8 gold in value, the game then starts. Both players play a plot card in secret then reveal them, the one with the highest initiative has the option of first turn. They both then get the gold listed on their plot card and are able to in turn play cards/heroes into play until they run out of gold or decide to stop playing cards. After each player has 'marshalled' their forces the game moves onto the challenges phase.

The challenge phase is I guess the real meat of the game, its the fight phase and is done with the option of 3 different types of challenges:

Military challenge: The goal being to kill an opponent’s characters.

Intrigue challenge: The goal being to discard cards from an opponent’s hand.

Power challenge: The goal being to steal power from an opponent’s faction card to yours.

Though the goals are different, the way they work is essentially identical. Every character card has a challenge value on their card and a set of symbols that match up to the 3 challenge symbols. Not every character will have every symbol but usually each character has at least 1.

Say you have Jaime Lannister who has a combat value of 5, this applies to him for the Military challenge phase and also the Intrigue phase, but not the power one as he has no icon for that type of battle. At the beginning of my turn I pick one of the 3 challenge types (or one of 2 since I have picked to use Jamie) and declare a challenge of that type, 'kneeling' Jamie in the process (which just meants to turn it sideways and it is no longer able to take action in the game until it is put upright again).

Now Jaime has an ability that says when he takes part in a Military challenge he doesn’t tap to attack so if I used this option he would still be standing after the challenge, however the Intrigue option would leave him knelt. The defending player then picks a character they own that is still standing and has one of the same icons of the challenge declared then kneels it also, it is now classed as defending.

At this point the strengths of each participant are compared and the highest is the winner (ties are won by the attacker). The attacking player will now take the glory and gain the ability for winning the challenge, in this case either killing an opponent's character or making them discard a card if they had gone with an Intrigue challenge.

It's worth mentioning that the defender doesn’t have to defend if they don’t want to, they can just let the attack pass unanswered, however if they do, the attacking player always gains a free power token as well as the win effect. Equally the attacker doesn’t have to attack, they may want to save their character to defend later on (Jamie is good for both as you can attack with Military and then defend with Intrigue + Military).

Jon Snow apparently

When the attacker has either passed or declared his 3 Challenges, it moves to the second player to do the same. After all that is over the game moves to the Dominance phase, all that happens here is the side that has the most power of standing characters + gold left in their bank wins dominance and 1 power for their troubles. You then stand every character and return any unspent gold to the bank and the round starts again.

This is the basic premise of the game, there are also equipment cards to attach to your characters, Location cards that can buff your army and event cards that you can instantly play at any time to buff your army or hurt your opponent. The Joust and melee versions are pretty much the same, only difference being the number of players and a bonus ability card everyone gets know as a title card.

Title cards really just give everyone a buff for that round. On top of that its the usual free for all multiplayer political chaos you might see in a game of magic the gathering EDH with grudges and alliances forming left right and centre (this isn't a bad thing).

Conclusion -

This is a decent game, its good fun, has nice components and is enjoyable to play. The gameplay flows well and doesn’t feel too unbalanced though can be very swingy, an early lead often results in a win that's hard to get back from. Some houses feel very much counters to others, giving it a slight scissors paper stone element to it.

The game of course is just core so far with no expansions and that means there isn’t a huge amount of variety per house, however there are a whopping 8 houses to play as and combo together to bump that variety up. Over the next few months we assume expansions packs will come thick and fast adding even more fun and interesting combinations to each house.

I've had several games now and not yet got bored with the game, I get the feeling I could play quite a few more as well, trying all the different house combinations and deck building options before I do loose my interest with game of thrones LCG. At that point an expansion will likely have come out anyway and rekindle that interest.

In addition to this like most FFG games, they offer prize support to your FLGS to run yearly tournaments and leagues so if you are a bit more hardcore that is an option also.

2015 Winter Tournament pack goodies from FFG

There isn’t anything I really dislike about GoT LCG, the over powered cards in each deck are balanced against each other, though it can be a bit of an arms race to be the first one to get your best guy out. Having the different challenges enable you to form specific strategies, starving your opponent of characters or cards being the main one.

The power phase feels a bit out of place at first vs the other 2 which control your opponent but the power phase purely steals power and doesn’t affect board state. Late game it can be better as a sort of draining killing blow where personally I found the other 2 much better early on.

Having never played first edition I cant compare it to that but I do have to say I'm grateful to FFG for releasing a second edition of this game to give me the chance to have played it, something I would have never ever done it wasn’t for 2nd edition being released.