I love the concept of this game, but I think the rationality/intuitiveness of some consequential rules is paper thin to non-existant. The fact that The Red Viper can have his save from a duplicate be cancelled by He Calls It Thinking just blows my mind as one of the most irrational decisions made. It's like saying you can't touch someone and then taking off all their clothes. I understand you could take the clothes off of someone without ever touching them, but I'd like to see someone actually do it. In the real world I would define touching someone as putting any amount of pressure on their skin, whether through clothes or not. In this game, they would define touching as actual skin-to-skin contact, not including clothes, hair, nails, make-up, sunscreen, lotion, denchers, rings, piercings, and anything else that does not contain nerves as if it does not contain nerves, the sensation of direct touch can not be passed to the brain and therefore the person is not being touched.

If the reasoning behind decisions like this is because certain cards are too powerful without them, stop making cards that are too powerful without unintuitive, convoluted rules.

What is everyone's take on the rationality/intunitiveness of the rules in this game? I'm not disputing that they are at least well-documented. They are. They just make no rational, intuitive sense to me half the time, even if they do create a perfect framework for rules lawyering and getting to a single correct outcome.

TL:DR

I think the rules in this game are irrational and unintuitive. What's your take?

Warning below post contains a spoiler from book 3.

If your complaint that the game does not accurately follow the book or perceived life cause and effects then you might want to avoid games in general as there will always be some level of abstraction. My favorite example would be the lannisport brothel. Do you really think the building would survive hosting a dothraki hoarde or a Dragon, or that Ned Stark would ever enter one? Though that would be one wordy card to effectively be nedly. For that matter certain characters never interact in the books but they do during my games.

If your talking mechanics, well dupes take effect through a response effect and he calls it thinking is a response cancel, so that seems about right mechanically. If the designers felt this unbalanced the game then dupes could become can not be cancelled. From a nedly perspective think of the he calls it thinking as figuring out that the dupe isn't the real red viper so the real one dies. Though really the Red Viper should say cannot be killed except as claim during a military challenge with Ser Gregor, then remove Ser Gregor from gane, right?

from a confusing rules perspective I think play vs. put into play probably is the most unclear rules situation that new players run into. I know I played it wrong for awhile. The runner up would be the fact when given a choose option you can choose to fail. I think in general the game could use better card wording standardization.

While I do agree, that the rules templating often seems to fail with individual cards in AGoT, I'm a bit surprised with why the workings of Immunity would make the game in some sense worse in implementation than idea. If that were the case, then most card games should get keelhaul'd for one reason or another.

As an example: In a certain other very popular cardgame, there is something called Protection From White. However, this ability still allows the character to be killed by the games classic mass destruction spell, which happens to be… White. How is this any different? Is that game then also worse in it's execution than concept ?

As far as rules go, AGoT is a game that tends to avoid rules/abilities that are *absolute*, as you would seem to want them to be. The only real example in the game is the word 'cannot', but even that doesn't mean that a clever player won't blank your Beric before killing him with No Quarter. Whether that's a *bad* thing, is a matter of perspective. A lack of absolutes may make the game harder to learn, since you get the feeling that there is no solid ground under your feet. However, absolutes in abilities also have a nasty way of taking the gameplay in negative directions.

TL;DR - The rules are what they are, not what you would want them to be. Similar things exist in most complex cardgames.

Someone responded to this with all that Melee contoversy? LoL.

It's not about absolutes. It's about intuitiveness. Immunity requires too much rules lawyering. If something requires rules lawyering, does it make the game more or less intuitive?

Forget all the rules for a second. The Red Viper says he is immune to events. You would assume this means events can not affect him, would you not? From an intuitive, logical standpoint, would you have come to the conclusion that He Calls it Thinking could affect him without considering any precedent?

Intuitive is a redundant word and concept in almost ALL complex games (of any type) as they are all use abstract rules to some extent. Rules lawyering is part and parcel of these sorts of games, and FFG do an above average job of getting faq's out for a lot of it.

The FAQ should be included in the rules as standard so that more of these issues can be addressed out of the box but i would argue the execution is usually very good (the latest cycle has had a few blunders to be fair though).

mdc273 said:

You're blowing this out of proportion. The question whether immunity extends to effects originating from the immune card or not is just a decision that had to be taken by the designers. None of the options is inherently more logical or obvious than the other. It's like in a Fantasy RPG with Invisibility or Teleportation spells. Whether the spell affects only the naked character or includes the character's clothes and equipment is just something that needs to be defined by the rules. It's not like it absolutely has to be one way or the other.

I totally disagree with you that the immunity extending to effects originating from the immune card is the intuitive, logical or obvious option. If it was, the question wouldn't be asked as often as it is.

Yes, to me it makes a lot of sense that immunity does only protect the card itself and not peripheral entities, including effects originating from the card. I think it's totally intuitive and logical that a card and an effect originating from it are treated as two different entities.

Superman is pretty much immune to everything. But if he throws a car at you, the car doesn't become indestructible just because it was thrown by Superman. If Superman writes you a postcard for your birthday, the card can still get lost in the mail. There's no guarantee that the postcard will be delivered, just because it was sent by Superman.

If the designers had decided otherwise, and immunity did protect effects originating from a card as well as the card itself, that would be fine too (and if I'm not mistaken, that was the rule at some point during the CCG). As I said, that's just a decision the designers had to make. And I see no problem whatsoever with the option they went with.

Yes, I do agree that there are some problems with the rules. Fewer than many people claim there are, but there's some. But, as Drakey said, those problems arise from sloppy templating and inconsistent rulings. The flipflopping on some card interpretations drives me nuts. Cases in point to be currently admired on the rules board: Burning Bridges and Little and Less. Also the speed and decisiveness with which open issues are resolved could be better sometimes. The Darkstar/Maester of the Sun thing was out there for months before they finally addressed it in the FAQ. The "loses all keywords/traits" issue is not satisfactorily resolved yet either, as far as I can see.

So there is definitely room for improvement in those areas (consistent templating, consistent rulings, swift and consistent clearing up of open questions). But the question you have chosen to open this thread over is just a non-issue in my opinion.

I love this game, but I have no problem admitting that the execution could be better. For something that my friends and I put a lot of time and thought into, we shouldn't have to look up rules as often as we do. The rules are often not intuitive and I'm surprised that anyone would argue otherwise.

Even simple things like using the word "claim" to mean taking power from the board and the "claim" value of your plot card to mean how much power you take from your opponent in a power challenge. So, when I use "The Siege of Winterfell" and "cannot claim power for your House except during a military challenge" is it intuitive that I do get to "take" power equal to the "claim" of my plot card during a power challenge?

There are many such examples where different wording would make it easier to understand. Little and Less being a perfect recent example.

Words used as core game concepts aren't always intuitive as to what they do. Stealth and Deadly are examples of two well chosen words that make sense for their ability. But has anyone else had a new player using "influence," "Initiative," and "intrigue" interchangeably? In my mind, making an influence challenge has always made more sense than making an intrigue challenge. I'm trying to influence your hand, not intrigue it.

There are also rulings on cards that don't make grammatical sense. Using "Risen from the Sea" as an example of a card that can save from a flame-kissed terminal effect because of the "Then attach this card to the saved character (counts as a Condition attachment with the text 'attached character gets +1 STR" part is not intuitive. The reasoning given is that the only way you can save a character from flame kissed is to save them and raise their strength at the same time . Grammatically speaking, "then" means it does not happen at the same time. I can understand why it does within the context of the game because the effects fully resolve within their own window. I get that. But do you really want a game where people have to refer to flow charts to understand what order things happen in? Can't you word cards in a way that are both grammatically correct/intuitive and make sense within the context of the game?

Having written all of this, I understand and appreciate how difficult it is to design new and exciting cards/mechanics when you have so many cards already in the pool. Every new set is harder to design than the last. Your flexibility in design is always on a downward slope and the necessity of obtuse rules/wording increases. It's an unfortunate reality of a game like this. That's why I wouldn't be opposed to re-booting the game and starting over with a fresh card pool.

I'm still not going to play the HBO version