What Would You Do With the Iron Throne?

How it works

Nine questions, four answers each, and not one of them is about a battle. They are about the parts of ruling that fill an actual reign: what you tax and what you leave alone, whether you spend on roads or on ships, what you do with a lord who is guilty but useful, and who you name to follow you. The nine are dealt from a larger bank so a second run puts different problems in front of you.

Everything is decided in the page. No account, no request, no record kept — and because the questions shipped inside the file, the whole thing works with the network switched off entirely.

The seven reigns

The Builder — roads, harbours, granaries. Loved in fifty years, resented in five.
The Reformer — you would rewrite the rules, and the rules would fight back.
The Conqueror — the map is the answer and it always has been.
The Merchant Crown — you would make the realm rich and be accused of selling it.
The Absent Monarch — you would delegate brilliantly to people you had not checked.
The Terror — order, immediately, at a price you would decide was acceptable.
The Abdicator — you would work out that you should not be doing this, which is rarer than any of the above.

Why every verdict ends badly

Each of these reigns has a failure written into its own logic, and that is deliberate, because a quiz where one outcome is the correct one is a personality test with a right answer. The Builder mortgages a decade for a generation. The Reformer makes an enemy of every person the old rule suited. The Conqueror wins a border and inherits a grievance. The Merchant Crown discovers that a realm which can be bought can be bought by somebody else. The Absent Monarch is governed by whoever is nearest. The Terror works, which is the horrifying part, until it very abruptly does not. And the Abdicator is right and is remembered as weak. Pick your ending.

Passing it on

The reign you land on is written into the page address, so a copied link opens on it exactly, for anybody, with nothing to sign into. There is a downloadable card as well, drawn inside the page with no resource fetched from anywhere.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This quiz imagines a reign on a famous fictional throne. It is a free, unofficial fan quiz — an unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to George R. R. Martin, HBO, or any official Game of Thrones property.

It reproduces nothing from any book or television series; the seven reigns and every question were written for this page. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to Westeros. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Where the rest of them are

The small council quiz is the same kingdom from the chair beside the throne, where the actual work happens. The Westeros — ASOIAF & Game of Thrones section lists every quiz and tool in this wing, and the fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner. If you would rather play something than answer questions, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.