Learning the Game Play-Thru: Guild Ball

Learning the Game Play-Thru: GUILD BALL

Welcome to this semi-introductory play-thru of Guild Ball, a game by Steamforged Games, LTD. You can find their website at:

http://guildball.com

Guild Ball can be simply described as a tabletop medieval football (or soccer) game played in a fantasy world. In a normal game, teams are composed of 6 players who compete to score victory points either by scoring goals or by knocking opposing players out of the game. The rules for the game can be downloaded for free. The player cards can be downloaded for free. Steamforged even made paper-doll models that players can cut out to play the game with until they decide which guild to invest money in.

This play-thru will be focused on walking through the basic mechanics of the game.  It has two purposes:

1.  Offer new players a step-by-step example of a game in order to learn basic rules and game play flow.
2.  Walk myself through the rules to make sure I understand them better in order to teach our local community who are just starting to play the game.

2014 C.O.G.S. Warmachine Fantasy Draft

2014 COGS Warmachine Fantasy Draft

Draft to be held July 23rd, 2014 at Art of War Gaming.  Draft will start at approximately 8:00 PM.  Draft will probably last 4+ hours.

League will last until the end of September.

Twilight Struggle

Boardgamegeek.com is one of the main databases used to find board games, rate them and talk about them.

Currently in over thousands of games, Twilight Struggle holds the first position in ratings. Made by a company focused on war games, GMT games, Twilight Struggle takes you back to Cold War era. Take the side of Russia or the USA and change the tide of history in this game, constantly referred to as the Cold War in a box!

X-Wing

Fantasy Flight is the current holder of all things Star Wars in the board gaming community. As many of you know, Fantasy Flight is also one of the biggest names in board games. So when I tell you that, as of last year, X-wing miniatures (released 2012) was the highest grossing game for this company in their history since 1995, there's got to be something good.

The newest releases for this game include Wave 4, with TIE Defenders and E-Wings and big ships like the Tantive IV.

Quarriors!

On comic book day, you might have been looking for an appropriate game to fill the day with. Sadly, Wizkids newest comic related release, Marvel Dice Masters: Avengers Vs. X-Men, is pretty much sold out everywhere. Consider Quarriors!, a game made by the same creators of Marvel Dice Masters. It is a "dice building" game with similar mechanics. It's always really fun chuck a bunch of dice anyways! Buy monsters, spells and fight for control of the land!

Evolution: A CincyCon Experience

I recently ran a few demos of Evolution at Cincinnati’s premiere gaming convention CincyCon. Luckily, I had participants ranging from 2 player games all the way to the max of 6, so I got the full breadth of the game as did a few people who checked it out more than once.

Evolution is a very well designed strategy game that uses hand management, resource management, randomness, and a delicious PVP system . The game starts off with a “species” board which is a generic unevolved species with a limited population, small stature and no particular evolutionary traits. You are dealt four cards and this is the bread and butter of game play. The cards that are dealt each have a “trait” (we liked to call them evolutionary traits or evolutions) that is played on the generic species granting it abilities to prosper. On the bottom of the cards is a number ranging from low negatives to as high as 7, this are to represent the food available each turn. At the beginning of each turn every player tosses one card into the center of the table face down, later those cards are revealed and totalled, that amount is the available food for the turn. The cards abilities don’t stop there, you can also discard cards to make you species bigger which allows it to avoid being attacked, have a greater population which acts as hit points and allows you to take more food, or even create a brand new species to evolve.

The win condition is simple, eat the most food, have the most species and the most evolutions. It seems simple but that is where the real strategy arises. You can only eat as much as your population and if somebody doesn’t eat, then they lose population, lose it all and lose the species. There is also the pesky trait called “Carnivore” which allows your species to eat other smaller species after the omnivores have eaten. It becomes a delicate balance of not over populating, having defensive traits, being big enough to not be attacked, picking the correct amount of food to toss into the communal pile and eating or not being eaten by the Carnivores that may be roaming the board. Carnivores may sound like apex predators and the win all end all of the game but they are very tricky to have out. If the carnivore can’t eat your opponents species, it has to eat yours and if it cannot do that then it can starve off and become extinct as well. One of my favorite aspects of the game was manipulating the food pool and watching multiple species starve off. It becomes a very balancing force to against someone who may have had taken an aggressive lead. Toss in a carnivore and you earn points as you take points away from your opponents.

The CincyCon experience was fantastic with the prototype of this game. Our games would start off small with 2-4 players and blossom into a 5 or 6 player game as people decided to stay and play again, trying out different strategies. With the eventual kickstarter, a majority of players were excited to back this product to get a copy in their hands to play at home. One of the common observations from the players is how the strategy behind this is simple to grasp but you have to be very fluid in playing it, that it bridges the gap between more complex strategy games and casual games. That comment is a lot of how I felt about playing and running the demos, it is an accessible game for a large audience and something you can pull out when cards against humanity has finally been worn out in with your casual gaming friends.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/155703/evolution

Ryan

Warmachine Map Campaign Example

There have been some questions about how exactly the map works during the campaign.  I'm going to run through a sample turn just to make sure it's all clear.

Here is the base map for the campaign:

Click on the map for a larger version.

You can see the starting grids for each of the faction pairs.  To re-cap, the pairs are:

• Cygnar/Trollbloods
• Protectorate/Circle
• Cryx/Legion
• Khador/Skorne
• Retribution/Convergence
• Mercenaries
• Minions

The Mercenaries and Minions factions are "fillers".  A player associated with one of those factions would be assigned to a normal team that was short on players.

Keep on reading to find out more!