| rdfs:comment | - In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Cyvasse is a board game which originated in Volantis, and spread through many of the other Free Cities. Due to Dorne's heavy trade contacts with the Free Cities, it recently spread there as well, starting in the first year of King Joffrey Baratheon's reign. It first arrived in the port at Planky Town, then spread up the Greenblood River valley. The game is all the rage in House Martell's court at Sunspear. It has not yet spread to the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, though soon after Tywin Lannister's death, the game is newly introduced to the capital, and Margaery Tyrell and her handmaidens are observed trying to learn the rules. The game is popular among both highborn and lowborn, and there are Cyvasse parlors in Volantis.
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| abstract | - In the A Song of Ice and Fire novels, Cyvasse is a board game which originated in Volantis, and spread through many of the other Free Cities. Due to Dorne's heavy trade contacts with the Free Cities, it recently spread there as well, starting in the first year of King Joffrey Baratheon's reign. It first arrived in the port at Planky Town, then spread up the Greenblood River valley. The game is all the rage in House Martell's court at Sunspear. It has not yet spread to the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, though soon after Tywin Lannister's death, the game is newly introduced to the capital, and Margaery Tyrell and her handmaidens are observed trying to learn the rules. The game is popular among both highborn and lowborn, and there are Cyvasse parlors in Volantis. The game was first mentioned in the fourth novel, A Feast for Crows, and several games were described in more prominent detail in the fifth novel, A Dance with Dragons. While Myrcella Baratheon stays in Dorne, Trystane Martell teaches her the game, and she learns quickly. Noticing that Trystane always places his pieces the same way, Myrcella wins more often than him, but he does not mind. Tyrion learns cyvasse after he flees to Pentos and quickly becomes an expert player. He plays it often in the fifth novel against various people, and mostly wins. His is careful to learn what his adversary's overall strategy is, offensive or defensive, then play accordingly. During the slave auction, he brags about his cyvasse skills as a selling point, and indeed wins a lot of money for his new master Yezzan. Tyrion also uses cyvasse to play a meta-game with his opponents, to learn their personalities and real-life strategies. When the sellsword Young Griff played against Tyrion, he boldly committed all of his powerful pieces from the beginning - from which Tyrion deduced that he was brash, arrogant, and easy to lure into a trap. In contrast, when the sellsword Brown Ben Plumm played against Tyrion, his style was entirely reactive, cautiously playing to survive instead of to win - an accurate reflection of Ben's character, as the sellsword switched sides twice (from Daenerys Targaryen to Yunkai, then back again) depending on who he thought was more likely to win, because he was more concerned with ending up alive at the end. Similarly, when Myrcella played against Trystane he adopted a classic Dornish siege mentality: deploying his mountains to create choke points then deploying all of his pieces defensively at the "passes" between them - this made his playing style predictable, so Myrcella could simply rely on flying her dragon over the mountains.
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