#soberoctober day 27: Guildhall

Another lazy evening…

After work a colleague introduced me to a new game, Guildhall.

Like many of my favorite games, it’s simple but deep. There’s one large shared deck, containing 30 types of cards - five colors and six guilds. Our deck was from the Job Faire expansion, containing Hunter, Peddler, Stonemason, Robber, Scholar, and Tax Collector guilds.

The basic objective is to play cards from your hand into your six guilds, trying to assemble five colors of a guild. If you do, you can convert the completed guild to victory points and start that guild over. Each card has iconography describing what it does. Tax collectors earn points, but the cost is, you must give an opponent one of your guildsmen. Scholars populate your guilds from the main deck.

When you play a card, it has effects that tend to add, remove and swap your guildsmen with the deck, the discard pile, your hand, opponents’ hands, and opponents’ guilds. You can’t play a card if you already have that card on the field, so it’s possible to end up with a hand you can’t play. In a nice touch, you can alway use an action to discard as many cards as you want and redraw up to six.

There’s plenty of interesting combos and sneaky ways to gain advantage over your opponents. I found myself spoiled for choice often, trying to calculate the best play out of a six card hand.

After that I went home and built my first 60-card Magic “Constructed” deck in a decade. It’s probably crap, since I’m just using the cards I’ve got in the past two weeks. It’s got a lot of flying pirates.