Well the title is misleading (as all those books are) in as much as I don'.t think this is a game for dummies. Quite the contrary.

As a brand new player, I am both excited by the prospects of this game, and overwhelmed by its complexity. So I pose this question.

What support would there be in this community to produce such a PDF book "Getting started with AGoT"? One can spend countless hours mining the forums, putting up new posts, but a PDF stickied to page one would be invaluable, and likely be a great tool for converting new players to enthusiasts.

Here's what I propose. What I lack in in-game knowledge , I more than make up for in project management, plus I already have the software needed to produce a nice end product that would be available here on this forum free of charge (of course).

What topics should be included? Here's a few that came up in our first games - please think back to what was a stumbling block for you when you started:

• Understanding the relative strengths of the Houses (or how to choose a house)
• Playing attachments and how to get rid of them
• What you can and can't do during each phase
• Picking your order of challenges
• Picking the right plot card
• Deck building strategies
• Draw enhancement
• Which CCG cards are playable in the LCG... and which are advantageous

and so on.

I'd love to give back to this community, and would be happy to compile and format what ever articles and topics we can produce as a group.

Love to hear feedback, positive and negative.

Sounds like a cool project. Here's some advice ...

Focus on the very basics first. Deckbuilding, choosing Houses, and specific card combinations are rather advanced ... and you might just end up with long debates rather than having something instructive.

To me, the basics are

When to kneel (should I attack, or should I defend?)

The best defense is a good offense (attacking for defensive purposes)

The gold curve how to make expensive things become cheaper

You could check out the old, archived Tzu-mainn site. I have several articles up there on strategy and deckbuilding and such. I may bring them up-to-date with the state of the LCG just for fun one of these days. My articles there are under Senff, but aren't the most relevant to the LCG. Let me know if updating them is something you'd be interested in possibly including.

Another thing you can put up:

A sample game using the Core LCG cards. From start to finish, walk through the decision trees that each player would have. I'd suggest using a 3-player game rather than just a 2-player game

As a new player to the game this sounds like a great idea. How about using this www.agameofthrones.com/PDF/agotnewplayerguide.pdf as a guide and just updating it? perhaps show four relatively balanced decks made out of 2 core sets (one for each faction), as an intro to deck building?

Thought I'd contribute a beginner's perspective, in case it's helpful to you.

Overall, however, it can be intimidating to get started playing due to the immense number of rules, terms, etc. If I weren't an enormous fan of the books, I don't know if I'd be willing to put in the effort to learn the game. The one idea I had was that it would be cool if there were a beginner's version of the game, which could be so basic as to ignore the keywords in order to better learn mechanics.

If anyone here has played Through the Ages, you may be familiar with the graduating levels of difficultythey actually use three levelsand the beginner version is very simple and intended only to introduce mechanics. That sort of thing.

Overall, I think the idea of having somekind of up-to-date material for beginning players would be very valuable, and I would be glad to participate in such a project, if others are also interested. Whether this should be done via some kind of updating of the PDF document, or integrated into the AGOT Wiki is open to discussion.Both options have their distinct strengths:

- PDF -documents can be printed out, and thus easily distributed to friends who are interested in the game

- Websites on the other hand are easier edit and keep up-to-date by a group of people. I think having such a section in the wiki should help give it some more visibility as well.

Any thoughts on this? Other people who would be interested in making something like this?

On a tangent: I've found something pretty interesting lately, as I've been trying to teach the game to some new players. At first I was teaching people (players with some background in CCGs, namely the one with 5 colors and such...) with the CS-decks in Melee with varying success, and it seemed to take quite a long time for people to get the hang of everything. So I did a little thinking and changed my strategy: I created some 'simple' decks for Lannister and Stark that have a clear idea of how they should be played, and taught people with those and via Joust. The results seemed to be hugely better like this.

The ideas behind the 'simple' decks were:

• 2-3x of basic structural cards [non-unique characters, locations, events, attachments]. This is important, since having many copies of cards speeds the game quite a bit when you're playing first time - making the game flow much more smoothly. Having only 1x of most cards in the CS slows the game down, as you're constantly having to read & learn new cards, and you can't learn to expect anything that the other player plays. Example Lannister cards: Goldentooth Mines, Lannisport Weaponsmith, Lannisport Steward, Enemy Informer...
• Joust instead of Melee, as this helps to get an understanding of some of the attack/defence mechanics much better, and also helps understand the fact that power is what actually wins the game. Melee is much easier to get to grips with after Joust.
• 1-2x of several iconic unique characters and locations to give the decks some more flair. Not necessarily strong ones, or ones that are in the CS, but ones that are memorable and not too complicated. Having duplicates doesn't seem to confuse new players nearly as much as I feared, so this is also a good option.
• No cards with too complicated rules (too much text to read)
• Some characters with the most important keywords (stealth, deadly, renown)
• No shadows cards...
• Plot decks that have some pretty straight-forward plots, and Wildfire as a reset
• The idea for beginner games isn't to get the two decks perfectly balanced, but rather the deck that the new player is playing should be slightly stronger than the other one, so that it allows for some mistakes.

The ideas should be transferrable to any house that the player would like.