There has been a bit of upheaval in the Guild Ball community. Where originally season releases were tagged to the Salute games convention in the UK Steamforged has now launched it’s own convention (Steamcon) and as such are keen that they tie their new release schedule & annual update of ‘seasons’ in the game to this event.
As a result Season 2 rather than running 12 months is cut short and Season 3 will unveil at Steamcon with the rules & cards scheduled for online availability from 28 November 2016. The seasons will then roll annually from this event (give or take a few days based on when the weekend falls).
So what does this mean? Well in short we’re due a new rules rejig and game rebalance within the next month. Steamforged in keeping with their usual media strategy have been releasing information in the run up to this on their blog, forum, social media and staff appearing on podcasts. So far we’ve had a few rules tweaks released and a number of the new stat cards.
Rules Tweaks (based on announcements so far)
1. Turn roll – Whomever loses the turn roll is given 1 momentum. This was to counter act the issue of one player winning a turn significantly and effectively getting a free go at an opponent without them having any come back. Now at very least you can get a counter attack in or a defensive stance to help mitigate that first activation
2. Mascosts – Now mascosts only give up 1 vp when they are taken out and now have an icy sponge value so can come back onto the pitch after being taken out. This makes mascot hunting less of an issue and hopefully brings mascots more into the game rather than spending most of the time hiding at the back of the board.
3. Icy Sponge – Only 1 icy sponge level. Previously most models had multiple but nobody liked to leave their players off the pitch as the loss of influence is more significant that the health considerations. So rather than have a redundant feature they’ve increased the health players come back on and made it just a single level of recovery.
There have also been tweaks to a number of abilities, the majority of these remain broadly the same but it seems that buffs are generally limited to own guild models only now and that there has been a simplification of anything which was deemed overly clunky or redundant.
Player cards – We have seen a number of these now. Most mascots have been shared and also some of the players which were considered below the curve before have had improvements to bring them up to viable options (Meathook, Harmony, Boar and Tower have all been shared). Overall it seems that balance and making all players equally viable is the intent of these changes which must be applauded.
The one unfortunate announcement is that the new player card decks will not be available until January 2017, so we’ll all have to play with print outs of the stat cards for a few months if playing the S3 rules but while inconvenient it doesn’t prevent playing which I’m thankful for!
Overall I’d been in a slight slump with Guild Ball due to the delayed release of the S2 Veteran models, on which the last of these will be released at Steamcon, but now that S3 is coming and we’re getting a good amount of information I’m quite excited to get ramped back up and playing regularly.
The other thing which has been announced is the 2 player boxed game for Guild Ball called ‘Kick off’. This set is reasonably close to a board game box in that it contains everything you would need in order to play Guild Ball in a single box. 2 teams, a mat, dice, tokens, stat cards and the rules. All of this coming in at a rather bargainous £50. The teams are going to be made of a PVC plastic but as high a quality PVC as possible to give a ‘near HIPS’ level of model quality. (HIPS is the GW styrene plastic, a different material from PVC which is a soft plastic that his then cured to harden). The two teams in the box will be brewers and Masons, chosen because they fall in the nice middle ground of Guild Ball being fairly survivable but capable of playing ball or beating on people to give people a good understanding of the whole game. The models have some slight re-sculpts from the original S1 sculpts and have also been brought back into scale with the line as a whole (Masons were previously a little small and Brewers a little large).
They have also released information on 2 of the new players which are due to come out, one for masons and one for Brewers. Steamforged have stated that they will be releasing more players but unlike season 2 it's not going to be a wave of all captains/mascots/veterans etc but a mix of different ones depending on what they feel best fitted with what they had been developing.
Overall it's good to have the news that Steamforged haven't forgotten about Guild Ball given their successful Dark Souls KS and other games getting released and that S3 will hopefully give rise to an even better balanced, more streamlined and enjoyable game than ever.