What It’s Like to Design Art for the Game of Thrones Card Game

From words to pictures in the Game of Thrones card game.

For a while, the card game based on George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones was pretty big. It began as a collectible card game. Picture Magic: The Gathering, but with Maesters instead of magicians. Then it moved into a “living” card game format, which is pretty much the same thing, except you know exactly which cards you’re getting in each pack and you never have to buy more than one pack of each new set. Now it’s dying, the manufacturer announcing it’s moved to a more limited release schedule.

Ten years ago, when it was still big, I stumbled into designing art for it, shaping the universe of Thrones just a little bit. I was playing AGoT, as it was called, with a group of guys in DC who were quite good. Good enough that, for three years in a row, the world championship was claimed by one of them. I wasn’t good. I’ve always been bad at card games, and I was particularly bad at this, at least in comparison. But I had just published my first novel, and my buddies knew the people at Fantasy Flight Games who produced the game, and so when FFG put out a call for writers to craft art descriptions for upcoming sets, they hooked me up.