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What I Learned From Creating an Overhauled “Game of Thrones” Board Game, Part 2

Welcome back to my series on my overhaul of the Game of Thrones Board Game, which I have graced with the name A Board Game of Thrones: A Game of Thrones Board Game (or “ABGoT: AGoTBG”), because if there’s one thing George R. R. Martin is known for, it’s brevity.

In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about how I structured the game’s turns, my initial ideas for Scheme Cards, the Battle Phase, and the conscription mechanic, all of which are big departures from the base game.

The Phases

Everyone’s favorite part of learning board games is the multiple steps (or phases) of the Game Round!

My first introduction to phases in a tabletop game was Magic: the Gathering, and honestly, this game is pretty similar: there’s an Upkeep phase, an End phase, a Combat phase, and two Action phase, one before combat and one after. However, two new additions to that formula are the Negotiation and Initiative Phases. Here’s the full list of Phases:

  1. Upkeep Phase: This is where various game effects are resolved and tokens are changed/removed. This is also when players draw new cards from the House, Battle, Scheme, and Crisis Decks.
  2. Negotiation Phase: During this Phase, players may give other players a Raven Token that signifies a desire to meet with them to talk in private.
  3. Initiative Phase: This is where players bid cards from their House Hands to determine the turn order for the Round.
  4. First Action Phase: This is where players manage resources and perform non-combat actions, such as carrying out Schemes, resolving kingdom Crisis cards, and more.
  5. Army Mobilization Phase: This is where players move their Heirs, Ships and Units of soldiers. Players proceed according to Initiative Order, and move all the Units, Ships, and Heirs they wish to move before moving on to the next player.
  6. Battle Phase: This is where players take turns engaging in Battles with one another’s Units.
  7. Second Action Phase: This phase is functionally identical to the first, but some actions may only be taken during this Phase, such as conscripting Units of soldiers.
  8. End Phase: This is where various game effects are resolved before the start of the next Game Round.

I found during playtesting of the game that each of the Phases ended up provoking different player behaviors:

  • Because players receive their Resources during the First Action Phase, they make a lot of planning decisions with their allies. This is where a lot of inter-player trading happens, as well as strategizing about battles.
  • The Army Mobilization Phase is one of the most crucial strategic moments in a Round–I’ve seen entire plans to take over Kingdoms fall apart due to one player moving their Units in an unexpected way. In this sense, it’s almost more important than the Battle Phase.
  • The Battle Phase is where everything hinges on a combination of cards and dice rolls. There’s a large element of uncertainty in Battles, and this uncertainty scares a lot of conservative players who don’t want to gamble their plans on the outcome of one decisive battle.
  • The Second Action Phase is where the outcome of the entire turn is reckoned: who won what battles, whether campaigns can be continued, and what moves players have made. This is also where new Units are created and plans for next turn are made.

During playtesting, I also found that two major issues with these Phases:

  • Players didn’t like the ‘private meetings’ introduced in the Negotiation Phase–instead they preferred to talk openly among themselves and make secret plans by whispering, winking, and so on.
  • Winning first or last during the Initiative Phase has almost no meaning–there’s only an advantage to going first or last if you know what your opponent’s are going to do. This made the Initiative Phase most trivial.

When designing the game, I found that I really did need an End and Upkeep Phase for keeping track of the game’s mechanics, especially Conscription.

Conscription

Conscription became one of the key new mechanics in the game. In a nutshell, conscription allows players to create Units of soldiers from their territories. Creating these Units requires 200 Gold and 100 Steel, and supporting these Units each Upkeep Phase takes 200 Food.

To conscript a Unit, players must choose a territory to conscript from. Each territory has a Population number, which denotes how many Units can be conscripted there (most territories can only conscript 1 Unit). The combined Population number of a player’s territories represents how many total Units they can conscript.

After conscripting a Unit from a territory during the Second Action Phase, the player must put a Conscription Token on that territory. Conscription tokens stay on those territories for two turns, and until they’re removed, no more Units can be conscripted from that territory.

Conscription is a particularly crucial piece of games design because it shows how time and space can effect a game immensely.

The reason timing is important is because players cannot create Units of soldiers before the Battle Phase of a Round–they have to wait until the Second Action Phase. Why is this important? Two big reasons:

  • All players can see how many Units everyone has before going into the Battle Phase. This makes battle-planning for players easier.
  • Players are forced to pay at least 1 turn of Upkeep for their Units, rather than being able to create Units, fight with them, and only pay for the surviving Units during the Upkeep Phase.

Here’s a quick example of play:

Alex creates 3 Units of soldiers during his Second Action Phase on Turn 1. Joe creates 2 Units of soldiers. Neither of them can fight with their Units this Game Round because the Battle Phase has passed, but they will be able to do so next turn.

During the Army Mobilization Phase of Turn 2, Alex moves his Units onto one of Joe’s territories. Joe, seeing this, moves his Units onto the same territory to defend it.

During the Battle Phase of Turn 2, Alex has a Battle with Joe. All of Alex’s Units are destroyed, while Joe has 1 surviving Unit. During the Second Action Phase, Alex decides to create 2 Units to replace the ones he’s lost.

During the Upkeep Phase of Turn 3, all players (including Alex) must pay for the Upkeep on their Units, which is 200 Food per Unit. Alex pays his Upkeep (400 Food) and is ready to fight in another Battle.

Another reason time is important is because those Conscription Tokens take two rounds to be removed. This means those territories are essentially inert for an entire Round. Because players prefer to conscript Units from territories that are the closest to the where they want to go (the easternmost edge of the Kingdom, for example), players will conscript from nearby territories first. This ensures that they can carry out their plans immediately.

However, this is where space comes in: players must conscript Units from more distant territories during the next subsequent turn if they want to reinforce their first Units. Because of how the map is laid out, this can cause problems: Units can only move 3 spaces during a Game Round, and most Kingdoms consist of 4-5 territories.

If a player isn’t careful, their second round of reinforcements may not be able to make it to where their previous Units were, or where they’re needed most. This is especially true if a player is controlling two disparate Kingdoms, like Dorne and the Riverlands.

Together, time and space place limits on how quickly players can react to one another and carry out their plans. With only 10 Rounds, every delay can be game-changing.

Conclusion to Part 2

I didn’t cover Battles and Scheme cards in this post like I’d hoped, but that’s because doing initial playtesting for the game brought up a whole new slew of ideas, issues, and design challenges. I’ll be writing up my full takeaways from the initial playtesting in the next post!

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What I Learned From Creating an Overhauled “Game of Thrones” Board Game, Part 1

Back in November 2018, I decided to do a total rules overhaul for the Game of Thrones Board Game, which I titled A Board Game of Thrones: A Game of Thrones Board Game as a joke. Beginning with a single ten-hour brainstorming session that ended around 3 AM, I started laying out everything I wanted to do with the new game.

One of the driving factors of the project was the fact that the original game didn’t capture what made the HBO show so enamoring: the “Influence Track” seemed like a really shallow representation of Houses jockeying for subtle advantages over one another, possessing the Iron Throne wasn’t that big of a deal, and the majority of the gameplay revolved around your armies. Instead of feeling like you were playing as Littlefinger or Tywin Lannister, you were just a military general.

To me, Game of Thrones was like watching smart people play 4-D chess: while the wars were being fought abroad, characters were throwing wrenches into their enemies’ plans at home, too. A lot of this didn’t make it into the original game’s territory-control aspect. Sure, players could backstab one another and broker deals, but it wasn’t enough for me.

After about a month’s worth of work, I’d created a 10,000-word rules doc that introduced everything from brand-new Battle and “Scheme” cards to new Houses and army mechanics. From there, I tinkered with the project bit by bit, figuring out what new material components I needed to make the game work. After returning to it months later, I cut out about 3,000 words’ worth of mechanics from the rules, paring down the game to be more streamlined and intuitive.

Finally, I had the first playtest with some gamer friends of mine. The setup was messy, some of the mechanics needed fine-tuning, and we only made it through three game rounds in 5 hours, but by the end, I heard exactly the kind of reactions I was hoping for:

“Oh, so that means…man, this is cool!”

“That’s really interesting…wow…”

“This was fun! Tell me what you’re doing this again!”

For a very complex, high-investment, five-hour game that didn’t even end with anyone winning, it was a great first reaction. Here’s what I learned from the whole experience, from brainstorming to playtesting.

THE DESIGN PILLARS

At the heart of the original Game of Thrones Board Game was territory control: you build armies, you capture territories, and you fight other armies. My first task was retooling this aspect of the game so that it was one element among many that the player had to manage, partly inspired by this exchange between Tywin and Tyrion Lannister:

Tywin: You really think a crown gives you power?

Tyrion: No, I think armies give you power [but] Robb Stark had one, never lost a battle, and you defeated him all the same.

This exchange made me think about how clever rulers had to juggle multiple aspects of power, not just managing armies. The new pillars of the game became:

  • Territory control (creating and moving armies and capturing territories)
  • Kingdom management (managing resources and public approval)
  • Sabotage (damaging other players’ resources and game position)
  • Socializing (making deals, threats, and alliances between players)

Many of these pillars are the same as the base game, but were reimagined to more closely fit the spirit of Game of Thrones (or, at least, my favorite parts of it). I won’t cover all these pillars in depth here–instead, I’ll start by introducing some of the major framework changes I made to the game and my thoughts behind them.

Changing the Victory Conditions

One of my first decisions was to forego the original game’s victory condition of capturing a certain number of Strongholds scattered across the map and change it to capturing and holding the Iron Throne to gain victory points. This, in theory, meant that everyone’s attention would be focused on a single geographic area: King’s Landing.

This kind of King-of-the-Hill victory condition caused a dramatic shift in how the game was played. In early drafts of the redux, it meant that players (like Houses Baratheon and Lannister) who were closer to King’s Landing had an incredible advantage, while distant players (like Stark and Martell) seemed constantly at a disadvantage. It also created a negative gameplay loop:

In the early iterations of the redux, one player started the game controlling the Iron Throne. Simply capturing the Iron Throne from that player was enough to grant victory points, and holding the Throne for each Round after would grant a continual (but smaller) amount. This incentivized geographically close players to bum-rush King’s Landing and fight for the Throne, while the more distant players would follow in their wake, capturing vacant territories on their way to King’s Landing, taking the Throne from the current holder (weakened by the previous fighting), then fighting among themselves.

No matter the outcome, the game would become a constant cycle of mustering troops, marching on King’s Landing, deposing the weakened player holding it, and gaining victory points (as demonstrated through simulations I played against myself). If for some reason a bid for the Throne failed, that player was usually left lagging behind in VP for the rest of the game.

Ironically, the situation resembled Daenerys’ description of the ‘wheel of power’ in Westeros:

“Lannister, Targaryen, Baratheon, Stark, Tyrell…they’re all just spokes on a wheel. This one’s on top, then that one’s on top and on and on it spins, crushing those on the ground.”

To solve this, I implemented three new gameplay elements:

  • Fortifications
  • NPC forces occupying the Throne
  • Heirs
  • Removing the ‘capture’ bonus

First, I gave certain territories (including King’s Landing) Fortifications, which differ from the original game’s Fortifications. In this version, some territories cannot be captured unless they are attacked by a certain number of army Units. I set the minimum amount of Units to capture King’s Landing at 8, meaning players would need to either band together or muster a very large army over the course of several Rounds.

Second, I set up NPC-controlled Targaryen army Units in Crackclaw Point and King’s Landing at the beginning of the game and put the non-player Targaryen faction in control of the Throne. This prevented a player from starting the game with the Throne and created more barriers for the players to gain the Throne in the first few turns. Having to raise a large army to break through the Fortifications and then having to fight a large group of enemy Units required more planning and resources, and encouraged players to be more strategic.

Third, I made new rules so that each player started the game with three Character cards called Heirs. Upon capturing the Iron Throne, a player had to choose an Heir to become King or Queen, and upon losing control of the Throne, that Heir risks dying in the coup. If all three of a player’s Heirs die, they lose control of almost all of their territories and resources and have to build themselves back up from almost nothing. This disincentivized the constant cycle of gaining and losing the Throne, which would cause players to quickly burn through their Heirs and lose everything.

Finally, I removed the victory points for simply capturing the Iron Throne and instead granted the victory points to the player when they took and held the Throne for one full Game Round. The idea was that it was easier to take the Throne, but holding onto it took more skill and deftness, which is what I wanted to encourage in players.

This combination of factors was designed to make assaulting King’s Landing (and gaining victory points) much more of a strategic endeavor, one that would require careful planning and canny decision-making, as befits the spirit of Game of Thrones.

As for the geographic isolation of certain Houses, I’ll speak more about that later.

Revamping Territories and Resources

One of the keys to making the game more multi-faceted and true to the book/show was enlarging the resource management aspect of the game. To do this, I changed how players gained resources to build and support their armies (which I renamed “Units”): instead of capturing territories that had Supply markers on them, every territory produced a certain amount of Food, Gold, and/or Steel.

This immediately made the economy and resource management more complicated, since players had to keep track of three resources, each with its own use:

  • Food was mainly used to support Units
  • Gold was mainly used to build Units
  • Steel was mainly used to upgrade Units and build Warships

Because each territory provided different resources, players had to think more carefully about which territories were most valuable to them: did they need more Food or Gold next turn? How many Units could they build if they captured (or lost) this territory?

The design challenge of attaching a certain amount of resources to each territory was made easier by organizing them into Kingdoms. Instead of starting the game with most of the map unclaimed by any player, I decided to give each player control of a Kingdom (consisting of 4-5 territories each) right at the start. This meant that I had to figure out the amount of resources each player should start with, then divide these resources among the Kingdoms’ territories. Instead of distributing resources among territories randomly, players could reliably expect each Kingdom to have a Gold-producing territory, a Steel-producing territory, etc.

However, this resource management element would create difficulty when it came to strategizing and playing the game, due to the number and complexity of the material components. I’ll talk more about that later on.

Public Approval and Crises

When watching the show, I noticed how much the Noble Houses worried about the peasants rising up during times of war: because armies are expensive and resource-intensive, a war necessarily meant taking food out of the mouths of the common people. In the base game, however, it’s never really a concern–all your resources go straight to your armies.

This quote from Olenna Tyrell sums up the threat of neglecting the people:

“The people are hungry for more than just food. They crave distractions. And if we don’t provide them, they’ll create their own. And their distractions are likely to end with us being torn to pieces.”

To emulate this aspect of kingdom management, I introduced the Public Approval and Crisis mechanics, which incentivize players to divert resources away from their armies to take care of their Kingdoms.

The system works like this: over the course of the game, the players may raise their Public Approval Rating, which gives them benefits like drawing an extra card each turn or collecting extra resources each turn. One of the main ways Public Approval can be gained is by dealing with Crises, which randomly arise each Game Round and demand a certain amount of resources to solve (for example, a Steel Crisis requires 200 Steel to resolve). If the player solves the Crisis  before the end of the Round, they gain Public Approval. If not, they start incurring penalties, such as drawing less cards, etc.

Forcing players to spend resources on things other than their armies (and gaining benefits/penalties for doing so) means the player’s attention is split between the battlefront and homefront, and benefiting one may mean sacrificing the other. The randomness of the Crises means players need to keep a certain amount of all resources saved up, or risk losing the support of the people. Those who properly curry the favor of their subjects find themselves in a much strong position overall, and become much more efficient and powerful.

Conclusion to Part 1

These are some of the biggest structural changes I made to the game, but there are a lot more to discuss–how battles are fought, the new Phases for each round, the process of conscripting and maintaining soldiers, and the Scheme cards all represent fundamental changes to how the game is played.

I’ll cover some of those in the next installment, along with my thoughts on their design! In the meantime, you can view the current version of the Rules (along with a material list) here.