Game Night

11 days gone, which last I checked is more than 7. Shitty.

Had a game night this weekend during a 3 day hiatus form work. 3 day weekends are awesome. Regularly working weekends nor so much. We played The Game of Thrones 2nd Edition. This game is bad ass and lots of fun regardless of head count. We had a group of 5 and expected an early departure for one of our guests so we gave them Tyrell so we could use the NPC tokens to take their place. He was new to the game, so not much progress was made near Highgarden to worry about. I played Starks and was ready to take the game by Round 7 but Baratheon beat me to the punch because Lannister and Greyjoy couldn't deal with them. I should have come down the coast sooner but Greyjoy was poking Moat Cailin and I couldn't risk losing it. They learned their lesson but it was too late. Way too many castles and strongholds in the south, ugh. Was a blast though.

Thoughts on customization of the game pieces:

Tracking armies is cumbersome and too involved during march orders and mustering. I think that small tokens with house sigils on banners on top of lances would do the trick nicely. Each token would have a small disc base, a spear/lance/pike elevating the piece above the top of the unit tokens, a flag/banner with house color or sigil, but numbers indicating army size on it predominately. This way you could easily identify how much of your current supply is occupied on the battlefield. I found the effort of counting armies very annoying as they changed so much and with so many marches and musters it was obvious this would alleviate the stress of that process.

The blinds use to hide your order tokens and power tokens when bidding are far too small and flimsy. Nearly every involved board game with units and cards and tokens will be in need of a storage container for use during play to easily access the pieces relevant to the action taken. I think that designing a small wooden structure that could house all the useful playing pieces would be a huge benefit to playing in groups, especially when table space is at a minimum.

There were not too many other things I thought the game could use worth mentioning. Like any other board game, these kinds of additions are completely superfluous and not needed to simply get up and go with the game. But if you're like me and want a deeper more involved and special experience when playing your game, these kinds of niche items make it so much more enjoyable.

Let me know what you think or your thoughts on The Game of Thrones 2nd Edition! Thanks.