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I'm thinking of starting ASOIAF but I'm a bit unsure. I used to play a lot of WHFB but couldn't really get into AOS.
I enjoy the books, the TV series not so much. My questions really are how does it play, I prefer normally playing narrative style games rather than tournament would this game suit that style. There's a few in my gaming group so how easy and/or quick is it to learn to play.
I'd appreciate any information the community can give.

ASOIAF is the best tabletop game I've ever played and I've played many others.

There are many players who enjoy a more narrative style. The game is well balanced with active developers that regularly (annually) tweak rules to improve balance and improve play experience.

The universe is rich, the developers take pains to design characters with rules that match their descriptions/personality in the books so much so that many book favorites are actually best in narrative style games rather than pure top table competitive (Arya Stark and Syrio Forell for example).

The game is very affordable compared to other massed battle games (you can build many interesting lists with a starter+heroes box +1-2 units). The catalogue is huge with ten different unique factions each with interesting sub play styles depending on your commander.

For comparison, my second favorite game of all time was WHFB 6th edition. ASOIAF is so fun I have not even given The Old World a serious look.

I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Thank you Gallahad. That's very much the reply I'd been hoping for, it sounds ideal to me.
I also really enjoyed WHFB 6th edition, so if you're rating ASOIAF as being better than that I'm very happy. By making the characters more like books than TV is awesome.
Again thanks for the reply and off to place an order I go.

Glad to hear it Jax.

I should add that you will probably find the community a little bit more skewed to competitive since there are many port over boardgamers but there are still many people doing passion projects, conversions, and narrative style stuff. The devs also provide some more narrative style scenarios.

This website is a great resource for narrative scenarios:
https://boardmangaming.wixsite.com/boardmangaming

I considered starting it as a wargame but instead just bought a couple figs for RPG purposes instead. The upsides are that the figs are well sculpted and affordable, two very important things for a full sized wargame. What turned me off to it was the massive changes over time they do to units in the name of tournament player balance. I'm fine with adjusting here and there in the points costs or tweaking the verbage of unclear rules but they have seemingly over the years completely changed the entire premise/niche of certain units to the point that the cards you get in the box are completely useless with all the special rules a unit gets either missing/cut out or swapped for others. That's too much variability for me personally if I'm buying and painting up a unit. You could buy a unit and then have it lose the special rule(s) that you specifically bought it for because some tourney players spammed it and the win/loss ratio was 3-5% too high for the army as a result... and the next year they can bump the cost or further change the rules if that's not enough... and the year after that they might roll back some of the changes that swung the pendulum too far with the second tweak. I was thinking about starting Free Folk and the unit reviews I was watching on youtube turned out to be useless because of two or three seasons worth of tweaks made since the release. I realize that not everyone uses the tourney rules but in my experienc at multiple stores pickup games with strangers default to the tourney standard rules as the "most fair" version and you typically do the more custom stuff with friends/regulars. YMMV. The good news is that they literally just came out with this season's update a few days ago so you're good to go for at least 6 months.

Also, they also just announced a couple days ago the skirmish level "Tactics" game they're coming out with that will be crowdfunding soon (weeks? months? I don't think they specified).

 Gallahad wrote:
Glad to hear it Jax.

I should add that you will probably find the community a little bit more skewed to competitive since there are many port over boardgamers but there are still many people doing passion projects, conversions, and narrative style stuff. The devs also provide some more narrative style scenarios.

This website is a great resource for narrative scenarios:
https://boardmangaming.wixsite.com/boardmangaming

I just want to thank you for the link. Those are indeed very cool scenarios.

After following the community for a while there is definitely a lot of tournament-based discussion, but there is also narrative stuff and of course lots of beautifully painted miniatures. A wonderfully balanced, and well designed game does not preclude it as a narrative game also - it just means you do get people playing it in tournaments, because it is well made enough and rewarding to be used as such.

The updates on cards are fine - you have the War Council app which has everything up to date, and being a heathen I just write over the numbers on the cards if I need to

There was recently a post by someone that was re-running events from the death of Robert Baratheon and playing a campaign using the old Mighty Empires tiles. Quite a difference in who was living and dying, different alliances being forged etc. it looked really cool and showed what can be done with the system.

Just a quick pic post of the rpg conversions that I worked on last night with my second ever ASOIAF fig (the first being a simple conversion of Belwas where I added a shirt to him, lol). The one on the left is supposed to be a sort of proto-valkyrie/shieldmaiden whereas the one on the right is just the normal spear wife with added gear (a horn on a strap and the shield on her back identical to the other shield). Hopefully with the quick primer job and then paint I won't obscure the details that are on super close up already a bit soft. The level of detail reminds me of what figs printed with the first generation of affordable resin 3d printers on the best settings could accomplish.

Nice conversions Warboss! Those are both first generation sculpts for the game, and while fine, there are some softer details.

They switched sculptors a couple years back and the newer units definitely have sharper details.

Thanks. Someone was nice enough to post comparison pics a while back in one of the ASOIAF comparing them and the new sculpts of similar units did look a bit sharper. I will comment that it's not as bad as these super close up macro pics might indicate though and I'm happy with the detail (especially at the price I paid for singles). Apparently these figs were an alternate sculpt for spearwives in a league pack. Once I saw them, I definitely wanted one for RPG purposes and ended up getting more in case I screwed up the conversion.

edit: I sprayed them with Rustoleon flat grey primer and they're a little sticky but I'm hoping that won't be an issue once I start painting them (it's been too cold for me to start painting so haven't tried handling them since priming/photographing). I've seen reports of the figs having issues with regard to that so hopefully they'll hold paint well.