Every now and again, I need a break from competitive play. Fortunately, AGoT provides 3 alternate rule sets, with each set providing some interchangeability. If you are familiar with AGoT in general, you can play any of them and, perhaps most importantly, they require little or no additional investment to get into. This week, I'm going to highlight the Civil War variant.
Civil War rules, which were introduced in the Martell deluxe set, are both the most time consuming to set up and the easiest to play. Since a single player provides all 100-180 cards all players draw from the communal draw deck, that player needs to set aside some prep time. The deck can't contain duplicates of unique cards and, if you want a coherent experience, you'll need to crunch some numbers (or practice a lot of trial and error) to get its gold curve right.
Civil War's biggest advantage is that it takes away a big advantage veteran players have over new and beginning players: deck construction. The deck-providing player can even provide each player's plots, either pre-built sets for each player or for each player to draft.
Civil War's second, and perhaps most overlooked advantage is that it support's 2-6 players. Why? Who knows? Regardless, seating 2 additional players (especially new players who don't have prebuilt decks) can be very useful.
Combined, these two advantages make Civil War ideal for brick-and-mortar retail. Specifically, this format allows a retailer to keep a 'store deck' on hand that can teach more players the game with fewer staff. Moreover, while 180 can contain a lot of card text and game mechanics, being limited to one house (plus neutrals) cuts down on a bit of the learning curve.
Now, if only FFG sold some sort of product that contained random assortments of agendas and plots for players to draft using this method, AGoT would have a great in-store product...
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