by Luca Vichi
With the new Game of Thrones season airing everywhere, my dudes-on-a-map/Negotiation itch has come out once more (as it wasn’t enough already). And what board game am I gonna use to scratch it?
What board game are you gonna use to scratch that persistent negotiation itch? I mean, not
physically using the board game BOX to scratch your itches, but... you know what I mean I guess!!:D
No suggestion could come more natural than the original and official Board Game: a Game of Thrones
As I explained in this
Epic Comparison here on BGG (go ahead and read it if you dare) the game's mechanics make me long for more. Some suggested to expand the experience with the new Expansion: Mother of Dragons. I haven’t had the chance to get the expansion yet, and I feel bad for this - rly. BUT for those of you who played the expansion:
do you think the expansion adds something meaningful to the whole negotiation feel?Next let me go ahead with the 2 Medieval-themed games that I love most:
Fief and
Warrior KnightsBoth allow for fierce negotiations and bribery, yet they scratch a slightly different itch. While Warrior Knights keeps the negotiations tight from beginning to the end - since there’s no shared victory; Fief allows for partnership as well, letting a team of 2 look for victory together, thus you’ll find yourself strictly cooperating with someone (and maybe betraying that same person later?).
In
WK you can slightly “predict” who’s gonna win, since VPs are gathered at the end of each turn, and nobody can take a VP away from you once you’ve gathered it.
In Fief you need to get to 3VPs by holding on to Strongholds or to Noble/Religious Titles. These can be lost if you don’t plan carefully, or if something bad happens. You really can’t plan everything ahead, but that’s the RPG nature of the game. And I’m loving it.
Fief embodies so well the aGoT lore that the fellow M0ebius made a wonderful Fan implementation:
a Song of Ice and Fief that requires Fief's base game to be played.
Also
Asyncron just announced their new
Fief France Edition Kickstarter project for May the 1st (with exclusive Miniatures, a new board, new coins and other stuff). You can
find here the announcement from Asyncron , leading to the KS preview page.
Two other great medieval titles are
Wars of the Roses and P
ax Renaissance.
These do not force you into negotiations as the others, but provide very strong opportunities of manipulation and to show your cunning. And when things go the right way, you’ll feel deeply satisfied.
Wars of the Roses leans on the German side and is mostly based on foretelling what your opponents are about to do: will they try to bribe my lord? I’ve got to prevent this. Will they invade this region, or will they attack this stronghold? I’ve got to move my lords away from there and then defend this point.
Pax Renaissance is more subtle and opaque and amazingly intricate. Even if it’s approach is more abstract is manages to be a thematic game. Pull the string of the medieval society and become the new World’s dominant family and plase just read my
review on BGG here :D
Sadly these two gems are out of print (EN version) but you should easily get by with the foreign versions.
Moving some thousand years further from the Medieval age we have 2 masterpieces:
TI and
Dune (with Rex being a re-implementation of Dune in the TI universe).
TI is the well-known space opera par-excellence. A meaty (to say the least) game that allows for endless negotiations, strategizing, and partnerships. The recent inclusion of rules for Promissory Cards, and binding/unbinding deals rules of the 4th implementation of the game may seem a small addition, but actually makes me like the game even more. It’s good to have some new mechanics that incentive deals-making and negotiations.
Dune (Rex) is one-of-a-kind asymmetric negotiation game which takes ages to be properly mastered. To excel you need to know the many races strengths and weaknesses, but most of all you need to know when to take advantage of them. Those asymmetries may seem to imbalance the game, but once you can recognize the situation to properly use your (and your opponents’) rule-breaking abilities, you’ll see the game moves on like an expert tightrope walker.
It’s the first negotiation game I fell in love with and it will stay in my heart forever.
Dune is getting a long-awaited reprint officially announced probably with the cool Ilya artwork: find
here the BGG discussion and
here the first announcement.In the end I’m letting in the list also the well-received
Rising Sun. That’s not a game I’d recommend for the sake of negotiations alone, but it has dudes on a map and “some” rules for negotiations - and I also see why people love it. I think this can be approached on a slightly more random game night (mind this: I’m still talking about my itch for negotiations). While I would skip it if I wanted some more serious bribing on my table.
So my questions to you now are:
what’s the game that best matches your aGoT negotiations itch? Is it the official game or one of the other excellent games we talked about?
Or maybe you’ve got your own hidden pearl to have us discover?
