If your interest is piqued by the Ice and Fire tabletop game – and I think it should be, because it’s got a good amount of strategic depth and is pretty well balanced – then you might be asking yourself: how do I choose a faction? Well, the good news is, there are no wrong answers!
Okay, I tell a bit of a lie. There are answers that struggle more than others. Specifically, the Boltons are built around a set of abilities that almost simply do not work, but overall there’s maybe a 5% variance in win rates across all factions in this season and no one choice particularly dominates the game. That means that, Boltons notwithstanding, your choice can boil down to the style you like.
If you’re not sure where to begin, one sort of safe option is to start collecting mercenaries. These guys are an important part of the game in that they can be used in every other army except for the Free Folk, because the Free Folk don’t believe in money and instead prefer to trade in giant dung. The Neutrals aren’t really a main faction, but if you get together enough models, you can play them as an independent force regardless. The upside is that if you transition into a main faction, you can use your Neutral models with your chosen allegiance. The downside is that there’s no one, specific, intended playstyle for mercenaries, so if you start here you’re flung a bit into the deep end with no guidance, and also with quite a few men who will work for hire yet will fundamentally embezzle their pay and then go home without contributing anything.
The Lannisters are, following the personalities within the book, an uneven split between some of the most cunning bastards around, and some of the dumbest people in Westeros who only think they’re being cunning, with that split leaning towards the idiots. That means that depending on how you build their army, you can either be one of the most oppressive forces available, or you can randomly play slots with the odds stacked fully against you and no way out from your people’s incompetency.
By the end of any game involving the Lannisters, if either player’s cards and abilities worked consistently, something has gone wrong. The Lannisters create chaos. They randomly disable things their opponents are trying to do, while at the same time struggling with their own impotent reliance on high-variance dice rolls. If you love a game of craps, if you love losing at craps, and you still have money in spite of your crippling gambling addiction, then the Lannisters are the faction for you. However, if you like the idea of knowing exactly what cards will be in your hand while you fricassee the enemy’s ability to make any sort of plan, the Lannisters are also for you just so long as you’re willing to learn which units can operate the child-safety latch on the kitchen cabinet, and which units will drink the bleach in there.
Outside of their horrifying ability to make everybody mad, including the person playing as the Lannisters, they might be notable as having the broadest variety of options for worthless security guards who can’t perform security and who will die at their posts.
Starks
The Starks are a faction based fully around Tully Cavaliers. Though intended as a force meant to be tenacious and scrappy, in practice you will almost never build an army that doesn’t have Tully Cavaliers in it, and then you will live and die according to what happens with those Cavaliers. They are your life force and the very firm glue which holds this faction together.
Often, the Starks will present you with abilities that get better as you lose men, which would seem to imply that you’ll be better if all your men are dead, but don’t be fooled because if all your men are dead, that also means you’re losing. That said, the faction does offer a variety of aggressive options once a player gets to know them, and they’re the only faction that gets “Assault Orders” as part of their default deck, which is amazing for them because Assault Orders is probably one of the most busted cards in the game. Using Sansa, they can draw that card again, and again, and again.
So in spite of everything, when you know how to combo these guys together correctly, they wind up uniquely difficult to kill. They can maneuver all over the place, attack more often than you expect, and can pull a frustrating amount healing out of thin air. The trick to doing all of this stuff is just to learn which units can do it, and how.
Night’s Watch
Prior to Season 4, the Night’s Watch was truly defined by the developers showing them an indignant amount of favoritism. If an ability was broken and inappropriate, generally speaking, it always went in the Night’s Watch. In their prime, they enjoyed malignant insensibilities such as units that gradually got more and more powerful as the game went on in spite of starting off already pretty effective, units that could not die and who in fact just came back to life on your flank after you killed them, and war machines that fired guided missiles. Today, all that is in the past, or at least manageable, except for the guided missiles.
That means that the Night’s Watch doesn’t currently have a really clear identity, but they still have a bunch of units that are relatively good, and which do a functional job without tons of strings attached. This makes them one of the easier factions to learn with and is a good place to start if you want to focus on the basics. They are also very good at completely obliterating other new players, because a person who’s unfamiliar with the game will have absolutely no idea what to do about the Patriot missile system blowing up their army from the far corner of the field.
Free Folk
If you love animals and fat, hairy men, you’re going to love the Free Folk. Their whole schtick is that they’re positively drowning in wild animals and fat, hairy men, and between these two things you’re always going to be taking more turns than your enemy, which means the opponent is going to be drowning in hair soon enough.
Free Folk can’t hire mercenaries, since mercenaries won’t accept poop or giant hair as payment, so as a result this faction has to work with what they have. What they have is a longer list of options than most armies, and almost every single one of those options is terrible. In other words, you’re going to be using Raiders, Trappers, giants, and Thenns for almost everything, because every other choice is a homeless person with a spear made of walrus teeth.
It may sound bad, but the size of a Free Folk army can get almost stupid. Most armies will be using seven units, whereas a Free Folk army might use an upward of sixteen individual units, and half of them are grizzly bears. In fact, the grizzly bear conscription program, dubbed “Bearmageddon” by some, is so effective that the rules had to be modified at the US Nationals to prevent it from fully dominating. If you like the idea of your opponent never being able to wait you out, or of your opponent getting mauled to death by Bambi’s friends, or of taking twice as many turns as the guy across from you, then this is your army.
Baratheons
Like the Lannisters, the Baratheons are split between two factions, but in their case it’s done intentionally and enforced within the rules. Luckily, they aren’t split between dysfunctional maniacs and their real army, but rather between the brothers Stannis and Renly. They’re allowed to overlap some units, and are recognized primarily for having a few fairly tough units.
Stannis deals a lot in morale. That is, his units have good morale and can block morale-affecting shenanigans to a high degree, and they also get an archer unit which causes and spreads Panic across the enemy ranks. That one, single archer unit is more effective at causing Panic than virtually the entire roster of Boltons and Lannisters, so if you want a major morale advantage with a balanced level of other abilities, then Stannis-side Baratheons are your guys. However, if you’re looking for good cavalry, there simply isn’t any available.
Renly works more in wound recovery and they have a few dirty tricks. In some ways, he’s like the Lannisters if they worked consistently and didn’t set bombs at their own feet, but his abilities focus more inwardly on rewarding his own troops rather than on spastically throwing dice at the opponent. Their Highgarden Lancers are extremely dangerous for their cost, acting like cruise missiles that will detonate whatever they land on at the high risk of themselves going with it. This side of the army is also fairly well-balanced, but suffers from lacking any kind of dedicated archery unit.
Targaryens
The Targaryens are more like “the Dothroki” faction given it’s all almost anyone plays of these guys. Technically they have other units, but the mighty, naked, Dothroki cavalry are so effective that until a unit of Unsullied Swordsmen can charge 12″, they’ll just never be as good as a Dothroki Screamer. Since the Dothroki are so common to this army, it can be safely said that this is the faction that’s most about maneuverability and zipping obnoxiously around.
This is the faction for a glass cannon playstyle. Whether it’s a dragon or a shirtless dude with his pecs glistening in the sun, they’re really much better at dishing out damage than they are at taking it. Combine this with their speed, and a new player can lose every game by the third Round if they choose to just launch everyone into the fray all at once. At a higher level, they instead wind up running circles around an enemy formation, trying to open up weaknesses so that the entire army can gang up and murder a single unit at a time – it’s extremely oppressive and claustrophobic for the person this happens to.
If you like the idea of building one army list and running that for every game without it ever being wrong, than this is the army for you. This is also the only army that is fully ready to win tournaments if you buy the starter set and a mere one other box, since the starter comes complete with all the Dothroki you’ll need, and your second box needs to merely to be the Bloodriders you’ll put Drogo in, or the dragons you’ll be using to hard-counter any and all defensive or morale-affecting units.
Greyjoys
They Greyjoys have an extremely fitting ebb and flow style of play. They ask the critical question of, “What if we can’t afford armor, but we can afford lots more guys,” and then make that their central identity. Greyjoys are nearly naked in most cases, but are swinging gigantic battle axes which will cleave a bus in half, and then they steal the children inside the bus – which brings us to their second notable mechanic: they gain power from murder. Once they’ve killed enough, their morale goes up and they fight harder, so if the battle is going their way they’re like a tidal wave gaining momentum.
Their biggest drawback is that, as a bunch of wannabe Vikings who have lived their lives at sea, they only barely know what a horse is and don’t have any cavalry. It doesn’t seem to bother them much, however, since their king, Balon, has the inexplicable ability to raise his men from the dead and have them appear at wherever would be most frustrating to his enemies. In fact, Balon’s mystical, unjustified witch doctor powers are easily the thing this faction is most known for, and he appears in nearly 90% of all lists.
Completely resurrecting from death aside, the Greyjoys also have one of the greatest abundances of healing abilities, so although their men head to battle in nothing but cloth and duct tape, they can easily recover most of the wounds they suffer as though it didn’t happen. So if you like an army that just won’t die in spite of taking catastrophic losses any time they come in contact with the foe, and you’re also creeped out by a horse’s long face enough to swear them off forever, then you’ll really enjoy the Greyjoys.
Martells
The Martells are the hardest faction to learn because their units are sort of mediocre in a vacuum, but their various abilities are an oppressive morass of unending frustration for everyone around them. Unlike the Lannisters who hit and miss randomly, the Martells will generally be able to oppress everyone with every card they get. However, that means that to play them well, instead of needing to know your own army, you have to figure out what works and what needs to be screwed up in the enemy’s army. Without the game knowledge to best deliver a whack to the knees, the Martells just don’t perform as well. Everything revolves fundamentally around torture.
If you’re willing to put in the work to learn how to use them, and you liked how the Lannisters sounded but you didn’t think gambling against the house was ideal, you might be well inclined towards the Martells.
Boltons
I’ve heard the Boltons described or summarized in a few different ways, but it’s never in a way that makes them sound good. For example, after looking over their units and having it explained that none of the Panic-related stuff actually works, one new player announced, “Oh, they’re like that kid who brought a knife to school, and they’re upset when the other kids aren’t impressed! And then they get in trouble and blame the school”.
Honestly, it’s one of the best explanations of the Bolton play experience I’ve heard so far. If you like bringing knives to places where they’re inappropriate, where you’re likely to get in trouble while not impressing anyone, and then being in a really bad spot because of your terrible life choices, you might be really glad you started playing Boltons.