Narratives and Databases in Game of Thrones - Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games - page 151

as key igures. 33 Zizi Papacharissi calls this the “networked self,” the conception
of the individual through “polysemic pertinence,” or the way that multiple
online communities reveal diferent aspects of the individual. 34 Ultimately, the
HBO Card Game focusing on this networked individualism illustrates the close
ties between the serialization of the game and the creation of narrative within
our digital lives, as we attempt to apply a coherent structure to the multiple
communities of which we are a part. As they manifest and relect a networked
understanding of the digital media environment, the Games of hrones games
demonstrate player efort, networked sociality, and narrativized game play, just
as the original book and television show engender similar attributes.
In contrast to he Board Game , HBO's Game of hrones: he Card Game
presents a highly serialized narrative structure throughout the game play,
mirroring the larger serialized narrative structure of the television series upon
which it is based. Like A Game of hrones: he Board Game , the HBO card game
is also based on a number of turns; however, in the HBO Card Game the turns
are much more ritualized and highly focused on particular actions at particular
times. here are more turns, but fewer things to do in one of them, highlighting
the serialization of the turns rather than the action within them. When playing
the game, my opponent and I found ourselves intoning which turn we were on
at any particular instance, fulilling what Wagner describes as the “complex …
relationship between rituals and games.” 35
Each player has a deck of cards with various abilities on them. By drawing
cards in random order, but from a limited deck, players can attempt to out-
deal their opponents. Kurt Lancaster describes this type of card play as games of
“dominance,” as players can use “diferent cards to support or oppose an attack
or to lead a leet of ships into battle, play … certain cards to enhance others, and
so forth.” 36 Cards all have certain abilities, but are separated into diferent types.
Character cards are used as attackers or defenders in three types of attacks:
military, intrigue, and power. Location cards provide players with beneits, such
as additional gold reserves with which to buy cards. Attachments are cards that
are played with a particular character and can modify his or her abilities: for
example, playing a Bodyguard attachment on a Regal character can save that
character from death. Event cards change the low of the game by afecting
characters and locations. Players keep a deck constructed of these types of cards;
playing the cards may suggest a story, although that story is necessarily iltered
through an understanding of the unfolding of events in the irst season of the
HBO series upon which the game is based.