How important is originality?

As anyone will tell you, lots of designs borrow from other designs, sometimes with tremendous success. Games like Puerto Rico have few to no truly original mechanics, yet PR is the #1 rated game on the 'Geek. The concern I have with your game is that you did all of your borrowing from just one source, and that's where you may run into trouble. Moreover, you didn't really fix anything that was deficient about the game (and indeed, there's very little -- AGoT is a magnificently designed game).

It all depends on your goal for the project. If you want a lighter, short AGoT to play with your friends and family, you've got it! Great! If you're looking to take the next step to actually selling it, though, you may run into difficulties. Maybe. It's hard to say. I don't think there's any reason not to go for it, but it may be an uphill battle. To me, a game has to have an original mechanic or element that leads to interesting and unique decisions. I love AGoT and don't find it too heavy, so I'd probably never need to buy your game. But if you could come up with some clever twists on the idea, then you might have something -- maybe a twist on how combat is resolved; maybe combat cards must be acquired instead of getting them to start, and the acquisition process could spawn some new thoughts.

I don't know. I don't think there's a hard and fast rule for how original a game needs to be, but my process tends to cause me to seek out other similar games -- and then avoid imitating them at all costs. I've never done a "tribute" game, so I couldn't say where the line is drawn.

Good luck,

Jeff

I feel like you're getting defensive here, and I don't think that's fair; we're only going on what you're telling us. At any rate, I did have a chance to read through your rulebook. Here are some thoughts:

The start player each round does choose an Event Card, but that's just a face-up draft, it isn't really like PR's role selection mechanic. The modular board is a difference, but other than that, this really is a very close knock-off of AGoT.

It seems that the substantial changes you've made are:

-- You can "buy" additional Supply. That's an interesting idea.

-- Supply applies to all armies. That's also pretty good: in AGoT, the idea that supply affects only multi-troop armies was mildly confusing at first to us.

-- Combat is resolved with an in-the-fist bid modifier rather than a card based modifier. I don't know if this is an improvement; I wouldn't call it a dramatic difference.

-- Troops can be mustered anywhere. This seems like a difference, but not a clear improvement.

-- No bidding round with Power tokens. Ok.

-- Terrain effects. This I'm worried about. You have a lot of terrain types, and I think it will actually make your game harder to play because the terrain effects are so varied. AGoT does have terrain effects, they're just so subtle and seamless that you don't notice them. There's a big difference between a water strategy (Greyjoy, Baratheon) and a land-based strategy (Lannister, Tyrell). Also, the impasse of the river introduces some very nice spatial concerns. I like that the territorial aspects in AGoT add tactical concerns rather than additional rules. I would look seriously at the changes you've made here and try to simplify or unify the territory classes as much as possible.

I think you should definitely enter the contest. My prediction, since we're just daydreaming: if it does get picked up by a company, it will be changed in a ton of ways before publication. The game is, in my opinion, way too similar to AGoT to be publishable right now. To me, the concern is that the major changes (esp terrain) appear to add complexity, and with complexity comes length. I'm not convinced it's actually shorter or simpler than AGoT. How long do your playtests take typically?

But again, I hasten to point out that if the primary goal is to have a fun game to play with friends, you've achieved that. That's no small accomplishment!

Best of luck with the game!

-Jeff