Just a fast guide for getting started. Players often think about models and tactics and rules about playing, but the setup steps can be easily mixed up sometimes.
Quickref first, then a longer description below.
If you are playing on a surface that don’t have the typical Guild Ball lines and markings have a look here as well.
- Terrain on pitch
- Gameplan cards (minor get +1)
- Roll for kicking/receiving (minor get +1)
- Captains and Mascots
- Squaddies (reciever picks first)
- Table edge (kicker pick side)
- Deploy Kicking
- Deploy Receiving
- Kick Off
- Influence, Receiving allocate
- Influence, Kicking allocate
- Reciever first activation begins
Longer description of the steps below. If you want, also have a look at the OPD in the rules.
- When you have the play area managed, place some terrain on the pitch. There are some rules regarding this, but for a quickstart just place a few terrain pieces and get going. If you don’t have any thematic terrain you can use any handful of small objects, or skip this step.
- Deal the Gameplan Cards. Major guilds get 7 and minor guilds get 8, then discard 2 each and keep the rest. Don’t play gameplans for turn one, the first is played on turn two.
If you’re playing without these cards, just skip this step. - Decide “who goes first” by determine who is kicking and who is recieving. Roll a D6 dice each, and the highest roller chooses wether to kick or recieve. A player with a minor guild gets +1 to this roll.
The kicker will later start the game by kicking the ball to the opponents half of the pitch, so in general terms you can say that the reciever is the player who “starts with the ball”. - If you are playing with drafting your models, this is when you do that.
First pick Captains and Mascots. - Draft squaddies – the Recieving player picks their first squaddie model from their guild, then alternate picking squaddies until both have four, to the total of 6 models (c+m+4) in your teams.
In casual play, it’s common to just decide beforehand what you want to play, if you both did, just skip drafting. - Kicking player selects table edge (only relevant if you are playing with terrain) and the recieving player takes this opposite side.
- Kicking player deploys his/her models completely within the deployment zone (behind the deployment line) on his/her side of the pitch. Then gives the ball to one model.
- Then the recieving player deploys his/her models the same way on the other side.
- The model with the ball makes a jog, then kicks the ball across the halfway line. If the ball isn’t fully across the line after scattering, the reciever gets to freely give the ball to any of their models.
- Recieving player allocates influence to all his/her models.
- Then Kicking player allocates influence to all his/her models.
- Recieving player goes first, and now the game is ON. 😀
