Guildball Intro, in case you've missed it somehow.

Think Rugby, but in a Gladiator stadium. A Captain, four players and a mascot. Your team, your fight.

You know Dark Souls? Did you know it has a board game? You may have heard of Steamforged. They recently held a wildly successful kickstarter for the Dark Souls boardgame. However, the boardgame is neither their first game, nor their first miniatures game. It started a few years ago with Guildball. Some of you may have heard of “Warhammer” or it’s American competitor, “Warmachine/Hordes”. Both fall under the tabletop wargaming umbrella, along with many other miniatures games. The newest contender to this genre is Steamforge’s “Guildball”. Guildball is a ballgame set in a fictional world full of crime, poverty and heinous organizations full of greed and intrigue. It’s almost a steampunk Victorian setting for the most part. Many guilds have become increasingly powerful in the wake of the Century Wars, and instead of settling their disputes through politics or money, they settle it on the field with their team. Thus: Guildball.

At the beginning of each round, players allocate “influence” to each character depending on what your plan is that turn, and each character is able to do an action per influence or use it towards “character plays.” There’s a second resource in the game, called momentum. Momentum is created by the players based on successful attacks, passes and scores, and can be spent to heal or perform extraordinary acts, or “heroic plays”. Some teams are better than others at building momentum, others at using it, and others still at taking it from you.



Playstyles are extremely varied. The Fishermen Guild and the Alchemist Guild both want to play ball, and bring the best “Strikers” to the game for that purpose. The Brewers’s Guild and Butcher’s Guild, on the other hand, would rather take out your players, and maybe score at the end when your team is down and broken, laying on the field in pieces. Then there’s Guilds like the Hunters and Morticians who don’t particularly excel at either, but are dominant at controling, and limiting. There’s currently nine Guilds, and almost any playstyle can be found among them. If you want to hit hard and survive, but maybe score a goal too, there’s Masons. If you want to hit from range and focus on scoring with the ball, there’s Engineers. If you want to be good at any and all of it and have the widest selection of players, there’s the Union. Any and every option is available and more on the way with each season.



Unlike Warmachine or Warhammer, a list is not built up of points spent on models. A tournament list is 8 models including a mascot and a captain, and two of them sit on the sidelines to be subbed out between games. Because a tournament list is just 8 models, most guilds only have 10-12 players available currently, though this number will go up slightly as the game ages. Compared to Warhammer or Warmachine where a tournament requires two lists, each one being anywhere from 20 to 50 models, and a pricepoint of 400-1000$ per list, Guildball hands you a starter kit for 32$, and individual models sell for 10-20$ per model depending on the size of the model. I own three complete Guilds currently, and most of another, and all of that for less than one Warmachine list, and waaaaaaay less than one Warhammer list.

Here's a few models. This is a Fisherman team. All about kicking the ball, pushing models around and being hard to get ahold of.

A few of the Butchers. They're out for blood.

My particular favorite, the Brewers, or the drunks. They can brawl and ball both, but they'd prefer to brawl.

The Morticians. They're dicks. All control, denial, and taking things from you.



A little bit of everything. There's some union, some morticians. It's all painted beautifully. Well, it looks confusing. Sure it does. I thought that too, and I’ve played seven years of tabletop games. It took five minutes to figure this out. 

Let’s look at a card real quick.

This is Corsair. He’s a badass from Season 2 for the Fishermen’s Guild. In Season 1, the Butcher Captain chopped his damn leg off in the storyline, and now he’s back. Unlike the Season 1 Fisherman Captain who plays ball all day long and exceptionally so, Corsair brings the fight back into the game. What’s the difference between Season 1 and 2, you ask? Is the Season 1 guy gone? Nope. You can play them both. Seasons just introduce new players and rules modifications to the game, much like large patches to any online game. 

This card is still confusing though, I digress. Let’s look. He’s got a name. Corsair. There’s a base size on the upper right. We don’t care because he comes with a base. Under that though it says his Melee zone is 2’’. That means he can hit people from 2’’ away which is great, and probably the best character rule in the game. Most Fisherman Players have it. They’re annoying like that. Now all the numbers. From left to right, let’s talk about this.

  MOV 4/6. He can walk 4’’ for free, sprint 6. Sprinting costs an influence, one of those resources we talked about.

  TAC 6: He rolls 6 six when he attacks things in melee. This is pretty high, and only a handful of models have higher. TAC 6 and 2’’ melee means this guy is a boss in a fight. Most captains can handle themselves, but this guy is in the top half for sure. 

 KICK 3/6: Believe it or not, this is what the game is supposedly about. The 6’’ is how far he kicks, and the first number, 3, is how many dice he rolls to do it. 3/6’’ is pretty decent, a little above average. Most players in the Fish have at minimum that, and usually more. There’s ways to modify it but 3/6’’ is a great place to start.

  DEF 3: So, let’s say Corsair attacks another player’s Corsair. TAC 6, we talked about that, right? So he rolls six dice. On a three or higher, it counts as a hit. 3+ is pretty average for a big guy like this. Not amazing, but with 2’’ melee, he has other options. Also, the back of his card says that he doesn’t give a shit about some things. We’ll get there. 

 ARM 1: So, everything on a 3 or higher hit, right? Well, take one away for his ARM stat. If four dice hit (average), then take one away, now he only has 3 hits. File this number away for a minute. 

 INF 4/6: The main resource here. 4 is how much he generates, 6 is how much he can be allocated. At the beginning of the turn, all of your dudes put their influence in a pool. Corsair contributes 4. Then you allocate it to people you want to do work. If Corsair’s in a good spot to kill a guy, then give him six. Someone going to take a ball and kick it? Great, give him some. Etc. It’s a resource.

At the bottom, we’ve got his health. This guy’s a pretty difficult guy to one or even two round in some cases. Pretty decent for a captain. See the numbers in squares? Those are what he can come back into the game with after being taken out, depending on the number of “Icy Sponge” tokens you spend on him. Most of the time, you spend just the one he gets, and he’ll come back in with 6 boxes and you can heal up from there.

The back of the card is similarly cluttered with abilities. Cosair’s got a lot of good ones, including Sturdy so he ignores the first Knock Down. A great ability. He also has a “Legendary Play” which he can do for free once per game. Most captains have something like that. Those are the basics of a card, which comes with the model. Getting into the game is easy. There are 3 man starter kits.

Then after that you buy individual models. You’re 3 away from being able to play a full game, 5 away from a full tournament list. The Guildball buy-in cost is very low for a miniatures game. Even better, it can be free. Steamforged has posted their entire ruleset, including the model’s cards and the complete rulebooks with tokens and scale sized printouts of the players themselves, all on line. You can literally print everything you would need except the dice and maybe a tape measure, for free, cut it out and play it. Even better, there’s an online option, ALSO FREE, called Vassal. Vassal is free to download, and Steamforged has developed an also free module for it allowing you to play the game online with friends, people from other countries, states, or just online because it’s easier than putting pants on. The game is widely accessible at 0 cost if you want it to be. You wouldn’t download a car, but you can download Guildball. It’s encouraged!

Try a game! Print it out, give it a shot. The rules are all there, youtube is full of videos, there’s a complete set of forums for assistance, news and strategy. Try the game! Want to get started?


For all of the rules and paper proxies, check out:
http://steamforged.com/resources/

For trying out vassal, try:
http://diceotfirstdegree.blogspot.com/2016/07/vassal-for-guildball-getting-started.html


For regular support and online community, go to:

http://forums.steamforged.com/


Want a professional introduction to playing the game? Steamforged has one, at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyoajPumow0


Hopefully this has piqued your interest enough to take a look, maybe even give it a shot. If you have a local game store, contact them and see if they have anyone there willing to do a demo. You can even use the Pundit locator on the steamforged website to locate a nearby rep to demo for you.

TL:DR A small miniature game that's fantastically addicting and either free or cheap to get into. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me through here on imgur, or email me at diceotfirstdegree@gmail.com. I’m a long time miniature wargamer and have two years of hobby support on my blog so hopefully I can answer a lot of your questions. Thanks for reading!

Vassal for Guildball - Getting Started

  Vassal comes up a lot when people talk about a Tabletop simulator, which boils down to what Vassal is essentially; A tabletop simulator with an internet connection.  Modules exist for Vassal for most games, and if you've played any of the other games, you understand the frustration that comes with trying to navigate Vassal.  But you really want to get that game in without driving an hour, or buying a plane ticket to the UK to play that one guy.

  So you're googling Vassal for Guildball.

  Here's the really nice thing though.  The Guildball Vassal module is produced by Steamforged and updated/maintained by them and they even have a place for it in their forums.  This is very different than any Vassal module you've seen before, and if you come from Warmachine specifically, Vassal is a hodgepodge rumination updated by a rotating group of people that do it as long as they can with out being so frustrated with it that they drop it entirely.  That's gone with the Guildball Module.

  The GBVM (Guildball Vassal Module; I'm tired of typing it out) is a streamlined program with all the shortcuts, widgets, art, plot cards, tokens and terrain created already by Steamforged.  It's amazing.  It takes a minute to get into, but not anything like the learning curve that the Warmachine module takes.

  My major complaint about the WMH Vassal module was how swingy the dice were, and that may or may not be true with GBVM too.  I haven't decided yet.  My first game definitely had me miss a 5D6 Supershot pass from Mash to Hemlock, but then when we rolled out the theoretical un-bonus timed snapshot kick through an intervening model, she got a 5,6,6 screamer.  So the computer generated dice are still interesting, at best. On the plus side, he never ever hit Slippery DEF6 Hemlock, even at TAC11.

 Anyways, I can't preach how great this program is enough.  I hope that if nothing else, you'll give it a shot.  The Guildball community is taking off like nuts, but most of the warmachine players coming off the presses will not have great memories of the WMH Vassal module.  I'm here to change that and tell you it's not the same.  Right now, we might see two or three guys on vassal a night.  It'd be nice to really raise that number up.

  So, let's look at it.  What are the major things that you need, or should have?

  Before we look at the actual Vassal program, the things you should consider having are:

1.  Skype/Mic.  Trying to communicate with the other player about what you're doing without using Skype is very much hamstringing yourself and doubling the time involved in the game.  If you're going to play Vassal, get Skype, get a Mic.  It's pretty imperative with Guildball.  You could get away with it a little bit in Warmachine because of simpler activations, but in Guildball, you absolutely need it.  

2.  Your cards, obviously, but the best thing I think is the App, Guildball Manager.  It's a free app with all of the guilds, their cards, a fight feature, you name it.  It's everything War Room 1 should have been with none of the downsides.  Get it.  It's free.  There's no downsides to this program.  Even if you have your cards sitting in front of you for playing Vassal, the app is great for checking your opponent's cards, and etc.  Even better, it doesn't require you to have your cards with you wherever you have your laptop.  Work trip?  Good to go.  Downtime on vacation somewhere? Good to go.

3.  Time.  A vassal game is still longer than a tabletop game, simply because you can't pick up a model and set it down.  It's a bit more finite in Vassal than that.  Everything else I think is actually streamlined and possibly faster, but physically moving models saves sooo much time.  Don't go into a Vassal game with an hour of free time.

4.  Vassal Ball Facebook group.  Want to coordinate with some people for a game?  Join the Facebook group.  The forum's a good place too but the Vassal Ball FB group provides some instant updates on people's availability.

Actual Vassal links needed:

1.  The Vassal program.  The base program is at the root of all of this, and you'll need it.  It's at: http://www.vassalengine.org/ and is currently version 3.2.16.  Download it.  Install it.

2.  The Guildball module, located in the resources section of the website.  http://guildball.com/#downloads

Install the program, then the module.  Start it up and double click the Guild Ball module.  This will take a minute to start up, so when you start browsing the forums, or this great blog, keep in mind that the wizard pops up on the desktop, and you can't see it, and it doesn't create selectable on the windows bar.  You'll have to minimize your window periodically (not show desktop) to check if the wizard is up.

  Once it's up, if you just want to play around, or for some reason your opponent is sitting next to you, do offline game.  Otherwise, look online.  This is what it will look like.

  The main window is the chat screen.  The middle right window is the rooms in existence (Main, Scrub vs. Byron, and the one I created for this, Test).  The far right is the players in the room.  If you right click a room it gives you the option to join it, or if it's your own room, you can lock it because you hate people and socialization but you play a social game.  If you right click a player, you can PM them.  Above those two right windows are a series of statuses to indicate what you're doing.  The X is afk, the exclamation point means you're looking for a game.

  In order to create a room, in the middle window where it says "New Game", just type a name and hit enter and it will generate the room.  Your other player will join, whatever.  Someone creates the game.  Ideally, get someone else to do it for the first time, but since this is a walkthrough, we're going to do it.  Go to File, and hit "New game".  It will ask you if you want to be a visitor, or home team, or visiting team.  Generally the host picks home team, but either way, make you both know who is who.  This will generate a normal green pitch, but if you hit the "Maps" button in the upper left, you can change your pitch.

  If you click Roster, up left next to Maps, it'll pull up a few more windows.

  There's several tabs that we'll talk about in a moment, but the Terrain one is the important one here.  In the dropdown menu, there's your types of terrain, and then the selection menu to the right has the different sprites available.  Drag them onto the pitch in a legal way.

-OR-

  Start over.  This is the simplest way.  If you've followed my instructions to this point, go to File, and close game.  Now hit file, and choose one of the setups available.  This will ask you all of the same questions, but will generate a pitch with terrain already placed.  If you're just getting going in Vassal and Guildball, this is the way to do it.

   The other player, when he joins the room, will select Visiting, probably, (whatever option is left).  Then you guys can drag your stuff out. So, back to our Rosters button.

    There's a lot of options here.  All of which, you click and drag to the pitch.  From top left to right:

  Templates: Your AOEs are here.  They're all 3'' AOEs, but with various art for various spells.  It should be noted that the AOEs are selectable at their centerpoint, not the whole circle.  This reduces some mouse confusion on the pitch.

  New Ball: There's a ball in the center of the pitch by default, but if you delete it by accident, or it goes buggy (which happens), there's a new one here you can drag out.

  Tokens: These are just little colored indicators for things if they aren't built into the engine.  Haven't needed them yet, but like, when Tater comes out, you might use them since he may not be in the system yet.

  Token Sets: These are faction specific.  Select it, select your faction from the dropdown box and drag what you want out.  Some of them will be missing, like Tapper's Commanding Aura, but that's because the aura effects are selectable options on the model itself.  It's pretty sweet.  These are indicators for spells and such, so Tooled up, Dirty Knives, etc.  Football Legend, Commanding Aura, all that will be attached to the model.

  Individual Dice: Haven't used them yet.  Let me know if you do.

  Plots: This is the wrong way to select plots for the game, but we'll talk about that shortly.  These are specifically for league play since they have every faction, season one, season two and the campaign plots.  How cool is it for a company to build their leagues into the module for you?

  Home/Visiting Team: These tabs are identical except that the base colors are different so that all the various Avarisse and Greedes are identifiable from eachother.  Same thing as the plots.  Dropdown box select your team, drag them to the pitch.

  Terrain: We talked about this already.

  So, now that your stuff is on the pitch, let's talk about the right side of the board.

  This is a great feature guys, I can't praise these dudes enough.  This is the scoreboard and what amounts to your trays.  The pretty artwork sections are where you can sit your tokens, templates, plot cards and dead players and keep the pitch clean.

  Then there's the Scoreboard.  If you look at the top and bottom of the board, it says "VP".  Right click this to select if you got a TO, scored a goal, extra point, or if you need to reset them all.  The three little divots to the right are for goals specifically. Selecting "Goal Scored" from the menu will automatically fill in one of those, and serves as a reminder for your extra influence.

  Then there's your MP with the arrows on either side.  Self explanatory for the most part.  Click left or right to adjust MP.  Keep it up to date because when you both are done, you'll hit "New Turn" and the game will factor in your MP for who wins initiative.

  Then there's the dice.  That long column from 1-22 is your dice.  After you've added up your dice pool number, select the box next to that number and it will roll that many dice.  

  Now, instead of browsing those dice and trying to figure out how many times you hit that sweet 5+, instead of counting them out, that colored chart in the middle summarizes it all up for you.  You got 5 hits at 5+ not counting any armor.  If you're whacking on Stave, you did considerably, and unsurprisingly, better, at 12 hits needing 2+.  Very intuitive, very simple.  I really like it.

  Brief note.  Do you remember the tape measures from WMH vassal?  Well, they're still here, in the upper right corner.  And they still suck.  They can be accomplished by many other things but if for some reason you need one, they're here.

  One more thing before we play ball.  The Plot Cards.  Select "Plots" from the bar at the top.  Not home plots or visitor plots.  That's where you drag your league cards from your roster.  Just select Plots, which is a deck you and your opponent will both use.  Drag 5 cards from the deck to the table, select which ones you want, right click "Claim", where they turn blue, and then return the other two to the deck.  The cards remain hidden from your opponent until you right click "Flip" to play them.

  Now we're going to drag a player onto the pitch.

  

  On top of the player, you see his name, Tapper.

  Below that is his Health.  Health is adjusted by Ctrl - or +, depending on how his day is going.

  The arrow means I have him selected and if I hit the arrow keys, which direction he will move.  I rarely use the arrow keys in this game though.  

  The little yellow dots on the bottom left is his current allocated influence.  These are adjusted with the - and + keys as well, but without the Ctrl.  

  Then there's statuses.  

  From left to right, there's Poison (Ctrl P), Burning (Ctrl B), Lacerate or Bleed (Ctrl L), Snared (Ctrl S), Knocked Down (Ctrl K) and then Taken Out, which would remove all statuses and give you a skull but most of us just drag the player off the pitch.

  Most of what you're going to do is holding down that Ctrl key.  Ctrl X deletes the model, for example, while Ctrl C clones it (important here in a minute).  It also creates our auras, the easiest part of playing this game.  Ctrl 1 - 0 are auras from 1'' to 10''.  Ctrl + Alt gives us the next ten inches, 11 - 20 by using Ctrl Alt 1 - 0.  You can have as many auras as you want out there, and they can all be cleared with Ctrl period (.).  

  So, let's say that Tapper is sprinting to the ball, then over to the forest to engage Avarisse, but I want cover too, and I want to stay out of Avarisse's melee.  I also want to be in Spigot's Football Aura so when I kick the ball at some point in Tapper's activation, I have 1/1 kick bonus.

  I'll start by selecting the ball and pressing Ctrl 1.  All of this can be done with the right click menu, but the keyboard is far easier.  

  So now, Tapper can move an inch, snap the ball, and use the remaining movement to get to the woods.  I'm going to create a 1'' aura on Tapper, and Ctrl C to clone him.  I'll drag the clone to where I want him to be in that Aura for that 1'' move, and then use Ctrl 6 to show how much movement he has left.  I'll use the original sprite now, clear his auras with Ctrl . and then turn on the 2'' aura with Ctrl 2 for my melee range.  I'm also going to turn on Spigot's Aura, which I can do with a Ctrl 4 since that's the range of it, or I can right click, scroll to "Special Auras" and select "Football Legend".

  This picture looks pretty complicated, but the TL:DR is Tapper moved south an inch, snapped the ball, sprinted with most of his remaining movement to engage Avarisse without being engaged by him, while toeing into the forest, and is still within 4'' of Spigot for his Football Legend.

  This took maybe 5 seconds to do.  It's very intuitive very quickly. I'm going to drag an invisible box over the whole group, hit Ctrl . and clear the auras and Ctrl X to delete the clones I don't need.  This is way better than using the arrow keys to nudge players around and back and turn and etc.  This is almost faster than a regular game of Guildball.

  Fantastic.  let's look at Kicking.  Tapper makes this kick to Spigot, and even at 4d6 kick, I miss.  If you select Spigot, hit Ctrl A to generate the Kick Scatter.  Or again, the right click menu.  If you ever have any doubts on the shortcut, use the Right Click menu.

  Now, with the Kick Scatter created, and the ball selected (it snapped to spigot when you created the Kick Scatter), tap End on your keyboard and grab the half circle piece (not the path) and drag it to align your kick.  Now hit Ctrl S for Single Scatter, or right click menu.  If this is scatter kick you hit with and you can reroll direction, use the undo button in the upper left corner to step back and single scatter again.

  

  Now resolve the scatter.  It didn't go far enough to run into cover.  I may have passed Spigot's path though, allowing him to snap the ball.  Press End again and align the path.  

  It just caught him, so I will snap the ball to him.  The path can be removed or created with Ctrl E, which is travel paths in general.  Use Ctrl E for charge lanes and kick lanes, etc.  Great tool.  Again, if you're having issues rotating the path with End, make sure what is traveling is selected, in this case, the ball.

  At the end of the turn, select "New Turn" at the top where your MP and your opponent's MP is calculated, rolled against and reset.  It will tell you in the chat bar whether Home or Visiting won initiative and you'll go from there.

  That's pretty much it.  There's really not a lot more to show with it outside of you getting in there and trying it.  Steamforged has a complete list of Keyboard Shortcuts available, but the ones you're going to use the most are the ones I've mentioned above, and summarized below.  Everything that can be turn on can be turned off with the same set of hotkeys.

Health: Ctrl - / +

Influence : - / +

Poison : Ctrl P

Burning : Ctrl B

Bleed : Ctrl L

Snared : Ctrl S

Knocked Down : Ctrl K

Auras 1'' - 10'' : Ctrl 1 - 0

Auras 11'' - 20'' : Ctrl 11 - 20

Clear Auras : Ctrl .

Travel Path : Ctrl E

Kick Scatter : Ctrl A

Standard Scatter : Ctrl B

Path/Scatter Rotate : End

Single Scatter : Ctrl S

Delete model : Ctrl X

 And that's pretty much it.  Hopefully this has given you a decent insight to playing Guildball on Vassal.  The Steamforged Forum for it specifically is located here: 

http://forums.steamforged.com/index.php?/forum/23-vassal-module/

And the Vassal Guildball group is here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/901202099948458/

  If you have any corrections, suggestions, ideas for further improving this guide, shoot me a message on twitter @diceotfirstdegree or comment here.  Thanks for checking this out and I hope to see you on the pitch.

  

Guildball Terrain -or- A Hirst Arts Commercial

  Guildball terrain, when I have painting articles to finish, is probably multiple counts of treason.  However, there's tournaments coming up for Guildball that I want to play in.  The nice thing about guildball terrain is that you need a lot less than you need for Warmachine, and it's considerably smaller pieces.

  And it's not stupid crap like acidic clouds or burning forests.  I'm not even going to create terrain like that because it'll never make competitive play.  It's going to occupy a special niche in the trashcan next to MK2 deep water.

  Anyways.  Guildball.  My wife and I have been playing a lot of it.  In my last picture, I had Mash, Stoker and Hemlock unpainted.  That's since been rectified and their pictures will be at the end of this article.  I've also added Gutter to my log.

  My wife picked up Decimate, and subsequently we grabbed Blackheart too since it didn't make sense to grab Decimate and Gutter separately for 24$ when we could grab the 32$ starter box and get another ball and a Captain.  So we're a Mascot and a player away from a 6 man union team now too.  This game is growing on us pretty fast it seems.

  The other thing I grabbed was a playmat, and then realized that the nice 2d terrain I have for Warmachine isn't really the right stuff for Guildball.  A couple of the templates work.  Forests, rough terrain and the walls are all functional, but Guildball has obstructions and such that can block los or be stood on.  So I started building some in my copious amounts of spare time.

  It's going to seem like cheating.  There's a lot of ways to build terrain.  What it boils down to is a backer to put it on, and the actual terrain.

  The backer was actually the hard part to figure out.  I originally thought that MDF would be fine, but it's really too thick and does not like to get wet.  At all.  So I was thinking hard about some different plastics but it dawned on me that I have all kinds of spare kydex scraps laying around as leftovers from other hobbies.

  Kydex doesn't show up very often in the wargaming world.  It's a PVC thermoplastic that's often heated up and formed over different things as a mold.  It gets to cosplay a little bit because it's very easy to work with.  Where you'll find it the most though, is holsters.  I generally get mine for a couple of bucks per sq foot at Knifekits.com, but some local craft stores may carry it too.  You can get it in varying thicknesses.  Mine is all either .06" or .08" thick.  It's cuttable, sandable, formable, you name it.

  I simply cut mine with a bandsaw to some manageable sizes.  My rough terrain patches are about 4'' long, 2.5 to 3'' wide.  My obstructions are about 2.5 x 2.5", and my linear or, other obstructions, are 1.5 x 2.5'' or so.  Very loose measurements, but just an idea.  I then dremeled the edges to get a light bevel and take out any harsh edges.

  Then I glued a plethora of Hirst Arts to the Kydex.  Really simple.  Drained most of the Hirst Arts blocks I had left.  I need to order some more plaster.  However, you can use regular rocks, or sticks, or tree bark or craft sticks, whatever, to form whatever your scenery is.  The difference in Guildball is that if there's room to put a model on it, you can.  If this is a goal of yours, then you should allow for a model to stand on it.  If the guy is worried about his miniature falling off and chipping, he's not going to use the terrain correctly, or the terrain just won't ever make the table.  So keep those things in mind.  In my terrain, the pieces that you can stand on are obvious, while so are the others that you're not supposed to stand on.  I just did 2x Rough terrain, 2x linear/LOS blocking obstruction and 2x regular obstruction.  I'll probably keep my WMH forest templates, and I have some regular walls from WMH that are perfect, and also made of Hirst Arts.  They'll slot right in.

  I then spread out elmers glue and dipped them in various mixed ballast to get the rocks.  Painted the base brown, washed it with a very dark brown, drybrushed a light brown on dirt, painted dark grey and drybrushed to white.  Very simple.  Add some grass tufts and we're talking.

  Boom.  Guildball terrain.

  So that's that.  Simple stuff.  But I really like using the Kydex.  That's probably going to stay.

  As far as my new Brewers, here's Mash, Stoker and Hemlock.

  That's all I've got today.  Probably won't see anything from me til after the 4th.  Enjoy your holiday!

Staying alive into MK3... and then Guildball

  The leaked cards were right.  Old news by now, but still.

  I've played some, and built a ton of lists, and I think I'm done with Trolls for awhile.  In fact, with the exception of some release events and things I'm already volunteered for, and happily, mind you, I'll probably be stepping back from Warmchine for a bit until the meta settles out.  For a ruleset that desperately wanted to get rid of spams, that's all I've seen.  PP has faith it will settle out, and when it does, I'll come back to Warmachine.  Might be two weeks, might be eight.  Might be early next year.  I don't know.

  The TL:DR version of where I think trolls are at right now can be summoned up in a few hotly debated bullet points that get thrown out if you step into the "Trolls can power through this" club comprised of the special snowflakes of the Facebook page.  Madrak2 is literally carrying the faction right now.

  1.  We're an infantry faction that's being forced to take twice to three times as much battlegroup as normal.  My Grim2 battlegroup stays almost the same size.  However, casters like Madrak2 and the Grissels that want as much infantry and support as they can get are forced to take 30pts of beasts instead of maybe 10 to 14 (in MK2 pts).  This hurts our ability to take Fell Callers, Stone Scribes, the KSB, the new Shaman, and our very improved Sorcerer.  Madrak2 straight up just spams infantry and does the work himself.  It's dumb.

 2.  We struggle to crank damage out on our infantry now with the Elemental buffs basically gone.  Again, important on the infantry casters.

 3.  Our fury management has not scaled with our forced battlegroup size.

 4.  Our beasts do not trade with Warjacks very well.  Rok can kill a Juggy, maaaybe hurt a second.  One kills him, and there goes my premium heavy because my other one is just a sad reach troll now.

5.  We can't take enough support for our infantry to trade up either.

6.  Borka2 is still trash.

7.  Doomshaper3 is essentially unplayable, and the Mountain King is equally concerned, when ranged Grevious Wounds got handed out like candy.

  Every game I played was very frustrating, and by the end of a couple of weeks of playing things, I put them on the shelf and took a break til this settles out.  If you're enjoying trolls, good on you.

  My meta's had the Guildball epidemic for awhile though, and nearly half to two thirds of the players own at least one guild, if not four.  I was enjoying MK2, but with MK3 kind of chasing the matador through the china shop, I finally gave in and demoed Guildball.

  Right off the bat, the access to the game is pretty amazing.  Everything you want is free online.  Printable widgets, full ruleset, cards, even paper cutouts to try playing the game.  So I printed them and my wife and I played a few games and we're pretty much hooked.

  Transitioning from Trollbloods, I naturally went with the Brewers and they are some hella beautiful models.  Steamforged is knocking them out of the park.  My wife tried Fishermen, but didn't like the playstyle that much, and switched to the Masons.  She's still playing paper cut outs but I expect her models soon.  She's thoroughly enjoying the game, possibly more than I am, so I think Guildball is here to stay.

  So, Guildball models.  I love these sculpts for the most part.  The Brewers have all been largely dynamic and exciting with the exception of the Cat and Friday.  The rest of them are mid sprint or doing the action they're known for.

  I personally started with the Brewer's Starter Kit, and really enjoyed the Tapper/Hooper combo, so I stuck with it.  I filled it out to six with Scum, Stave, and Spigot and painted all seven of them.

  Red is new for me.  I've done a lot of black, a lot of blue and a lot of tan, so I went red on this one as my primary color.  The Tartan is actually my family's, it's the Rose clan's parade tartan so I was pretty excited to use it.

  Tapper's my Captain right now.  I literally have no idea about the game, so I couldn't tell you if I prefer him in a tournament to Ester or not.  I love his sculpt though, and I've straight up one-rounded more than one player with him.

  My biggest problem with Tapper is that he pretty much requires the cat.  Scum is ok, but I'd love to have Second Wind from Quaff or that extra TAC on Hooper or Spigot.  I can't pass up a free 1/1 INF though.  It's pretty hard to pin this mascot down though.  He's ok towards the end of a round for getting a free extra TAC by engaging another model, but Quaff still seems like a lot more utility.  1/1 INF is so nice though.

    Spigot's a fun model.  I've looked at the Spigot2 rules quite a bit, and I keep coming back to him.  Again, I'm 6 games in, so things will probably change, but Spigot1 does so much for the team around him that it's hard to pass it up.  Even Scum passes a ball decently around him.  So far, most of my goals have been with him, not Friday.  I've played the two of them together in every list though, and Friday's very good paired with him, but if I had to drop a striker, it wouldn't be Spigot.  I bought Hemlock the other day, and she'd probably trade in for Friday or Stave depending on the matchup, and Spigot makes even her a decent kicker.

  The ball.  Woo.

  Friday's been nice.  She's hard to hang onto with her immediate dodge, and she's an amazing striker.  I usually try to push her towards the goal and snapshot her, but people generally focus on tieing her up or knocking her down and she ends up kicking the Spigot instead who snapshots.  Which also works fine.

  Hooper.  He either kills everything or I can't keep him alive because he gets tag teamed.  I really enjoy just running him around with Tapper though and ganking things.  If it gets really bad, Spigot usually sprints over to help after they've KDed the guy, and really polishes him off.  

  Stave, my personal favorite model in the collection.  He gets a bit of a bad rep and Mash usually slides in to replace him but I've had decent beginner's luck with him for board control.  He's really bad about feeding momentum to the other team, but he's amazing for really bringing in the model I want to kill.  I've straight up blown the Hunter Captain and Shark into my lines where Tapper, followed by Hooper, followed by Spigot have round-one killed the guy.  Heck, I even did it to another Stave in a mirror match.  

  So, I got into this game, and my first game was a proxy game with my wife who tried the Fishermen Guild.  She got wiped off the board by Tapper/Hooper stabbing things repeatedly and Friday running circles around the muggings, scoring points.  So she traded them out for Mason proxies and liked those much, much more.  Hammer's a legit threat.  

  So, as of today, she has 7 Masons, the only released models she doesn't own is Hammer and Tower. She's not sure if she likes Brick, but she loves everyone else, and is looking at Union players now too.  I went ahead and grabbed Mash because he's popular and I want to try him, and Stoker because he looks hella fun.  I also grabbed Hemlock for that great smelling salts ability.  

  So yeah.  I'm a Guildball player.  A lot moreso than I'm a Warmachine player.  Temporary change for now.  We'll see where that goes from here.  I'm thoroughly enjoying Guildball right now though, and my wife is too.  Even if certain things are addressed in MK3, I think Guildball will be pretty big for us for awhile, and I currently doubt that Warmachine will be able to take that 1st place against for a bit.