A Game of Thrones
I bought my first designer board game, A Game of Thrones, about a week ago. I couldn't really afford it, but I wanted it and so I got it and it has turned out to be a pretty good investment so far. The game is based on the first three books in the series A Song of Ice & Fire by GRR Martin and the designers did a a great job (IMHO) of capturing the books theme and feel while making an excellent war/strategy game.
So far I've played it three times, a 3-player, 4-player and 5-player game and each instance I ended up playing a different faction. I haven't done so well in any of the games, but they've still been a lot of fun. The 5-player seems to be the best option, though the 4-player didn't seem too bad, but the 3-player was just a little too out of whack. In the 3-player two of us ended up butting heads early, which allowed the third player to seize the necessary number of cities and strongholds to get the win.
In the 5-player game the Muster card, the mechanism that allows you to get more troops, came up fairly often and so there were plenty of battles. The 4-player saw only one Muster card come up and we all had trouble figuring out what to do, (also this was a much more passive group)...I can see now that there needed to be a lot more negotiation going on as no one could afford to cover all thier fronts at the same time. I like this notion that one game can be heavily militaristic and another be more diplomatic, though it looks like both elements need to be in every game. This sucks for me, because I'm not good at the diplomatic end.
Can't wait to play it again though.