A Song of Ice and Fire book series got really famous with the Game of Thrones TV show. But while the TV show died a death ignominious enough to burn it out of the public consciousness, the miniature wargame seems to be doing fine. What wargame? Why, A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game!
A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game is a rank-and-flank game, but one that uses trays instead of bothering with unit coherency rules. Good TTS modules have scripted a lot of tray-based interactions.If Warhammer Fantasy tracks every removed casualty while Kings of War doesn’t remove minis ever, ASOIAFTMG does it a bit differently. The attack dice your roll are determined by how many ranks remain, and a rank is not destroyed while there’s still a single soldier in it.Unit sizes are pre-set – infantry is always 12 dudes in 3 ranks of 4 lads each – so there’s no messing with that, either. Unit attachments replace one miniature in the first rank, giving unit new abilities.There’s also the Non-Combat Unit table, which allows all sorts advisors, midwives and literal children to affect the proceedings of a battle without themselves getting stuck in. It’s a clever way to represent both all the intrigue that the books are known for and the multitude of characters that are absolutely not warriors. Plus, activating an NCU instead of a battlefield unit can force the enemy to carry out their maneuvers while you hold your troops for reactions.NCUs and their table affects – like giving a unit free movement – are just part of the SAGA board-like fuckery present in the A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game. Units, attachments, and army commanders all have abilities, orders, and traits that come into play – and that’s before you consider tactics decks. These are build from 7 faction 3 leader cards – all of them duplicates, so the final deck is 20-card strong.The D6 mechanics are easy, but they’re made even easier by the TTS modules’ ridiculously nice dice tray that allows setting target numbers, rerolling successes, and all that jazz. The module is also heavily (though not fully) populated by 3D scanned miniatures.All in all, A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game is a good game. You can see all the smart ways it ties itself to the flavors from the book series. And playing a new edition of rules on modules that have obsolete resources made us appreciate the changes in the new edition more. I can only say this: where’s the damn book, George?
