Unboxing: Guild Ball Mystery Box

In early August, and probably in response to how Dark Souls has been received, Steamforged Games had to move to a bigger warehouse. As a way to celebrate - and I guess to clear out some older stock - they offered up a Guild Ball Mystery Box, which would provide a variety of items at a large discount, including two random six player teams.

I'm a fan of Guild Ball, even though it is a game I haven't played often enough - for a start, it is the only game where I can say I have a 100% win record against Jamie Perkins¹. I've currently got two teams, in various stages of WIP, in the form of the Mason's Guild and The Union, and had my eye on the Hunter's Guild and Farmer's Guild² down the line.

As a result, when the Mystery Box came up I was happy to take a punt on it - with eight Guilds on the market I hadn't bought into, I was in with a decent shot at getting ones I didn't own at this stage, which would give my collection some variety. The box turned up recently, so I figured people may be interested in whether it was a good move or not...

Just the one box, honest - which came with added packaged air!

When it arrived, the box was a little dinged around the edges, but no more than you might expect for a package travelling through the British postal system. Once opened, it was clear that the contents were sufficiently protected to avoid damage, with packing material which would act effectively to absorb shocks.

Also, it is always fun to pop these small bags of air - though not as much fun as actual bubble wrap...

Some items start to become clear...

With the airbags out of the way, we can start to examine the contents. Two items are immediately identifiable in this picture - the Big League Campaign Deck and the box at the bottom. The latter is the new team packaging which was used for the first time with the Farmer's Guild³, which tells me straight off the bat what one of my teams are. The second team will be in the white box, so I'll have a look in there next.

The Big League Campaign Deck is required to run the Big League, a narrative league structure for Guild Ball. The rules for this are in the Season II rulebook, and it sounds interesting, though I would want to get some more games under my belt before giving such a thing a try.

The contents of the Farmer's Guild

The Farmer's Guild box is, as I mentioned before, the first of a new style of starter for Guild Ball. When I picked up the game, the starters contained three members of the team in metal, a ball token, and a bunch of packing peanuts.

These new starters have much more than that - though they do cost a bit more than the old starters. However, you now get a full six player roster, a goal marker, a ball token (masquerading as a pumpkin, in this case) and some terrain, along with two sheets of card tokens. You also get the player cards in multiple languages, which I guess saves Steamforged Games some localisation work.

Having not encountered the new plastic models before, I was a little worried about how they might turn out. We've seen varying degrees of quality in plastics - and varying quality of plastic - in the recent past from various companies, after all. I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen in my quick look so far - no obvious mould lines, a hard plastic with a little flex on parts that might get caught by accident, and a crisp cast.

I also like the expansion to the starter set - building a goal marker, for example, could be tricky if you couldn't come up with an idea. Adding card tokens for effects they players have is handy, to make it easier to remember what's going on. And taking the team up to a full roster makes it a much better starting point for a new player, saving them needing to pick up several blister packs to need to start playing the game.

All in all, this looks to be a positive move, Steamforged Games - I approve.

The bear necessities...

The white box is the same packaging as normally used for the starter sets, so I was pretty confident this was my second team⁴. Once I fought through the foam peanuts, and laid out the little bags on the table, it became clear that I'd gotten the Hunter's Guild as my second team. Given what I said earlier, this is pretty awesome, and even more so because it isn't just the Season II starter set for the Hunter's - the two individual players which have been released for them (Chaska, and Seenah the Bear) were also included. I may have popped down to my LGS over the weekend to grab the Heralds of the Winter's Moon box to give me a full roster...

A quick calculation at this point would show I've already gotten over £135 of product at RRP before looking at the other bits in the box - heck, the Hunter's Guild starter alone is £50. However, there's more to look at in the big brown box, so let's do that.

The non-starter set elements. Quite a few of them, really...

As you saw earlier, there were quite a few bits and pieces in the box along with the two team boxes. In no particular order, we had:

• The Big League Campaign Deck
• Season III Plot Card Deck
• Chibi pins of Honour and Marbles
• Stat cards for a Captain and Mascot of the Hunter's Guild and Brewer's Guild with chibi-style art
• Two sets of dice, for the Farmer's Guild and Butcher's Guild
• A limited edition model - in this case, Rage, from the Union.

A useful spread of things, none of which it turns out I owned. I do have a couple of minor quibbles, though. While the product page has since been taken down - as they've finished selling the Mystery Box for now - it did say that both the dice and chibi art cards would match the teams you got. As it stands, I managed 50% hit rate, with one set each of cards and dice not matching the included teams.

I can understand this not happening for the chibi cards - the Farmer's Guild are a fairly new release, so they may not have had the chibi art cards for that team. However, there have been dice sets for the Hunter's Guild out in the wild for a while now - I was able to acquire a set from my LGS while grabbing the expansion box for the team. As I said, I don't find it to be a major thing - but if you say you're going to do something, you really should follow through with it.

Conclusions

Despite the slightly negative tone to my last comments there, I'm really happy with what I got in my Mystery Box. I've done some back-of-the-Notepad math, and I got over £200 of stuff for £50 - including the two Guilds I was considering starting next. Can't argue with that at all.

Would I order one if they came up again? Currently, I'd say yes, especially if the value proposition is as good - of course, the more Guilds you own, the greater the chance of getting a duplicate in a random draw.

If you're new to Guild Ball, an offer like this could well be a good way to get started - though I'd probably recommend the Kick Off set instead, if you're interested in either of the Guilds in it. If you're just after two teams, then this sort of box is a much better value.

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¹ - Yes, it was a demo game. No, I haven't played him at anything else. A win is still a win, OK?
² - I'm the son of a farmer. Of course I'm going to want to try out the Farmers Guild if given the opportunity...
³ - The second team to be using this style of set, the Blacksmith's Guild, aren't on general release until November, going by my LGS.
⁴ - That, and there was nothing else in the box which could've contained them - sometimes, I'm smart...