Played a 5-person basic game (original game, no changes except for switching the Greyjoys on the Kings Court track) last night. Starks and Lannisters were new to the game. Everyone else had played at least a couple games.

Greyjoys won in turn 6, had a chance to win in turn 4. Tyrells' fleet had been trapped between the Baratheons and the Greyjoys, and ended up retreating east; the Lannisters attacked the iron fleet inadvisedly and lost both their ships; and the Starks were never able to put together a fleet that could challenge for the West. Starks, unchallenged up north, were slow to move south and to collect supplies/cities, which allowed the Greyjoys to take advantage of musters to build fleets (first) and (then) armies without fear of losing the fortresses in the center of Westeros. Baratheons' lack of supplies hurt them a lot, and diplomatically, they hurt themselves by orally threatening both the Tyrells and the Lannisters, which meant the latter houses' attention was directed east instead of towards the growing Kraken menace.

A good game.

Sounds like an excellent game!

Just a note - experienced players and fresh players both tend to fall into the trap of 'kingmaking'.

New players do it by negligence - they let one person get too strong without noticing and they just...win. Veteran players do it by refusing to commit to stopping someone from winning, and just end up supporting the person 'they like the most' to win. Both are not very fun outcomes.

Watch out for someone with multiple high influence tracks, lots of power (especially early), or lots of cities (within 2 of the win condition, especially late). If you can see a decent chance for them to win this turn, everyone needs to turn on them and bring them low NOW.

The solution is to realise that, with creative use of support and raiding and turn sequence, it is possible 99% of the time to prevent someone from winning, even if that victory is imminent, if everyone works together. Realise that the object is to win, there is no 2nd place prize.

That means if someone else wins, you have LOST. So stopping someone else from winning is a higher priority than winning yourself. You can always win next turn. You can't if the game is over. I have seen dozens of 'hopeless' situations where one person was 'unstoppable' turned around when people worked together and brought the would-be king low. I have seen dozens of situations where the obvious 'leader' of the game was dogpiled and killed, and the guy who got his entire army double-sworded on turn one came back to a surprise win!

So never, ever, ever give up in GoT. If everyone is playing optimally, you ALWAYS have a decent chance of winning even if you are down to 1 footman on a useless city - as long as there are a couple of turns left in the game.

So never be satisified with playing 'kingmaker' rather than being the king yourself. This will keep the game exciting for all.