Do you like your board games to be almost impossibly epic and complex? Do you like the feeling of steadily crushing your opponents into paste over the course of several hours? Do you like constant opportunities to reference the HBO TV series and epic novel collection? Then Game of Thrones is for you.

Ragnarök is coming! The end of the world is nigh and it is your job to steer your Viking clan through battles to secure your place in eternal Valhalla. As you’d expect, there’s more than a smattering of pillaging, warfare and cunning tactics as you upgrade and develop your clan, and as the game moves through its three phases, you’ll receive help from mythical Norse creatures and fight other players for precious tokens.

The game shines if you play all four chapters, and that’s how I recommend doing this. If I have one quibble with Last Friday, it is that my group hasn’t enjoyed the standalone challenges. The third and fourth ones work well, and the second one does to a lesser extent, but we found the first chapter to be a bit unbalanced as a standalone game. Frankly, it feels like a tutorial. Like the games that came before it, Last Friday offers a fast-paced and tense gaming experience. Depending on the chapter, you feel like either the hunter or the hunted. But unlike Scotland Yard and Letters from Whitechapel , this game doesn’t often veer into frustration. The game will always reset — with completely different circumstances — after just fifteen rounds. This shift in gameplay is a welcome addition to the genre, and Last Friday deserves the praise it has received. Ever wanted to call your friends and family a bunch of fascists? When playing Secret Hitler, that’s totally socially acceptable. Set in 1930s Germany, Secret Hitler is a beautifully presented hidden roles game in which fascists and liberals outvote each other to secure a majority in parliament. Failing that, they can try to kill each other off. Chapter IV: The final chapter. The predestined needs to find and kill the maniac. During reveals, the maniac shows where he is currently. The maniac may not pass over a camper during the final round, so the campers can try to box him in to help the predestined. If a camper passes over the maniac, he reveals, and all the campers move one step. If the predestined crosses the maniac, the campers win the game. If the maniac isn’t dead by the fifteenth round, he wins the game.

Chapter II: The chase . The campers attempt to catch the maniac, and if he crosses over one of them (or they over him), he dies. During reveals, the maniac shows where he is currently. The camper that killed the maniac — or, if he didn’t die, the camper that is the closest to him at the end of the fifteenth round — becomes “the predestined” (which matters for Chapters III and IV.Relying on little more than instinct, liberals must identify their allies, then work together to root out fascists and, in particular, the secret Hitler among them. If Hitler is made chancellor or too many fascist policies are enacted then the fascists win. But if the liberals pass enough policies or assassinate Hitler, then Germany is saved from fascist rule. Once all players have passed consecutively, the war in the current region will be decided by the strengths of the Saxon and Dane armies battling there. Players gain victory points if they are aligned with the winning faction and based on their level of affinity. The focus of the war then moves to the next region, and the battle continues._x000D_ It’s just a sweet world to exist in for a while. It’s pleasant, like a cup of green tea. Nice, but ultimately, uninspiring. In saying that, the design is well thought through and there are so many helpful indicators of progress that it’s quite difficult to lose your place in the game, a necessity for any solo adventure. My issues with the game stem from the variance in the random number generation. As you’d expect, the Game of Thrones board game starts by casting you as one the noble houses of Westeros, with the objective of crushing the other houses and claiming the Iron Throne. What you may not expect, though, is the massive scale of that task. Games can easily last several hours, most of which is spent walking around the gigantic board feeling like some real-life general moving troops across a map.