Guild Ball Demo Day

I journeyed to my FLGS Titan Games today to have a demo of Steamforged Games 'Guild Ball' game that was recently funded via Kickstarter. Though I've watched the various Kickstarter Vids and had a look at the on-line version of the rulebook there's nothing quite like having one of the people who designed the game give you a run through of it themselves...

They had brought with them a rather nice demo kit consisting of two three person teams, a small pitch, templates, dice and the appropriate cards to play them in a game.

Over the morning I got in two demos and watched a few more and the game ran very well indeed. The basic mechanics were simple and the more advanced concepts that came up and were easy to understand being fairly natural extensions of the existing rules. The stats used for the demos were slightly different than those in the retail versions in order to facilitate the smooth running of a demo to new players on a small play area but on checking the full rules this would have made little or no difference to the outcomes in my humble opinion.

Having tried out both the Fishermans Guild and Butchers Guild in demo games it was pleasant to discover that though both had radically different play styles the balance between the two was extremely well done. The Fisherman relied more on manoeuvrability and scoring while the Butchers had a more directly confrontational style...by which I obviously mean they hit things more, lol. Both of these teams though different in function were as easy to pick up as each other and I needed no further explanation of the rules to play with the second after experiencing the first apart from the occasional confirmation of the meaning of a rule.

I also got a chance to see the retail version of the boxes...

 ...and some other bits and pieces including blisters of many of the other available figures.

The physical version of the rule-book was also brought along and was of extremely good quality and came in a rather fetching slipcase. Artwork was in the style that those of you who have been following the various posts about the game will be familiar with and each character entry had a bit of background information on them. Some of these background features were written as if the character in question was being described by another character from a different guild and these were a nice touch and in addition there were some more generic background stories that nicely immersed you in the Guild Ball world...here's a few sample pictures...

I'm now extremely jealous of any-one who has already received their Kickstarters and eagerly await the arrival of mine. For those of you who are unaware there was a slight delay with some of the pledges due to them awaiting a model from a particular faction but these are apparently being frantically packed at this very moment and all these packages will be despatched before the end of next week.

As soon as my stuff arrives I'll be doing the obligatory unboxing articles and features on the various factions but until then you'll have to be patient...just like I'm being...well...I'm being sort of patient, lol.

For those of you who are interested in discovering more about this wonderful new game then you should be able to find what you need at the following links.

Guild Ball Kickstarter Page.
Guild Ball Website.
Guild Ball on Facebook.

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.