Hey Everyone,

Just picked up the Core Set today. I used to play the LOTR TCG, love the George R. R. Martin books, and am intrigued by the benefit of the LCG format over traditional booster packs.

So I was really excited to try the game, but after reading the Core Set rules a couple of times, plus the FAQ document, plus this forum, I still find myself unsure about a couple of key rules. I realize these are extremely basic for those of you who have been playing for a while, and appreciate your patience:

1) Challenges: If you choose to do more than one type of challenge in a turn, do all your challenges have to be directed against the same player?

2) Challenges: Do you have to pre-announce all your challenges at the beginning of the challenge phase, or do you announce them one at a time after seeing the result of the previous challenge?

3) Duplicates: As far as I can tell from the rules on duplicates, it appears that if you have a character in your dead pile and a duplicate card in your hand, you can neither play nor discard that duplicate. Seems kind of harsh from a hand-clog perspective. Is my interpretation correct?

I apologize if any of these questions seem to be coming way out of left field. I was an ASL player many years ago, so I tend to get paralyzed by even vaguely ambiguous wording...

Thank you!

1.Every challenge can be directed against another player. However other cards like the multiplayer titles can limit that choice temporarily e.g. if you support the player you aren´t allowed to initiate challenges against him/her.

2. You can announce every challenge one at a time. This brings an exciting tatctic element to the game.

3. Once a "unique" card is in your dead pile you aren´t allowed to play a duplicate of the card that´s in your hand. Keep in mind that you are only allowed to run each card thrice in your deck, so your hand shouldn´t be clocked unless you plan on running 6-7 unique chaarchters thrice in your deck. Besides the ruling was the same in LOTR CCG for the unique fellwoship members and i think it was a good choice for the gameplay as it is in AGOT LCG. Also remember that the one card in hand limits the chances of your opponent to remove something useful with an intrigue challenge- other cards will be protedcted that way.

Thank you very much!

With the challenges, I was hoping for the answer you gave. That sounds more exciting than my initial reading of the rules, which was backward in both regards.

In LOTR there were always several ways to discard a useless card, depending on what kind of deck you were running. In the AGOT Core Set I didn't see many "discard a card to..." mechanics (which was why I worried about hand clog) but I completely forgot the effect of losing intrigue challenges. So I can see your point, that even a dead duplicate can come in useful.

I'll run a test game today and post again when I have more questions. Thanks for your help!

Yes, in the LCG only enviroment there aren´t that many cards right now which profit from discard mechanims. But you can find some examples in the latest chapter packs, such like Open market www.tzumainn.com/agot/cards/card.php which lets you exchange hand cards with the discard pile, or maester of the sun www.tzumainn.com/agot/cards/card.php which uses hand cards as a requirement for it´s safe effect, or just a card like Scavengers of the sea www.tzumainn.com/agot/cards/card.php which allow you to play a rather cheap charachter with the "additional cost" discard a hand card or let your opponent discard a hand card.

Thanks again for all the help (here and elsewhere in the forums).

I played a solitaire game to test my knowledge of the rules, and in doing so, I finally realized that "hand clog" isn't really an issue in AGOT like it was in LOTR, due to the very different rules for card drawing. I'll probably have a few more "aha" moments like that, I suppose. Core concepts don't always translate from one game to the next....

Arma virumque said:

Right. The discard cards in the regroup phase rule in LOTR was necessary, because you always had to redraw your hand to 8 cards. Otherwise you would´ve been stuck with some dead cards in your hand for the whole game.

Since AGOT allows you to draw two cards in the draw and a lot of additional cards (through other effects) and doesn´t have a maximum hand size it´s totally different from LOTR.