One thing I really like about this game is the “neutrals” system, which allows you to pay mercenaries to fight for you if your own team is too inept to do it. It’s common that in any war game with a ton of different unit options, you’re sometimes going to be looking at an army that just didn’t get a great rendition of something. With the Lannisters, it’s because all their politicians are insane, compulsive liars who can’t seem to eat breakfast without causing an international incident. Renly’s men spent so much time painstakingly painting rainbows on their banners, then spent painstakingly even more time explaining they aren’t pride flags, that they forgot to check if their army made arrows before the battle started. The Boltons, who work for hire themselves, believe campfire ghost stories are a viable form of combat.

Whatever your faction’s malfunction is, the neutral mercenaries have it covered, and if you realize your entire army isn’t cutting it, you can even run a mercenary army by itself – just say they work for your primary army and you haven’t violated faction purity! But that said, just like any capitalistic society, there’s a very “buyer beware” element to who you hire. There’s contractors, and then there’s “contractors”, and if you’re not careful, then instead of calling a specialist to patch up a few leaky pipes, you’ll be hiring a guy who vanishes mid-way through the project to “secure permits”, and it turns out the permit he forgot to grab was a license to do any of the work he already did.

Combat Units

Mercenary combat units are hired on an extremely conditional basis, and players are naturally quite picky about them. After all, the number of points you can use to hire mercenaries is limited, and there’s no reason to outsource if your own men can do the job. There’s especially no reason to hire outside help if those men have careers defined by how well they blend in with the circus.

Bolton Cutthroats

Starting us off, we have the Scooby Doo villains of the game: the Boltons. Boltons are a funny faction in that they spent a lot of time watching Saturday morning cartoons and thought to themselves, “Hey, what if we tried to scare everyone off our land, but we had the dogs?”

The answer is you get a lot of men who aren’t very confident in what they’re doing, because if they’d done it even once before they’d know better than to do it again. Surprisingly, Cutthroats are pretty good fighters with a strong melee profile and a “sucker punch” ability, which I guess comes as a result of constant fistfights over the TV remote, but that’s pretty much the entire sum of their useful qualities. Just like a bunch of rowdy kids, a good smack in the face from someone bigger than them will straighten them out and make them realize the follies of violence, which unfortunately for you who paid for them, means they’ll leave with your money.

One of the funnier things about the Cutthroats is that they have “Vicious”, which is the weakest ability in the game because it doesn’t do anything. It reduces enemy morale by two, and in theory that would mean the enemy is more likely to get scared and bug out, but in practical terms, that means that if the enemy had 5+ morale to start, they were always going to run away if they rolled under a five, and they weren’t going to run if they rolled a seven or higher. The only time Vicious would matter is if the enemy specifically rolled a five or a six.

The incredibly narrow band in which Vicious has an effect says to me that Vicious represents doing something especially weird or esoteric that only certain people would find scary. For example, if the Cutthroats put on a rubber Frankenstein mask, that won’t scare most enemies, but some enemies will be reminded of that one time with their uncle, and it’ll be surprisingly effective against them.

The Boltons also have a 7+ morale, which means they’re especially jittery since almost every unit people actually use has a 5+ morale. If you look at this in the context of Vicious, it means that Cutthroats respond to every other enemy as though the enemy were Vicious, and the rubber monster masks are, at best, making up for the gap in cowardice. Realistically, the only way they’ll come across as especially scary is if they run into another unit of Cutthroats, in which case you’ll have two groups of men buying into their own stock, dressed for Halloween, shouting “boo” at each other while scampering off and giggling.

Stormcrow Mercenaries

Stormcrow Mercenaries are actual, bona fide mercenaries. They’re the type of contractors who, if you ask them to build a deck, then they get all the permits, build your deck, and then leave. Like most of the units in this game that are really good, they’re not doing anything crazy or half-baked. They’ll just stand on an on objective and hold the dang thing, and it’s surprising how hard it could be to find a single craven soul who can do that sometimes.

Aside from the amazing miracle of following basic instructions, not listed on the image is the fact that any attachment put in this unit costs one less point, so not only do you get guys who can do basic perimeter duty without playing Nintendo or falling asleep in the truck, but you can also put an officer in the unit and they just tolerate him. It’s insane how good this is and how you just don’t see it anywhere else in the game.

Lysene Sellswords

Hiring the Lysenes is like going to a bar in a bad area and handing money to a bunch of randos with switchblades and moltovs. You really can’t expect much out of them, but at the same time you’ll be surprised at how much damage they can do if they get out of control and start stacking up flaming tires. These are the guys to go to if you definitely don’t know what you want and you certainly don’t care what happens.

Their attack profile can be all over the place. Because they have Critical Blow, they can get additional attacks, but only at random. Sometimes they’ll be fighting at a normal or even a subpar level, and other times you’ll get Yahtzee and these guys will yank a squadron of knights off their horses and then eat the horses. You’d think they wouldn’t be that tough with such awful armor and poor morale, but killing makes them stronger, and as they gain momentum they get surprisingly tenacious. If you add in an attachment that gives them extra attacks, more defense, or a decent source of healing, all bets are off.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say the Lysenes are good. If the Stormcrow Mercs will build your deck with all the permits and everything done correctly every time, the Lysenes will attempt to build a deck, but they don’t know what building codes are and they don’t care. If someone tries to stop them, the knives come out, and then the SWAT teams have to get involved, and at the end of the day the Lysenes will charge you the same amount of money the Stormcrows do because they know what a deck is worth, in theory.

Stone Crows

Stone Crows are weird in that they were specifically designed to be used by the Lannisters, and they allow you put their guy Tyrion on the field for free. As mercenaries to any other army, however, they’re just a bunch of assholes who spend a lot of time playing dead and then revealing that it was a trick all along. This stupid farce works way more often than it should, until at some point they get scared and their pigeon instincts kick in.

CMON tries to describe this unit as “scouts” and harassers, which is a job that they’re fully unequipped to do because they’re typically going to lose fights with wild animals or even peasants, and if more than one enemy attacks them, or if one enemy attacks them twice in a single round, they instantly fold up and die. The absolutely last place you’d ever want these guys to be is behind enemy lines or anywhere where someone or something has swords, claws, fangs, or an enforceable restraining order.

The one place where they’re uniquely useful is for a game mode called “Honed and Ready”, which is a mode where holding objectives causes your men to spontaneously explode. The explosion is, for some reason, not surprising, so your men never have to take any Panic Tests as a result of it, and that means the Stone Crows are ideal for the process because they’ll spend each round pretending to be blasted into chunks and then will get back up like nothing happened.

Bloody Mummers

The Mummers are a group of guys who decided their theme would be, “we are clowns”, and then they fully commit to it by being a bunch of useless clowns on the battlefield. Unfortunately, they spent all their money on face paint and bright dyes for their clothes, so they can’t afford to wear any armor, and a single unit of enemy archers will handily demonstrate why wearing armor is smarter than painting yourself up as brilliant, colorful targets.

The biggest problem with these guys is that they’re way overcharging for what they do. It’s the only unit you can turn to if you need birthday clowns on short notice, and they know that. Their pricing is based on the assumption that their services are a scarce resource. Obviously you’re not going to paint clown makeup on your own men, because it’s not as though you’re going to celebrate a birthday during every battle, and it would be silly to deploy clowns to a wartime scenario where no one is having a birthday.

Stormcrow Archers

Stormcrow Archers are kind of the black sheep of the Stormcrow family, because instead of spending all of their time learning how to use their bows, they dedicated it to practicing backflips, ventriloquism, and handstands, which didn’t help their archery that much. They’re one of the game’s many units that’s only functional if you control a specific zone. That is to say, they have a mechanic that declares, “if you’re holding a banana, then you can re-roll your attacks”, and using this unit means that, strategically, now you have to figure out how you’re always going to be holding a banana.

A unit that asks you to hold multiple bananas tends to be more self-destructive than usual, because not every banana is equal, and sometimes you just need to do things now and don’t have time to collect an entire bushel of bananas. Whenever looking at a unit like this, you should generally ignore all the banana abilities and evaluate how useful they’ll be as a default. In this case, they’re almost never going to perform better than any other army’s archers.

If the Stormcrow Mercenaries are contractors who reliably do a job you pay them for, the archers are contractors who will give you too many options and not be able to provide any firm guidance on what the best option is. Sundering, Vulnerable, and re-rolls are all good, but which might you go for first if you were backed into a corner and about to be killed by an angry giant from the frozen north? The better question is, why am I being forced to choose? If they would cut the bull crap and just be good archers, then they’d be good archers.

Bolton Blackgaurd

The Blackguard are one of many units whose only instructions were, “Hold this shield and wait to be killed.”

And just like every unit that follows this path, the only thing they do is die. If it were possible to build a wall that holds objectives, the wall would be more effective because the wall doesn’t run away. I think the reason these guys work for hire is because they have to be constantly on the run from poor work reviews. If they stay in any one place for too long, they’ll eventually get tarred and feathered by whoever hired them, and they’ll one hundred percent deserve it.

Vicious is a useless ability that doesn’t do anything, and Horrific Visage is easily countered by just not being a Bolton. The only unit you can buy that’s slower than them is a catapult, which is basically a stationary emplacement. Finally, there is no other unit that fights this badly at this high of a cost. For guys that will work for anyone, they clearly aren’t getting a lot of work, because what they demonstrate on the field is a complete lack of experience. The Blackguard are men you hire to align your chakras, or to help with your feng shui – things which are purely placebos and that you can’t prove they didn’t do. They don’t need to seek permits for this kind of work, because it’s not real work, and there are no building codes to establish the most appropriate way to spin a chair around.

Although they do have okay armor, if another player sets down a dragon somewhere in the game store, even at a different table, these guys will spontaneously combust. It doesn’t even have to be a dragon from Ice and Fire. Dragons anywhere, or a game of Dungeons and Dragons played nearby, will terminate the lifespans of a Blackguard within seconds.

Zorse Riders

Zorses are a favorite unit of mine, because it says something important about zebras within the setting. This is a game where you have tame dragons, and people are riding polar bears into battle, and yet the idea that someone could tame a zebra and get it to stop biting them for five seconds was simply a bridge too far. See, something that not everybody realizes is that zebras are absolute bastards. They grew up in the savannah where lions and tigers are a daily threat, so in spite of being pack animals, they just don’t trust anything that isn’t a white and black, striped, ornery, horse-shaped hate-machine.

It couldn’t be zebras, it had to be zorses. That’s the only way anyone who knows about zebras would believe a man could ride these things. They had to be crossbred with a horse first. All that said, they’re still surprisingly dangerous as cavalry, because if they get on an enemy’s flank and roll Yahtzee on their attack, they can do a devastating amount of damage, and the malicious spirit of the zebra lying dormant within these beasts can overpower any feeble ability an opponent has to defend themselves. It doesn’t matter what kind of magic those men have, the zebra part of that zorse is going to bite them.

Their biggest downfall is a mix of poor armor and godawful morale. I feel like the men can’t be blamed, though. The zebra is a bloodline curse within the unit, and if the seals are broken then everything within forty feet of the zorse gets kicked in the head. You wouldn’t want to take your chances either.

Bastard’s Girls

So the Boltons watched a lot of Scooby Doo and it clearly had a very deep impact on them. They really wanted scaring people to work, but they noticed that the meddling kids and the dog always got in the way. So what’s the answer? Genius strikes. They themselves get a bunch of dogs. See, if you have a dog, that make you the protagonist, so you can’t lose.

This kind of idiotic logic is exactly why the Boltons always lose.

The problem with dogs is that you can’t put armor on them, so if you run them directly into a unit of heavy infantry they transform from dogs into meat sauce, a reality that Scooby Doo never prepared the Boltons to comprehend. In spite of how easy they are to kill, people still find them to be a fun unit because they’ve got a good movement speed and are allowed to shoot at, then charge enemy units. Since shooting allows you to take an extra 2″ move forward, it means you’re pretty likely to make that charge given their fairly fast 6″ movement. The vulnerable token that goes on before also helps a lot. The trouble begins only when the enemy hits them back.

Although Vicious is always a useless ability, at least in this case the Girls have a 5+ morale, which means they’re less likely to run away during the fight instead of being more or equally likely. It doesn’t compensate for being a bunch of naked dogs, but at least the Boltons have one thing that is naturally scary to everyone else that doesn’t scare itself just from thinking about it.

Stormcrow Dervishes

Once again proving themselves as one of the only mercenary contractors who won’t waste your time and budget, the Stormcrow Dervishes are a unit that’s both relatively effective and provides a unique enough role that you might take them just for what they can do, instead of because your units can’t do the job. While not effective in every army, what they can do is practical to understand: when they attack, they retreat, and that can be pretty useful in a lot of scenarios.

Their armor is pretty mediocre, so they don’t like to be engaged with anything for too long, but some armies have abilities to heal by attacking, or to heal by retreating, and those armies have a strong working relationship with the Dervishes. Once again, these guys are really just defined by the fact that they do what you expect and are pretty consistent about it.

Hedge Knights

Hedge Knights are more or less billed as, “knights, but not very good”, and in a nutshell that’s pretty much what they are. Go to your army, look to your cavalry units. If you have cavalry, then typically it looks like these guys, only these guys are worse – and probably smellier because they get the name “hedge knight” by sleeping outside in cowpat. By nature, the unit only becomes effective if you’re holding two separate bananas, and that’s assuming your opponent is nice enough to let you have them – and they won’t be that nice, because swords and wealth are the two most competitive zones in the game.

Where a lot of the best units are simply things that do what you expect them to, Hedge Knights are going for the opposite approach, where they promise to be knights, but then vastly underperform as knights unless it’s between the hours of one and four PM on a weekday, and not on holidays.

Golden Company Swordsmen

The Golden Company Swordsmen are a bit of an Icarus tale. In a prior season, they flew too close to the sun by being the best infantry unit in the entire game so that everybody used them instead of their own infantry. That caused their wax wings to melt, and they’ve been reduced to a unit that is painfully average for their cost by almost every metric. It’s better this way, because it’s not very fun to see this same unit in every list, but now that everyone has at least one infantry unit better than this, you just don’t see them at all.

Everything about them is just okay. Their attack profile starts off good, but it becomes poor if they take losses. Their armor is very mediocre. Their morale is mediocre. Their ability can fire once per round so it’s got really limited use. Nothing is laughably bad, but nothing is very notable either. You have no reason to hire these guys, but you could. If you wanted.

Golden Company Crossbows

Golden Company Crossbows, on the other hand, really set the standard for what you might expect out of a bunch of mercenary archers. They have crossbows and they shoot good. You don’t get more basic than that, and as a result they’re better than the ranged options of several armies! To add to their utility, they get the option to take a free maneuver after someone gets a smack in the face, which feels like something they might have learned from an abusive relationship where they got yelled at for things they didn’t do, but it lets them reposition to get revenge on the offending unit, which prevents them from getting yelled at by the unit that was smacked.

They also have Iron Resolve, which is a fantastic ability that helps them ignore things like the Bolton Cutthroats wearing a Frankenstein mask. To be fair, almost everything worth its price will ignore the Cutthroat Frankenstein mask, but these guys are especially oblivious to it.

Bolton Flayed Men

Easily one of the worst heavy cavalry options you can get, the Flayed Men came about because the Boltons had to begrudgingly admit that although horses didn’t appear very often in Scooby Doo, they seem to be kind of an important part of a medieval army. They tried riding zebras, which is the scariest horse-like animal known to man, but that went completely bust after too many lawsuits, and eventually they had to settle for the practice of putting their Blackguard on regular horses.

Luckily, being on the horse helps the Blackguard on it go from one of the slowest idiots on the field, standing around waiting for someone to kill him, to a unit that can rush directly into combat to be killed immediately. For as expensive as they are, they really just don’t swing hard enough – their main claim to fame is stacking Vicious on top of Intimidating Presence. Unlike Vicious, Intimidating Presence is actually a good ability, because instead affecting only the dice roll on rare occasions, it also adds harm to the outcome if the enemy fails their test, which is genuinely helpful. The problem is, even with all the modifiers, enemies still just don’t find a Frankenstein mask to be all that scary.

These guys suffer from the same problem the Golden Company Swordsmen do, in that they’re pretty much just a unit of knights, and if they were good, everyone would use them instead of their own heavy cavalry. It’s kind of logical, if you think about it. When you’re good enough to be relied on all the time, you’d get hired for an exclusive position. It’s just a shame for the Boltons, who have to rely on them all the time.

Elephant

When man first gazed upon the elephant, he said, “I bet that thing could kill all my enemies,” and he was right. Kind of.

It turns out that elephants can be tamed well enough, because they’re gentle, and smart, and live for a long time, and think humans are cute, but they don’t domesticate very effectively because they’re smart, they live for a long time, and they eventually stop thinking humans are cute as humans train them to kill. They could be effective as siege engines, battering down doors and walls, but breeding them like dogs to take orders and turn into funny shapes like a weenie just wasn’t something man could do to the noble elephant.

A Golden Company War Elephant is pretty believable as a war elephant. They will trample people, but they’re frankly just family-oriented herbivores with man-made spikes stuck on their heads, and they aren’t quite the killing machines their huge size would imply they could be.

Attachments

Not only can you take mercenary units, but you can buy mercenary attachments to place on any of your units! There are a few standouts who are really useful, but as is the case with all attachments, most of them aren’t offering enough to be concerned about.

Bolton Flayer

As another contribution from the Boltons, naturally these guys are trying to scare the Mystery Crew off their property and failing miserably at it. It’s rare that anyone ever falls for the rubber Frankenstein masks, and even if somebody does fall for it, it’s not very likely their friends will fall for it too. In essence, what this guy is asking for is money for something that might not happen, so he can do something in response that might not work.

Stormcrow Lietenant

Although Sundering is a good ability, what we have here is a guy who is promising he might provide you a benefit if you’re holding on to a specific banana. However, we’re once again presented with a situation in which a guy might do something, but you definitely have to pay for him whether he does his job or not.

Dreadfort Captain

As another Bolton candidate, this guy is so obsessed with the idea of scaring people that he literally subsists on it. It’s just a shame that nobody is actually scared of the Boltons except for the Boltons. If nobody ever becomes startled by the Dreadfort Captain – which is very likely because there’s nothing naturally concerning about him except his low standards – then he doesn’t do anything.

Fortune Seeker

While being forced to hold a banana is usually just harmful to you, being given the option to transform a banana into a potassium-fueled, free attack can be pretty useful. What’s interesting about this attachment is that it’s any of the Hedge Knights – you just take a guy out of the Hedge Knight unit and put into a unit of better cavalry, and somehow that cavalry improves in spite of the Hedge Knight being worse than them. I think it’s probably because the cavalry they go in doesn’t want to be shown up by a stupid Hedge Knight, so they work a little harder to avoid the embarrassment.

Glory Seeker

One of the most popular attachments, this is another case where you take a Hedge Knight and just drop it into one of your far superior cavalry units. However, in this case, it’s a Hedge Knight that’s too stupid to leave, and if this awful Hedge Knight guy won’t run away, your own knights can’t run while saving face. The popularity of this attachment is owed to the fact that knights are often the most expensive thing you bring to the table, and reducing the frequency at which they run away is very helpful, especially if the knights have high armor – which is often the case, since they’re knights. Corporal Dingus keeping your men in line through the sheer power of shame is always worth a consider.

Bronn

Bronn is another fantastic attachment that sees a lot of use by all factions. In the books, he was hired originally to arrest Tyrion, and he did such a fantastic job of it that Tyrion hires him to act as his lawyer during the trial, which turns out to be a genius move that makes everyone angry. Most players will put Bronn in a unit of archers, because archers can almost always be shooting at someone, but frankly, extra attacks, bonus armor, and increased morale are good in any unit.

Daario Attachment

Daario is the leader of the Stormcrows, and in the books he’s notable for being a somewhat regrettable lay for Danaerys, an aspiring princess warlord. Fitting to that, he’s a bit of a regrettable attachment. The threat of stabbing his own men to death is a bit counter-productive. Daario is best in a unit that you especially hate, if you want that unit to be miserable and have all their attacks backfire. Wherever the Stormcrow mercenaries are learning their basic practicality from, it’s not their boss.

Jaqen Attachment

First of all, Jaqen is not a lady – he just has long hair and a girl’s name that nobody knows how to pronounce. However, he could take the form of a lady if he wanted, presumably, because he has shape-shifting magic and that’s what his ability is trying to represent. Sadly, there’s not any practical reason to use Jaqen, because even though he can transform into the enemy commander or anything else that dies on the field, that attachment still has to die in the first place, which delays Jaqen’s opportunity to be useful until after you’ve killed a strong enough attachment to justify transforming into it.

Sandor

Sandor was originally a Lannister man, but he has a fear of fire because his brother held his face to a hot lamp when they were kids. It’s unclear why Sandor developed the fear of fire, and not a fear of his brother, but the brain is a complicated and wonderous palace. At any rate, this version of Sandor represents when he ran away from home because someone on his team decided to use fire as part of a battle strategy, and Sandor swore he’d never work in the same town as fire.

Threaten is a good ability and Sandor is a good attachment. Personally, I like to read the ability as pointing out someone’s weaknesses, like Sandor is giving them a hypercritical dressing down that becomes true as the enemy become self-conscious.

If you take Sandor, then you’re allowed to take Arya as well for an extra one point in cost. It’s meant to represent the period in the book where she was traveling with Sandor, when Arya had sworn she’d never work in a town with other humans in it, more or less, and Sandor seemed just inhuman enough to be tolerable. However, because she has to go into a separate unit, she winds up, appropriate to the story, not easily fitting in with anyone.

Lysene Bosun

I don’t have the slightest clue what a “bosun” is. It sounds like a slur they’d throw around in Japan to describe a man who tries out for sumo but ranks last in all his matches. If so, I guess it’s fitting, because neither of these abilities could rank well. Interrogate lets you discard a Tactics card if you kill an entire unit, but only if the Bosun’s unit dealt the killing blow, specifically with a melee attack. It’s a little counter-intuitive, because usually you would add an attachment to make a unit more powerful. The bosun, instead, asks you to find a unit that’s already too powerful and then have him scoop up a reward at the end of each murder spree. Frankly, if you can just outright kill all of your opponent’s units like this, the tactics cards can be damned – you’re winning the game as is.

As for Domineering Pride, I’m going to let you in on a tragic secret about this ability: you normally take Panic Tests after the enemy hits you. If the enemy hits you, they’ll reduce the number of ranks you have.

Brienne

Brienne is described consistently, relentlessly, as being one of the ugliest women in your area, though her personality sounds like the most beautiful person you’ve ever met. It’s part of her character arc that she’s been teased about it all her life and has developed ridiculous trust issues because of it, and yet she winds up trusting Jaime Lannister of all people in spite of him being one of the smarmiest men in the Seven Kingdoms. It’s unfortunate, but she catches Jaime right during his redemption arc, so her impression of him is vastly different than the one everyone else has of him being the guy who has sex with his sister and is smug about it. All this just gets her bullied more. Then she starts traveling with Tyrion’s squire after Tyrion betrays the country, and that makes it worse.

I’m not sure where exactly in Brienne’s personal journey this card is supposed to take place. She has no specific long-term foes outside of society’s cruel beauty standards, and while she does take a vow, the vow is basically to protect Jaime rather than to hunt someone down, and then later her vow is just to find somebody’s daughter before the police do. At some point she bites a guy’s ear off with her hideous snaggle-teeth, and he dies from an infection, probably from very ugly bacteria, but that was in self-defense.

The bottom line is, for the cost of two points, needing to choose one specific rival is weirdly conditional, and nothing that has to hold a banana just to get their power is going to be that valuable.

Ramsay Attachment

Ramsay is a guy who eventually stands to challenge Jon Snow, and if you’ve read the novels, you know that means he’s unequivocally evil and has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Jon Snow is the main character, or at least has all the most aggressive properties of one, so this was something preordained, something that Ramsay can’t fight – Ramsay is narratively wrong. He enjoys making people eat their own fingers and would like to wear people as shoes, even though his dad explains to him that people make terrible shoes.

Ramsay is also an ample illustration of how at a disadvantage Panic-related abilities really are, because unlike most of the Boltons, he is trying. Restoring wounds by killing people is a great power that can only be unlocked by the evil of a Skeletor mentality, and Ramsay even gets to bring his friend, Reek, to battle for free.

Ramsay is able to hit Reek so hard that it scares everyone else who can hear the slap. In fact, it’s so violent that there’s a chance of Reek randomly dying from it. Even for a game, it’s extremely cathartic to yell at Reek as you take this dice roll and punish every enemy around you for seeing it. Especially because it removes any opportunity for the enemy to justify themselves as good people. You know they have abilities that can block Orders and stop you from doing this, but you’ll never see them use it to help Reek. They just stand idly by and watch it happen, probably hoping Reek dies this time.

Yet in spite of all this, Ramsay doesn’t really appear in anything too serious, because Panic effects are still so extremely unreliable, and he just isn’t worth the points.

Vargo Attachment

Vargo is the guy who gets his ear bitten off by Brienne, and aside from that he’s most notable as being in charge of the people who cut Jaime’s hand off, only to royally piss off the nobles with soldiers outside his house. Vargo doesn’t last that long as an alive human in the books, and as a two-point attachment who relies heavily on Panic mechanics and whatever your opponent has done with their list, he doesn’t last long in the application process for your army either.

Rorge

Rorge is an escaped convict with the miraculous talent of not being useful in any army, at any time, yet still asks to be paid top dollar, like your cousin who became a brokerage agent and doesn’t realize how much he sucks. Incite is basically Vicious, which doesn’t do anything, except now you can only have that nothing once per round. Elusive Escape is only good for running away. These abilities are so generally bad that some armies might pass on Rorge if he cost nothing, because they would have better attachments and don’t want him to take up the slot.

If for some reason you suffer a brain aneurysm and buy Rorge, then you’re allowed to take Biter for free, like a two for one deal on spoiled milk. Biter is an insane, escaped convict who eats people, which explains why he’s free, since anywhere he is will be trying not to have him. Biter’s ability might be worth spending a point on, but unfortunately he forces you to bring Rorge along, like your parents insisting you write your most hated enemy a Valentines card so that nobody feels left out. Frankly, I think Rorge should be taking a long look in the mirror when the bald cannibal is the guy getting a more sincere “Please Be Mine” than Rorge is.

Jokin

Jokin is like a guy who applies for a position at a business, and there’s nothing wrong with him at all – he fits all the requirements – but there is just always a better candidate than him for the slot. He’s the reason why your company just ghosts people instead of writing formal rejection letters, because it would be very hard to explain to him why he wouldn’t “fit”. Precision would fit in a bunch of places – it’s fine. It’s a fine ability. It’s just, there’s always someone who’s going to be a little more valuable. Although, actually, it’s not just that.

Jokin insists that you also hire his friend, the Widower, who he assures you has phenomenal people skills in spite of his name – it’s an ironic thing, he’s never widowed a fly. The problem we’ve got here is that you’re looking to fill one position, but Jokin charges you for both attachments up front. That means you can’t have just the one, you have to find two openings at once and build your entire army around these guys. It’s kind of galling, really, because it’s a competitive enough field already, especially when having no attachments is so tempting, and it takes a lot of balls for a guy to insist you have to bring his friend or not hire him.

Golden Company Officer

This guy is not worth two points, but he asks for two points. Know why? Because he’s your only pathway to elephants. Don’t want to hire him? No elephants. Are elephants good? Don’t ask stupid questions. Elephants are huge. They’re big animals. They have prehensile penises. Your enemy will rue the day. Pay the man, or don’t get elephants.

NCUs

The Neutral NCUs are where people find the most value in the mercenaries. Although there are a few losers, most of them are passable at worst, and the thing about NCUs is that they’re meant to provide some kind of force-multiplying ability to the field. Some armies need to rely on neutral NCUs to achieve decent functionality, but they’re not placed in all that tough of a spot since there’s a good wealth of options here.

Roose NCU

Of course, it really wouldn’t have the name “Bolton” on it if it weren’t an exception to quality and wasted everyone’s time trying to convince the enemy that your army is a spooky ghost. Like all of his people, Roose has religiously assured himself that the country of Westeros can be won by running a fog machine while dressing up as a tiki man with a knife, and unsurprisingly this tactic almost never works. Technically, he can convert any zone so that it plays a theremin in the most eerie tune Roose’s cartoon-scrambled brain can conceive of, but it really only makes every zone worse. The sword zone stabs people. It doesn’t get more effective by turning it into a man with a hockey mask who only pretends it will do a stabbing.

Do you need a politician who leaps up and down while shrieking in what he thinks is the world’s scariest impression of a skeleton? No, you never will, but Roose will always be there, ready and eager to do exactly that for anyone who will pay him to.

Petyr

Petyr is one of those “clever man” NCUs that really only makes sense once you’ve got a good grasp of the game, and after that you realize he’s one of the best NCUs around. In the story, he was basically cooking the financial books, but nobody understood how he was doing it and described it instead as being “very good at money”. Petyr is the reason we have a lot of banking laws, and also the reason why those banking laws get repealed, and then the reason why those banking laws get reinstated again.

In terms of the game, his ability to stand on one zone and successfully convince people it’s a different zone is wonderfully useful for being a complete bastard. Often times you know your opponent wants a Tactics zone. Maybe they need healing, but you don’t, for example. It’d be a waste of a zone claim for you to sit on something you don’t need just to spite an opponent, but with Petyr you get the best of both worlds. You can be an asshole and you get what you want!

Jaqen NCU

Here we have Jaqen again, who is still not a girl, even though he could be if he wanted. On that note, within the books, Jaqen was an assassin who never transformed into any specific person. Rather, he would transform into completely non-specific people, commit a murder, and then transform into a non-specific someone else. If it were possible for someone like Jaqen to transform into, say, George Washington so as to strangle Ben Franklin, you’d think it definitely would have happened before, and that type of thing would be widespread public knowledge.

In this case, it’s presumed that Jaqen is transforming into someone like Joffrey, a current self-proclaimed king of Westeros, and then by all reports Joffrey would be in two places. In Joffrey’s case, it wouldn’t raise too much suspicion if he dumped scalding oil on a bunch of his own men, because that’s basically the main thing his cards do when he’s a commander, but it might raise a few questions if any of the other kings did it.

Regardless of the practicality of what Jaqen is doing by transforming into major political figures, the average Influence ability kind of sucks. In fact, a lot of armies don’t use them at all, so very few players will actually hire Jaqen unless they know that they, personally, are going to use one of the only good Influence powers, and they also know they’d want to use it twice.

Varys

Varys is a creepy weirdo who has acted as an advisor to a parade of wannabe rulers who really just needed to be advised to stop. Unfortunately, you don’t get to keep your head on your neck by telling kings when to stop, so instead Varys enables or undermines all of them. In the books, he had an obsession with dressing up in various disguises, even if it was grossly irresponsible and inappropriate to do it. For example, he once meets with a noble named Eddard to discuss arranging a plea deal from prison, but he does this while “disguised” as a prison guard, which would be like if the District Attorney showed up to secretly negotiate your indictment in a false mustache. It wasn’t even a good deal for Eddard, it was basically just, “Hey, you should plead guilty.”

As an NCU, he works off of what your opponents are doing, arranging special deals for you as a response to whatever the opponent did. Because this is so psychologically damaging to your opponent and gives you so many options, it’s made Varys the most popular NCU, period, and he gets hired by everyone. The fact he’s playing all sides and is indispensable everywhere is frankly the nail on the head for his character.

Shae

Shae is basically a hooker who gets brought to King’s Landing by Tyrion so that he can enjoy the comforts of her boobies while she enjoys the comforts of a rich guy’s summer home. Technically, she really only works for Tyrion in the story, at least until the very end where she winds up working for Tyrion’s dad, but in theory she could work for anyone because she’s a hooker, so I suppose it’s fair she’s a neutral mercenary and not a Lannister operative.

It’s funny that she inflicts weakness tokens, since she’s in principle just a major liability to Tyrion within the books. Alternatively, she can heal units, and while Shae is not a doctor, I guess there must be some restorative properties behind a good pair of butt cheeks. Each time Shae gets used, she spends a token, and when all the tokens are expended, her timer runs out and Tyrion strangles her to death. It doesn’t matter what faction you play; he will find her. It’s like a romantic destiny story, only with a terrifying ex-boyfriend and a police report, and also none of the love was real.

Tycho

Tycho is a banker. In the books, Cersei decides it would save a lot of money to just go ahead and default on all of her family’s loans, so Tycho is dispatched to every enemy territory around her to offer them loans on the condition that they’ll pay back the debts of any territory they conquer. Although “A Lannister Pays His Debts” is the family motto, you can really tell from both Cersei’s behavior and the card in this game by that same name that the Lannisters are a bit confused about what the word “pay” means, or they aren’t sure what a “debt” is, or they might not entirely be sure who the “Lannisters” are. It’s probably that the phrasing, “a Lannister”, leads them to believe that a Lannister, somewhere, will pay the debts, but not this Lannister, and they mess themselves up with diffusion of responsibility.

Regardless, Tycho works the same way an insurance program does, in that if things go well, you’ll never need to invoke his ability, but if a hurricane hits the battlefield, then assuming you can convince Tycho to cough up on the policy, you can recover from the damage right then and there. Of course he does represent just a whole mess of opportunity costs and just having him around doesn’t come cheap.

Walder

Walder is notorious for holding the worst wedding reception in national history. Other than that, he’s a very cranky old man with a family tree so wide it could be used alone to dam a river. As an NCU, he does quite nearly nothing and charges a ton for it.

The problem with him is, if an ability is going to replace a zone only one time and then your NCU will never be useful again, it really shouldn’t just be an effect that’s marginally better than what a typical Tactics zone already is. The wealth zone restores three wounds, so changing it to restore three wounds and then having Walder be bereft of abilities thereafter is kind of pointless. Screwing up the player order is unique, and not usually done, but since your opponent sees it coming thanks to Walder announcing it’s going to happen, they aren’t going to leave themselves vulnerable to it.

Walder’s wedding worked as a means to destroy most of the Stark army because it came as a surprise. If Walder had told everyone on the invitations that he was going to murder them, they probably wouldn’t have RSVP’d.

Commanders

Not only can you hire mercenary troops, attachments, and politicians, you can also choose to hire mercenaries to act as commanders for your whole army. Although that sounds neat, you’ll never actually want to do this. If the mercenary commanders were better than your own commanders, you’d never use your own commanders, so naturally the neutral commanders are all just objectively worse than the ones you already have.

Ramsay Commander

Showing up with the patented, Bolton seal of “watched too many cartoons”, you can hire Ramsay Bolton to lead, and for no particular reason, when he shows up as a commander, he leaves behind the good abilities he had as an attachment to make room for premium, Bolton, dog shart. He still drags Reek around with him, who he can still slap whenever he starts losing – which should be always – but the only time Horrific Visage does anything is if the attacking unit is also a Bolton who believes in all this mystical ghost-chakra stuff.

His cards could be worse, but they’re really not very good because to get the maximum effect out of them, you have to be using them on a Bolton unit, and we’ve already established that the Boltons are, by far, almost the worst people you could hire for any job, so you shouldn’t have any Bolton units. What winds up happening is that, really, the only good unit that can use this card is whatever unit Ramsay is in, and only after you’ve clobbered Reek to lay Panicked tokens on everyone.

Cruel Methods is probably the best card Ramsay can draw, because it allows you to replace a Panicked token, which will frequently do nothing, with regaining four wounds or handing out a token that actually has purpose. It’s nice that the card seems to acknowledge for once that replacing a Panic effect with anything else is more cruel to your opponent than trying to use the Panic effect.

Meanwhile, Sadistic Games allows your opponent to choose the effect of the card, and because Panicked tokens have a pretty high chance of not doing anything, they’ll choose to accept the Panicked tokens every single time. I’m not sure where exactly the “game” part comes in, because it sounds like something a five-year-old would come up with if he were trying to create an impossible dilemma. “Okay, you have to choose: do you let me slap you in the face five times? Or do you spin around real fast?”

Considering that giving Reek the Ramsay backhand already lays out a ton of Panick tokens, the odds are pretty good everyone already has one and all you’re doing is asking your opponent if they’d like that guy in the back to hear how Reek’s last smack really welted up.

Roose Commander

And then of course you’ve got Roose, whose abilities are all built around the pre-conceived notion that Roose is scary somehow, even though the scariest thing about him is just that a man could be this delusional. While Roose can achieve value, he becomes one of the saddest and most sympathetic characters in the game if nobody he’s engaged with will Panic. It’s the only thing he does, it’s all he believes in – he’s got those cotton cobwebs spread out on the spikes of his pauldrons – but then everyone Roose meets politely stammers, “Y-yeah, that’s pretty scary,” without meaning it. And then Roose dies.

CMON absolutely, beyond a doubt, hates counter-cards. Roose could theoretically block an enemy card or ability, but to do so, he has to both spend the card and a token that you probably placed out for a benefit you’ll now no longer get. This ensures that no matter what you blocked, you probably paid a worse price than your opponent unless your opponent set themselves up to get completely rammed in the butt somehow. The fact people do sometimes get themselves rammed in the butt because they forgot you had this card is, according to them, justification enough for the card to suck this hard, and not justification for them to remember you have this card.

Fear Keeps a Man Alive is a card that can restore wounds, if only you were using a Bolton unit besides Roose, and if only the Boltons were scary to someone who wasn’t a Bolton. Because of the randomness of Panic Tests, you really never know when anyone would fail a test, or if they’ll even fail a Panic Test in this game. It makes it hard to tell if you should hold on to the card, or throw it away, because Roose’s unit could be in critical need of help, but inevitably it seems you only get a chance to play the card after Roose dies.

And this card is especially frustrating because it’s only doubling down on the sheer, shoot-for-the-stars hope that one of these days, Roose will actually be really scary to someone. If it was sad enough to watch Roose positively fumble his ghost story in the middle of a battle and not get to use any of his “scare powers”, it’s just that much more salt in the wound if you’re holding a card that you only play after Roose finally startles somebody. The fact the card works better if Roose is nearby goes to show that he’s probably a major of source of the Boltons clinging to this suicidal tragedy, and since if you wisely aren’t using any other Bolton units, this card is actually just Roose hyping up himself, to further convince himself he’s on the right track.

Typically, unless you play Whispered Threats on a pass NCU – which is an NCU who can still use their ability even if they aren’t set on the Tactics board – then it’s more advantageous for the player to accept the tokens than it is for them to skip the zone claim. In essence, that means that this card is pretty much a guaranteed infliction of two tokens on the enemy, but with some weird extra steps where you ask them to think about it for a second.

I can only imagine what kind of threat Roose must be whispering given his general performance in most fights. Perhaps he’s just threatening to try harder. When Roose says it, he’s imagining getting out the light show, which he normally doesn’t deploy because the portable generators are heavy. For his enemies, they don’t know what he’s talking about, but they worry if they allow it to happen their reputation won’t recover from being in the same room as whatever it is.

Vargo Commander

Because Vargo can place a Weakness token at will and then use it to kill an attachment if it can be Weakened, he isn’t quite as monumentally useless here as his attachment form. However, it’s worth noting that he can only destroy an Infantry Attachment, so if you ever see Khal Drogo running his cavalry towards your location, your first step should be to put Vargo back in the box. Actually, come to think, your first step for every game should be leaving Vargo in the box.

Instead of himself being a natural black void of quality, Vargo transfers his endless sucking to his cards, which are bad enough to compensate for any good thing about him. Crippler’s Infamy is a Panic-based card, and because Panic-based cards fail more than half the time, it turns out the vast majority of people do not know who “the Crippler” is and react with confusion rather than fear. Or worse, they do know who the Crippler is and react by appropriately calling in more men because it’s a safe fight, or by backhanding the unit that tried to scare them – and that is not a joke, that is a thing that happens as part of the game mechanics.

Free attack cards are normally some of the most busted options in the game, but not Careless Aggression. Careless Aggression gives you a free attack, but everything about it is wrong and backfires. To start with, it’s hard to play, because you have to play it at the start of the Round rather than whenever you actually want to attack, and that creates tons of timing issues. Another problem is, if this Round is your opponent’s Round, then after taking this free attack, you basically let them have two turns in a row, and they will use that to slap your balls off.

Since Vargo can place Weakness tokens at will, this is actually a perfectly average, mediocre card for him, and he deserves at least one round of applause for just narrowly not having a completely detrimental deck. That’s one or two-ish abilities and one card that’s useful, which beats the Bolton running average of no useful abilities and only one or two good cards.

Of course, taking a Vargo victory lap for having a marginally greater quantity of abilities is still not something you want people to see you doing. On the one hand, you can’t predict it, but if the enemy does get scared the Boltons wind up winning out over Vargo. On the other, it’s like winning a contest of who could eat the most broken glass, or who could get their hand furthest down the toilet before getting stuck, only worse because this contest is a lot more subjective. Neither Roose, Ramsay, nor Vargo are ever going to be reliable, so comparing the three is more like lining up the worst Disney princess sidekicks to decide which one is the least useless. Sure, there’s always that one scene where it turns out the nasal-voiced snowman being the loudest guy in the room is crucial to the team’s success and he barely justifies his horrid existence, but that doesn’t make the stupid snowman into someone you’d call in case of an emergency.

Daario Commander

Daario is a commander who I kind of like, but who I still recognize is barely beating Vargo in a battle for “who isn’t the dumbest man today”. Being able to change a zone into a free attack is always nice, but Daario doesn’t get to hit any harder unless you’re holding a banana, which then necessitates you to ask, “how will I always have a banana”. Still, he deserves a few accolades for his valiant effort to reclaim blue hair as a style for everyone; since the books are set in the past, it’s not yet associated with online feminism, which is good for him because his sword hilts are carved in the form of naked women, and he rubs them inappropriately during every business meeting.

He does try to make up for needing a banana by offering up a card that changes the definition of what a banana is. However, because this ability is only rescuing his own men when they’re in danger, it’s effectively giving up any other task that zone could do to throw more money after Daario’s antics. Yes, he could use that zone to actually attack someone, like he’s paid to do, but first he’s going to need more money to pay for all of his equipment he broke the last time he attempted it.

This is actually pretty alright! Well, kind of. It harnesses the power of shrieking and leaping around, but unlike Roose’s hopeless attempts to prime the enemy for a bad jump scare, this version makes the enemy nervous and demoralized to be out here in front of these people, which also puts them off guard for a jump scare. What sucks is that it relies on a morale test because it requires your men to honestly believe this is going to work, so it can fail, and any card that fails is the worst card you could possibly have unless your commander is Joffrey, the incest-boy king.

This is actually the same ability as Daario’s attachment, but unlike the attachment, it can be pretty good. The problem with the attachment is that your opponent knows that’s where this ability is, and if they can keep Daario’s unit Weak all game, they can force Daario to re-roll every attack so that he always kills himself, making Daario your enemy and not someone you paid to do the opposite of what he just did. When the ability comes in the form of a card, however, your opponent doesn’t know if it’s in your hand, and you can play it on any unit. If you throw this down on some lance cavalry when they make a charge, that unit might kill everyone. Though there is still some risk they might only kill themselves, as the dread force of Yahtzee can cut both ways.

Daario winds up generally better that the dingus triarch of Roose, Ramsay, and Vargo, in my opinion, but it’s still safe to say that Daario is tripping over his dick often enough that it’s no wonder he isn’t being hired to a permanent position somewhere unless he’s sleeping his way to the top. Incidentally, Daario does have a permanent position in the Targaryens purely because of his skills in the bedroom, but being a lean predator of teenage girls tends not to help him take advantage of the bald and middle-ageing Stannis, nor any of Stannis’s equally cantankerous generals.

Jokin

It’s nice to see that Jokin has committed to a very stern, “Yes, this is fine,” in both his incarnations. Perhaps it is understandable, because he and the Widower only appear at the very end of the last book and are merely recognized as the guys who take over if Daario dies, and this only comes up because Daario has died. Beyond that, we learn nothing about what they’re like nor what they care about. Based on how straightforward and non-offensive it is to grant Precision and nothing else, I think it’s clear that if the Stormcrows haven’t been learning their practical basics from Daario, they learned it all from Jokin.

We can probably blame Daario for the archers learning a dozen dramatic ways to shoot an arrow mid-backflip, and perhaps his death will only be a good thing in the long run.

Just as before, the Widower comes along as well, and if you can’t find a place for him then there’s really no reason to hire Jokin, but on the upside, at least Widower is a little stronger in this version. Hold the Line is a funny ability that sometimes gets thrown on units who absolutely choke at combat, and the hope is that delivering a bunch of free hits will make up for the problem. Think about the Bolton Blackguard, who cannot fight to save their own lives and therefore lack any form of real defense. That’s the poster boy for Hold the Line.

So naturally Jokin’s cards necessitate that you use Stormcrows.

If you don’t have at least one Stormcrow unit, you really won’t be able to justify using Jokin at all. On the bright side, that one Stormcrow unit will be doing an absolutely stupid number of attacks so long as they stay near their friends. For the sake of stability, most players will throw this on a unit of Stormcrow archers because archers are less finnicky about where they’re standing, and the irony is that Stormcrow archers are naturally finnicky because they won’t shoot a bow and arrow normally since Daario taught the basics of good hair care and sexual assault before graduating to lessons on how to even hold the stupid bow.

Though you do get pressured to grapple with Daario’s terrible training, the rest of Jokin’s cards are as stunningly practical as he is. Getting a free maneuver after an enemy attack can be game-changing in the right circumstances, and it’s applicable to any kind of army you might put Jokin in.

And being able to automatically pass a Panic Test is a great way to make Boltons an even more shameful waste of time to everyone, as well as being a fine opportunity to invalidate half of the Lannister roster. Jokin is a guy so practical, so humorless, that he doesn’t even attempt a smirk about a man in a loincloth who wants you to believe he’s an ancient cave man and this also for some reason makes him scary. As ever with every unit, this incredible stability and no-nonsense approach makes it no wonder that Jokin tends to be one of the best performing neutral commanders you can get. His biggest drawback is that while he’s steady in what he does, he doesn’t quite do as much as a faction’s own best commanders, and he winds up relegated to “best of the dumbest idiots”.

An Independent Mercenary Force

So what if you decide that your entire army isn’t worth fielding, and you’d rather hire a force composed entirely of mercenaries? Well, that is an option, but as you may have noticed from the above reviews, it’s not a conceit without a ton of dangerous pitfalls. The neutrals have a great archery unit in the Golden Company Crossbows, they’ve got plenty of competent NCUs, and the Stormcrows can do a bit of lifting, but beyond that they’re really looking at a mishmash of some of the most flagrantly unstable soldiers in Westeros with even worse leaders.

Is it doable? For sure. Is it going to be easy? Not very. However, to help make it up, a mercenary will get their own deck of cards, and a lot of them are surprisingly pretty good.

For example, dealing an extra hit is dealing a little more damage. Several cards in the Neutral deck will ask you to hold a banana to unlock their full potential, but what’s peculiar is that it’s always Message that it wants you to hold. Since Message lets you draw more cards, it’s possible that the reason you have this card in the first place is because you already grabbed Message. If not, it’s also one of the only zones that’s always at least somewhat relevant, because you can usually benefit from having more cards. Finally, even if you don’t need the zone, you could always use Petyr to sit on the zone and say it’s something else.

The point is, this is just a very straight-forward and effective card. You do a little more damage, and doing damage is what you’re trying to achieve in a war game. That seems insightful enough!

This card has you doing a bunch of weird shell games with tokens. The bottom line is just that the enemy is going to wind up with one, or possibly two tokens, which is going to make them easier to kill or will make it harder for them to kill you, which is, again, just incredibly practical and is doing its best to make up for your men being otherwise deranged and convinced that Scooby Doo was a true-life documentary.

As we once again run into a card that lets you automatically pass a Panic Test, I hope it becomes all the more abundantly clear why the Boltons are so positively hopeless. In this case, not only will your unit be completely unimpressed by how dumb it was to show up to battle dressed as a “living scarecrow”, but two more men will show up to laugh at it.

A lot of the Neutral commanders aren’t great about their cards. If you had to rely on drawing the good ones at a natural pace, you can’t know for sure if that one good card they offer is going to ever pop up. That is, unless you draw Meticulous Planning, in which case you can just go in and grab your commander’s only good card right then and there, or at the end of the Round at the latest.

So okay, you might be thinking, the Boltons can’t be that bad. Sure, if you’re playing Jokin then maybe four times you’ll completely ignore how scary the Boltons are trying to be, but on that fifth attempt, there’s a chance the ol’ fog machine and theremin routine might really do it!

No. There’s no chance. I play Suprise Strategy, I go into my discard pile, and I get the card that automatically passes the Panic Tests again. Two more men arrive to laugh at just what a fool you are to have even showed up. You are dressed like a ghost, but I can see from here it’s a bedsheet. Go home.

Most armies have what the players call a “quest card”, which is a card with a multi-step plan for how you benefit if your own guys die. The problem with those cards is that they’re contingent on your own men dying, and if you’re getting a lot of value out of those cards, you should be arrested immediately and drawn in quarter by your men. The Neutrals, however, seem to be the only faction that gets it right, and who offer a benefit if you kill the enemy. What a concept! It’s the thing you’re trying to do, instead of the opposite of what you want!

And well, what more can be said except that, really, this deck furiously beats the tar out of the decks of a couple of the main factions. It doesn’t fully make up for the lack of good options the Neutrals have, but it certainly gives them a bit of power the other factions may not have. Altogether, the neutrals add some fun flavor and variety to list building and helps keep everyone on more even terms. Well, everyone who uses currency – the guys making an emigration from Santa’s Workshop in the north have to figure out their own system.