Guildball – The Painters Guild

Guildball - Kinda medieval football with weapons!

Per their site:

Guild Ball: Tabletop Fantasy Medieval Football Game
minutes to learn - incredibly deep gameplay - modern-design game mechanics - fully realised world - amazing miniatures.

So medieval football was actually entire villages of people pushing against each other, this is a bit more stripped down, 6 players per team and two goals rather than the aim being to get the 'ball' to the other villages church!  But broadly the theme works.  Also it features guilds to represent the teams rather than a village so it gives them a distinct theme to each team.


'is it just another bloodbowl rip off?'
In short my answer would be no, in practice this game appears to have more in common with the likes of Malifaux or Warmachine than Bloodbowl other than the fact it terms itself a football game.  It plays on a 3x3' board, the movement is freeform rather than a grid and the objective of the game is to score more points than your opponent (points are scored by goals and by what is effectively killing people).






I bought into this when the Kickstarter released.  The designers had done a really good job of plugging it on the Fools Daily podcast, if you don't listen then I recommend it, it's a general gaming podcast not tied to any one system where the guys tend to ramble on like a couple of old timers. I liked it so much and I really wanted it to catch on locally (also knew a few others were backing it) so I bought 5 of the 8 teams available.


But this is meant to be a painting blog in the first instance so lets get to the models.

Guildball - The Models

I love the sculpts, they're really cool looking and fit the art really well.  There are, as with any line, some duds and some great stuff but generally speaking they're mostly hits for me.  The one downside at present is the material of choice. I backed in metal, thought for the Kickstarter there was a resin option, and these are not heroic scale so the limbs are quite spindly.  Combine that with the attempts made to give dynamic poses mean they required a lot of pinning.  From memory I pinned 6 out of 9 arms which needed attached to the models and I've had thin weapons snap on me already (both chains off Shank and one of Meathooks meathooks!).  If I were to do it again I'd pay the extra to get them in resin, but I don't suppose it would solve the problem as resin is also fragile.


Onto the models in terms of painting.  They reminded me of Malifaux models, truescale rather than heroic, with a really nice balance of detail of 'stuff' on them but plenty of open spaces to apply shading/highlights to get nice transitions.  And my particular favourite, and this is mostly in the team I chose to start with,  a couple of them have some nice wide expanses of flesh to play with.  Blowing my own trumpet I rate my ability to paint flesh as one of my better areas of painting, not to say I don't have the occasional horror, but I get compliments on it fairly often.


So as noted I settled on one particular team to paint first, originally I was going to knock this team out quickly just to have a painted team ready to hit the table, in part because I suspect the play style isn't going to be my favourite, but once I started painting the first model I realised there was no chance of this happening. I was having way too much fun painting them and that team was the Butchers.

Butchers Guild

As you might guess by the game, the teams are all based around specific guilds, in ye-olde times guilds were basically the groupings of people of similar professions/skills through which all training etc was done and this gives a nice theme & feel to each team that is unique to each.  Butchers guild as you might expect are all about the wonderful tools of chopping up animals, so lots of cleavers, sharp knives and aprons to go round. 


The first model I painted up was actually the late addition to the team through the kickstarter stretch goals in the form of Meathook.  In the background she's a bit of a nutcase who seems to 'get pumped' by making people bleed (I was tempted to say 'get off' but that's maybe a bit too eewww even for me).  I have really enjoyed painting female models in Malifaux and it's really nice to see the same 'powerful women' themes and aesthetics come through into another game.

Meathook

Next up was one of the slightly more unique aspects of Guildball, each team has to field one player that is the 'mascot' in the case of the Butchers this is Princess, a bulldog (well I decided a bulldog, could be any type I don't really know dogs).  This actually lead to some research being required as I've not got any experience of painting dogs.  So I Googled a few pictures and saved these to my desktop as reference material as I worked up the fur.

Princess

Brisket was next, the last of the ladies in the team, yes princess is a lady dog, of all the sculpts probably the one I was least fussed about.  It's still quiet a nice and dynamic pose but doesn't overly do much for me.  I think this came through as she's probably the one I'm least happy with the skin on.

Brisket

Next up I did the captain, Ox, he's way bigger than the ladies in the team it's something that's quite interesting about guildball they've not been too fussed about all models being the same size which you tend to get with other ranges which will stick religiously to a 32mm scale unless on a bigger base, I really liked that about what they've done.  Also worth noting the pose is a Kickstarter exclusive one, so unless you backed it's not generally available,  but the retail release model is still very nice too.

Ox

Boar is the large based model in the team, all the teams have at least one of these guys, basically the bruiser in the middle of the park that is in there to trade blows with the opposition. Boar is the possibly the biggest beater in the entire game and is suitably imposing.  I love the pose, gives the feel of him thundering into someone at a charge and knocking them flying it has great movement but still suggests he's a lumbering hulk at the same time.  Plus this model really let me go to town on his flesh and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Boar

Boar

Shank was up next, this was a frustrating model as it had two cool chains coming off the weapons that wrapped round his body but of course both snapped in the course of painting and won't reattach easily as too thin to pin.  He's a bit different looking from the rest as fully clothed other than the head, I wasn't a huge fan of painting him but think it still came out ok.

Shank

Finally the 'little boy' of the team, Boiler.  I think this was just an excuse to put steampunk goggles on a model but I'll allow them the liberty as it's a lovely pose to the model, despite being one of the smallest in the range he probably came in the most parts to achieve this but it wasn't difficult to assemble.  Again less flesh to play with but still a nice figure to paint.

Boiler

I painted all the figures first and then decided on basing.  I'll blame Rich for this in part as his heather obsession rubbed off on me, so you'll see it making an appearance there along with a range of other tufts, some rocks and the usual earthy base.  I just tried to add a few different elements to what was on there but without going over the top as they're meant to basically be on a playing field for a sports/combat game so standing on huge rocks wouldn't make sense to me.


And the team as a whole:

Butchers - Season 1