Off the beaten path: Kingsmoot

This week's Off the Beaten Path is dedicated to AGoT's Kingsmoot variant. However, I must first make an embarrassing admission: I've never played it. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard of anyone else playing it either. This reality may illustrate two significant challenges for AGoT and rules writing in general.

The first and obvious challenge: if rules are purely optional AND require additional work to facilitate, no one will play them -- and Kingsmoot stumbles on both of these points. Not only are its rules unsupported by official play, you will need to build a new and fairly specific melee format deck to do well at it. 

Second: Kingsmoot rules, by their very nature, adding 'more rules' to the game. 

Together, these issues are not unlike the woes we all face with the first CP of each cycle. Naval enhancements are interesting, but are they worth the effort to get working? Will they clutter the errata list and scare away yet more new players? At least those mechanics are tourney legal...

In principle, Kingsmoot is quite interesting. Like Civil war, it supports up to 6 players, which is a great boon for 6 player casual metas and, possibly, retail spaces alike. Additionally, as they have no support/oppose concept, Kingmoot's Titles are probably easier for new players to understand. However, this simplification is a catch 22, as it results in some cards (admittedly only a small few) having meaningless wording in the format.

In practice I can't imagine Kingsmoot working well at all. Without supporting Titles, no player is ever safe and since 'winning' is dictated by the number of Titles you control (semi in addition to collecting 15 power) it only emphasizes the advantage of going last and/or forcing the earlier players to over manage the later players to prevent them sweeping the board. In short, the poor player decisions that already throw a standard melee format into the non competitive pile are probably worse here.

Unlike Hand of the King, Kingsmoot doesn't lend itself to use as an Agenda ...but maybe,

given the Character-Title coming up in the currently cycle, maybe we'll see something like them in the future. Who knows? House Frey characters that lend their owner title-like effects when you reach certain achievements has some appeal...

What do you think? Does Kingsmoot deserve more play? Do you think we'll see more kingsmoot-like titling in the rumored revised Core set maybe.maybe not due later this year? Say your piece in the comments below.