Key Preview Takeaways:
- I only got to try the 1v1 Skirmish mode on two different maps.
- Visually, War for Westeros adopts the look and feel from the show, with heroes like Jon Snow and Tywin Lannister both looking like their respective actors.
- The camera was problematic in my preview build.
Having grown up in the ‘90s, an era when base-building RTS games were far more prevalent than they are today, I have a special fondness for this variety of strategy game. So when a new one gets announced nowadays, the wave of nostalgia washes over me, and I take notice. That’s exactly what happened when PlaySide announced the upcoming Game of Thrones: War for Westeros RTS back at Summer Game Fest 2025. Recently, I had a chance to ride into battle waving the banner of House Stark and Lannister in an early build of the game, coming away knowing a bit more now than Jon Snow.
Set in the era of the mainline series of A Song of Ice and Fire as opposed to the prequels of House of the Dragon or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, War for Westeros has players hoist the banners and take command of some of their favorite Great Houses. These include the likes of the Starks from the North, the lions of the Lannisters, Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons, or even the frozen hordes of the Whitewalkers themselves. The build that I had a chance to check out was a bit less grand, consisting of 1v1 online and offline skirmish modes with the choices of fielding the armies of either Stark or Lannister, with two smallish maps to pick from.
Visually, War for Westeros adopts the look and feel from the show, with heroes like Jon Snow and Tywin Lannister both looking like their respective actors — Kit Harington and Charles Dance — and drops them onto an already impressive-looking battlefield. Even in this Alpha state, I was impressed with just how good War for Westeros is looking. Watching flaming arrows rain down on Lannister structures and set them on fire as they crumble, or the brilliant emerald flames of Wildfire engulfing poor Robb Stark as the pyromancers hurl their precarious projectiles, were always delights to watch.
The rest of the game, outside of the death and destruction, is already looking pretty damn good too, and even though only two of the factions were playable, I got the sense that PlaySide is putting great care into making sure the aesthetics of the various houses look distinct. You could zoom in and see the Stark units, adorned with fur capes and the armor that living in the north would require, their structures built from sturdy lumber and grey stone, while the Lannisters fielded soldiers in gold-and-crimson armor, their buildings draped with the lion’s banner.
The distinction between Stark and Lannister is far deeper than simply “one side has wolves and the other lions” (just to be clear, the Lannisters don’t have lion units as far as I know). Both armies can unleash all sorts of unique units with varying abilities and strengths, which I eagerly took advantage of, with both armies requiring their own strategy and build order to take advantage of.
Starting off first with House Stark, these northerners are powerhouses, with some fantastic cavalry options to run straight through the lines of much of what the Lannisters can put out there. In a bit of a surprising twist, the Stark faction is able to recruit and train not only powerful Night’s Watch Brothers, with both melee and ranged options to pick from, but also Wildlings and some of the beasts that call the realm beyond the walls home.
Helping to lead the north’s forces, the likes of Robb Stark, Jon Snow, and their respective dire wolves served as the faction’s hero units. These special hero units will level up as they take out enemy forces, learning more and more powerful abilities as they go, at the expense of longer recruit times and higher cost to do so, should they unfortunately fall in battle. Jon Snow, for instance, will inspire those around him, making his nearby troops deal more damage and imparting some damage resistance while having another ability that lets him deliver a savaging sword strike and causing a bleed effect.
“Lannisters always repay their debts,” and that is thanks largely to them being stinkin’ rich, a fact that PlaySide has used to help define the faction. The Lannisters’ gold production structures produce more of the given resource per structure, granting them a faster rate of getting gold and can make their builders work faster by lining their pockets with a bit of extra coin. Coupled with the ability at any time to turn their gold into influence, and vice versa – influence being the other resources used for building and training your more advanced structures and units- this house had a vastly easier and faster early game compared to the folks from the North. While the Starks gain all their allies through more traditional training methods, the Lannisters can purchase contracts for a variety of mercenary companies to hire their fighters, each with different strengths.
Jaime and Tywin serve as the Lannisters’ heroes, with the younger of the lions serving best on the front lines, while Tywin leads from atop his horse. Tywin can negate debuffs on his troops while strengthening his own cavalry. Jaime, being a master swordsman, can deliver some devastating strikes on single targets while also taunting enemies to target him instead. Alternatively, using his menacing history as a Kingslayer can slow and damage enemies near him over time.
Right out of the gate, sides will only have access to a small plot of land, where they can start expanding and building out their bases. You have your seat of power, your home base you have to protect from being destroyed (thus losing you the game), but then you will also need to expand your reach by constructing barracks, archery rangers, and resource-generating buildings. Some of these are locked until others have been constructed first. Anyone who grew up with the likes of StarCraft, Command and Conquer, or more recently the Age of Empires series with their remakes will have the general gist of how Westeros plays out.
To expand your workable land, War for Westeros breaks the overall map into captureable regions, with a tower that can be held to allow your workers to start building in that region. In the small 1v1-tailored battlefields that I had access to, these regions would also feature resource-rich points that can allow you to build advanced versions of your production buildings like the Lannisters’ Mine Shafts or Stark’s Windmills, which allow you to really bump up your production line. A few of these regions’ spaces, though, had something I found to be even cooler, and in some respects, that I found to be more impactful and important to getting that W – camps.
These camps spawn neutral hostile mobs that you can kill and will net you some gold as a reward. Rushing to get a squad of soldiers built and sent out to kill these mobs quickly became my go-to strategy during the early game. Its injection of resources saved my butt more than once by allowing me to quickly start training another unit to protect my new expansion into the region or allow me to start constructing the next building in my tree. And the fact that they would respawn every couple of minutes meant I could park some knights and archers nearby and use them as another source of income. It’s a trick that I used in another similar sort of game years ago, and one I hadn’t thought of much until now.
With each match I played, War for Westeros kept reminding me of another amazing RTS game based on an epic fantasy book series: The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth 2. (Side note: It is, depressingly, a game that is unavailable digitally anywhere, at least officially.) From how heroes behave to the more spread-out building placement and of course the random mobs you would want to kill, playing War for Westeros takes me back to leading the forces of Gondor against my friend and his annoying army of Dwarves.
Even in this small snippet, War for Westeros is already presenting itself as an RTS that can be fun regardless of whether you consider yourself a seasoned battlefield general or just someone wanting to get vengeance for Ned Stark by slaughtering a whole host of Lions. Against easier CPU adversaries in earlier games, I would just click and train whatever units looked cool just to see what the armies were all about and did just fine, but the more time I spent and the harder the foes got, using the hotkeys to assign orders to specific groups, playing to a unit’s strength to counter specific enemies, and knowing when best to use my heroes’ abilities became critical to avoid getting crushed. And this was only with two of the factions; I can’t wait to see how the wild clashes and strategies will evolve once the rest of the armies are introduced.
But, as a game still in development, there are certainly some areas that I hope get tweaked or adjusted prior to the final release. Tooltips are a bit sparse, such as giving you specifics on what the bonuses are when you garrison a worker inside a building, and the marker showing what direction your units will face is pretty tiny and easily obscured by details on the map, like trees and grass. Perhaps my bigger request, however, is with the camera. Buildings are big, armies can get equally imposing, and I frequently would find myself scrolling my mouse wheel down in a futile attempt to pull back my view even farther. Give me a high-up, bird’s-eye- or in this case, a Three-eyed Raven’s eye view, of the battlefield, and let me see the whole of these epic clashes.
Game of Thrones: War of Westeros is shaping up to be an impressive RTS, especially for folks that are looking to scratch that base-building fantasy itch. Still, from the other three launch factions, to the campaign mode, to even how larger matches will play out, all remain as much of a mystery as the release date for Winds of Winter. But for fans that have been hungry for some base-building, PlaySide looks poised to deliver quite the feast.
While you’re here, check out these previews of other big upcoming games we’ve played recently!
Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.
