Hey everyone,

I just bought this game last night and spent about an hour reading the whole rule book and watching the videos online. My wife and I then sat down and played the game. It is safe to say it took us a couple of hours because we had to keep referring to the rule book on almost every card we played.

This is our first LCG so we didn't catch on quite as fast as some may. Below are a few questions that we were still unsure about after playing the game through once, and I was hoping you guys could help clarify.

1. I was under the impression that your plot deck and house deck are just supposed to be made up of the cards that are part of the House you choose to play. For instance, If I am playing Lannister House then all my characters, locations, and attachments should have the Lion in the top right designating the Lannister family. My only issue with that is, that I saw you can pay 2 gold to play a character from another family, but how would you ever be able to play one if your house deck and thus your hand only has your house cards and not another house? Do you mix all 4 of the core houses together and make your decks with a mix of houses or keep them separate? If you keep them separate then where do you buy another house's card from? Sorry if that's confusing...

2. On the cards with rules text, sometimes they have small icons limiting what kind of character they apply to. A lot of the icons though I do not know what they are referring to. Like for instance the House Tully Recruiter card says "Kneel to lower the cost of your next (icon that looks like a wolf head) character you play this phase by 1." Is that wolf head referring to any stark character since the wolf is their symbol or is it referring to an actual dire wolf character or what? Same thing with the Eastern Fiefdoms card. It says "Kneel to lower the cost of your next (icon that I can't even make out to be anything) character you play this phase by 1." There are many icons on the cards that there is not a legend for in the instructions so I am not sure what they are referring too?

3. When a plot card such as the Valar Morghulis card says "When revealed, kill all characters in play." Is it referring to just the player's characters who played that plot card, or all the characters of every player?

I know there were a lot more questions but I will ask them when I think of them. I know this is a lot, but hopefully you veterans can help us out some here. Thanks a lot!

1) If your House Card is Lannister, that means that you do not have to pay any extra costs to play a Lannister character (to play them, simply play the printed gold cost) and you can include "House Lannister Only" cards (cards with that exact wording in their text box) in your deck. Typically, you won't want to include cards from other house affiliations, because to play them you have to pay an additional 2 gold known as the "out of house penalty". For certain very powerful cards, that can be worth it (a common example is Asha Greyjoy from Trial of Champions cycle, which is often played out of Lannister because she fits the theme very well).

Note that regardless of your house affiliation, you can include "neutral" (a blank, grey shield on the top corner) cards without paying any penalty for playing them. A typical Lannister deck will include primarily "House Lannister" affiliated cards, supplemented with Neutral cards and, occasionally, the odd out-of-house card if it complements your deck extremely well. As Lannister generates a lot of gold, they're one house that can occasionally afford to pay this 2 gold penalty.

Note that there are no plot cards with a house affiliation (although there are some that have the deckbuilding restriction "House X only", like Hear me Roar). That means that any house could run a plot like Valar Morghulis, which you mention later, but only a player with the Lannister house card could include Hear me Roar in their plot deck..

2) The icons refer specifically to the house affiliation; House Tully Recruiter (with a wolf) can reduce the cost of any character with the House Stark affiliation (a Wolf in the top corner), and Eastern Fiefdom can reduce the cost of any card with the House Targaryen affiliation (a 3 headed dragon in the top corner). There is one such icon for each house affiliation; a wolf, a squid/kraken, a dragon breathing fire, a lion's head (lannister), a stag (Baratheon) and a sun (martell).

3) No need to read too much into it; it says "All characters" - so that's all of them. If it were otherwise, it'd say "All your characters".

Thank you very much for your help! That answered everything I asked.

Thank you very much for your help! That answered everything I asked.

Happy to be of service! The rules can be a bit a bit intimidating and a barrier of entry, but if you make it past the initial confusion you'll find a fun, thematic game with a great community! Feel free to ask questions like these; there are a number of us on these rules boards happy to help out.