Hello all.

Long-time lurker, first-time poster. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

I wanted to get some advice from people 'in the know' on kick-starting AGOT-LCG playgroups in cities where there doesn't appear to be an active meta.

I'm living in a city of roughly 8 million people, have a core-set gathering dust on my shelf, and am desperate to find other people to play this game with. My problem is that, even with all those people around, I can't seem to find an active circle of players to get involved with and am faced with the task of generating such a group by myself.

As such, does anybody have any good advice on ways to go about doing such a thing? My regular gaming group is very large, and while I've managed to table the core-set a couple of times responses have been mixed, most players there tend to favour more 'Euro' type games. My local FLGS's (Central London, UK) don't seem to harbour any actively recruiting playgroups, and Google searches haven't picked up any local AGOT'ers with a website.

So what can I do? This is fantastic game, I'm insanely eager to keep playing it, but I need to find a nucleus of players to melee with. Help me out a little, how did you all get your respective metas started? Has anybody been in a similar situation and found a method that works? Are there any other websites that might be hiding untapped reserves of potential players?

Any and all help gratefully recieved.

PS.I think I've chosen the most appropriate forum for this; but apologies if I've just made a gigantic n00b error with the placement of my first-ever post.

Hello and welcome. In my own experience, CCGs (and from a gameplay perspective, if not a marketing one, AGoT is still most comparable to a CCG) are a different animal, wild enough to scare away a tamer Euro-loving group. And I mean no disrespect in this, as I enjoy a good Euro as well, so there can be some cross-over in the audiences. But your best bet is to find some people who used to play CCGs or even still play them and introduce the game, making sure to point out the strengths of the LCG. Lots of players who hated the money sink of a CCG but miss the gameplay might be interested in Thrones.

You may want to contact FFG about getting demo decks (a little outdated now since those cards were rotated out along with the other pre-LCG stuff, but still a good way to teach the game). Otherwise sleeve up your own Core Set decks and ask your local store owner if you could run demos one Saturday. It can be slow going, but if you find even one or two friends to play regularly with it could snowball from there.

Hope this helps. It is a great game, and worth some effort to build a local group.

Make them read the books, they'll want to try the game after

Maybe after the TV show is out, more people will wanna try the game.

Besides, what do you call "Euro" games? I'm european too (french) but a lot of american games are played here, especially for card games. European board games are strong (especially german) but CCG (or LCG in our case) from US or Japan are very popular.

Agot is more for adult players than, for example, Magic, I think, and the players should have some experience of card/board games. If you find people playing the L5R card game, I think they will love the Agot game. Or ancient Magic players who will be happy to play something different (but not that much so they are not lost at the beginning).

Here in France there is a small coommunity that communicates on a forum. That helps a lot finding players.

Try www.boardgamegeek.com. You can see which ratings one gave the game. If he gave the game a good rating move over the flag near the name. If your mouse stays over the flag you will see in which city he lives. If it is your city: contact him. You can also check the people who own the game but did not give it a rating yet. Three of my four fellow players in our city I found on boardgamegeek! There are two entries for Game of Thrones one LCG one CCG. Check both. If you have any questions I will help you.

May not be of as much help as you hoped for but we have a small group of us playing in Cheltenham (UK) at the moment. We're still working out ways of balancing out the core set starting decks for new players at the moment (and my Kings Landing I set arrived today so haven't had much of a chance to look through it) since that seems to be the best way to get people into it.

Haven't heard of too many organised play groups outside of that (although I beleive there is one in Birmingham (UK) and one in Newcastle (UK) ) .

Obvious place to try would be Orc's Nest in London, used to have a thriving Vtes scene and seems a lot more open to the whole CCG ethic.

Hope that helps a bit.

Pmyucps

longclaw said:

On the support page for AGoT you can find PDFs for two demo decks. Just print and enjoy!

Thanks guys, a lot of that advice was extremely helpful. Really appreciate it.

I think it's just going to have to be a case of hitting the internet message-boards hard in the hope of finding nearby players and maybe even printing out a couple of flyers to put in local FLGS's (like Orc's Nest, which coincidentally is where I bought my copy of the game). I'm sure that there must be other people in London that want to play/try the game, it's just a matter of finding them or getting them to come to me.

So there we are, a push on London-focused message boards and a couple of tactical visits to FLGS's. Just have to hope that I get lucky.

mischraum.de said:

That's a really good idea. Is there some way of searching the site for everybody who has reported 'owning' an AGOT-LCG coreset though? I had a hunt through a few forum threads about the game, but what I could really use is a big list of everybody on the site that is registered as owning/playing the game itself (running any kind of user search really), then I can just hunt down any locals and get in touch with them. Can that be done, or is that a search too far?

Anyway, thanks again for the helpful suggestions.

Is there some way of searching the site for everybody who has reported 'owning' an AGOT-LCG coreset though? I had a hunt through a few forum threads about the game, but what I could really use is a big list of everybody on the site that is registered as owning/playing the game itself (running any kind of user search really), then I can just hunt down any locals and get in touch with them. Can that be done, or is that a search too far?

In the game entry scroll down to the statistics. After "users owning" there's a number. Click it. You will see all users who have reported owning the game worldwide. Now you have to look through the pages for UK flags. Move your mouse over the flags. Most times their city will show. There is at least one guy in London, whom I found. Look through all pages. After the ones who gave the game a rating there are also those who reported owning but did not give it a rating yet they are also worth contacting. Unfortunately there is now direct search for people owning the game in a specific country. But you will find people this way!