The setup is this: you're playing through the history of the Night's Watch, set thousands of years before the events of George R.R. Martin's books and HBO's TV show, around the era of Bran the Builder, original Papa Stark. First, you choose a character to be Lord Commander for a while - this changes, with new Commanders and new stories for them generated indefinitely - then you make a few decisions, you send a few people on some errands, and then you wait. Just chill out for a bit. Watch little symbols slowly burrow their way into the wild forests of the north and gaze at the lovely artwork or just go for a walk, read an article, do something else entirely.
This is the essence of proper idle games, but in Game of Thrones: Tale of Crows that essence feels distilled to its purest, and there's a kind of clarity of design that comes from it. What you're doing, as with most idlers like it, is sort of inconsequential: some more minor, barely registering decisions might arise, and you might decide to send some builders to I don't know, build something, with a waft of your begloved Lord Commander's hand, and then word comes back by raven from a scouting mission and there's another minor thing to do - then something more major, a crumb of lore or sprinkle of typically cloak-and-dagger intrigue to break it up - and back to the break. But the way you do it is sublime. Tale of Crows' magic is its interface.
In fact the game really just is interface. It's laid out in a triptych of isometric settings: Castle Black, with its perpetually moving elevator to the top of the wall; the wild forests to the north, where the banners of your captains slowly worm across a map in that sparse and scratchy hand-drawn style; and the watch, which lets you scan the landscape along the length of the wall itself, the occasional prompt appearing now and then for something you might investigate, in time, if the mood finds you. Everything is tactile, a little knuckle rap buzz of haptic feedback when you make a decision, itself made by holding down on a choice, as opposed to just tapping it - which makes you feel a little like your parents with their first smartphone, pushing and prodding with their index finger at everything on the screen a little too hard and for a little too long, but is also just wonderfully satisfying. Yes, I am doubling the guard tonight. Each little thumb hold and feedback wobble a sort of resounding slap on the table. Done.