So, I made a thing 🙂
Honestly I’ve put some time and effort into it, and I hope that it’ll be of use to someone.
This is a de-flavoured Guild Ball for any flavour generalised use, so that anyone can play with the awesome Guild Ball ruleset, using any models from Warmachine or any other games!
I really want some other name for this, to better describe it as a standalone thing. But “Guild Machine” describes the project well enough for anyone who is likely to find it anytime soon. So now I could post about it and hopefully get feedback, and maybe better name suggestions from all of you 😀
If you’re coming to this post from somewhere else than a Guild Ball place, and dont know the rules or anything, you can access the rules here easy and completely for free. Also if you’re interested to know more about the game in general, have a look here. Almost all posts here on the Bench might be of interest eventually.
Guild Ball really is a great game – I mean I’m heavily biased hehe, but try it for yourself, I bet you’ll like it too 😉
Just a few more thougths about it, before we dive into the 0.1 version of this little project.
Feel free to skip ahead a bit.
I fully count on that some of you will scoff at it and say that playing the true one of either game is better than a mashup. My argument there will be that this is still 95% Guild Ball, just made more accessible. While some minor things affect the rules, it’s basically only ability names and style that is changed.
Another thing I anticipate feedback on is that many feel like one of the really nice things with Guild Ball is the flavour, the low-magic human-only setting. We’ve discussed this on discord more than once before.
Personally I kinda agree with it to be honest, I really like the Guild Ball setting.
But there is still room for both in this game system, and that is my point. For those who prefer steampunk warjacks or greenskinned orcs and so on, or even scifi variants or silly fun stuff.
Personally I enjoy both high fantasy and steampunk settings as well as the original Guild Ball flavour, AND I have heard several other people say that they’d be way more interested in Guild Ball if it wasn’t limited to “humans playing soccer” only. More trollkin and interesting magic needed, and no sports references, and so on 😀
Thus, I couldn’t really let go of this idea, so it’s been sitting around in the back of my head for a while, and now tadaa – here is the very first 0.1 version.
With this module (for want of a better word) the game can be played in any setting with basically any models. I hope you like the idea!
DISCLAIMER: This is a fanmade passion project completely unrelated to any company or claim. I use words and concepts freely below, but with no intention of making money off any of it. If I need to limit anything, let me know. I will happily cooperate with anyone who contacts me regarding any contents I’ve dreamed up here.
A whole different ballgame…
There is no ball.
But before you jump from you chair and yell that the game isn’t that much without the movement by Momentum from passes and so on – don’t worry. All the mechanics around what we know as the ball remain, it’s just rethemed.
Elevator Pitch
(There aren’t really any elevators on the pitch though) 😉
- Instead of scoring goals on a goalpost you aim to destroy the enemy objective.
- Objectives typically have 12 hp.
- Instead of a ball there is something that enables you to destroy the enemy objective, like an artifact or a power of some kind. Attacking the objective with this thing deals 4 damage to it.
- When a friendly model is taken out, the objective will revive it (or summon another instead or such) at the cost of 2 damage to the objective.
- First to destroy the other’s objective wins!
This flavour module keeps all the rules and angles of original Guild Ball, but opens up for a wider design space than humans playing soccer.
Next is a rather long jumble of thoughts that is basically the same as the summary above, but in more words. If you skip it, make sure to still have a look further down for example cards and some other stuff.
Feel free to skip ahead again if you like.
Flavour Remake Examples
In the lands of [Insert Flavour of Choice] there is some kind of Power or a special Artifact.
It might be The One Ring or maybe Strangelight, or something else that would be rare enough for two teams to fight over it, and powerful enough to account for affecting the battle’s outcome.
This Power/Artifact isn’t freely accessible, and as soon as it is found, various groups will try to get to it to keep it for themselves. When two different groups arrive to the Power/Artifact at the same time, they will need to fight for it. This is where the game takes place, in that fight over the Power/Artifact.
Thus, the play area isn’t a soccer pitch. It is anywhere in the world of your setting, be it the Iron Kingdoms, Gotham City, or some varied Multiverse without limits to what can be played. You decide.
The Power/Artifact is in fact the Ball. A model holding the Power/Artifact can Channel it to other models, and moving by Momentum remains exactly the same.
I will refer to i as the Power from here on, and on the example cards I have made, but remember that as far as the flavour remake goes it can just as well be a powerful item as a mystical power.
What we know as Goalposts is instead the Objective, but can be flavoured as a Portal or Base or Focus or Nexus or something. It could even be that that is the leader of the team on the battleground; the captain/warlock/god. It doesn’t move or act, but it’s the model that has to be killed in order to win the game.
Just as with The Power (the ball) some widely varying things make sense here. But the main thing is that the Goalpost is instead the thing that is keeping your team together. Each team’s Portal is how they all got there, and holds a connection (magical/scientific/spiritual or the like) to all the team’s models on the field.
I went with Portal at this time, for the examples in this post, but whatever fits your setting and is on a 50mm base will be perfect as Objectives.
Maybe something representing a Well of Orboros, or a Cryx necorfactorium thing – or some kind of headquarters/spaceship to play with Infinity models, or even the classic unnamed Castle for a team of princesses. Here as well: You decide.
Staying with the “The Power” and “Portals” angle, we move on to other terms that need changing for it to fit. You can’t “kick” a magical artifact or a formless Power, thus I went with “Channel” since a power can channeled between models, or into the enemy Portal to damage it. Channeling the Power is thus equivalent of kicking.
The Portal has 12 HP and successfully Channeling the Power into the enemy Portal deals 4 damage to it.
Taking out enemy models also works the same as normal, with a different flavour on top. Whenever a model suffers the Taken Out condition, it is kept alive and healed/revived by the Portal, and can return to play the turn after like normal. Reviving models costs valuable energy for the Portal though, and deals 2 damage to it.
If you want, you can also do another variant of this, and make that models aren’t revived but that each time a model is killed another model is summoned. Have a look at the rules for Carnage Draft if that sounds interesting.
Being awesome magical things (or whatever your setting dictates) the Portals cannot be damaged by normal attacks. The only way to damage them is by either Channeling the Power into it or by taking out models connected to it.
Thus, you can deal damage in bursts of 2 or 4 to it through channeling or revivals/summonings, and when you’ve dealt 12 damage you win. Just like scoring goals and beating human opponents in the guildball soccer-style flavour.
I had trouble naming any difference between Shoot and Kick and Pass so ended up calling it Channel for all of them and any written rules could be changed to account for what the model is channeling the power towards instead. If you go for the Artifact flavour instead of Power, you could opt to keep Pass but change Kick to Throw or Activate or such.
Since you don’t Tackle someone to steal the Power from them, instead you “Drain” it from someone. Therefore, on the example cards I made (all included further down below) I changed all instances of T in playbooks to D. Mechanically it still works the same though. It could be argued that T can be kept but meaning just “Take” the power as well.
I also removed the “playbook” word and some other references to ballgames in the example cards below. Playbook is only “columns” now, and some stuff like that.
Well, hopefully you ge the picture. 😀
Some variant rules ideas
For the cards that I made to this project I wanted to differentiate a teeny tiny bit from normal Guild Ball team building rules, just to make it broader and better able to incorporate any flavour setting, and discretely sidle away from the “always 6 models each” concept. To try a Guild Ball variant with points for list building like in Warmachine and many other miniatures games. No more Captain and Mascots, but still staying with something very similar.
Three types of models. Elite, Normal and Scrubs.
Elite models cost 4 points, Normals cost 2 points, and Scrubs cost 1 point.
For example one Elite, four normal models, and one Scrub will get us to 13 points.
So standard playing goes to 13 points.
I’m thinking that there is no “field allowance” and that the same kind of card can be taken multiple times, but feel free to rule that only one of each card can be played at once per team.
Another really relevant thing to generalise the flavour is to prepare the game for different kinds of “racial traits” for want of a better word. I thought long and hard, and came up with these below as a first example, and we can go from there:
Humanoid, Undead, Mech, and Monstrous.
These four can represent lots/any kind of models and add thematic but simple rules-depth to team list building. Each model trait except humanoid affecs the card’s stats a little, but also costs points towards what team you can field. I might be way out wrong with the point costs here, but it’s a start.
0 point – Humanoid – no modifiers
1 point – Undead – immune to poison & disease
1 point – Mech – immune to poison & disease, +1 ARM and -1 DEF
2 point – Monstrous – Get +1 TAC
By this I mean that in order to thematically correctly field a Cygnar Warjack (from Warmachine) you’d want to pick an example card below and add the Mech trait to it, and take into account the point value towards the maximum for the match you’re playing. If you want to play with a cool dragon model from a board game, you could pick an example card and add Monstrous to it, at the cost of 2 points. And so on.
Example Cards
And that brings us on to the example cards that I made, heavily based on a number of existing Guild Ball models. Most of them are changed in some way to filter out the soccer flavour, and to add/remove certain things here and there.
Can you pick out which GB cards all of these example cards are based on? 😀
The article continues a little more below the cards. Click on a card to open full size image in new tab.
As stated above, these are all examples! The very first 0.1 version.
But there are infinite possibilities in this design space. Either to create all-out new cards based on the actual abilities of the models from other games that you love, or to make many more generalised de-flavoured cards to select from when list building.
I selected models to base these on before I changed anything or named them, so there might be others that would fit better to the names and so on. There will undoubtedly be stuff here that can be too good, or someone will find out that “fielding only models with this card and that thematic trait will be stronger than anything else”. But give me everything! That’s how it can evolve and adapt over time.
If someone with more time and energy and card-making skills than me made de-flavoured versions of all existing models’ cards, then any Guild Ball game could be played with this any-flavour-module. Maybe we’ll see that one day.
Some additional minor rules changes would maybe have to be made for a future more stable version than this 0.1 edition, if someone would like to actually put together all the needed tweaks into a pdf or such.
For example no team would start by holding the Power and volontariy channel it off to free ground at the beginning of a game. So that could be changed to the Power starting in the middle and first activation simply goes first to try and get it. Another example would be when the Portal revives a model that was taken out, it would return beside the Portal, not at the side of the play area.
I bet there are more ideas on minor tweaks that would need to be made. Hit me up!
Let me say again that this is only for fun, because I think this game system is the best I’ve seen and I know it would work great with any flavour and not only the Guild Ball flavour. There are just SO many possibilities 😀
I intend to create some example teams to post as well, complete with featured models from other games and styles that can be used. If you like that idea, feel free to make your own and I promise I’ll post about it here, or stay tuned for more of this from me over time!
Link back up to the Summary.
Thank you for following my thoughts all the way through this monster post, and I hope to see you back here again!
