It has been a long wait for the final season of Game of Thrones, and sadly, the wait is not quite over yet. But HBO has thrown hungry fans a bone with a shiny new teaser trailer. There's no new footage from the upcoming episodes, but we do get one full minute featuring some of our favorite moments from seasons past.

(Some spoilers from prior seasons below.)

Game of Thrones is the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin's best-selling Song of Ice and Fire series of novels—for those of you who've been living under a rock since the show debuted in 2011 and turned into a bona fide global phenomenon. It's a ratings blockbuster for HBO that has won multiple Emmys and may be one of the most expensive TV series ever made, thanks to numerous film-quality battle scenes, CGI dragons, and a simply massive all-star cast of characters. Bonus: it's got a killer theme song and opening title sequence.

"When you play the game of thrones, you either win or you die." Those were Cersei Lannister's (Lena Headey) words to Ned Stark (Sean Bean), way back in Season 1, as the two rival noble houses got caught up in a bloody power struggle over who should succeed the late king of Westeros to rule over the nine districts. Everyone wants to lay claim to the Iron Throne (a monstrosity forged out of the swords of long-ago vanquished foes). That includes exiled Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), who plots an invasion from across the sea.

A walk down memory lane

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There are unlikely alliances and bloody betrayals, steamy sex scenes, disastrous weddings, dragons and jousting, gorgeously staged battles, and a shockingly high body count. Kings have risen and fallen at an alarming rate. Game of Thrones quickly distinguished itself for killing off a slew of seemingly major characters with nary a flinch over the course of seven seasons. When we last left Westeros, Cersei Lannister had improbably ascended to the Iron Throne, although this being Game of Thrones, one shouldn't count on her holding onto it for long.

Of course, all that jockeying for power distracted the leaders of Westeros from the one, true threat: an impending invasion from the north, beyond a great wall of ice. It's led by the so-called Night King, the truly terrifying head of an icy undead race called the White Walkers. Humans who die by their hand in the north turn into ice zombies, or "wights." And now the wall has fallen and the Night King is marching on Westeros.

Will the kingdom of men survive? It is far from a foregone conclusion. The TV series long ago outstripped Martin's writing pace—the next two novels in the series, Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, have yet to be published—although the author had considerable input in shaping the overall narrative arcs for the HBO series.

The eighth and final season differs from prior ones in that it will only have six episodes rather than the usual ten (Season 7 had seven episodes). "From the beginning we've wanted to tell a 70-hour movie," co-showrunner David Benioff told Entertainment Weekly last year. "It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it's stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle and now we're coming to the end."

That end begins next April on HBO. We can hardly wait.