Card Analysis, or “Wassat Do?”

This seems a good point to look at something that is vitally important to every game, but might as well be written in Swahili to your average rookie. That’s right, it’s the humble stat card, and we're going to spend a little bit of time looking at the front of the card to help the new player understand the role of a player.

All of these can be downloaded direct from Steamforged Games here, or can be found in the various apps.

One thing you need to make absolutely sure of is that you’re looking at the latest cards for Guild Ball season 3. A lot of players got a complete re-write from season 2 so older cards should be unceremoniously binned, trashed or whatever the local equivalent is. You can tell by the Roman numerals at the bottom right corner of the back of the card – I is season 1, II is season 2 and III is season 3. I’m sure you could have worked that out by yourself, o handy reader such as you are, but this is the planet that has voted for Brexit and Trump. It’s worth making sure…

Further complicating matters is the fact that some cards have been errata’d, and you’ll only be able to get hard copies of the pre-errate. They’ll need to be downloaded and printed to make sure you’re using the correct card. The list of errata’d players (as of now, 14th November 2017 anyway) is as follows;

• Shark
• Siren
• Veteran Siren
• Theron
• Hearne
• Hammer
• Midas
• Vitriol
• Avarisse & Greede
• Harry the Hat
• Ox

Once you’ve done all that though, you’re good. Get rummaging, printing and sticking!

Still with me? Excellent!

"Hit that one!"

Right then. Let’s try and break down what these things actually mean.

Top left of the front of the card is a player’s Guild. There are a couple of dual-Guild models – Compound can bring his unique brand of war crimes and goalkeeping (suddenly Simon Mignolet doesn’t seem so bad…) to Alchemists or Engineers, and the limited edition Lucky can play for Brewers or Masons. The Union are a law unto themselves and we’ll look at them later. But for the most part, everyone in your team for each game needs to come from the same Guild.

Just under the player’s name (I’m assuming even your average Butchers player can figure out what that’s for) is their Melee Zone. This will normally be 1”, but 2” isn’t uncommon. This is a player’s reach and it’s important because if a player with a 2” melee zone is 1.5” away from a player with a 1” melee zone, the player with the 1” reach is engaged but the player with the 2” is not. There are various things you can’t do whilst engaged such as charge, and being engaged also makes it more difficult to kick the ball or hit someone. If you can, you want a 2” reach, but 1” is not the end of the world.

The next box down is a row of stats, the first of which is Move. You have 2 numbers – the first of these is the player’s Jog move, the second is their Sprint or Charge move. A jog doesn’t cost anything, a Sprint costs you 1 Influence, and a Charge costs you 2 but you get an attack with extra dice as well.

Mash's stats - he's a big lad that likes to play football

It’s important to note that in Guild Ball, you only get to take one of Jog, Sprint or Charge (collectively known as Advances) and you can’t, for example, go 3”, make an attack and then carry on. You have to make your complete Advance and go as far as you’re going to go. There are other ways to move – skills like Shadowlike or plays like Acrobatics, or Dodge playbook results – but those may not be as reliable.

The TAC value is simple – this is how many dice you roll to attack someone. The higher the TAC, the more dice you get and therefore the better the model is at fighting. Mascots may have TAC as low as 1 or 2, a striker could be around TAC 4, whereas a vicious lunatic like Veteran Rage has TAC 7. Your average player is TAC 5.

Blackheart. Scourge of mid-table.

Next up are the kick stats, expressed as 1/6” or 3/8” (there are many variants, those are just examples!). The first number is how many dice you roll to make a kick, and the second number is how far the model can kick. A model that has zero interest in the ball could have kick stats like 1/4" or 1/6”, whereas your all-powerful strikers will be up at 3/8” or even 4/8”.

Nearly all kick rolls, such as passing and shooting, require a 4+ to be successful. The more dice you can roll, the more reliable the player will be with the ball at their feet (or hooves, or tracks, or paws). Distance is fairly self-explanatory – this is as far as the model can pass or shoot.

We come to DEF next. This is Defence – how hard is it to punch this model in the face. Your average big lug will be defence 3+. That means that for every dice rolled to hit them, a 3 or higher will be a successful hit. By contrast, a slippery winger will sit at 5+, meaning a 5 or a 6 is needed to hit.

After DEF comes ARM, or Armour. To hit an opposing player, you roll a number of dice equal to your TAC value, and every roll that equals or beats their DEF is a successful hit. If the player you’re trying to punch has an ARM value, you lose 1 successful hit for each point of armour. As an example, Veteran Rage (TAC 7) tries to hit Benediction (DEF 3+, ARM 2). He rolls 6 dice, getting 1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 6, 6. The 1 and 2 miss, so he has 5 successful hits. He then loses 2 of those because Benediction has 2 points of Armour, leaving him at 3 successful hits.

Basically armour makes a player more survivable and harder to hit, and can go some way to mitigating a low DEF value.

Lastly is possibly the most important stat, the INF stat. Of the two numbers, the first is how Influence a player generates for your pool, and the second is how many you can assign them.

Influence is one of the most important Guild Ball resources. You need Influence to attack, to kick, to trigger some characters plays... Basically, to do anything other than jog and then stand there, you need Influence. One of the most important skills you'll need to learn as a Guild Ball player is how to allocate Influence to make sure the right players can do what they need to do. And the sum total of Influence you have to go around is the sum of all the first numbers of the players in your team. 

For example, a Brewers lineup includes Esters (4), Quaff (1), Mash (2), Hooper (2), Stave (1) and Spigot (2). That means at the start of the turn, their player has a pretty average 12 Influence to hand out.

That second number for how many Influence a player can receive is quite important too. It sets out just how much you can expect them to achieve, and is also used to kerb the stronger players. The likes of Boar and Rage, who can charge for free and keep attacking if they hit, are restricted to only being allocated 1 Influence per turn. 

This is also a restriction on how many Character Plays you can use in a turn. Some Character Plays can be triggered by spending Influence, and if the play costs 2 Influence and the player can only be allocated 4 Influence, it means that play can only happen twice - don't go planning on a third because it's not possible.

After all the stats are two lines of funny coloured circles - this is the playbook. I'm not going to go too in-depth on the playbook because frankly, I could be here years and this blog post is already turning into an essay! 

The advice I will give you however, is look at the first 2 columns on the left. This will give you a pretty clear idea of what the player is about. If you look at the Farmers Captain Grange, he has a Momentous (a coloured circle indicates that the play also generates Momentum, which is a Good Thing) Knockdown on 1 successful hit, and a Push on 2. This is indicative of his role as a brawler - he likes to sit in the scrum and knock over opposing players or shove them around to where his mates can reach them.

If we look at Mist, he Tackles the ball on 1 success, and has a Momentous Dodge on 2. His role is a striker - get the ball, evade retribution and disappear to go and shoot on goal.

Translations for the symbols - a number is the amount of damage that playbook result will deal. T is Tackle, KD is Knockdown. < means Dodge, so the player making the attack gets to move 1". << is double Dodge, so that's 2 separate 1" moves. > is Push, so the target player gets moved 1" by the attacking player, and >> is double Push meaning 2 separate moves. > < isn't a disappointed emoji, it means Push Dodge. This means you Push the target player 1", then Dodge the attacking player 1". 

It is possible for a result to include separate results - as you can see from Esters' 4th columns above, she can do 3 damage and a double Push, or deal 2 Momentous damage and a Knockdown.

The Guild Ball symbol links to Character Plays, as touched on before. If we use Brisket's Dirty Knives as an example, this play can be triggered either by spending 2 Influence (the CST value for the play), or by hitting a Guild Ball symbol on the playbook. The playbook essentially offers a discounted Dirty Knives that doesn't need to roll to hit the target - if you spend 1 Influence to make an attack, you can trigger the play on 3 successes rather than spending the 2 Influence and rolling dice. 

Again, in the interests of not wasting years of people's time, I'm not going to sit and go through every potential combination of Character Plays. The vast majority are self explanatory, such as Super Shot on Brisket's card, which makes her an even better Striker. 

Right at the bottom of the card are a players' wound boxes. This is how much damage a player can soak up before they get taken out of action. To cut a long story short, the more boxes, the tougher the player and the more effort required to put them on the sidelines. 

Veteran Katalyst has a frankly ridiculous 29 wounds - it takes a lot of damage to put him down. You can put these players into the front lines and as long as you don't take any stupid risks, you can be fairly confident that they'll still be there next turn.

Compare and contrast to Siren's 10 wounds. This is not a tough player - this is definitely someone that wants to be a very long way away from where the pain is being handed out! They will either want to be away scoring goals, or hiding just behind the main scrum under the protection of bigger models. 

Hopefully, at the end of this epic, you've started along the path of understanding what the stat cards actually mean in practice. I appreciate that this information is in the rulebook but I hope that by adding contrasting examples, that it's a little easier to understand and relate to!

Ask Singled Out Andrew. This is a thing.

Until next time...