LogFAQs > #939550682

And finally, there's the challenges phase. As I've already alluded to, the fact that one player's challenges immediately follow another's is unique to AGOT. But what's even more interesting is that you can initiate three different types of challenges each round: military, intrigue, and power. Each character has icons that indicate which type of challenge it can participate in. A challenge is defined by the rewards for winning it, the claim. In a military challenge, the closest analog to a game like Magic, winning a military challenge means the opponent has to lose a character. The cool thing about this is that the loser gets to choose which character(s) to kill when a challenge is resolved, and whether you win a challenge by 10 points or in a tie (since attackers win ties), the claim is the same, because there are no life points to lose. An intrigue challenge lets the winner discard a card from the loser's hand at random, preventing this from being a safe area - it does not affect the board state. And finally, the power challenge lets you steal power from your opponents. Since power is the win condition, this is obviously an important challenge - but since it affects neither the board state nor the opponent's hand, it can be weaker early on. The reward for winning a challenge unopposed is gaining a power, so there's plenty of incentive to try to wreck your opponent's board state.

AGOT, at least early on, also did a great job making the decisions in the challenge phase the most important part of the game. For one thing, most event cards, unlike Spells or Sorceries in other games, usually do not do anything super-impressive alone. You can't just play an Event card and suddenly have a huge dude on the board, or suddenly kill your opponents' dudes. Events interact with the game generally in the challenge phase; you can stop a character's defense or attack with an event, or you can get targeted kill on an opponent's character if you win a challenge. There are also lots of other ways the game rewards winning challenges through characters' innate abilities; a character who has the common Renown keyword gains power on itself when it wins a challenge. And losing a character matters; you can have multiple copies of Tywin Lannister, but if he dies in a challenge, you can no longer play those extra copies of him - he's dead!

If there's a downside to AGOT, it's that not every game is guaranteed to be fun. It's very possible to experience NPE (negative player experience) in the game; losing a key dude can often mean you're on your way to defeat, but defeat can be slow and agonizing - a rush deck will win quickly while seemingly not damaging you too much; an aggro deck will obliterate your board but still win relatively quickly; but a control deck can take ten plots to sink in an inexorable kill. There's tremendous variance in how a game plays out, and many decks de-emphasize the challenge phase, which to me can feel disappointing. (One example is the Shadows mechanic, introduce almost three years into the game's run; many cards can enter play outside of the marshaling phase, and when they do, they can do something ridiculous.) Power creep can also devalue interesting strategies in favor of degenerate combos.

That said, with the right matched decks, AGOT is strategic, dramatic, tactical, thematic and beautiful. Highly recommended.

Future - Between COVID-19 shutting down in-person tournaments, the difficulty of buying and organizing cards, and the game no longer being supported by Fantasy Flight Games, it's hard for me to recommend making AGOT your lifestyle game at this point. However, it's well supported on theironthrone.net and by the playerbase on Facebook, and if you just want to play casually, you can still buy starter decks or used sets pretty easily. One of these days I'll get around to doing that more. 'Til then, I actually played in a tournament online at the start of the quarantine and had a decent time doing it. It's not the same as in person, but it did give me access to all the cards, and I didn't have to leave home to do it. As I get more and more reps in other games, I imagine AGOT LCG will drop more and more, but it had an almost unmatched run for me.
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yet all azuarc of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness