Game of Thrones and Mother of Dragons expansion - Shut Up & Sit Down Review

[Applause] [Laughter] game of thrones today we are looking at game of thrones the game of thrones the board game a board game that takes the analogy of the game of thrones and turns it into an actual game and in keeping with the first series of the television show in the background you can clearly see a perky pair of boobs the box is shaping but when you play the game of thrones you win or you die no you just win or you lose that's less dramatic right but there is drama here famously this game has sent more players into a childish sulk than any other board game in the last 10 years and we first reviewed it back in 2011. it was a written review you'll find a link to that in the description of this video but today we are returning to westeros because an unlikely expansive expansion has just come out mother of dragons adds loans from the iron bank it adds a new board it also adds two new playable groups you've got daenerys herself the big dragon mama and house aaron are in a good time having a good time please stop that boy he keeps killing people push them through a hole just the base game was already a bigger experience than any other licensed board game you care to mention with this expansion it becomes something as epic as the war of the ring so for this video i'm going to start with a quick re-review of just the base game and then i'm going to talk about my time with the expansion and as i haven't actually played this game since about 2013 i'll be leaving this review to gwen's the things i do for love ah you know nothing quintin smith but that's what i do i drink and i know things chaos isn't a pit chaos is a ladder it's a ladder on a children's climbing frame and the rungs are very close together and at the top of that ladder is a plastic slide i'd like this to stop now that's reasonable the game of thrones board game is a war game about trying to collect castles like a demented tourist each player controls the armies of one of the six great houses stark lannister baratheon greyjoy tyrell and martel and on each round of the game everyone is going to place an order token on every area where they have a plastic playing piece secretly denoting whether those troops are going to be marching out of that space defending it adding their strength to nearby battles earning you power a sort of political currency or raiding which removes other nearby tokens it's a mechanic you might have seen in last year's really quite good battle for rock again except where that game took one hour game of thrones can take three to five hours and part of that is because as people are putting down orders players might engage in a little bit of negotiation well you say to your friend if you're not going to attack and i'm not going to attack then maybe we could both consolidate power and make a little money and maybe you were both telling the truth or maybe they were lying and take your territory or maybe you were both lying like a pair of duplicitous bananas in the same rotten fruit bowl it's basically the prisoner's dilemma over and over again and this is why this board game is so nasty because you only finally went if you managed to hold a whopping seven castles which is an act of comparable difficulty to trying to hold seven basketballs at the same time to win you're gonna have to do whatever it takes and that includes not just stabbing your friends in the back but specifically making friends with people just so you can stab them in the back you're gonna want to try and build lasting agreements in this game and that's sweet but it's dangerous you're building bridges out of sugar no no no no instead winners in this game will be masters of the difficult systems of support and supply the printed barrels on the board once you take those regions increase you on the supply track letting you field larger armies but even once you've taken some of these you're still going to have to think very carefully of exactly where you field your armies it's only by out thinking your friends in this sort of tactical patchwork of attack and defend and support that you will win more battles than you lose and similarly if you beat people it doesn't actually destroy their units instead those units are routed and it's only by attacking again with a different order can you wipe them from westeros like a smarmy professor clearing numbers from their whiteboard so that's the base game as it came out in 2011 but the question is have the last seven years been kind to it and the answer is no i don't have time today to competitively circle our conclusion winter isn't just coming it has crept into this flat and i am going to skip straight to the end oh edgy this is the board game review equivalent of like killing off ned stark yeah who's led stark he's uh played by sean bean in the tv show he dies let's start here for anyone without some experience of board games this manual is going to less resemble a stumbling block than it will someone firing a starting pistol into your kneecap now obviously lots of complicated board games are worth the time and frustration to learn i just don't know if this one is in the years since we reviewed this game i've come to realize that the thing that differentiates good rules from bad rules isn't how long it takes you to teach them but whether once you've taught them the rules coalesce in everyone's head you can put the manual back in the box and just play game of thrones does not have that if you teach it players are still gonna be confused about ports and support and supply for the whole game they're gonna be forgetting what each of the one two three four five six seven tracks around the board means and that's not their fault because it's not written down anywhere but worst of all players are still going to be giddily performing super cool super important moves that might win them the game and you're going to be going actually you can't do that it's illegal and you know what else is illegal kids that's right it's insects my name is jimmy lannister and today i'd like to talk to you about the imaginations you know what if you could just uh leave yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah great oh i was thinking do you think it would be problematic if i kind of did the thing like putting uh shoes on my knees yeah yeah yeah i wouldn't i wouldn't do that yeah no i'm probably gonna do that i've just got the wig and i figured you know yeah yeah yeah do you need any with the do you need help no all right all right i'll see you in a bit players losing a game because they didn't understand a rule that's kind of forgivable in a game that takes half an hour or an hour less so when you're playing something that takes all night and takes 20 minutes just to set up but on that note let's talk about how some of the hours you spend playing this game might just be tedious there are literally and figuratively too many moving pieces that do not concern you listen this game is a foggy land grab where everybody is trying to expand all of their borders all of the time and yet where resolving a fight is a five-step process i think about games like uh root or commet or even shogun where the designers know that this is a problem and so resolve fights with the role of a dice the choosing of a card or even the tossing of cubes into a weird tower and seeing what falls out in game of thrones the board game if two players are fighting first they have to calculate strength then they have to calculate support then both players have to choose a card that's going to lead their army then you have to calculate total strength again and then you have to calculate kills and then you have to work out retreats and if i am house martell and greyjoy and stark are fighting i don't care who wins i just want it to be over because after this there's another fight we have to resolve before i can even take my next turn but actually i wonder if there's a bigger reason that this game drags you see because unlike in the books in the tv show armies can be reconstituted and because players aren't unlocking new powers or making permanent progress of any kind the third round in this game can feel quite a lot like the fifth or the seventh or the ninth it can be almost purgatorial if you're evenly matched you pour wit and guile into this game and nothing really changes in fact if you have a really bad turn it can almost be like time is going backwards and of course for most people this slow pace and the tricky rules are gonna compound one another you'll play it and go that was an experience maybe let's not play again for quite some time but then when you do get it off the shelf again everyone's gonna struggle learning the rules one more time i don't want to sound too negative it's not like this board game is boring all of the time especially not at the start when westeros is a field of promise and not whenever you get to hatch a particularly devious stratagem like a poison egg and not when all of the players are just into it which is which can be quite often as anyone with even the slightest inclination towards fantasy or wargaming will tell you this game is an exhilarating proposition look at this map the lacquered playing pieces the irrepressible thrill of placing secret orders and with the right group a layer of pompous if thin negotiation it's like what risk wished risk was sitting down with the promise of a full game ahead of you you can't help but feel like a brilliant varys but a cool varys like a cross between varys and the fonz and of course i am overlooking what is going to be the most important thing for some people which is that this is a lovely toy for retelling if not the stories then the wars of game of thrones pivotal moments in the books might go a different way characters who've never met before clashing on the field of battle so spoilers for season eight but that's winter pretty much over there are people who i'd still recommend this game to namely super fans of game of thrones them and people who don't mind the bitty ponderousness of games like axis and allies or diplomacy old school war games who want to drink real ale and consider another player's plan while they roll a cigarette in the conservatory but for me just seven years on from this edition's original release this game feels old-fashioned i found that i got a lot more satisfaction from all of these war games which we've done reviews of and you'll find links to in the description of this video i found they offered more strategy than game of thrones but with more elegant rules and less admin and less waiting so now that's done that finally brings us to the expansion and if this game was fiddly before now it's fiddlier than the world's tiniest violin if this game was long before with the expansion it is ridiculous to even try and fit it into an evening if this game was complicated before now teaching the whole thing intimidates me who reads board game manuals for fun and what do we have here glossary oh you saucy minks in other words this expansion takes all of my problems with the base game and elevates them to queasy new heights but get this matthew if i was going to play the game of thrones board game i would only ever play with this expansion but coins that's crazy stick with me kitty wink as i take you on a journey through a little town that i like to call my review on a horse that has the name metaphor so contained within this expansion is a sideboard where somebody can play daenerys queen in exile with her armies and three pet dragons which is ridiculous because even i know that in the universe of game of thrones dragons are extinct you really messed that one up fantasy flight it also adds the iron bank which offers loans of troops and materiel it adds house aaron and most awkwardly of all it adds a new vassal system so that you always play with all of the great houses no matter how many people you're actually playing with and the players who are highest on the iron throne track can each pick one of these non-player houses to boss around by choosing a couple of vassal orders every round the expansion also adds some quality of life tweaks like giving every player three special orders that can only be used on navies expanding their options slightly which i thought was really great it adds an extra c region for balance and it adds a rule so that players can give one another power tokens as part of negotiations which is pretty hot but let me be crystal clear all of this stuff makes the game even more inaccessible literally in the case of westeros which already looked like an overgrown garden and now we've drenched it in yet more pawns that are covering up the vital iconography that players even need to see to play and yet if what's bad is worse what's good about this game is better look it's a lot like how i don't really eat sweets it messes with my blood sugar and makes me feel depressed but when i do eat sweets you'd better believe that i have the entire bag of haribo tang fastics resting on my chest as i lie under a blanket and watch star trek the next generation and maybe some cream eggs on the side as well yeah that sounds that sounds pretty good yeah pass them here i don't want to play this board game it's going to be exciting and frustrating in equal measure but if you and me are gonna play this board game then what the heck let's make it the most exciting and the most frustrating although let's also stop short of playing it with a full eight players because the thought of the time and energy involved and how everyone would have to crane to even see the board makes me feel physically sick with mother of dragons this game's ability to retell the story of game of thrones becomes even more multi-dimensional and vivid and not just because it has more characters including everybody's favorite third wheel jorah mormont khaleesi forgive me it is not safe to return to westeros when you are making a dragon for your good friend you've got to make the best dragon that you can this dragon is very bad i'm jordan mormont by the way in case then and it wasn't clear michelisi forgive me michael forgive me goodbye forgive me kalisi forgive me and remember how i said the base game doesn't have an arc well with the expansion now it does the daenerys player doesn't actually win by getting seven castles like everyone else no instead she has to conquer regions that contain her supporters and you get more and more of these appearing across westeros as the game goes on and similarly daenerys dragons actually grow from babies all the way to essentially nuclear weapons as the game goes on so now all the houses of westeros have this threat that they can decide to work together to defeat or to selfishly ignore and that is so true to the books but these new daenerys mechanics aren't perfect i was reading the manual when i realized with some horror that there is now a player who wants the game to go on for as long as possible the whole thing is absolutely ridiculous before game of thrones didn't fit into my life now it doesn't even fit onto our table but if expansions are supposed to be treats for people who loved the original game then this is inarguably a phenomenal expansion it adds more depth more complexity more color everything that made the base game great is greater if you like the base game then buy this expansion immediately but for the love of god if you like the sound of this expansion don't then go out and buy the base game unless you've tried it just food for thought in the process of playing game of thrones to review the new expansion i realized i didn't like this game so much i'm now getting rid of my copy it's going to the sharks library even though i still like the idea of it if fantasy flight wanted to do a new streamlined edition just like they did for twilight imperium 4th edition oh my goodness sign me up this is such a complicated thing to look at ti has that huge cult appeal game of thrones now no longer has co-appeal it has mainstream appeal and the fact that we have this this game of a different era of game of thrones of an era where really it was just fans of the books and the tv show was just starting out now everybody loves it and that's really cool but now game of thrones we're probably not going to get a new edition of this big super heavy war game we're going to get like card games and things and that's cool but i think it's wonderful that even though we've gone back to this and it doesn't quite stand up against modern games the fact that there's still some support for it the fact that we're still oh yeah diving back into that is so cool and for so many people if you're sitting there watching this and being like oh but i love it it's my favorite game i can see why this is people's favorite game and if you play this on weekends and everybody knows exactly how the game works and you don't end up having to go oh you can't do that i'm sorry i'm ruining someone's day i can see why this would be your favorite game it's not like war of the ring this could never be my favorite game yeah but i can see why it might be yours what's that and in the the age of the new and the shiny sometimes it's nice to just have companies that are still looking back on what came before and still just ensuring that things from the past don't just become forgotten absolutely my sister's gonna give me a golden hat a golden hat a golden hat my sister's gonna give me a golden hat a season one episode six what's up youtube it's your boy viserys targaryen of course you remember that because you know me because i'm the most important character in game of thrones and everybody talks about me all the time when we talk about game of thrones oh but imagine what it would be like to be forgotten by the world oh that would be incredibly sad so maybe if you don't want to forget this youtube channel you can subscribe to it using the buttons at the bottom of this thing and then you won't have to remember it anyway lads i've got head off i've got an important tantrum to throw in in a tent full of sexy topless men hopefully i won't get killed bye

Channel: Shut Up & Sit Down

Views: 514,165

Rating: 4.8631482 out of 5

Keywords: Shut Up and Sit Down, SUSD, SU&SD, Board Game Review, Review, Board Games, Board Gaming, Boardgame, Board Game, Gaming, Tabletop, Fun Games, Quintin Smith, Matt Lees, Game of Thrones

Id: ignD6P7E3q0

Length: 21min 34sec (1294 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019