Every now and then I walk past the rows of miniatures at the FLGS and wonder about them. I like assembling and painting them, but committing to a game not called X-Wing has been tough because most of them haven’t appealed to me thematically. Enter Guild Ball, a miniature take on medieval mud ball. Mud ball is kind of like soccer. Except the rules were loose and people could get beaten up. Guild Ball pushes that to an extreme in a fantasy soccer-battle game that’s got me hooked.

This is the third part in a short series of articles I’ll write as I get into Guild Ball

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We’re 4 activations into the first turn, and the score is 2-2.

Remember when I said I was laughing because I originally thought the first turn was slow? I really couldn’t have been more incorrect. Knocking people off the pitch, scoring goals, and even the occasional beatdown occur very early once you’ve got the hang of your squad. Some teams, like the Mason’s, even have named sequences for some of their turn one power play. Mason players can load up one of their players -Chisel- with a series of buffs, bonuses, and extra activations and launching her like a missile at your opponent for a 1-turn kill. The name of course, is “The Chissile”.

The reason the first few games felt slow and later games take off running is the same: each team is designed with really interesting combinations of powers and playbook results that result in some great synergies. I’ve just started a game with the Brewers and the difference in what I can do when someone is Knocked Down vs standing up is tremendous. Once I stopped treating each model as an independent and looked at them like a team, things began to click.

Any time you see a bunch of Brewers gathered around one person, it’s probably not a good sign. Poor Jac.

That seems obvious. And I certainly wasn’t sending anyone out on their own, but the power of figuring out how your team plays together wasn’t immediately obvious to me. Recognizing that Theron’s ability to drop a forest in the middle of the field combos well with Hearne’s ability to teleport into it was relatively easy. Recognizing that Theron could give Zarola the free use of her ability to let Jaecar shoot halfway up the pitch, before he danced his way among 3 or 4 enemy players and hopped back out of retaliation range took a few extra plays. Even more to realize, again, how that could be made even stronger with Theron’s forest or Egret taking advantage of clumped slow enemies to poison them all.

Of course, now I have new frustrations I’m trying to figure out. When neither my opponent nor I appreciated the power of momentum it wasn’t a big deal. We’d trudge forward to combat or soccer stuff and trade blows with one person coming slightly ahead. Now I watch as the receiving player bats the ball around, generating lots of momentum and ensuring a pivotal first activation on Turn 2. I’ll of course turn that right back on them when I’m receiving.

In many ways, it feels as if we’re on a strange plateau where the games are more lopsided now that we know what we’re doing. Before, when we were figuring everything out things were even. Now the games go to the person who best executes the combo or string of synergies they figured out. I’ve seen this in other games before, and I’m hoping the next step is learning to interrupt my opponent. It’s very night to have the roster fixed. I’m learning my opponents team as much as my own, as opposed to other miniature games I’ve played where there is so much variety and so many special rules that I don’t bother figuring out their stuff.

Raf Reviews - Guild Ball: Mid Season

Rafael Cordero

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