This is a great board game produced by Fantasy Flight Games. It's based on the A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels.
My proposal is for us to play it online over at Sakeriver. Mike has gaming subforums that would suit this need quite well.
The game takes about 2-3 hours to play in person, and will take a week or two to play minimum online. I'd ask for at least one action per day from the players.
Each player represents one of the great houses from the books, and attempts to gain influence and territory in the land of Westeros. The mechanics of the game are quite brilliant, in my opinion, and even those who know nothing about the books should enjoy the game if they like strategy games. If you do know the books, the game captures the feel of the books in a great way.
The original board game was 5 players, and called A Game of Thrones. They then added an expansion that updates the game board to allow for 6 players, called A Clash of Kings. The expansion does a much better job of balancing the houses, and also adds a number of optional rules. A fan created expansion was developed that expands the board to 9 houses total, and is pretty well done. I'd prefer to start with the 6 player version, because this is what I am most familiar with.
A representation of the game board, in it's initial state, can be found here.
The rules for the original version: A Game of Thrones The rules for the expansion: A Clash of Kings. Only the Ports section would be used our first time through the game.
The basic flow of the game involves everyone secretly placing orders at once, and then all are revealed. Then each player resolves one of their orders in turn until all orders are resolved. Each territory on the map has some combination of castle/town, crown, or barrel. The castles are used to recruit new units, the crowns are used to gain game currency, and the barrels are used to determine how many armies, and how large, you are allowed to field. Sea territories are vital, as they allow for fast and stealthy troop movement.
Battle is 100% deterministic, with no dice or other random factor. Each player has a hand house cards representing a character from the books, with specified strength and attributes contributing to the outcome. Which card your opponent will play is often the deciding factor in battle.
Some turns involve each player bidding on three separate areas of influence. The first determines the order the players go in. The next involves the order of tie-breaks in battle. The third determines how many "special" orders the player can play in a turn. The bids for these are done in secret, and the outcome of the bids has a huge impact on the game board for each turn until it's time to bid again.
I'd be modding the game, and updating the map after each phase of the game. The image of the board linked above is a Gimp file with a layer for the pieces and orders, so moving stuff around and placing new stuff on the board is cake.
Since I'd be playing the game, we would have a couple of options for how to handle keeping me from know what orders other players have placed.
1) Trust me not to look. I can pinky-swear and everything 2) We decide that I am not trustworthy, but that a different player is and have him forward them to me to update the map. 3) Each player sends their orders to a third party that isn't playing, and that person forwards them to me when all players have sent them. We'd need someone willing to do this. Probably the best option if someone was willing.
I currently have 3 confirmed yes' from the sakeriver crowd, and two maybes (one more reluctant than the other).
So I need at least one more player, most likely two.
Any takers?
Posted by Flaming Toad on a Stick (Member # 9302) on :
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