This is awesome! In an effort to promote nations to host their annual National Masters event, the spanish community decided to host an online invitational where the best players from each Nationals event got an invite to play in this championship tournament.
Champions League
Online World Championship
Battle of Nations?
Four Nations Tournament
In sweden it’s a common saying “loved child gets many nicknames” and so I deem this tournament a lovable child indeed. I personally want to call it something with Invitational, especially since we can then abbreviate it WIN for World Invitational Nationals or something 😉
I’ll just stick with that for now.
But regardless of what we call it, tell us more about it!
During 2025 there were four National Masters held for Guild Ball around the world. I still think Warmanchester in UK should count in there somewhere, but I’ll just keep calling that the main World Championship until it catches on or someone asks me to stop hehe.
The four countries that held Nationals last year were Spain, Argentina, Sweden and Finland. From each of these events two participants were offered an invitation to compete in this grand new event. To all Nationals by wargaming tradition, any and all nationalities are welcome to participate, which shows now in the player list for the grand Invitational. I love that, and I’d love for more of us nerds to get to travel more and play each other face to face.
Spain contributes two players, Argentina two players, and Sweden managed to scrape up one strong swede to hold the flag. Finland unfortunately didn’t have any participants from their Nationals that could accept the invitation (myself included, I was there!) for this event this year. Let’s all hope we get another one next year and that we get Finns to join that one!
So it was decided to offer Finlands spots to France since several french people played in the Spanish Nationals. The last spot was meant to be held by Britain since there were no less than THREE brittish guys playing in the Swedish Nationals and even ending up in the top.
Unfortunately, none of the brittish guys could participate either, so the last spot was offered to one of the masters of the online Guild Ball community Ducky Hacket who will compete for Australia.
Take a look at the Longshanks event page:
https://guildball.longshanks.org/event/28898/
Spain – Dani Gordito & Arnau Barenys
Argentina – Ignacio Pons & Antonio Montes
France – Pierre Bialobos & David Antonino
Sweden – Marcus Persson
Australia – Anthony Hacket
Each round will be two weeks using the standard swiss pairing system on Longshanks. Thus the paired players get ample time to schedule their game despite time zone differences.
Due to obvious geographical challenges it will be played online, using Wartable and/or Vassal, and the first matches are sceduled for today!
There will be video coverage by the amazing Almagrow who runs the Guild Ball channel GB de Primera. I don’t think we have live streaming set up, but who knows further along the line. If I know Almagrow there will be good stuff to watch.
Huge shout out to Almagrow and Ale-Ultran who have organised everything and are hosting the event. While it isn’t the largest tournament ever held, I think it’s just SO awesome to have a start like this with it and now it can only grow from here on out.
Best of luck to all the players, and another huuge thanks to the organisers.
Here’s to hoping that more nations get a chance to organise Nationals during 2026!
I know I hope to be able to host the swedish one again, that’s for sure.
See you on the pitch everyone!
