More than a game for fans, Game of Thrones: The Board Game is the definitive medieval strategy game. At least on the tabletop, it is 17 years old and in its second edition. The reason for its popularity is that the multiplayer infrastructure does not support pick-up-and-play with matchmaking, although the digital version works well enough if you bring a friend. The mediocre user interface and slow single-player game speed are also bottlenecks.

The fundamentals of A Game of Thrones are appropriated from the immortal Diplomacy, where negotiation between players is the issue. All orders are given in secret, and battles are unpredictable unless you have a numerical advantage. It is basically a strategy game, but during play there is a knife-edge social game of bargaining and deception. Everyone lies, everyone breaks the bargain, and everyone stabs others in the back. Only one can win by getting the first seven castles, but not without bargaining.

Each round the player secretly orders all areas on the map where his troops are: move to other areas, defend them, support other troops, strengthen his forces to gain resources, or raid them to thwart the enemy's orders. It might order knights to march into enemy territory, order ships to support an attack, or order infantry to destroy enemy defenses before raiding. The effects and types of orders are often determined by one of three power tracks: the Iron Throne, the Domain, or the Royal Palace. The holder of the Iron Throne breaks ties outside of combat, the holder of a fief breaks ties in combat, and the master of a royal court may change his orders after seeing the actions of others.

Combat is simple and deterministic. The forces of the units involved are added together, and a character card from the hand is added to the total. Since the hand is open, it is always known whether the battle can be won or not. The options are deeply conflicting between the players, adding some randomness to the battle, but not enough to sway the fight if one side has an overwhelming advantage.

Orders are the only thing you really control. Recruiting units, gaining large amounts of resources, and pushing up the political turn order and power track all depend on drawing random event cards at the start of each round. For some factions, this draw can be the difference between winning and losing, and if the card you want doesn't appear until the fifth round, tough luck.

The simplicity of the rules is generally appreciated. Similarly sized forces often stalemate, and choosing when and where to fight is important, as soldiers and ships are precious commodities and increasing them is not easy. Each territory gives you only a fraction of what you need out of three main resources: supplies, power, and bases. In this game, one player cannot overwhelm another without all his forces, but he cannot concentrate all his forces on another. The only option, then, is to forge uneasy alliances for temporary goals. The enemy of my enemy is never my friend, but we may be able to jointly kill a common enemy first.

But if you want deep simulations and mechanically complex strategies, you cannot cut your teeth on this game. This game is more of a strategy game for planners and plotters than for logistics and thinking.

The simplicity of the digital version, however, is not generally appreciated. It is a functional implementation of a tabletop game, albeit a fairly unsophisticated one. Functional, not fancy. Neither the game design nor its presentation is much to reconsider in order to rework it for the digital medium. The map itself is a simple static image with a few low-poly models placed on top of it. It's not enough to be the centerpiece of an epic conflict, and it doesn't compare to the vast, table-dominating experience of a board game.

The interface is huge and clunky and cannot be scaled or changed. The mass of interface dominates the screen and even seems to be trying to distract from the sad map. The setting looks more like a tablet game than a computer game.

But what really ruins the experience is the speed. Each turn, you have to watch every action the six factions take, and even whether or not they refuse to take the actions they don't take. The camera pans with their actions, soldiers march, battles are resolved, and raids are animated. In multiplayer, this makes sense, since the behavior of human opponents is inherently interesting.

I was reading a book while the AI worked out the resolution, which frankly is about as damning as can be said about the game.

Playing against the AI is otherwise as interesting as possible and a pleasant surprise. It fights hard in regular Skirmish matches and understands how to punish players, especially those who overreach. They can also engage in rudimentary diplomacy by pointing out threatening leaders and making vague non-aggression pacts.

The most interesting single-player, however, are the challenge scenarios, a series of missions that put you in puzzle-like situations with goals outside the normal win conditions; it is unfortunate that only four of the six houses have challenges, for a total of only ten challenges, and that the game is only available in the "challenge scenarios.

Playing with others is the heart of "Game of Thrones," and the social aspect-the bargaining, haggling, and trading-is what makes the game enduringly popular. In fact, the negotiations and backroom deals that make "Game of Thrones" so much fun are difficult to pull off without setting up a separate voice chat channel, and there is no way to facilitate them without a deeply invested group.

In short, "Game of Thrones" is great for fun with friends, but not matchmaking enough for fun with strangers. Furthermore, the lack of distinction between synchronous and asynchronous play means that the game is constantly hampered by single player play and constant bugs that cause the game to crash after a few hours.

Social games only work on PCs with either voice chat or robust text chat for asynchronous play. Therefore, even with pre-prepared signals and text chat, A Game of Thrones: The Board Game - Digital Edition does not reach that level.