6 Rules for Surviving the Game of Thrones

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.”
Those words have never been truer as we barrel into the seventh and penultimate season of the hit epic fantasy TV show based on George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Countless betrayals, narrow escapes, and deaths at weddings later, our scattered enemies (and friends) are about to collide. Amid all this mayhem, how have characters like Dany, Tyrion, Jon, Cersei, and Arya managed to survive as long as they have? By following the tips below, which we’ve laid down into a Game of Thrones survival guide.

Your House defines you…or you defy it

In this world, family and legacy are everything. Your last name, and its place in the social hierarchy, will dictate everything from your economic class to the values you hold most dear. Some characters survive by clinging to those values—like Cersei, who embodies everything Lannister—even though her father constantly underestimated her. Who could have known she’d start this season sitting the Iron Throne? (Us. We knew.) But Tyrion, for example, decided a long time ago that he was done trying to live up to the Lannister name; he’s carving out his own path as Daenerys Targaryen’s Hand of the Queen, pledging his allegiance to an orphan of a failed dynasty instead of his own family. (But she has dragons, so…)

Bad things happen to good people. So don’t be too good.

In this world, it’s rare for the bad guy to get his due. To survive the Game of Thrones, you probably have to be a little bad. After all, we lost Robb, Catelyn, and Rickon Stark—all good people. Jorah Mormont betrayed his Queen years ago, but after fighting for her trust, just when she forgave him, he revealed he was infected with Greyscale and would most likely lose his mind before dying. Sansa Stark was an innocent, if selfish, teenage girl, and she suffered greatly at Ramsay’s hands. But even as Sansa has grown wise to the world, she’s learned that sometimes you have to keep lie to the people you love—and keep the company of people who lie, like Littlefinger—in order to survive.

But being a Big Bad comes at great risk.

Joffrey Baratheon, Meryn Trant, Roose Bolton, Walder Frey…one by one, the truly villainous characters in this universe have met gruesome ends. It’s possible that Cersei has survived this long because she truly loved her children—but now that they’re all gone, there’s nothing to stop her from ascending to that Big Bad status…which means she’d better watch her back. When you’re truly, unrepentantly evil, odds are there’s someone a little less evil waiting to cut you down—or perhaps it’s Arya Stark, by now a trained assassin on a quest to avenge her family.

Winter’s here, so don’t get distracted.

We all know by now that the real war isn’t the one for the big hulking chair, right? If you’ve been paying attention, you know the long night is coming, and with it, the army of the dead. The Whitewalkers are getting closer and closer to the Wall, and we don’t know what will happen if they cross. Odds are if our characters stand a chance at surviving, they may need to put aside their petty game of thrones and focus their attention—and the fire of three dragons, perhaps—on the real problem. Jon has taken on fighting the whitewalkers as his mantle—but if ANYONE (literally, anyone) is going to survive, they have to put their own motives aside to listen to him. Would you?

Don’t underestimate the little guy.

Sure, while everyone’s paying attention to the Lannisters, the Starks, and a Targaryen, let’s not forget the other players in this game: Samwell Tarly, at the Citadel studying to be a Maester; the sandsnakes of Dorne, now aligned with Dany; The Hound, with Beric Dondarrion and the Brotherhood without banners…and many more characters who have popped in and out of the show—like a certain other bastard, perhaps—that may wind up with more skin in the game than we think.

Expect the unexpected

Because who are we kidding—it’s Game of Thrones! Twists are the name of the game, and if you’re not paying attention, you could end up dead…or worse.
Real talk: how quickly would you bite it in Westeros? We’d give ourselves half a feast.