The Lannisters are a complicated faction, and their army design reflects well on their character in the book as complete psychopaths. On one side, they’re a formidable force with some of the best units and abilities in the game which should be respected by everyone. On the other side, they are a clown show of dysfunctional boondoggles and schemes that sound like they should work, but in practice get your kids taken away by Child Protective Services. I call this the “Tywin and Cersei” styles to the faction. If you’re not familiar with the series, Tywin is a calculating Machiavelli figure, and Cersei is the stupidest woman alive.

The Cersei Style

Cersei-style Lannisters are fascinating, and I recommend playing as them if you enjoy losing everything in Vegas because you believed you could count cards, but you didn’t have nearly enough bankroll to survive the losses, you never learned to count cards, and you don’t know what blackjack is.

They are messy. They are chaotic. They run off at the drop of a pin. They’re lovingly ogled after by new players who don’t know better. It’s amazing how frequently you can outsmart yourself with Cersei-style. You ask your opponent to take a Panic Test, and when they pass the test a landmine explodes under your own legs. Cersei-style can be safely compartmentalized into a set of completely wacky assholes who stick their own dicks in a light socket and give the enemy a knowing wink.

Joffrey Commander

So it’s only appropriate that to start things off, we should look at Cersei’s incest baby, Joffrey. If there were a prize for sticking your genitals places where they don’t belong, Joffrey would be battling a team of esteemed judges and one unprepared security guard to put his genitals in that prize. He’s the only commander in the entire army that genuinely fits into the Cersei Style, but boy howdy does he fit it.

To start with, his ability isn’t that big of a deal. That is, unlike most Cersei-style units, there doesn’t appear to be any way for it to harm the player using it. Taking a free maneuver by claiming Crown is okay, so long as Joffrey’s unit isn’t engaged in melee. If he is in melee, he cannot legally Maneuver, so naturally…

The big draw behind Joffrey as a commander is that you’re supposed to place him in this one, specific melee unit. The Kingsguard, which, according to the book, is a group of geriatric pensioners with gout. One of them was fired but is there in the unit anyway, and one of them is missing his sword hand. CMON was nice here in that they gave these diseased, old cripples a 2+ to hit. That’s pretty good for a 6 pt unit. What’s not so good is that the unit can never have above eight wounds, which means that when the game starts, they already have 2/3rds as many hitpoints as any other unit on the board and are that much more likely to die off at the merest inconvenience.

If you deploy them, you’ll want to hold them back and lie to your opponent that they’re an amazing unit – the best in the game, naturally. Guarding the rear objectives where none of these claims have to be tested. You need your opponent to believe this and avoid the Kingsguard, because as soon as they get into any altercation they will die off unceremoniously and stupidly. They will seem good until they fight with somebody. It’s frustrating how accurate to the series this unit is.

But this isn’t what makes Joffrey truly terrible. You can choose not to use the Kingsguard, and even if you do use them, they can at least make an effort. Where Joffrey really shines as Cersei’s own son with all of her cunning is in his cards.

In this game, there are very few cards that inflict a malus on your own units, but Joffrey really pulls out the stops. In exchange for automatically passing two armor saves, Joffrey makes that same unit less able to fight, and more likely to run away the next time they’re attacked. It’s great that the unit in question may hang on a bit longer thanks to the automatic saves, but leaving your own unit screaming and farting hot diarrhea kind of cancels out any advantage that gives, making it likely that same enemy is going to smack you again, if only just to teach you not to play this card a second time.

And if that’s a bad card, my personal favorite for the peak of Cersei Style is this one. There are no other cards in the game where it’s possible to hurt only your own units and not affect an enemy. This is it. The Worst Card. See, Vicious is the weakest keyword in the game, and there’s roughly an 80% chance of it being irrelevant to any attack that uses it. That means that if you play “Traitors”, if you have all four of your combat units attack the card’s target and they fail to kill it because Vicious typically doesn’t do anything, then your entire army will be more likely to fail their armor saves and are more likely to flee the battle going forward.

Notice the card says only melee attacks gain Vicious, yet archers still have to pay a price just for independently helping. That’s like watching someone fall out of a building, and then you get an ambulance bill because you dialed 9-1-1. Should your archers help, or do they just stand there and watch your melee units try crawl to the hospital by themselves? Your opponent would normally pay points for an NCU to inflict less than half of this damage on you. One of Joffrey’s signature moves is to have his whole army lower their own balls into a hot toaster oven.

But thank the Seven, at least one of his cards is good! Just don’t whiff your attack rolls or it’s the ball toaster again, boys.

The High Sparrow NCU

When you try to explain why certain Lannister units are bad, people will argue. The reason is because some Lannister units are statistically useless, and humans are just naturally bad at estimating statistical outcomes. Our chimpanzee ancestors never really had any reason to know the odds that a banana would do anything, and it has left man woefully unprepared to grapple with something like the Lannister army.

People will spend their last dollar on a scratcher ticket for the same reason they’ll add Sparrow to their army. Because it’s cheaper than a bottle of whiskey sours and they think gambling is more productive than being inebriated. And that’s your first big hint that Sparrow is an awful NCU. If this guy could really heal wounds on a unit when you needed it, would he only be four points? Would he be slumming it at the lowest cost that any of these guys come? Tycho can heal five wounds at the start of any turn, but only once per game, and he’s five points. Something isn’t adding up here, and it’s not that Tycho is ripping you off even though he’s a banker.

Sparrow costs less than a bottle of whiskey sours because he’s got less worth than a bottle of whiskey sours. With that bottle, you’re going to be drunk and angry, but with Sparrow, you’re just going to be angry, and out the cost of an NCU with nothing to really show for it. The enemy never fails their Panic Test, and when they do fail their Panic Test, they don’t suffer three wounds, and when they do suffer their Panic Test and take three wounds from it, they have a card that automatically passes the Panic Test.

I’m not going to get into the math and the probabilities, because people just tune that out. Instead, imagine this: I load one bullet into a revolver and spin the cylinder, then place the gun to your head. I then press a quarter into your hand and tell you to flip it. If the quarter lands on tails, I pull the trigger. I force you to do this six times. What are the odds your brains wind up splattered all over my nerdy models based on a book about dragons?

The answer is you don’t do the math! Nobody does that math except for statisticians, and the best statisticians will admit there’s like ten different answers depending on how I phrased the question! Statistics is the devil’s math; it’s the only math with contractual loopholes! If your unit is about to die, what are the odds it dies instead of getting help from Sparrow? Greater than the odds of you surviving this game of Russian Roulette I’ve concocted*! Sparrow fits his theme as a force of divine punishment, which is to say he punishes you for gambling. It’s a sin and you need to stop.

Cersei NCU

It really wouldn’t be fair to call it “Cersei Style” if she herself wasn’t a complete traffic accident of an NCU, but rest assured, Cersei will generally do more harm than good any time you use her. Once again fitting the novels like a glove, as an NCU Cersei is a painful mix of demanding, counter-productive, and useless, and that smug look they give her on the card is really just the cherry on top of the ice cream truck getting rear-ended by a semi.

Any card that only provides a benefit if you claim a specific zone will tend to be hurting you, because in a game about making careful tactical choices based on your current needs, it really sucks to be forced to deal with a perpetual need such as, “you must always have a banana”. To meet that need, you have to support Cersei with another NCU who owns a banana, and in and of itself, that’s a cost. If it requires two NCUs just to get the first idiot working, that ability had better be amazing.

Aside from being a really awkward joke set-up in terms of “How many Lannisters does it take to screw in a lightbulb,” let’s look at the cards Cersei is pulling.

So okay, if you control Crown, you can draw this card, and if they have already lost ranks, they suffer an extra -1 to the roll, and if they fail the roll, they take +1 wound. Careful readers might have noticed that there seems to be an almost silly number of conditional statements baked into Cersei being able to draw and play this card effectively. Now there’s a possibility the enemy may suffer one wound if they fail their test, but I think my results might be more consistent if I don’t use Cersei at all.

And okay, look Cersei, we’re not really getting any better with this card. Not only does this card not do anything if the enemy passes their Panic Test, but to inflict the penalties to the test, it also wants me to have a banana at all times. Granted, if I drew this card with Cersei, I must be holding at least one banana, but it really doesn’t reach peak efficiency unless I have a banana in each hand, and if I invest to be able to hold two bananas reliably, there’s still no guarantee of anything good happening. You know, the chimps may have had it right, because back when we didn’t have to figure out the odds on a banana, we could at least trust it would impress a girl enough to get you laid.

So this absolute dog-water NCU. She’s asking us – no, asking our managers to control specific zones before she yields any results, Crown is not even a good zone in the first place, the cards she draws have a chance to do nothing, and she only chooses to do this twice before she gets lazy and stops doing anything. I don’t know if the show included any of Cersei’s lesbian stuff, but I just can’t understand what Taena saw in this woman.

Qyburn NCU

For those not in the know, Qyburn was a friendly little, bald, doctor who tortured people to death in the dungeons and combined their bodies into “Mecha-Gregor”. It’s where the book series ends and I didn’t watch the show, so I can’t tell you much beyond that. However, without belaboring too much into version updates, I can tell you that in the past, Qyburn was designed to do a weird impression of another NCU named Varys. He’d put on Varys’s little slippers, and talk in a high falsetto voice, but everyone agreed he didn’t do a very good job and it was kind of uncomfortable, so CMON changed Qyburn so that he’d start doing impressions of an NCU named Cortnay instead. Even though he sucks at this too, a lot of the players were simply relieved for him to drop the falsetto.

It didn’t do much to make him any good. In theory, he’s capable of inflicting as much damage on the enemy as Joffrey is able to inflict on your own army, but it comes wrapped up in a ridiculous package of mind games that are only tricky in Qyburn’s incredibly stupid head. Allow me to explain how he works in a way everyone can understand:

“Don’t stab me, or afterward, you might feel pretty bad.”

And that’s it. His power is to ask his opponents politely not to take actions that will lead to the death of his own troops, and when the enemy kills his troops anyway, Qyburn gets revenge by making two units a little softer. Placing the tokens after the enemy gets what they wanted is like going to tell mom after your brother slaps you in the face. Yeah, your brother has to stand in the corner, but it doesn’t un-slap you, and he’s going to come and hit you again when he gets out of that corner.

Qyburn is another NCU that confuses people and makes them think he’ll be good, until they actually show up to the game and realize they’re asking their opponent what Qyburn should do every time he activates his powers. It’s one of the most passive, limp-noodle abilities in the game. He comes across more like a waiter who’s not sure if you’re ready to order yet, and he’s trying his best not to intrude before everyone has set down their menus. It’s not something I would think to bring to a competitive game where I am trying to kill my opponent’s friends.

Joffrey NCU

This is an opinion that tends to get me a certain amount of pushback, especially from less experienced players, but Joffrey is a pretty garbage NCU. He’s not as bad this way as he is when he’s a commander, because in this case at least he isn’t instructing your army to take off their loin guards, but he’s also five points in cost, and it’s not exactly clear to me why he costs that much. In a lot of ways, he’s like an employee who shows up high every day and only does about a third as much work as everyone else, but he is still a warm body and he can still press the picture buttons on the cash register. I just don’t understand why we’re paying him a middle manager’s wages.

I think what happens here is that a lot of Lannister abilities have the caveat that, “you must always have a banana,” and Joffrey’s ability is, “you always have a banana,” so quite a few people think, “oh thank god someone has the banana,” instead of wondering why it is they even need a banana. I’m going to tell you a secret: you don’t need the banana. Almost every single unit and ability that requires you to have a banana in this army is the stupidest unit or ability you can get.

I don’t know how to make this sound fair, but if you avoid picking the kid without legs for your dodgeball team, you are more likely to win at dodgeball. And yes, you could theoretically build a rocket wheelchair that would give that kid three dimensions of movement and he’d be the star player, but you can’t really afford that on the playground, and a professional team has to pay wages to everyone else, so ultimately, choosing people with legs is just the more competitive choice.

Joffrey wouldn’t be as bad if he counted as controlling Crown just by being in your army list, but he has to go to the tactics board first, and that makes him vulnerable to every single anti-NCU ability in the game, especially if your opponent knows your units have no legs and need a special rocket wheelchair just to play. To make matters worse, none of the banana units have access to rocket wheelchairs – they just get regular wheelchairs, and they generally scoot around the field slower than normal units anyway, so there’s absolutely nothing to gain unless you just want to include those units as part of an equal opportunity program.

Kevan NCU

Kevan Lannister is Tywin’s little brother, and I think what CMON was going for here was they wanted Kevan to be like Tywin, but stupid because he’s the little brother. Honestly, the main problem with this ability is just that it’s a lot of random, unrelated stuff to do all at once, but you’re obligated to do all of it at the same time. It feels a little like a Terms of Service, where there’s just a huge list of things you agree to with one button click, and in some cases you lose a few Constitutional rights because it’s lumped in there with your right to download a video game you paid for. Even though you’ll never be able to take advantage of this in a strategic way, he’s also kind of expensive at five points.

Out of all the Cersei-Style NCUs, Kevan has got to be the least egregious because he doesn’t encourage bad army design, doesn’t fail randomly, and isn’t hurting your own units, but he does still fit the mold of being something chaotic and impossible to plan for.

Guardsmen

This is the most misleadingly named unit in the Lannister army. They are neither guards nor men. You see, a guard would be capable defending a position, but these guys are so poorly trained that there is almost nothing in the game that they can actually beat in a fight. It’s true that they have a decent amount of armor, but so does a wall, and the advantage to building a wall is that a wall doesn’t run away, which incidentally is the one thing Lannister Guardsmen are really good at – and that’s ironic, because they’re agonizing slow with a 4″ movement.

However, you won’t hear about how awful this unit is from everyone, because at least once, every player has failed that Lannister Supremacy roll and had their army inexplicably run for the hills as a response to winning a one-sided bullying match against the Guardsmen. Because that happened once, and it was very memorable for the same reason nobody touches a hot stove twice, anyone who doesn’t play as the Lannisters will tell you that Guardsmen are fine and doing their jobs. It is an extremely frustrating argument to get into, because just like in politics, both sides are correct as far as that everything sucks for everybody.

This is a unit whose design makes nobody happy. For the Lannisters, when the ability fires, it’ll fail to do anything more than half the time, and because the unit can neither fight, nor move, nor even stay standing, the Guardsmen are a massive letdown that never lives up to expectations. Yet for their opponents, Lannister Supremacy does entirely too much damage, because it’s ridiculous to lose half your unit as a result of kicking the Guardsmen’s ass.

It boggles my mind how often the Lannisters present these units and abilities that require an education in statistics to fully understand, but to put it succinctly, Guardsmen lose more often than they win. You can’t know for sure if they’ll throw this game because gambling is always swingy by nature, but over time, they will definitely lose more. It’s all the same problems as going to a casino, where you know you can get a jackpot, and it’s happened before, but in the long run you make more money by not gambling.

Gold Cloaks

The Gold Cloaks are basically the police. Not only that, they’re specifically the police of King’s Landing, and nowhere else, which means that any time you field this unit, it implies you’re not fighting on a battlefield but are actually breaking up a drunken brawl outside a tavern in the Flea Bottoms. That’s the best part about the Gold Cloaks, and also the only good thing about the Gold Cloaks.

They’re competing with the Guardsmen for being unable to defend themselves against every other unit in the game, to the point where it’s questionable whether they can even act as decent police officers. You see, there’s a unit of “Peasants” in the game and they’ve got better morale than the Gold Cloaks do, which means it’s more likely that the Gold Cloaks will cut and run than the peasants will. I’m not sure if that shows more or less discipline from the Gold Cloaks, because presumably the police come back later with larger numbers and their body cameras turned off, but they don’t come back during the match you’re playing.

Also just like the police, “Laws of the Realm” only works if the Gold Cloaks are nearby enough for anybody to care, and if somebody does break those laws, the Gold Cloaks can only catch one person at a time, so after that ability gets used, every other unit is free to zip by at twenty miles over the speed limit. Some units don’t even wind up getting their attack power reduced by losing a rank, in which case “Laws of the Realm” is as effective as trying to stop a guy from doing meth after he’s already done meth.

This is also one of the Lannister’s many banana units. If you’re holding a banana, enemies that are immediately nearby the Gold Cloaks become just a little nervous. Almost no unit in the game has anything to actually fear from the Gold Cloaks and will kill them instantly dead, but they still pat themselves down to make sure they have their wallets and double check that their insurance papers are up to date. I’m not sure what specifically about holding the banana causes this since in real life it’s kind of an intrinsic property police offers get from the uniform – maybe the banana establishes jurisdiction, or something.

Mountain’s Men

This is easily one of the strongest units you can bring to any game where your opponent has agreed not to attack you, but you start to run into trouble if they find a mind to smear you across the pavement. I think the desire with these guys was to make a unit that was very good at bullying, but instead it created a unit with “kick me” painted permanently on their backs. As it turns out, for reasons that must have been unforeseeable at CMON, nobody brings unarmed women and children to any of their matches, so Mountain’s Men are more like that fat kid who watches too much anime, who tries to bully people, but they suffer a lot more wedgies than they deliver because most of the game’s population is in better shape than they are.

As soon as this unit takes a hit, they’re no longer punching at a class above the local police, but they cost more. Being Vicious and “Preying on Fear” are both generally useless abilities which, just as with Sparrow, are statistically unlikely to do anything when you really need them to. Even their name is a little misleading, because they’re not mountaineers, but rather men who work under a guy who’s nicknamed “The Mountain”. As in, they’re “The Mountain’s Men” in the same way that men who work for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson are The Rock’s Men, which is definitely what the Rock should call his men if he doesn’t already.

Red Cloaks

The Red Cloaks are Cersei’s personal guard, and they’ve got Cersei Style written all over them. As a double banana unit that can’t win a fight with goddamn anything, they are hilarious. Lannister Justice causes units around them to flee in terror, but the Red Cloaks are so inept that it becomes a game unto itself to describe what must be so terrifying about them.

My most memorable game to date with these guys was the time they got attacked by a bobcat, and they may as well have been a toddler trying to fight Mike Tyson at his peak. Ears were getting bitten off left and right, the men were screaming, trapped up to their knees in a bog, and the whole time, a nearby unit of Free Folk Raiders was gradually peeling off out of sheer terror at the spectacle. Every time the Red Cloaks swung their swords at the cat and missed, a few more Raiders panicked until finally they were completely ejected from the table. WHAT HAPPENED?

We have a lot of theories. Our most leading supposition is that the enemy is concerned that the Red Cloaks know something they don’t. Why else would somebody with all the military acumen of a high school guidance counselor march so confidently to the front lines? Do they have bombs in their shirts? Are they going to perform a puppet show about their feelings? What‘s their secret?

A lot of times, the unit will just shuffle around aimlessly, because even the action of moving or spinning in place will trigger a Panic Test. Retreating also causes a Panic Test, which means the enemy runs away from the Red Cloaks who are running away. It’s baffling. We can’t account for it. But for all this, it’s one of my favorite Cersei units, and I tolerate needing to bring Joffrey just to hold a banana so I can enact this obscene clown routine.

They are in almost every way worse than a unit of crossbows. With crossbows there’s a logical cause and effect; you shoot a man and he dies. With the Red Cloaks, you lose a fight and the enemy leaves anyway, as if they’re concerned they’ll be forced to go to an HR meeting if they hit the special needs children dancing around the field in bright red tights. The enemy doesn’t necessarily leave fast enough to win you a game, but they do leave fast enough to raise a lot of questions with only stupid answers.

Arys Attachment

Ary’s claim to fame in the books is that he had sex with the enemy and then died. Though in fairness to him, the lady he had sex with is described as having a big ol’ tiddie, and also she was the Princess of Dorne, so if you have to betray your kingdom and die, you may as well go out with a good “bang”. In fairness to the princess, it wasn’t her fault. Well, she didn’t plan it, anyway. The murder, I mean. It seems like she did plan a lot of the banging.

Unfortunately for Arys, he’s about as good at protecting your army on the tabletop as he was at protecting Cersei’s kids in the book. That is to say, any surprise attack renders him useless, and because he absolutely requires you to be holding a banana for his ability to work, he’s fundamentally crippled from the outset.

Boros Attachment

Boros, if I’m remembering my Kingsguard right, is most famous for completely abandoning Cersei’s son to kidnappers as soon as they pulled swords on him. He got fired for it, but was later reinstated for reasons I can’t remember. I think it was because the Kingsguard kept dying and it was hard finding people dumb enough to fit the post. As a result, his ability involves everyone dying all around him. The worse your own unit is doing, the better off Blount is.

We call this a “malincentive”, for those of us in the business of not being the world’s dumbest sociopaths. See, normally you want to plan on your men to not be dying, and you shouldn’t be at your peak performance by intentionally getting your own people killed. Imagine introducing Blount to your military and explaining what he’s about to contribute. “This is Blount, everyone! For each of you who dies, Blount will kill one of theirs, plus an additional man! So get to dying, we spent a lot of money on Blount.”

Arys may have been sleeping with the opposition, but it seems like Boros is actively working for them. To make matters even worse, he’s a banana unit, so you can’t get the full rewards of being suicidal if you aren’t holding a banana.

Qyburn Attachment

Oh god, he’s back and he’s somehow less useful than he was as an NCU. I’m not sure what happened here, because it looks like they gave Qyburn a valuable ability that would be worth spending a point on, but then someone had a stroke and added a malus that would cancel out the value of the bonus. In a lot of cases, I can trace the ineptitude of characters in this game back to their behavior in the book, but I cannot figure out why Qyburn is consistently awful in this game. He’s an evil doctor, but in the book he’s depicted as being able to treat infections and is honestly pretty good at his job.

I mean I think all of us in America have accepted by now that medicine is always going to be a little evil. Yes, Qyburn might leave you bankrupt by billing you three thousand dollars for a bag of saline, but that should only mean he’s ineffective for his cost, not that he’s completely ineffective period.

My best guess at what’s happening here is that Qyburn is trying to do his best with the resources he’s given. Most of the Lannister units are completely untrained, so he “experimentally” has them sell some of their armor to afford private tutoring for the whole group. That’s not ideal, obviously, but nobody on the Cersei side of things is competent or willing enough to stop him, and it’s the most logical explanation I’ve got.

“Not Gregor” Attachment

This is one of my favorite characters in the book because of how insane it is that he exists. There’s a man named Gregor, see, and he’s raped and killed a lot of people. Eventually that catches up to him, and he dies – somewhat as a result of that. It’s legally very important that he’s dead, because if he weren’t dead, they’d have to have him executed because of all the rapes and murders. However, Qyburn is a very skilled, yet very evil doctor, and he somehow manages to bring Gregor back to life, albeit as some kind of Frankenstein monster, and they can’t admit he’s Gregor, so everyone starts calling him “Robert Strong” even though he’s nine feet tall, and the only nine-foot-tall person in all of Westeros is Gregor. It’d be like if the WWE tried to have Andre the Giant appear as a masked wrestler, and everyone was forced to pretend they didn’t know who this mysterious stranger could possibly be. This all happens because Cersei specifically asked for it to work out like this, and it’s really just the glorious pinnacle of where she is, mentally.

Merely looking at his card, he’s really not that bad, except he costs three points, and it’s impossible to figure out what unit could possibly, ever benefit so much from “Not Gregor” that you would be willing to spend those points.

Gregor Cavalry Attachment

Speaking of Gregor, here he is before he became a mysterious, masked, nine-foot man with a hidden identity, but in this version of himself, he costs three points so that you can completely lose control of your cavalry and get them killed by charging directly into the least advantageous position possible. You don’t benefit much from “Not Gregor”, but this version of him is just actively detrimental. It’s nice that they stayed true to the idea that his “unstoppable wrath” is too overwhelming to control, but it seems like the obvious solution for that is to, you know, not use him.

Just to drive home how actively harmful Gregor is here, imagine the military inventing a new combat vehicle that has every single expensive piece of electronic horse crap they could imagine, including an espresso maker and a deployable mammogram machine. It’s the most expensive vehicle you’ve ever seen in your life, with half the money just going straight to embezzling, so the guys inside can’t even get the money back by stealing the parts. Then, for some reason, the mandated doctrine for this vehicle is that it must drive to the front lines, unsupported, at the beginning of every engagement. That’s what this attachment is, but without the espresso maker and without the life-saving mammograms.

Maime Lannister Attachment

Maime is a neat idea, and I think I get where it came from. The guys at CMON were sitting there coming up with the game’s attachments, and somebody said, “Man, if these were kids getting picked for a team lineup, I’d hate to be the team stuck with Qyburn.”

Then BOOM. The concept of enemy attachments was born. Attachments so bad, with abilities so counterproductive that they go on the other team and screw them up. Jaime is a Cersei-style attachment that you hand to your enemy, and you explain that his one main job is to pee in all the water bottles. It’s almost genius! Almost.

The first big problem is that you can’t control what kind of list your opponent makes, so if they don’t have any infantry to put Jaime in, he doesn’t go anywhere and just winds up sitting on the sidelines wondering why nobody wants to capture him. The second big problem is that he helps your enemy, which really feels like Maime didn’t understand the assignment. The third huge problem is that he’s a banana unit, so the malus he inflicts is only active if you hold a banana, which is really frustrating because the idiots on the Lannister team usually do that the other way around.

The Tywin Style

The simple fact is, if there weren’t any good units in the Lannister army, nobody would play these lunatics – or at least not for long. I’ve seen more than one player pick up the Lannister army, and after getting familiar with the Guardsmen and Cersei in the starter set, they give up on the faction if they don’t decide to find a different game outright. Cersei Style is genuinely such a mix of deceptive and horrible that new players don’t quite see how they’re getting suckered by it until it’s too late, but if they do stick it out, eventually they’ll learn that there’s another way, and it’s as effective as it is bald. The Tywin Style is the army at a functional level.

Gregor Commander

At its simplest heart, the Lannister units committing to Tywin Style are the ones that are promising evenly to do one thing: bury your enemies. It doesn’t require a double backflip while holding five bananas at once. Those are things promised by people who famously die mid-backflip from an unexplained potassium overdose. All it really takes is a big weapon and a very, very severe compulsion to murder everybody. That’s why Gregor is one of the leading competitive commanders for the Lannister army.

Gregor’s main ability in the context of leadership is that he’s nine feet tall, and he kills everyone. Seems in order! Let’s take a look at what his cards do.

Ah, yes! Well, it would appear he is nine feet tall and kills everyone.

And here we see he is nine feet tall, and he kills everyone.

Just to keep it interesting, it appears that here, he kills everyone and is nine feet tall.

See, everything Gregor does revolves around the same skillset as a slasher villain, and because a large part of a war game is systematically hunting everyone down, there really just aren’t a lot of flaws to complain about. He’s so simple a child could make good use of him. He reminds me a lot about when Brock Lesnar entered the UFC, and plenty of professional commentators pointed out that Brock wasn’t as skilled as some of his peers. Of course, this observation was often made in spite of the fact that Brock Lesnar was an escaped convict from Gorilla City, and he had converted a steady diet of leafy greens into pure destructive power. There was a skill gap between Brock and some of his contemporaries, sure, but it wasn’t as wide as the gap in strength between a man and a silverback.

Using Gregor is the same principle in this game. There might be a skill gap between you and the other player, but when your commander is King Kong strung out on bath salts, it’s really hard to make a move wrong enough to lose as often. In fact, I have had games against Gregor where he personally killed half my army in a single round after my opponent fumbled literally every other aspect of the game. This is likely the most disgusting beast of a commander available to anyone.

Gregor is going to break into your house, he is going to kill you, he is going to rape your wife, and then he is going to punt your children down the stairs. For reasons we’ll go into later, he’ll always have the cards that let him do it. Your task, as his opponent, is to figure out a way to find peace with all that.

Tyrion Commander

If you don’t feel like winning games based on the sheer, natural realities of the square-cube law, you can always turn to Tyrion Lannister. He’s a little person, but the books are set in a time period before political correctness was invented, so mostly everyone just calls him various slurs. In the show, I hear he was depicted as being a bit heroic and noble, but in the books, he’s got a bastard, mean streak that’s right in line with his family. At one point he has a guy chopped up and put into a stew as “mystery meat”, and the townsfolk eat it without knowing the difference. Tyrion is a guy you don’t want to mess with, and as a commander he does a very good job at messing with everyone else.

You might think I’m talking about his ability to randomly shut off enemy cards by simply standing close to them, but that ability gets a lot less use than you’d imagine, and because it misses a third of time, it’s not why anyone takes him. You see, sometimes CMON doesn’t do a respectable job with unit design, and sometimes they do great and really hit the nail on the head. Tyrion is one of the cases where they do a fantastic job, because he is the thinking man’s commander. Tactical Reposition, especially when sitting in a unit of crossbows, is an incredibly powerful ability for any player who knows the game better than his opponent does. What looks like a small three inches to the untrained eye is a game-winning leap for a player that understands it’s not the size that matters.

As a good case in point, this is a card that really doesn’t mean much to someone who hasn’t gotten the game figured out, so it can be hard to explain. It’s like this: imagine you park your car in the best spot in the lot, you go inside the store, then Tyrion moves your car to a handicapped spot and calls the police, and afterward he parks in your spot. That’s what this card does.

Once again, I’m sitting here looking at this amazing card knowing someone unfamiliar with the game is only going to understand it after a very technical explanation. It’s even hard to make an analogy for – it’s like, if you forgot your ID so you sent your friend to the liquor store to buy beer for you, but you didn’t pay him. Or maybe you needed more hours at work, so you erased your co-worker’s name off the schedule and wrote yourself in without helping your co-worker make up the hours.

In a vacuum, it sounds a bit like you’re winding up with a net neutral trade in the scheme of a team effort, but not all units are made equal, and sometimes if you can sacrifice a move from the unit whose only job is to stand in a bog and scream if somebody stabs them, you can get an extra action from the guys whose job is to shove the enemy’s heads into a dirty toilet and flush it.

This is Tyrion’s best and worst card. Its essence is to grab the lingerie you asked Amazon to ship to your wife, but Tyrion switches the labels to send it to your mom instead. Depending on what Tyrion screwed up and how important that package was, this can be absolutely fatal to your units on the board. There’s just one problem.

CMON is absolutely allergic to counter-cards, and because there are a lot of cards that grant zone effects, they chose to punish this one with a 33% failure chance. Now, for those of us who went to basic grammar school, you might remember that no matter how good you did on your assignment, if you failed to turn it in, you still got a “zero”. That means this card is an A+ when it works, and an F- when Tyrion doesn’t put it outside the reach of his dog.

I can’t get over how much I want to praise this card while emphasizing how mind-numbingly infuriating it is when the card fails. Not just because the card failed, but because you also spent the card while it’s failing, which means you throw away an important and powerful resource for nothing while feeling like Yugi Yami’s idiot sidekick, Joey Wheeler.

Tommen NCU

Tommen is Cersei’s youngest son, and also one of the reasons why she flies into a mental breakdown in the books, because her little boy is too good to get married to one of the most influential families in the known world. Mom is right here, and Cersei is fine with incest. In spite of being so closely tied to her, however, he’s a pretty effective NCU if you’re willing to jump through all the correct hoops and honk like a seal.

This is the only exception to the rule where you’re better off not taking banana units, because although he does want you to hold two bananas, Bribery is actually a fairly stupid card you don’t care about at all, so you can ignore that, whereas Intrigue is an amazing card that’s worth all the trouble.

In short, all this card does is tell your opponent that they and their people can go straight to hell. That’s it! It’s kind of a counter-card, but it’s better than every counter card in the game. For one, it doesn’t randomly leave you eating pavement when you hit a random dice pothole, and since it’s one of the only counter cards that won’t do that, it’s automatically the only counter card that isn’t complete, Joey Wheeler ass. Following that, because it blocks NCUs rather than cards, you always know what you’re blocking, and you know which NCUs need to be blocked the most. When stopping cards, your can’t see your opponent’s hand, but the doofus in pantaloons and pointed shoes can’t hide who he is.

Although you have to hold a banana to get Intrigue, you still would never want to take Joffrey, not when you can bring Petyr Baelish who has the twin advantages over Joffrey of not costing as much and not showing up to work smelling like weed. Tommen can only draw the card twice, so you only have to hold the banana two times, and unlike Joffrey who can’t see straight because he’s been lit since 4 AM, Petyr can change his game plan if a customer throws up on the floor.

Sure, it’s taking two of these guys to screw in one lightbulb, but you’re getting a pretty good deal on that lightbulb.

Tywin NCU

Tywin is the namesake of his style, and although he costs six points, which is as expensive as any NCU can get, he’s also the only NCU anyone pays that much to use. Normally, a six-point NCU is some kind of gimmicky, used car salesman type of thing that’s trying to convince you that you need an extended warrantee on your car freshener, lest the car cease to be fresh and need to be thrown out like a carton of milk. It’s only natural that the more angles and opportunities to fail you add to an ability, the more likely it is to never be worth those points, but in spite of all this text, Tywin is really only doing one simple thing here:

He sucks your bones out of your body with an industrial strength vacuum and then packs your remains in a Ziplock baggy for your family to keep as a calm reminder of the pain yet to come.

See, what most people do is they select one unit, and when this ability goes off, it suffers all of these effects at one time and simply explodes into meat chunks. Exploding the enemy into dog kibble is kind of the point of the game, so it works, and there is never, ever a game you won’t see a unit you’d like turned into spicey blood salsa. Even if the enemy doesn’t immediately detonate from the ability, you can choose when to use it, so typically most players will fire it at the start of their turn and then complete the meat flurry process with a unit of knights if Tywin alone didn’t do the job.

Crossbows

The Tywin Style includes a triumvirate of three essential units that do exactly what you’d expect them to, and who are otherwise not performing any elaborate rituals to commit suicide without it being legally classified as a suicide. The Lannister crossbows are crossbows. Trying to explain why this is a good unit would be like me trying to explain to you why a man with a gun would be a good addition to the US Army. They have a crossbow. That’s it. That’s their power.

If you’re still not following here why this works, you might as well stop reading here because strategy games may not be for you. In fact, I’m not sure what game would be for you, because I guess we can also rule out first person shooters. Maybe racing games? I don’t know what you’re interested in.

Earlier I mentioned that these guys are better than Red Cloaks, and the reason why should be really obvious. The crossbows are asking what happens if, during a wartime scenario, you load a sharp projectile into a powerful firing mechanism and then shoot it at the other side. The Red Cloaks are asking what would happen if you put on a musical rendition of Cats!

In spite of how mind-blowingly obvious the Lannister Crossbows are, even more mind-blowing is that they’re one of the only ranged units that only shoots people, and as a result they’re often described as one of the best archery units in the game. Almost every other army is giving up armor or valuable training time to teach their archers how do a handstand or whatever, and the Lannisters are the only army that seems to be willing to give their guys a crossbow and then teach them to use the crossbow.

Knights

And continuing what should be a really obvious theme, the best cavalry unit in the Lannister army are the knights who simply do exactly what you would expect knights might do. They put on heavy armor, get on some horses, and then run the enemy over. Dead enemies! It’s done!

Cavalry is complicated, and there are a bunch of details I could go into about the best ways to use them and so on, but that would be boring, and technical, and is something you’re either going to learn with practice or you’re going to lose games. The end story is, the Lannister knights are knights, and the fact that they just do that role well makes them one of the key three units that are carrying this entire faction.

Infantry

And the third unit in the triumvirate are the Lannister Honor Guard, who are fundamentally just very good infantry with heavy armor and the ability to swing their swords well. I can’t think of very many funny things to say about this, other than that good soldiers are good soldiers. When the men kill people, the people are dead!

However, at least in Season 5, these guys are easily one of the best infantry in the game, if not the best, because they can turn off enemy abilities when they attack. That means that when someone begins to explain how their Sharingan Jutsu works, the Honor Guard just tell them to shut up and stab them through the neck. Let’s see your magic eyeballs work now, genius!

To be fair though, the point of buying a ninja master is specifically to use his mystical shadow peepers, so in all likelihood and for the sake of sales, the Honor Guard won’t be quite this good indefinitely.

Tyrion Attachment

If you didn’t grab Tyrion as a commander, you should almost definitely be using him as an attachment. Just as before, his ability to randomly block cards doesn’t matter that much because it misses all the time, and Joey Wheeler abilities are how you lose games, but speaking of Joey Wheeler, Tyrion’s card-milling ability is how you avoid having the faction’s stupidest cards in your hand.

We’ve already looked at Hear Me Roar and Subjugation of Power, and can conclude that, because they’re cards that Joey would absolutely use in his Yugio-Oh deck, you should almost never be playing them. Let’s go ahead and look at the rest of the faction’s core deck.

Well we’re not off to a strong start. No soldier should be thrilled by a multi-step plan for what happens after you die if the plan isn’t “your family will be compensated”. Even for a plan based on your own men dying, this is pretty weak. As mentioned earlier, Vicious is one of the worst abilities in the game and has an 80% chance to be irrelevant every time you use it, so gaining Vicious after a unit dies is like vowing to avenge your fallen friends, but then forgetting who killed them or which friend it was that died, so you’re not sure where to direct your fury or if you even care that much.

The banana effect at the end doesn’t make it any better, because although that does help, being forced to hold a banana just to remember what vengeance is tends to be counterproductive. Heck, your friend probably died in the first place because you were spending so much time obsessing over this damn banana.

It’s a good card to mill.

So here we have a card where you have to give up something – namely the effect of a zone – so you can pay the enemy to be really bad at their jobs. On its face, that’s fine, until you realize that morale tests are highly available in a lot of cases, and the enemy takes one every time they’re attacked. They also pass them all the time.

In a way, I can’t fault the card for being logical. You pay the enemy not to fight, but they still put up a little show of half-heartedly swinging their weapons around. Of course if you turn around and stab them through the innards, suddenly the money doesn’t seem worth it. Apparently gold isn’t as valuable as avoiding total organ failure, who knew? But this does mean that after “Bribing” a unit, you have to enter into a sort of unspoken covenant with them, where you let them do whatever they want, and you try your best to ignore them even though they are still attacking you and are still in the way. You spend the rest of the game with that unit hovering a knife next to your eyeball, asking, “does this bother you?”

And yes, it does bother you, but the second you do something about it they call the deal off. They keep your money, of course.

You rarely find a good place or time to play this, and it’s a good card to mill.

A counter card. Well that’s fine, except it’s got a Joey Wheeler mechanic and unless you’re holding enough bananas, there’s a chance for it to do nothing and it’s an F- card.

You can keep this card and use it, but because there’s a chance it’ll fail anyway, if you really need a different card, you’ll want to mill this thing.

This card actually adds yet another reason not to use Sparrow NCU: he’s redundant with a card that’s obligated to be in your deck, except Fealty is actually easier to use than Sparrow is. That said, it has the same statistical problem as Sparrow in that the enemy will almost definitely never fail a Panic Test in the turn one of your units needs help. Honorable mention, however, for the fact that holding a banana causes the card to materially improve and get a better end result, instead of outright refusing to work without a banana.

If you’re really lucky, you can play this card, but otherwise you should probably mill it.

And there it is! See? You want the Tyrion attachment because there’s a massive chance that you’re going to draw two cards that suck lion balls, and you really won’t lose anything by throwing them away so that you can draw whatever much superior cards your commanders are offering. In fact, the Lannister deck blows so absolutely hard, I think there’s no single attachment that changes your game so much as Tyrion.

Those Outside the Mold

There are more units, but most of them aren’t worth mentioning in much detail, either because they don’t do much, or they suck, but in a really boring way. Still, I’ll give them a short rundown.

Pycelle NCU

Useful old guy, gets tired and has to nap three rounds in.

Tyrion NCU

Useful, overpaid, summons the spirit of Joey Wheeler.

Gregor Solo

Terrifying security guard.

Poor Fellows

Homeless security guards.

Halberds

Effective security guards.

Stone Crows

Cro-Magnon security guards.

City Watch

Overpriced security guards.

Brigands

Nervous addicts on horses.

Pyromancers

Suicide terrorists.

Warrior’s Sons

Supreme ultimate final boss security guards.

And I could say a bit about the other attachments, but the safest advice I can offer is, just don’t use them because they don’t do enough to be worth their value. They have their places occasionally, but rarely. It’s actually a common problem across all factions that only a few attachments are worth the bother.

As for commanders? They change up the flavor a little bit, but there’s nothing egregiously wrong with anyone outside of Joffrey. The fact that Jaime’s cards all insist that Jaime himself must be doing everything is characterful, but dumb, and the same goes for Addam. Otherwise, they’re fine.

*For those with a burning, masochistic desire to know, the odds on this hypothetical are easier to calculate than it sounds like. Assuming a revolver has six cylinders, you just calculate the odds for how many times you flipped heads and multiply it by the odds you didn’t get shot.
6 flips n = 6 p = 1/2 p/(1 – p) = 1
P(0) = [1 – (1/2)]^6 = 0.016
P(1) = 1 * 6 * P(0) * 5/6 = 0.078
P(2) = 1* (5/2) * P(1) * (5/6)^2 = 0.163
P(3) = 1* (4/3) * P(2) * (5/6)^3 = 0.181
P(4) = 1* (3/4) * P(3) * (5/6)^4 = 0.113
P(5) = 1* (2/5) * P(4) * (5/6)^5 = 0.038
P(6) = 1* (1/6) * P(5) * (5/6)^6 = 0.005

You can now sum those values together, and you have a 59% chance** to survive my theoretical game of Russian roulette with coins. Meanwhile, the average practical morale among units people bring to the table is 5+, so the odds of one of those units failing a Panic test on 2d6 is 17%, and in fact the only way to get odds of a Panic failure better than the odds of not getting your brains exploded is if you pushed a unit’s morale to 9+. That’s only if you ignore the existence of cards that automatically pass the test. In other words, I am NOT kidding, although the odds of healing any wounds at any random time get better with more attempts, the odds of Sparrow healing any wounds on the specific turn you really need it isn’t reliable enough to argue this is a good or useful NCU. A lot of these Panic abilities are just mathematically terrible.

Of course, people will still argue with me anyway.

**Because I showed my math for this equation, someone IMMEDIATELY caught me and reminded me that pulling the trigger means you’ve already used a cylinder, so actually the odds are closer to 50% survival, which means that you only have to lower enemy morale to an 8+ to have better odds of Sparrow working than of surviving “Lannister Roulette”. This is why statistics is the devil’s math.