Lesson 23: Why I love Guild Ball

Welcome back, readers, to Crit the Books! This week, we’ll be taking a departure from our strategy articles, and look into the design decisions between one of my favorite games, Guild Ball. Guild ball is a game with a ton of deep strategy and is most definitely one of those games that is easy to learn but hard to master. It’s a super deep game of tempo, resource management, and planning ahead. It rewards familiarity with the game to a deep level. Honestly, Guild Ball is a game that I constantly adore from nearly every aspect; in today’s article, however, I’m going to focus on specifically the design aspects.

When Guild Ball is boiled down to the base parts, there are 3 things about the game that really draw me in. The resource system is Guild Ball is very deep and interactive, with multiple uses for the two main resources of the game. The complexity of the game is something that contributes to how easy the game is to learn and is a huge positive point for the game. Finally, Guild Ball brings to it a huge depth and that depth makes it an interesting game to play even after you have played hundreds of games.

First off, let’s talk about Guild Ball’s resource system. Guild Ball has 2 main resources: influence and momentum. Influence is given to you based on the models that you take in your team, and can be used to move further, make attacks, and use special moves on the character’s card called character plays. Influence essentially tells how much a model can do in a given turn. The other main resource is momentum, which is produced by characters selecting certain results from their attacks or succeeding on passes with the ball. It can then be used to remove negative conditions on models, move a model after one of the passes, make a shot on the goal, or heal the wounds off of a model.

Guild Ball, like many other games, is a game about resource manipulation and control. The fact that it has two main resources, unlike many games which only have one, adds a huge amount of depth to the game. In addition, those two resources play completely different. Neither one can substitute for the other, except in very specific circumstances. This, of course, does not touch on the numerous other resources in the game – wounds on models, activations of models, movement… Guild ball is rife with resources and engines to turn those resources into each other. The web of interactions that those multiple resources creates is core to Guild Ball, and I love that!

While Guild Ball has those multiple resources, learning the game is actually quite easy. All a player will need to memorize are the core rules to the game – which can be condensed into a roughly 20 page rulebook – and a few symbols on the cards. Those symbols are all reasonably self descriptive, and every model’s rules are on the card. Unlike games such as Warmachine/Hordes – with 12+ symbols to learn – or Warhammer 40K – with rules kept in a book that require multiple flips through the index to find – Guild Ball keeps its base rules simple and puts the majority of the rules on a model’s card.

In addition to this, Guild Ball is very accessible to new players, both on a rules side and a price point side. I have taught a number of players Guild Ball within 20 minutes, mostly because of the ease of describing what a model can do. They can move – either a jog or a sprint – and use their influence to make attacks, kicks, or plays. The win conditions in this game are easy as well. If you score a goal, you get 4 points, while each player dealt enough damage to be removed from the field will give you two points. 12 points is all you need to win! The basics of Guild Ball are super easy to understand.

The price point of Guild Ball is also very affordable. The game’s starter box, Kick Off, only costs $75, and contains literally everything you will need for a game – 2 teams, dice, a board, widgets, the whole nine yards. In addition, each team of 6 players costs between $60 to $80, making it very affordable for a player interested in a new team to pick them up. These low costs make the game very attractive for a player who is not previously invested in miniatures games, making it an excellent entry choice for a player new to the genre.

Do not fool yourself, however. Guild Ball is an intensely deep game that takes huge amounts of effort to master. As I mentioned earlier, the multiple resources at play in a Guild Ball game make every decision matter. Multiple games I have played have come down to the difference between a single result of an attack or a single misposition. The web of possibilities that happen as a result of the interplay of those resources and the different engines they power make the game incredibly deep. Even if both teams take the same models, the game can turn into an entirely different one because of one or two scatter rolls.

The other thing that makes Guild Ball difficult to master is how unpracticable the majority of the game is. While the first turn can be practiced due to the lack of interaction from your opponent, the ability of your opponent to make choices that directly impact your models – both their positioning and their ability to make certain moves – makes the game extremely interactive. There is not a single strategy in the game that does not have any kind of counterplay, and the different plays, traits, and playbooks on each character make the game incredibly deep and interesting.

When it comes down to it, Guild Ball is one of my favorite games because it obeys the classic adage of a good tabletop game – it is easy to learn, and hard to master. While the game’s base rules are not incredibly complex, they do create a deep well of possible interactions and engines. Mark Rosewater, of Magic: the Gathering fame, called the ability to create complexity out of simple pieces “elegance”. I cannot think of another miniatures game as elegant as Guild Ball, and that elegance is what keeps me coming back to the game and supporting it as much as I do. If you’re interested in small army skirmish games, or even miniatures games at all, I cannot recommend Guild Ball more.

A big thank you to my Patrons for this month: Alex, TicTac, and anonymous patrons. If there are specific subjects or concepts you’d like an article written on, I suggest you look at my patreon! For just $7 a month, you’ll be able to suggest article topics for me to write on.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 22: Bluffing

Readers! Welcome back to another weekly article at Crit the Books. This week, we’ll be going into depth on lying to your opponents. That’s right! It’s bluffing week. We’ll be talking about what makes an effective bluff, when to use those bluffs, and most importantly, when it’s worth it to go entirely off the rails and shock your opponent into handing you the win.

Bluffing is something that is core to any strategy game. Even in games where you cannot directly communicate to your opponent – games like hearthstone with limited emotes, for example – you can still maintain bluffing even with such simple things as gameplay or strategy construction. Bluffing is the art of making your opponent think that you are going to, or are able to, take actions that you are not planning on taking.

The actual mechanics of bluffing are very simple when it comes down to it – in heavy communication games, simply speak to your opponents about what you are going to do. A bluff can be as simple as telling your opponent, “Hey, if you move there, I’ll take your piece. Do you really want to do that?” or it can be as subtle as not playing a card that you could, to fool your opponent into thinking that you don’t have access to that card.

Presenting the potential of moves is a powerful tactic and is one that you can often use in limited communication games. As an extreme example, I would suggest watching a video by Disguised Toast, of hearthstone fame. In this video, Toast plays a deck where he removes a key combo piece from his deck, instead replacing it with more cards that generate him value throughout the game. However, and this is very important, he keeps in most of the combo pieces. By doing so, he fools his opponent into thinking that he has a potential instant win, and you will see in the video that many people will concede once part of the combo starts to occur. This demonstrates the power of potential moves.

The most important part of bluffing is to make sure that you can actually take the action that you are pretending you can. Nobody is going to fall for something like “If you take my piece, I’ll just immediately win.” It’s not possible, and your opponent is not going to play around that possibility. Sure, this kind of tactic might work on newer players or players that far overestimate your abilities, but that is more a failure on their part for being able to accurately estimate your potential actions than any great act of bluffing on your part. It is important to remember, however, that your opponent does not need to see you take the action. They just need to see the possibility of doing so! In the example above, Toast cannot actually play the game winning combo, but his opponent believes he could given the information that they have. This is very important!

There are times to break this rule, and those times are mostly when you have nothing to lose. Maybe you’re going to lose anyway, but that bluff will put you into a situation where you have a 2% chance of winning. Maybe your opponent falling for the bluff will give you another turn with which you can plan and try to stabilize the game – maybe get yourself back into the game! At these times are when you can afford to make those ridiculous buffs that are almost outside the realm of believability, but not quite.

Another trick to effective bluffing is to keep the risk/reward ratio in mind when you make moves. If the move that you are bluffing is potentially risky to you, or doesn’t stand to gain you much, your opponent might not worry about it, letting the action that you were bluffing happen since they don’t really care. This is a bad situation for you – you haven’t made the opponent waste any resources, and you likely haven’t gained much from the bluff either. However, if you can make a play that the opponent knows has the possibility of winning the game – attacking with a creature and bluffing the pump spell that would give them the loss, for example – they will often be forced to play as if the bluff was true, since the risk to them is too great!

There are a number of articles and opinion pieces on the power of bluffing out there, and I encourage you as readers to seek them out if it is something you are interested in. Bluffing is a very, very deep topic, and it is one that I do not think I can even begin to adequately cover in my weekly articles. However, it is a skill that is very important to learn and can guide you to victory even when you are far behind. It’s not all mind games – it is about knowing what expectations your opponent can have of you and playing on those to get you the win.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 21: Venues of Interaction

Another week is upon us, and that means another article here at Crit the Books! This week, we’ll look at a game design concept that I have found is core to knowing how to approach different matchups to your strategy. We’ll be talking about venues of interaction! Knowing how to interact with your opponent effectively is one of the most important things when you are playing games competitively and interacting with your opponent in ways that are inefficient or not helpful is the cause of many a loss. With that, let’s dive in!

While many games have interaction as a core part of their mechanics, not all strategies care about these methods of interaction in the same way. For an example of this, let’s look at Magic: the Gathering. The strategy we’ll be looking at is one that is popular in modern and legacy, and has left a mark on Magic’s future regardless of the fact that the core mechanic hasn’t been printed in a number of years. That’s right, folks. We’re talking about Storm.

For those of you who are not familiar, a Storm deck is a deck that plays a number of spells in a single turn, eventually able to turn those spells into a game-winning combo by dealing their opponent upwards of 20 damage on turn 3 or 4. Storm is one of the most polarizing strategies in the game, since it can often take a new player by surprise. In addition, there are very few ways to interact with the deck. Many colors do not have strong answers to storm, and perhaps have one or two soft answers. Storm, therefore, does not have many significant venues of interaction.

A strategy’s methods of reducing venues of interaction can vary heavily. We’ll continue to look at decks from Magic: the Gathering to discuss these different methods. Storm is special in that it takes advantage of two of the main ways to reduce the venues. First, it plays with a set of cards that have a limited amount of answers within the game. This is called answer limitation – it limits your interaction by using game components that you simply cannot interact with in some cases. Storm also limits venues of interaction by attempting to win the game as early as possible, ideally before the opponent has time to amass the resources and cards to interact with it effectively. This is timing limitation – it limits your interaction by reducing the amount of time that your opponent has to interact.

When playing your game, try your best to reduce the venues of interaction that your opponent has. If you have a plan that relies on your opponent not interacting with a specific piece that you will be using, wait as long as you safely can to implement that plan. By giving your opponent as little time to react as possible, you can increase the odds that your plan will go off. Similarly, it can be to your advantage to figure out what pieces of your strategy are the most difficult for your opponent to interact with and focus on using those to their best ability.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are playing a game of Magic: the Gathering draft. You are playing a Blue/White deck that has a number of fliers, and one or two hexproof creatures. You also have a few spells that can make your creatures larger or counter your opponent’s spells. If you are playing against an aggressive red/black deck that you notice has a lot of targeted removal, it can often be beneficial to use your flying creatures to block your opponent’s early aggression. The field will then be clear for you to play your hexproof creature and use that to win the game, since your opponent will not be able to remove it easily. You’ve limited your opponent’s ability to react to your plays by emphasizing threats that your opponent can’t answer. You’ve used answer limitation.

On the other hand, perhaps you will play against a green deck that has a number of large creatures that can profitably block your hexproof creatures but have a high mana cost. Here, you probably want to drop your fliers as fast as possible and swing in, keeping your opponent on the back foot and ideally defeating them before they have the time to play their large creatures. In this case, you’ve used timing limitation – you’ve done your best to make sure your opponent didn’t have the time to respond to you.

These are only basic examples, but you start to see the idea. If you can limit your opponent’s ways to interact with you, you will naturally find yourself in advantageous positions. Similarly, identifying the ways that you can interact with your opponent, and taking advantage of them, is key to finding yourself in a strong position in games. Interactivity is key and learning how to manipulate it in your favor is one of the best ways to put yourself at an advantage.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 20: The Mental Game

Hello, readers, and welcome to another week on Crit the Books! This week, we’ll be departing from our usual direct strategic discussion and move into something that is a little bit more abstract. We’re going to talk about mental pressure, and the idea of “playing your opponent.” While some people might believe that this is a “cheap” or “unsportsmanlike” method of gaining an advantage in the game, the truth is that every game, on some level, is a mental game. If you can make your opponent start to go on tilt, it will be much easier for you to win the game.

At the core of the mental game, in my opinion, is the idea that you are in control of the game. When you are in control of the direction of the game, you will find that you can manipulate your opponent into playing less optimal moves out of fear that you have a response to them. In general, players try to avoid making moves that they believe their opponent has predicted. This is typically because they believe their opponent will have a strong countermeasure to their move and will therefore not want to put the game into a state where those countermeasures will be effective.

Stay calm and collected. If your opponent believes you have predicted their entire gameplan, then you are in the advantageous position. Sometimes, in fact, you can convince your opponent not to make their ideal play by spelling it out to them. I can’t tell you how many times I have half-jokingly said something like “So you’re going to attack for lethal now, right?” and stopped my opponent from doing just that when I had no response. My relaxed attitude led them to believe that it was the wrong play to attack, even though it was the correct play.

Just like how you can bait your opponent into making suboptimal plays by predicting the optimal ones, you can also do the opposite. If you act surprised or taken aback by bad plays that your opponent makes, they will be more incentivized to make similar plays in the future. A simple, “Oh crap. I didn’t see that coming.” can go a long way against a lot of players. Maybe they’ll be more incentivized to commit more resources against a piece that you pretended was very important, when you have actually made game plans around that component being expendable. Maybe they’ll think they can make a similar move, planning on you not predicting a move that you actually know is coming.

These tips might seem to give you a very minor advantage. You might say that in many games, the amount of hidden knowledge is so low that your opponent can tell when you are bluffing. However, it is important to remember that there is a part of the game that is always unknown to the opponent: your thoughts. Your opponent will never have the exact same thought patterns that you have, and you can take advantage of that by making them think that you are ahead of them. Like I said earlier – you should always act as if you are in control of the game. Fake it til you make it!

Another part of the mental game is patterns and upsets. Patterns refer to the common sequences of play that you will develop naturally as you play a game. Many players believe that they do not fall into patterns, but I am here to tell you that they are probably very, very wrong. Every player has play patterns that are more comfortable to them. Upsets, on the other hand, are times when a player goes against the patterns that they have established throughout a game. Knowing when to foresee upsets, or create upsets of your own, is one of the things that distinguishes players who are experts at the mental game.

I read an article by a fighting game player the other day – Unfortunately, I can’t remember the article – that said that one of the most important parts of the neutral game is establishing those patterns and preparing to create upsets once your opponent has started to recognize those patterns. Using the times when neither player has an advantage to start to lay mental traps for your opponent is a very smart idea! I found myself immediately making use of that idea when playing games myself, letting myself create play patterns that my opponents could recognize, then letting them figure out strong responses to it and use those responses once or twice.

Once they had a counterpattern set up to deal with my pattern, however, I struck. I changed the way I approached my opponent, going for a path that they did not expect. Not only was I able to avoid their counter by doing so, but I was also able to predict their response, countering their counter. It can get ludicrously deep at some point, but what the idea boils down to is this: create patterns for your opponents to predict, then include upsets to surprise your opponents and take advantage of your opponent’s reaction patterns.

When talking to expert players of many games, you’ll often hear them talk about the flow of their opponents and disrupting it. In essence, this is what patterns and upsets are – it’s about taking the flow of your opponent’s game and turning it against them. This is the mental game at the core of it all: use what your opponent knows and thinks to turn the tides against them. Next time you play a game, try to identify patterns your opponent falls into and try to disrupt those patterns. You might surprise yourself!

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!

Lesson 19: Influence

Welcome back to another week at Crit the Books, readers! This week, we’ll be doing something similar to what we did last week – we’ll take an established strategic concept from a game, then distill it into its smaller parts and uses to try to apply it in other games. This week, we’ll be pulling a concept from the ancient game of Go, also known as weiqi or baduk. We’ll be looking into the concept of influence – what it means and how it can help your gaming improve.

Influence, in Go, refers to the potential impact a given piece can have in the game as a whole. It can refer to how difficult it is for a given stone to be captured, or how important the stone is to making certain groups unable to be captured. A stone’s influence also takes into account how much that stone helps you capture those of your opponent, or how it makes it hard for your opponent to score territory around that stone. In short, a stone’s influence is a rough measurement of how much it can affect the larger game state. A stone that saves a large number of stones has a high influence, and a stone that denies your opponent only a small bit of territory is a low influence stone.

For the purpose of applying the idea to other games, we’ll look at that first definition – how much a given game component can affect the larger game state. A component that the game will revolve around, and one whose fate will decide the course of the game moving forward, is a high influence piece. Even if a given piece ends up being important only once, it can still be a high influence piece if the game hinged on that piece’s position or even presence. An easy way to measure a piece’s influence is by asking how much of the game state it can directly impact.

When we are looking at a given game state and trying to analyze it, it is important that we not only look at the pieces themselves, but the influence that those pieces have. It is not enough to simply look at what those pieces are going to do this turn. What are they going to do next turn? The turn after that? Identifying which game components the game will center around is perhaps one of the most important skills that you can train when looking to improve your ability to comprehend the state of the game.

Just like identifying your outs, it is important to recognize that a piece’s influence can change drastically over the course of a given game. A piece that can be very aggressive early, but is fragile and easily answered, will have a lot of influence in the beginning of the game but much less influence as the game goes on. Similarly, components that look like they may not be very influential early can end up being very important later on in the game, as players’ resources dwindle and become harder to make use of.

When you can familiarize yourself with a component’s influence, you can also use that to present threats to your opponent. If you know a piece has the highest influence in a given area, you can use that piece to claim resources for yourself and threaten your opponent’s resources in that same area. For games where there is a free movement component, such as Warhammer 40K or Guild Ball, a model’s influence can be interpreted as an area around that model where they can impact the larger game. Oftentimes, influence and threat range are synonymous in games like this – the more areas a model can extend its threat and influence, the more influential that model typically is, especially in objective based play.

Also important is paying attention to the influence of your opponent’s pieces and how they interpret the influence of your own pieces. If an opponent thinks a piece is less influential than it is, they are less likely to spend resources on mitigating the effects of that piece. If an opponent overestimates a piece’s influence, they are likely to give up resources or efficiency to answer that piece. This will create an opening that you, the player, can exploit. At its core, this is what bluffing is – causing your opponent to misinterpret the influence of a game component.

Being familiar with the influence that a component has is also vital to planning ahead and making predictions in the game. By accurately being able to predict the way the game will go, you will be able to place yourself in better positions later in the game or force your opponent into disadvantageous positions. The manipulation of your piece’s influence hinges on your ability to accurately identify how much influence a given piece has.

Many of the metaphors and examples I’ve used are most useful in a tabletop or board game setting, but it is important to remember that these same theories of influence can be applied to card games as well. We’ll look at a digital card game as our example for this: Hearthstone. In Hearthstone, a 4/4 minion will have a large influence when played early – it is a quick threat that must be answered and will likely be able to influence the board state heavily. On the other hand, that same 4/4 minion will likely have a significantly lower influence on the board later on, since there will more easily be creatures larger than it or more powerful cards that can be played. Early on, it might be worth it to put more resources into getting the 4/4 on the board since it will be very influential, while later on you probably won’t want to make that 4/4 into a big resource sink.

Overall, influence and understanding it is something that will move your game to the next step if you master it. Try not to look as your pieces as what they are doing this turn, or what they are capable of at the immediate moment. Instead, focus more on what they can do and what they can’t do. That next step – thinking ahead and not in the present – will crystallize your strategies and strengthen them beyond what they are now. Know the potential of your components, and success will come your way.

As always, remember that it’s not enough to just hit the books if you want to win. You’ve got to Crit the Books!