Thursday, August 18, 2016

How the wife and I got started with Guild Ball

Good day to you fellow wargamers and welcome to another set of ramblings!  I hope you have been making progress with your models in whatever way it is.  For me I’ve been working on assembling models from GenCon and so I wanted to talk briefly about a particular set of them.  In this case I’m going to go over Guild Ball, yes that’s right the game of low-fantasy medieval rugby!

So while we were at GenCon I was excited to see that Steamforged Games had a booth and of course being the excited gamer I went by to check them out.  The amount of people rushing the booth was incredible.  That boot was so busy it was unreal, I’m not sure Steamforged realized how popular they would have been.  I think it was just a glob of people watching demo games and they were just running demo games over and over and over.

So when Courtney and I were able to get a demo game in it was pretty quick and straight-forward.  Our demo guy was a great guy by the name of Jaime who is part of the GBHL crew on YouTube (link to their channel can be found right here).  He did a fantastic job of teaching us yanks the basic mechanics behind Guild Ball.  We could tell he was worn down since he probably ran demo after demo non-stop.  He took the time to give us a rundown of each faction, mostly for my wife’s sake than mine (I’ve been reading up on GB for a while now). 

So those who know my wife knows that she is a gentle, quiet kind of woman who’s interest in miniature gaming can be best described as mild.  She enjoys the occasional game of Warmachine, has been getting into painting, and likes being a part of our local gaming group.  She does not get super excited and obsessive like I do when it comes to gaming.  So when my wife, after being given an explanation of Guild Ball mechanics/factions, rather quickly declared her chosen guild and said we should buy into it before I did, well you can imagine my surprise and delight.  So she chose the Alchemist’s and I went with the Mortician’s guild.  Some money exchanged later and we were on our way to getting ready for some matches.

So today I wanted to just give a quick little blurb on the models themselves.  The models are made from white metal and to be honest are fairly easy to assemble.  Out of the 21 models I’ve assembled only a few had any noticeable flash on them and even then it was not in large amounts.  Mold lines were minimal and so most of them were not hard to clean off.  There were a few places that were a bit odd to get a file in there but I think I either managed to get at them with some angle work or I decided to leave it alone and hope for the best.  The larger models had nubs and spots for pieces to fit in but mostly were solid pieces requiring no pinging whatsoever.  Overall they were quick to assemble and once I cleaned them up it took about an hour to get a whole team up.

The one thing I will say is that the tabs for the slotted bases were either hit or miss.  Some of the models’ tabs were perfect fits and clung to the sides allowing the super glue to hold on.  For other models thought the tabs were waaaaaaaaaay too skinny to be effective and required some bending to get the connection points in.  I would say the ratio really was about 50/50 in terms of being perfect or not but it really wasn’t an issue.  More of a minor inconvenience really.  Speaking of the bases most of them will require some sort of filler to close the gap in if you care about that sort of thing.  I am thinking of using green stuff to fill it in but will take suggestions.

As you can see I was able to get both of our teams assembled and put together in about 2 days work (2 hours per day that is lol), so the wife and I are now ready to toss around the ball and knock each other’s teeth out!  That’s about it for our introductory foray into the game of Guild Ball, if you are interested here is a link to Steamforged Games.  The rules are free as well as stat cards and even paper doll cutouts if you want to try the game before buying in.  Until next time fellow gamers take care and happy gaming!

No comments:

Post a Comment