For those that don't realise it Paint Hammered is a conglomerate of bloggers from assorted parts of the world but primarily the guys up in Scotland where Rich hails from. I used to be part of that scene but due to family (ie the wife told me I had to) reasons I moved down to the South West of England just outside Bristol & Bath.
As such Rich didn't bother to include me in the Tale of Guild Ballers (as can be seen here) I'm going to run my own tale, only now I think about it forget the blackjack.
Anyway unlike all those try hards who didn't really get into Guild Ball until after it was cool I backed the kickstarter from the early days. I first heard about Guild Ball on Fools Daily (a wonderful if slightly inaccurately titled podcast that covers all sorts of games and quite regularly has new developers on to tout their stuff, speaking of which check out the Roots of Magic on Facebook or Twitter, it looks ace!).
Anyway ramblings aside as I say I got into Guild Ball pretty early and it was listening to Mat & Rich talking on Fools Daily that I was taken with their obvious enthusiasm but also the fact it seemed tempered by a very sensible business head that made me think this game could be more than just a flash in the pan.
So I duly sunk £150 odd into the KS which netted me 5 teams, yes that's it suckers who didn't back early I effectively got 2 teams for free. I then had to live through a year of waiting for the stuff to turn up and it was about 4m delayed over their original schedule but given they had the incredible misfortune of their lead caster dying in that period not something that I was about to get upset over.
Come April/May this year I get a box in the post with my 5 teams and was faced by the tough decision of deciding what I wanted to play. I'd committed to painting up a team as soon as possible to allow me to get started. On that basis I decided I wasn't a huge fan of the Butchers playstyle (on backing the KS I didn't actually know how the 5 teams I'd picked would play, though Butchers and Fish were pretty well set out). So I would paint up the butchers as a 'get me by' team whilst I learned the rules and would then paint up nicely the teams I liked best.
Then I started to paint up the models. All of a sudden there was no chance I was doing a rush paintjob on the team. For those that haven't looked at the figures they are nice. They're metal (or resin) with the issues that brings but they're so beautifully done. Mat is a self proclaimed dynamic sculpt junkie and it shows! The other thing is the wonderful balance between enough detail to keep the figure interesting and the lack of pointless clutter on the model.
Pointless clutter is a personal bugbear of mind, GW were very guilty for a while but are now much better these days, it adds nothing to painting a model as often it's too fiddly to paint very well, it clutters up loads of space and takes loads of time for very little return on the overall effect of the model. Invariably if there are optional parts to add to models I'll leave them in my bits box.
Well with the Butchers now firmly stuck on my painting table I then turned to Union as the team I would mess about with to learn the game. The concept of strong individuals without much by way of interdependencies/synergies made them seem like a simple and straightforward place to learn and as it turns out they're also filthy good too! With that I became hooked on the game and tried to get as many locals playing as possible.
Bristol is an odd gaming scene Bristol Vanguard is the main club round here and it's always had a wide range of games being played. This makes finding people to try out new stuff generally fairly easy and the league which got set up consisted of 15 players, sadly the organiser had swept people up from various sources like facebook etc and it ended up folding as there were only about 6-7 of us regularly looking to get our games in. Apparently there is a league play doc in the offing from Steam Forged so once that is out a new league will be kicking off but for now I'm just in pickup game land.
BIG (Bristol Independent Gaming) is my local game store and has hosted one Guild Ball event (run by the local pundit Liam) and is running a second in December which is currently sold out at 32 players (this will be the biggest event in the UK to date).
So basically it seems I'm in the heartlands of Guild Ball players and loving it!
Anyways back to the painting, after getting the Butchers done, I smashed out the Union because I'd been having so much fun playing with them.
This was then followed by painting up the Alchemists because I wanted a fast scory team (as a result I chose to sell the Fishermen team from my KS). The final team I added was the Engineers, I'd largely picked this up on a whim when a clubmate was selling because they felt like a different playstyle.
That brings me to my 4 completed teams and no intent to add any more at present. 1 Bashy (Butchers), 1 Scory (Alchemists), 1 Mixed (Union) and 1 Alternative playstyle (Engineers). the other team which would make sense would be the Morticians due to the different playstyle again but I dislike the mechanic of 'I work by making you not work' so I sold them off as well.
Anyway that's my ramble through where I've gotten to with Guildball so far, season 2 is upon us and to date only Compound interests me to pick it up at present as Tenderiser seems cool but I don't overly see the need for his skillset as yet.
So there we have it my guildball blog with Strippers. Only forget the strippers... You know what screw the whole thing. (for those that don't realise the Blackjack & strippers thing is a Futurama reference, shame on you if you don't know it).