All Things Shagga - The Tides of War

AAAaaaaarrrooooooooooooooooo…..

Wait, do you hear that? The warhorn blows. Their charge begins. The flames of war will wash over the land like a rising tide.

Welcome, dear readers, to the first installment of All Things Shagga in the new year! This year I thought we would kick things off on a different note than our established formula. While the Shagga player archetype is always a fan of the large shiny effects in the game, this doesn’t always equate to more or less convoluted combos and expensive characters. No, sometimes we like to go as big and flashy as you can get. How can we do that, you might ask? By changing the rules of the game! Nothing is really flashier than that! There are already several established variants to the game such as Civil War or Hand of the King, but a year or two ago, an idea was sparked in my head for another variant of the game. One where an outside force caused something unpredictable to happen to the game and forced players to deal with an ever shifting state of the game. I tinkered with it and made up some proxies that we tested for awhile at the local game store, and then I moved on to other projects and ideas without much more thought.

Lately, though, I’ve been getting back into the Lord of the Rings LCG since it gives me an out for my love of LCGs even when I’m at home with no one else to play. In fact, there’s even a great LotR podcast that I follow which reminds me quite a lot of 2C1C- Cardboard of the Rings. One of the blossoming aspects of the LotR community are player created quests that add a new spice and variety to the game, while breathing new life into older encounter cards. Thinking about this process, however, led me back around to this old design that I had sitting in a backup folder on my external hard drive. The more I pondered the game, I eventually came to realize that the AGoT community does surprisingly little in the way of fan creations. And this lead me to dusting off that old design and tweaking it with some thoughts learned since I first worked on it.

So, with that preface out of the way, I present my own slightly belated Christmas gift to the A Game of Thrones community:
The Tides of War!

The Tides of War is a joust variant with standard deck construction rules. Both players bring their own draw and plot decks to the game with all of their cards playing as normal. In addition to those cards, however, players take one Tides of War deck and place it to the side between them so that each player can read the cards. The Ruin card (which appears much like an agenda) should be placed face up, while the ten Tides (which resemble plots) should be shuffled and placed face down.

Each turn, players reveal the top card of the Tides of War deck at the same time as their own chosen plots. Each Tide may have a variety of effects, several of which are “When revealed…” much like plots. Resolve these effects as though they were plots in an order chosen by the first player. Each Tide also has two sets of stat lines at the top on the left and the right. These modifiers are considered to be constantly modifying each player’s plots for the duration of the round. Tides are not considered under any player’s control and thus still apply even if a player is using Knights of the Hollow Hill. Note that player placement does matter. The player to the left of the Tides of War will always receive the bonus on the lefthand side of the Tide card and will be referred to as Player 1, regardless of who is chosen to be first player in regards to initiative. Likewise, Player 2 is always to the right of the Tide.

As the game progresses, a variety of circumstances and effects may place Ruin tokens on the Ruin card, representing the growing chaos of the Seven Kingdoms at war. Sometimes these circumstances can be turned to players’ advantage such as The Battle Rages (ToW 9), but beware- if the Tides of War ever reach 15 Ruin tokens, players are considered to have completely lost control of the war and the chaos of raiding and pillaging has consumed the land!

Do you have what it takes to finely manage an ever shifting Tide of War before all is lost?

In addition to the Tides of War card above you will need the below cards and tokens to try it out.