I'd pretty much given up reading fantasy books since, oh, junior high, but was prompted recently to read A Game of Thrones after having played A Game of Thrones. The boardgame incarnation is a decent game, something like Diplomacy with some nice Eurogame concepts on top. I enjoyed my one playing, but I could tell I wasn't seeing a deeper part of the game like my friends who had read the novel. I managed to find an ugly mass-market paperback edition of the book for $3.99, and must admit this is above the ranks of the usual fantasy dregs (don't be distracted by the awful design of author George R. R. Martin's website). I guess I'm going to have to purchase the rest of the novels in the series, and I look forward to playing the boardgame again. I will absolutely not, however, play the CCG.

On the darker side of the games/novels crossover scene, you have Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga. Even as CCGs go, Elemenstor Battles was awful--or that's the general opinion; I wouldn't ever play it. Then you've got the anime, the U.S. cartoon adaptation, the RPG, the novels, and the comics. There's just so much crap in this universe, I decided to at least check it out. Seeing as how I wasn't about to watch some kids' show or play a dorky role-playing game, I picked up some of the books by Tycho Brahe. I read the first two novels in the series, and stalled about 100 pages into the third. This is exactly the moronic, flowery fantasy crap that drove me away when I out-matured it at age 12. It's worse than Dragonlance! It's easy to see why the passing quality of A Game of Thrones stands out.

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Posted by erik to HipSmart at 11/22/2005 10:30:00 AM