Guild Ball – Interview with Mat Hart

#1 – Creating Guild Ball

Guild Ball is a sports game in a pseudo-historical world. That is an interesting concept. What made you want to make a miniature sports game?

It came from an idea we were spinning around between us about what the objective and purpose of a wargame actually is. Most wargames seem to fixate on battles and martial conflict, but when you look at what the players are actually doing, they are really focussing on achieving specific objectives through good positioning and effective use of resources. Why not make the objective scoring goals instead of taking territory or destroying a feature etc.?

After a few beers to aid the thought process the raw initial idea was literally, “can we write some rules that would let us take a Blood Bowl team to the tabletop rather than being restricted to a board and how would that make the game feel?”

After a couple of months of brainstorming and ideation Guild Ball began to take shape.

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#2 – What Inspired Guild Ball?

What inspired you to go with a pseudo-historical background of medieval guilds? Where do the idea for the setting come from?

There’s a huge amount of thought and inspiration that has gone into the setting. For us, the setting needs to be coherent, believable and full of flavour. We’re heavily inspired by the grim, gritty, realistic feeling of worlds created by people such as Joe Abercrombie, George RR Martin and David Gemmel.

The original idea for using Guilds was a result of wanting each team to have a unique look / feel as well as play style. From a pure design point of view, we wanted to ensure each team had its own ‘silhouette’ both visually and in play.

We’re very inspired by films and TV, the opening fight scene from “Gangs of New York” has always stuck in my mind. The rag tag gangs but unified by the colours they wear and the style of clothing too. Really wanted to capture that feeling…

To achieve this, we came up with the idea that Guilds sponsored teams and provided their uniforms and equipment almost as if advertising their particular trade. We knew we were onto something when it became obvious that the second you mention a possible Guild team idea, you can instantly begin to imagine what it will look like, how it will feel to play and from there its pretty easy to begin building out the actual play style.

This is the key for me, if a world literally fizzes with ideas every time you talk about it then you’re onto something.

Early on in the design we knew we didn’t want to go down the non-human route (at least initially). We wanted to make sure there was a differentiation from other games we might be compared to initially but the more we thought about it, the more we felt it was the most coherent choice for our setting. We don’t feel restricted by this choice, after all, humans come in all shapes, sizes, and colours and we get to explore and celebrate this diversity.

We definitely wanted a low-magic feel but without ruling out some degree of supernatural-like effects. Pseudo-historical is simply a term we use to try and convey this feeling, but is also an observation that we are taking inspiration and ideas from history and the world in general around that time.

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#3 – On Guild Ball Game-Play

On the game itself: Your Facebook page shows plenty of examples of player-cards with different “action-paths”. How will these work?

Action paths have now been streamlined massively. It was a great idea but in play test we found them to be the key factor in slowing the game down and this was counter to our design principle of ‘fast, fluid to play’ and so had to be revised.

We wanted to retain the core design element of ‘many options from a single dice roll’ and so took a look simplifying the action paths.

Now the number of hits you generate on your dice roll simply allows you a greater amount of choice/effect on your results. You simply pick a single result from your options now…

In play test this has been much slicker and yet still given players plenty of choice.

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#4 – What about the Guilds?

Aside from the fact that each Guild Ball player is unique, what are the things that tie together the different guild-teams, as well as making them different from other game?

Guild teams are clearly tied together visually but under the hood we wanted to ensure the rules created that team dynamic feeling too. We have built in lots of mutual buffs across each team, supported by the fluff so it all makes sense, that create the opportunity for some pretty strong combos…especially at an advanced level of play.

Guild Ball is unique in the gaming marketplace right now…it has the depth and challenge to high level players that a wargame provides, but it has been designed to be easy to pick up and play so isn’t prohibitive to casual players.

Further, it’s a sports game based on soccer not American football, and it not played as a board game, instead the open nature of a tabletop means it has greater fidelity of movement and options.

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#5 – The Guild Ball “Combo-System”?

There are mentions of a “combo-system” in Guild Ball. Can you briefly explain what these two are about?

I touched on it in a previous question when talking about the teams needing to feel like teams but in terms of gameplay, the combo-system is what brings the depth to the game.

Each model has a number of special abilities we call ‘plays’ as well as standard in-game effects such as Pushes etc.

Plays are mostly used to apply buffs or debuffs,( although there are other effects possible too) and they stack! This means you can begin to use your positioning and plays to really give you an advantage to burst into space and score, or cripple an opponent and smash him into the ground.

Another aspect that lends itself to combo-play is passing the ball…we’ve simply made it highly advantageous to move the ball about…much like real football. If you successfully pass the ball you generate an in-game currency called Momentum.

Momentum is huge…it gives you access to quite powerful effects, for example, if you pass the ball you may immediately spend the Momentum gained on a play called ‘Pass’n’Move’ which allows the receiver of the ball to make an out of activation move. This creates quite a fluid feeling to the game as the team in possession advance on the goal. Of course, there is counter play available to the defending team to try and break the attack up and get possession…

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#6 – How Long Is a Game of Guild Ball?

How long does an “average” game of Guild Ball last?

We’ve found a casual game to be in the region of 60-90 minutes which is great. We always wanted a game you could fit 2 or 3 games into an evening.

From a tournament perspective, 60 minutes or less per round will be perfect…which means that 64 man 1-day events are completely possible which was another design goal.

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#7 – The Guild Ball Miniatures

The miniature-previews on your website look great. What material will the miniatures be made from? And how many miniatures make up one team?

Guild Ball miniatures are available in both metal and resin. We are working with the very best manufacturers in the UK and can confidently say that our minis are amongst the best.

We use a fully digital pipeline for sculpting which provides us with some amazing control and sculpting options…a good example would be the very fine fish scales on Shark’s (the Fisherman Captain) arm which would be practically impossible using traditional sculpting techniques.

We’ve teamed up with Golem Studios to provide our studio painting. Jason is literally chomping at the bit to get started after he saw our resin masters. We’re chomping at the bit to see what he can do with these minis.

We are 100% confident that our miniatures are of the highest standards…

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#8 – Which Guilds Exist So Far?

Which Guild-Teams will be in the basic game of Guild Ball?

The game has been planned to launch with 4 teams; Butchers, Fisherman, Masons and Morticians.

The amazing start to the Kickstarter has enabled us to put additional teams into the work flow and so we’re hoping we will have at least 5 if not 6 or 7 teams at launch.

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#9 – Star Players?

Will Guild Ball have – to stick with the popular trope – starplayers or players-for-hire outside of the Guild-Teams?

Absolutely…in fact this is one of the first ‘unlocked’ teams so we can provide more options for every other team. We’re currently nailing the name down, with the current favourite being ‘The Union’; making it not a Guild sponsored team, but a group of independent players that can be hired to play.

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Many thanks for the interview!

You’re very welcome. We run as transparent an operation as we can…you can see all the behind the scenes successes and triumphs over on our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/guildball ) or the Guild Ball website (www.guildball.com).

Take a look at our Kickstarter and let us know what you think…