Episode 36 - Guild Master

In this episode, we review the little heard of game Guild Master.  We're building up our guild structures and trying to make the best teams to go out into the world and fulfill all those adventurer contracts!  The person who builds the most fame will claim the title of Guild Master!  Listen to find out why Jake prefers playing with only 2 people and how Rachel needs to roll all the dices!

Game Info:
2-4 Players
60-120 Minute Playtime
Ages 13+

Board Game Geek Entry

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Transcript

Rachel: 0:00

I try it. I fail. It sucks. I get nothing for that turn.

Jake: 0:04

I mean, I prefer with two.

Rachel: 0:07

Really? Yeah. Because you just kicked my butt or what? Yeah. Hello, and welcome. I'm Rachel.

Jake: 0:31

I'm Jake.

Rachel: 0:32

And we're so bored. The Podcast where each episode we take a close look at a tabletop game and discuss our personal experiences with said game to help answer the question. Will this cure our boredom?

Jake: 0:44

That's right, we look at the mechanics complexity and replay ability in a game to determine if it's the perfect alternative, just say, picking up all the hedge and Bush trimmings you had so much fun cutting off with the hedge trimmer. But now your yard is just littered with thorns and you should probably pick them up.

Rachel: 1:00

That was me. I did that. I, I got the hedge trimmer working. And it was like, Oh, I'm powerful. But now I just have a bunch of thorns on the ground. I need to probably work on picking up yesterday. That's the worst part. Especially because they hurt like we've got gloves. But they still poke through my gloves. It hurts. And then the bin is full. But I'm picked up all the trimmings yet. So it's like weeks and weeks of filling up the green bin anyway. That's live. So before we get started, let's talk about our streaming. So we are back to streaming weekly on Wednesdays usually, I think we're going to miss it tomorrow because we're actually out of town. I know we just took a vacation. We had some time off. We weren't streaming for a couple of weeks. I know. Maybe we'll do it like Friday or honestly, I'm not sure. Because we're recording this a week in advance. And I don't know what next week looks like. But we streamed last week, which is tomorrow for us in reality true. Well,

Jake: 2:11

we are getting back to a more regular schedule. Sorry. This has been a busy busy time. Let's put it that way. Yeah, speaking of streaming, I am also streaming on Twitch. I also took a break from that while on vacation. But I am getting back to that more regularly. Lately I've been playing slay the spire and Legend of Zelda Windwaker. And that's pretty much it for now. But you can find me on Twitch at Naughty dock 541 Er that's twitch.tv/naughty Doc 541 and Aug HTTYD, OC 541. And you can find our streaming on Twitch as well. It is twitch.tv/so Bored podcast. That's S O Bo AR D podcast.

Rachel: 3:02

So what game are we talking about today? Chutes and Ladders? Yes, my favorite wit's end Wait, there is. Today we're talking about Guild Master. This is apparently a game that no one in the world has ever heard of. Because I posted a teaser for it last week, and I got a grand total of one reply. So one person who knew what this was. Normally I've got people guessing within minutes, and responding and all the different places that I post on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And this one is just lacking, I guess they don't have the popularity, which is also represented by the number of reviews that it has on BoardGameGeek, which we'll talk about. But today, I guess is just a learning experience for everyone gets to know a new game that no one has ever heard

Jake: 3:57

about, which I'm kind of bummed about because I really liked this game. It's good. Guild Master was created by Chris Antony, with art by Andrew Bosley Alexander, Mahalia Vick, and Amanda Orci. Yes, there, Scandinavia names and I am horrible at pronouncing these I'm sorry if I've butchered them. This is actually a relatively new game. This was released in 2020, by good games publishing. And we actually want to send a thank you to them because they reached out to us and asked us if we wanted a copy of this game to review. And that was early on in our podcast career, and we are just now getting around to it. But I'm very excited for that.

Rachel: 4:45

me. Like I saw a post in Facebook, and they said, Hey, let us know are you Well this person in let us know if you're interested in, in one or two of these games. And so I had said, I'm interested in Guild Master. But I'm not interested in this other game. And no one ever replied back to me. No one ever responded, I didn't think I was getting the games. And then they just kind of showed up both of them at our door one day. And so I felt a little weird about it. Like, I felt less obligated to do a review about it quickly. Because no one even bothered talking to me about it. So I'm just throwing that out there. If you're thinking about, like reaching out to a podcast, to have them review your games, like have a little bit of communication, and it makes it feel like you're a real person. That's all.

Jake: 5:46

I mean, this is definitely a real game, because we haven't, and we've played it, and I like it. Jake loses three points.

Rachel: 5:54

So what does that put him at? 31? Or 32? No, it doesn't matter, because we just made the same thing. But was he a 31? Or 32? It doesn't matter. Ah, you guys jinxed me. I was so far ahead. And now you're catching up. And

Jake: 6:12

now I'm not winning anymore.

Rachel: 6:17

Points. Okay, we're doing this. No. I knew it. I knew you were lying to me. You're you're not going to cooperate with me. I knew it. No, not at all. How would you describe Guild Master? Like how would you categorize it into game? Like type?

Jake: 6:38

It is a sort of worker placement, sort of auction? Sort of, what's it called when you have like a, like in crisis when you have actions that are taken in a specific order? I don't know how we describe that. But actions are taken in a specific order. I mean, it is definitely a strategy game. It's almost a Euro game, but there is dice rolling involved.

Rachel: 7:05

I actually have something to say about that later. But okay, we'll come back to that. Okay. So the goal of this game, your goal is to be the most famous guild or build up the most famous guild by building up Guild Hall establishments and upgrades, recruiting new adventurers and completing contracts. And this is the guild that you might think of like, I don't know, in Dungeons and Dragons, or like any kind of role playing game, the guild that, you know, has adventurers that go out and complete these quests and these raids and stuff. So you are kind of the guild leader? In this situation?

Jake: 7:43

I think of Skyrim. Okay.

Rachel: 7:45

Honestly, I think of wow, I think like a collection of people that go out and like raid some dungeons or some raids,

Jake: 7:53

that's what I think you would.

Rachel: 7:55

So the board is a long rectangle, kind of similar to arc Nova, but not quite as long, it's

Jake: 8:02

a little shorter. is probably like half the size of arc Nova. Ah,

Rachel: 8:08

yeah, yeah, like 60%. Maybe. On the left side, you have the round tracker, which is, you know, Nine Circles, I guess the represent various moon phases. The tracker itself represents different moon phases. So it's just a little flat token and one side, it's a full moon. On the other side, it's a half moon. And then on the board, every third round is a blood moon. And these just represent different different phases, different like scenarios, different environments in which your adventures might have different abilities that can trigger. So your adventures could have a sun symbol, which they can just do that ability at any time at any round. Or they might have a full moon, a half moon or a blood moon, and say like something that they can do, specifically only on those rounds. And then right next to the round tracker. So taking up about half of the board on the left side is the adventures that you're available to hire. There's kind of two rows of that with three slots each. At the very top, you'll have two to three slots filled with adept adventures, that depends on how many players you have, you might leave one of those slots blank. And then on the bottom row, you'll have two slots for heroic adventures and one for legendary adventures. And so these get stronger and have like more abilities, higher dices, higher dices, more dice that they can roll on skill checks, etc. And usually they're like round abilities become more powerful,

Jake: 9:51

the higher up you go. So as Rachel said earlier, the adventurers will have a oftentimes have a power that is based on the face of them And or the sun, which you can do it anytime. numbers associated with the different skills determine how many dice you can roll to attempt those skill checks or those quest types. So there are might skills which is indicated by a red X charm, which is a yellow harp spirit, which is an orange fire, which I don't know. I mean, okay, I would do like a holy book. But that's just me. Oh, Arcane is like a Purple's pentacle necklace, or a purple necklace. It's

Rachel: 10:31

not actually a pentacle. It's not a pentacle. It's got six sides to the star.

Jake: 10:36

So it's actually a Star of David. And then it's not Guile, which is indicated by a green hood with some eyes underneath the hood. And then logic, which is a blue book.

Rachel: 10:52

Yeah, next to the adventures in the center of the board are on the center, right of the board, is the contracts. And so again, we've got different levels of contracts we have common, which are the easiest, Next Level is heroic, and the next level is legendary. The only real difference in those I think, is just the skill checks that they require. Although I feel like as you go up, like in higher difficulty, there's more chances of those events to be at the bottom that and you get better rewards. Oh, you definitely get better rewards. Yes, you

Jake: 11:28

definitely get from doing the more difficult ones. Yes. And the contracts, those are the quests that your guild members are going to go do.

Rachel: 11:36

Yes. And then off the board, kind of just off to the side, you have those various different contracts. So that's where you have like the decks for each of those, the board starts out with just common contracts. But as you complete them, like the person who completed them gets to choose what kind of contract fills the spot that that previous contract was taking up. So you can choose to add heroic or legendary after completing the common ones.

Jake: 12:06

All of those things that we have just described are the majority of the orders. So there's a couple other ones. But those are what we call orders in this game. These are your worker placement slots, for lack of a better word, because we're going to use that word order in the next little bit. So I wanted to kind of clarify, that's what we're talking about.

Rachel: 12:25

Yeah, the whole concept of the game is that like you are managing these adventures that belong to your guild, and splitting them into teams and sending those teams out to fulfill orders AKA, like complete tasks or,

Jake: 12:41

or hire adventures or Yeah, by builders to upgrade your guild, depending on what you know, you're you're giving them orders just like your boss. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so

Rachel: 12:54

off to the side of the board, you've got the contracts. And then you also have your additional upgrades that you can do. So you have your core upgrades. Everybody starts with a level one stables, which controls the number of orders that you can fill per round. And at level one, you can only fill to level one mess hall, which controls the number of adventures that you can assign per team, which is also limited to two at level one, and a bar, which gives you income at the end of the whole round. And again, that starts at two. So there are level two and level three upgrades for each of those off to the side that can be purchased. There are also skill upgrades, which can kind of be purchased at the same time as the core upgrades. And these give you like training rooms is how they're described in the rulebook. So those allow you to either re roll two dice for a specific skill check or change one dice to a five for a specific skill check. And you can have up to four of those types of upgrades. Lastly, we have the prestige upgrades. So these are a unique upgrade that grant you extra points at the end of the game for various circumstances. And that's limited to one per player.

Jake: 14:14

Each player in this game also has their own personal board. This has a couple of different things on it. First is our guild upgrades. These are where core and skill upgrades are placed. And this is public to everyone at all times. So everybody should be able to see what upgrades you have and what ones you don't the order board however, it's like a four by four grid where you're going to be assigning these teams and giving them orders on what team should do what on this order board you have order 1234 This is the order that you want these to be fulfilled in. So if your number one priority is to upgrade your Guild Hall you would want to put a team to purchase builders in slot one On. Next, if you wanted to hire a new hero, you would put that into order number two. So this four by four grid, like I said, is where you're going to be sending your current heroes to go out and do these things. During the first phase of the round is hidden behind kind of a DM screen, if you're familiar with what that is, while you're assigning these teams, their tasks. And once everybody is done, it's all revealed at the same time, so nobody can change what they want to do when, because there is kind of a bidding element to this game. Now, the phases of the game, the start of the round is, first you need to announce any events, like Rachel said, some of those contracts will have events attached to them. For example, hiring heroes might cost less gold this round, or nobody will be able to fulfill contracts from their hand. Some of those things are attached to specific contracts that may or may not be publicly

Rachel: 16:04

on the board. If it is a Bloodmoon.

Jake: 16:07

For this round, each person draws a private contract of their choice, they can choose a common heroic, or legendary. The plot phase, this is when you're going to use plot abilities. So at the bottom of your adventure cards, sometimes they will have an ability that says during plot phase, do this, for example, the last game I had during a Bloodmoon on the plot phase, I could pay to gold to gain to fame, and fame in this game is interchangeable with victory points. That's that's what you're tracking really. During the plot phase, everybody should also announce their gold totals.

Rachel: 16:48

This is kind of a silly rule. In my opinion. I don't know like we totally forgot to do that, while we were playing our last game,

Jake: 16:56

I never do it. I don't know why that's the thing. I don't think it should be. That's my opinion. Next is the order phase. This is when you assign your team's to complete specific tasks and what order you want them to be completed in. This is the time that nobody should see what you want to do. And when you want to do it, because there is this kind of betting and risk versus reward system where you want to go first to do these things because some of these orders can only be completed once. For example, if you and another player are trying to complete the same contract, the person who puts that on the order list first or in the highest priority slot, they will get to do that contract. If they succeed, then the next person who wanted to attempt it as well, well, they're out of luck, that one is not available, there are other things they can do to kind of recoup that last bid. But it does behoove you to balance that out. So that's why this is hidden so that nobody sees what you want to do when you want to do it. During the order phase, you're going to assign those teams, like I said, and money must be assigned to the team if they're going to hire builders or recruit new adventures. For the builders, you can put as much cash on there as you want to, you don't have to use it all. But if you are short for the amount that the builders currently cost, you will not be able to hire them. However, if you are going to hire a new adventure with your team, any gold that you place on that will be lost. So if you went to, to hire an adventurer that cost 10, and you put 12 gold on there, you don't get to keep your two leftover, that actually still goes to the adventurer, or to the bank, really, you still have to pay that amount of money. team sizes and number of orders that can be completed are limited by the mess hall and stables respectively, and their specific upgrade level.

Rachel: 19:07

And I don't know I just want to point out that like it is really important to make sure that you allocate the right amount of money, quote, unquote, for each of these teams, because you know, one, that money is not available in your treasury during that time when the that team is off doing whatever task, it's not available. If something else comes up and you need it. It's not available to be interchanged. If you're both going and hiring a builder and you want to try and recruit an adventurer, like you can't just have a big pool of money and like whatever you don't spend on the builder you spend on the adventure, right? It has to be split up and decided beforehand how you're going to do that and what you're going to allocate.

Jake: 19:47

Yes.

Rachel: 19:48

The action phase is when you actually go and perform these actions. So you remove your screen so that everybody can see what everyone's orders are and you're going to resolve everything in this order. So like, everyone's going to do order slot number one. And it's going to go from hiring builders, to then recruiting adventurers to then completing contracts that are on the board. And finally, and was what we call wandering or completing private contracts that you have personally. And you're gonna go through all of that for order number one, and determine who gets what and who did what first, and then you'll move on to order number two, and you'll do all that again. And so this is where we can start to see conflicts where you've got two or more people who have chosen the same task to be performed in the same order slot number. So there are different ways of resolving this depending on which action you're trying to do. So if multiple people are trying to hire builders at the same time, then you're going to roll a skill check based on the skills the team you sent to hire the builders has. So you know, these are not just throw away team members, you should have a little bit of synergy or where they have some ability to roll dice in case there is a conflict here, the person who gets the highest role on that skill check will get to hire the builders first. And as you hire builders, it is actually going to increase the cost of hiring more. So the next highest role we'll get to go assuming they have enough money, and then the next assuming that they have enough money. If you conflict when trying to recruit an adventurer, it's the person who sent the most money to hire that adventurer who gets to hire them. And that's where it comes, you know, into effect that you might want to send a little bit more than what it actually costs to hire that adventurer just in case you have to compete with somebody. If two people have sent the same amount of money, then you end up doing another role for that skill check to determine who hires them. If you're competing over completing a contract, this is where it starts to get kind of I don't know, interesting or crazy, you can actually discuss with the other player who was trying to do the same thing at the same time as you and try to decide if you want to cooperate or if you want to conflict on performing this contract, you can negotiate terms of how you would split up the rewards if you decided to cooperate. And then you have a little token in your hand that has like, it's got a green fist on one side, or like maybe it's supposed to be like shaking hands green on one side, and then it's like a red fist on the other side. So green indicates I want to cooperate and red indicates I don't want to cooperate. And so you negotiate and discuss your terminology, or discuss your conditions for cooperating. And then you kind of all both slam down this token at the same time and reveal to see well do they actually even want to cooperate or not? That's where it can get kind of fun. If you decide to cooperate, it ends up being pretty easy. You both just pull your dice rolls together and you slaughter the contract almost definitely. And you have to split up the rewards as previously discussed. If you decide to conflict or if one person decides to conflict when the other decides to cooperate, then you both attempt the contract individually. But with a penalty check or with a penalty to your skill check. So basically the number of dice that you are rolling for that skill check, you have to add that number to the skill, which did happen between me and my sister while we're playing this game and resulted in her barely not meeting the skill check and me barely meeting it. So yeah, it was interesting. So that's completing a contract. And then the last action is just wondering. So this is something that you can always do. This is kind of a fallback action if you fail to do one of your other actions or someone gets to it before you. So you can always just do a skill check for whatever team you sent. And there's a table that defines how much fame and money that you get. For those roles. It's usually pretty low. It's not going to really completely encompass or cover what you lost or what you missed out on. But at least it's something this is also an opportunity to complete a private contract instead of wondering you can attempt to to complete one of the ones that you have in your hand.

Jake: 24:45

I have a question about that. Because I don't remember, if let's say I wanted to complete a contract, somebody else beat me to it. Can I complete one from my hand instead? Or does that have to be predetermined?

Rachel: 25:00

When you miss out on performing an action, because someone else did it first you have the opportunity to wander or complete a

Jake: 25:07

private con. Okay, so you can complete a private contract. Yeah. Okay, that's

Rachel: 25:11

cool when someone else takes it from you, if you fail at completing a contract, that's not saying, yeah,

Jake: 25:18

that is different. That means you, you just failed your team last. Yeah. Yeah. So after everything has been completed in alphabetical and numerical order, according to everybody's order charts, 123, and four, everybody now clears their teams from their queries, their, their specific order assignments, and brings that back into their their hand, or they're available cards for their team. Every person gains income from their bar. Depending on how much it's been upgraded, that tells you how much gold you get. You then reset the builder cost tracker, so it will go back down to the lowest amount. If it is a blood moon, and you finish that round, you will then remove all adventurers who are face up and all contracts that are faced up from the board, and then replace them. If it is not, you will just reveal any new adventures and contracts. And you will move the round marker down and flip it to the next moon phase. And that's the game, the end of the game was triggered by the end of the ninth round. So it's not somebody needs to complete something or do something specific. The game just last nine rounds. After nine rounds, you add up all your points or your fame obtained throughout the game. And then you can also get End of game points for what are called prestige upgrades. These are things that you can construct using builders that are all different in how they will get you end of game points. And then all of your gold also is worth victory points at a five to one ratio. And once you calculate who has the most fame or the most victory points, that person wins, game over. No, no, no. No, no. I think Squeenix is pretty litigious. So I don't know about that.

Rachel: 27:17

Well, we've already been sued by Disney. I think there was one other one I don't remember. I don't know. Anyway, so Jake loves this game. Let's talk about it.

Jake: 27:29

I do actually really like this game.

Rachel: 27:31

Tell us why.

Jake: 27:32

I don't know why. Because you and I were talking about this. And it does feel like there could be more to this game. And I typically don't like games that are dictated or depend on dice rolls. And this one kind of does when you're going to complete the contract. But there are viable ways to get victory points in this game. And they're not always dependent on contracts. For example, each time you purchase a hero, they have a victory point value. So you could in theory, just continue to buy heroes, each upgrade to your Guild Hall and upgrade skill gives you victory points as well. So if you just beef that up, and then continue to buy heroes, you could in theory, I mean, you would make amazing teams. But you could get victory points that way. And I like to do that. I like to just buy heroes because I think they're cool. Like they have cool artwork. Each one looks individual and different. And they all have unique abilities.

Rachel: 28:36

So I like it. I don't know. Okay, yeah, I guess I never thought of that as a viable strategy.

Jake: 28:44

I mean, you need to complete some contracts like, but once you have a few amazing heroes, it makes those contracts easy. But I like the it's almost like an auction for your bidding for these worker placement slots by saying, Well, this was most important to me. So I need to do this one first. Or this one's most important to me. So I need to do that one first. So if you kind of know what your opponents want to do, you can kind of either beat them to it by either paying more money or having a stronger team. Or if everybody's trying to do the same thing. You can just back off and say, Okay, well, I'm gonna go do this stuff over here instead and get resources for the next turn

Rachel: 29:31

and build that up. That is smart, because I think so in the last game that we played, we were playing with my sister and her husband as well. And there was a lot of competition right in the beginning for I don't know, the first two or three rounds with builders, trying to hire builders so that people could upgrade, you know, the number of orders that they're filling upgrade the number of people that they're sending upgrade the amount of money that they're making, and I kept getting really crappy roll on that, and that's where it's like, I hate the luck component of this. And, you know another thing that we played incorrectly. I'm going to talk more about this, I think in the easy versus difficult section. But the setup is confusing. And so there's one portion of the setup that always kind of gets me. And that caused us to not make all of the skill upgrade components available when they should have been. So I had a team that I kept sending to go try and do builders and they would roll three dice, and I'd get a crappy roll. And then I didn't have the skill upgrade to be able to like reroll the dice or set one of those to five or anything, because we were playing wrong. And that wasn't a purchasable thing that we played. So there's that. But then I'm also like, trying to, I don't know, complete the contracts and stuff with this other team that I think does better or, you know, has more dice to do that. So I'm not good at prioritizing, I guess. But I do feel like something is missing from this game. And I've been thinking about this for a while, I can't quite put my finger on it. One idea that I came up with was that I feel like the contracts should be more interesting. They are basically just a skill check. Or like, there's a couple of different options for different skills that you can do. And this is the number that you need to roll. And then this is the bonus that you get. It has a title that says something about what you're doing. But honestly, I don't know if anyone ever reads that. But there's room on the card to make that more interesting. Put a little bit of artwork or do something to draw attention to that title. So it's like, Oh, I'm not just rolling the dice for this Guile skill check. No, I'm actually I'm trying to sneak into, you know, somewhere and get evidence for something right, like, tell a story with it. I think that would make it more interesting. I don't know if that's the oomph that it means to kind of bring it up to that next level. But I feel like that would be helpful. What do you think?

Jake: 32:12

I think that that would actually be awesome. I was just thinking, as you were saying that the cards are missing something, either a short little story, or artwork, or both. I think Saif did a pretty good job of this. A lot of them are repetitive in sight. But just the cards themselves have some really nice artwork on them.

Rachel: 32:34

And the other thing that I was thinking, which I said I'd come back to was, okay, this may get controversial guys. Don't hate me. This feels like it wants to be a Euro game. And what I mean by that is, I feel like it's lacking some of the silly goofiness that comes with typical dice, rolling games, Euro games, I feel like they can stand on their own being a little bit more serious, like Ticket to Ride. That's the most classic Euro game example that I can come up with. It's about building trains around Europe. And there's not a whole lot more to it than that. Right? You're just building railroad tracks. And that's it. And it doesn't need to be more. Because what your games are about is it's about mastering that strategy. It's about saying, I did this last time, let's see if I can try and improve on that this time. Right? You can't do that with a dice rolling game. You can't do that with a game that is so heavily dependent on luck, even though they have these things that are like something that allows you to kind of regain some chance or you know, regain some control of that by Re rolling the dice or by setting one of the dice to a five. It's still luck based. And so I don't feel like it can have that very serious theme and like it needs to add something that's a little goofy or silly.

Jake: 34:14

Okay, so I'm gonna I'm going to ask you a couple general questions here. Okay, okay. How do you feel about games that reward you with victory points for dice rolls?

Rachel: 34:30

For getting good dice rolls? Yes. Those are certain types of games. Right? Those are games. Yep. My general preference is I think like you to have something that's more based on my skill level. It depends on what game we're playing right? If we're gonna play King of Tokyo, then like I have myself in my mind my mentality set up for like, this is a lock based game and It's gonna be based on dice rolls.

Jake: 35:02

Let me ask you, how do you feel about abomination?

Rachel: 35:08

abomination. Abomination is a Euro game until you try to bring the monster to life.

Jake: 35:18

Because it rewards you based on dice rolls, yeah. But it does have some of those same elements to mitigate luck. And there are strategies on how many dice to roll and when to roll. But it does still come down two dice rolls.

Rachel: 35:38

The difference is that I don't only have one opportunity to bring my monster to life in abomination. That's true in abomination. The first time I played the game, I waited way too long to start rolling the dice, and trying to bring things to life. And, you know, I realized that's a mistake, don't wait that long, you have to start trying to do it earlier. And you don't have to bring everything to life at once. Like you bring the individual pieces together over the course of multiple rounds. Once I figured that out, it's fine. Because you know what, it's unlikely. And you have the ability to control the likelihood of destroying parts of your monster by controlling how many dice you roll. So you have some control over that. And even if you do damage, and you don't manage to bring something to life, if you don't destroy it, it can be fixed. So like, it's not just, I tried once I had one roll, I failed, I'm lost forever. Right? Right, Guild Master, I have one skill check, I try it, I fail, it sucks, I get nothing for that turn, I'm rewarded with nothing. And the only possible chance of recovery is hoping that that contract or whatever will still be there next round when I come back to it, but I've lost a whole round, where other people are gaining points. And I'm not now because I failed a dice roll. Yes. I mean, I understand that. So I don't know, it's the difference between, like determining if you're successful or not. Now in this one instance, and this one round, or is it accumulation of everything that you've tried to do throughout the entire game added up at the end?

Jake: 37:25

Okay, I just wanted to point out the fact that we love abomination, which does have those dice rolls with rewards.

Rachel: 37:34

And that is a I know, we're we're supposed to be talking about Guild Master. No, no, we're talking about abomination. That is a, like feedback that people have given on the game. And those those variants also add to controlling a little bit of that luck and not having so much of it dependent

Jake: 37:53

on luck. Yeah, I get them. Okay, So suffice it to say we both like this game. For me. It's way more fun with more people. I mean, I prefer with two. Really? Yeah. Because you just kick my butt or what? Yeah. No, but it was more fun with more people. Because I think three would be the best four, it feels like it's so competitive for slots. So I think three would be the best.

Rachel: 38:27

I don't know, I liked it. I really liked it at four at two. It's kind of boring. I know you really liked the game. I'm sorry. But it too, it feels like there's no reason to compete for anything, there's no opportunity to cooperate on anything. We both are just kind of off in our own little worlds doing our own little things. And like we don't have to interact at all. I like it much better at for people,

Jake: 38:54

I get that. So let's go on to the expansions and add ons for this game. This is going to be a pretty long section, because there are none. So next, we're gonna go to the Board Game Geek rating. This game is rated at a 7.4 of 253 ratings. We have not rated it yet. I don't know if it go up to 7.5 or 7.3. But as we said earlier, this game is not really available in many places. You can't buy it on the Amazon, you have to buy it at a few specific websites. And we got it from the publisher for for free.

Rachel: 39:35

It is at Walmart supposedly I've never seen it at Walmart. I mean, I'll go shopping for board games at Walmart. I did a search earlier and I found it on miniature market and I found it at like Walmart and some other like random places that are maybe like individual like game stores friendly local game stores. But 253 ratings is so low Like, this company just has not done a good job of marketing this game. Advertising this game like No, no one's heard of it.

Jake: 40:09

Yeah, I was looking at some of the other games that they have on BoardGameGeek. We won't talk about them or go into what they are right now. But not many of them have many reviews already. So I'm not sure if they just don't market very well, or advertise very well. But I think this game is is fine. I think a 7.4 is honestly a pretty accurate rating. I'd probably say a seven. If I were to go into BoardGameGeek and rate it. But there's no problem. It's there's no glaring issues. There's some minor gripes that we've talked about earlier, but nothing major, nothing that says like, this game is not playable. I don't understand why it's not performing poorly. It's just not being well received. Yeah, well, it's just not being received. I don't know why. And I'd be interested to find out. If any of you have played this game, or heard of this game? Let us know what you think about it. Because, you know, 253 ratings is not a lot. I think this is the least number of ratings we have seen on a game that we've gone through. Yeah,

Rachel: 41:13

I'm interested in like, if there's anybody who listens to this episode, and thinks that sounds like a fun game, you know, go check it out. And then tell us what you think of it. And, you know, maybe we can help kind of get this game off the ground a little bit more, because I think it does deserve more attention than it has gotten. So I totally agree with that. All right, we're gonna go into our rating section now. First, we have easy versus difficult. This is basically, how is the rulebook? How easy are the rules to understand how easy is this for a new player to come and pick up? You know, how often do you have to go back to the rulebook and look, you know, look something up or like, interpret the rules. So I think that this rule book is written pretty poorly. Maybe that's part of why it's not received so well. The game sounds so much more complicated from reading the rulebook than it actually is. And normally, when I'm filling out, like our outline for each of these episodes, I'm going through the rulebook and kind of just putting it in my own words, in the outline, but I'm following like the same direction and like, order that everything is written in the rulebook. For this, I totally went off script and wrote it myself, because it doesn't make any sense to me, the way that the rulebook is laid out, like they don't talk about like, the different phases of play until like page 11, or something like that. I had also mentioned that I was going to talk about something in the setup, that always ends up being very confusing for me. So in order to determine your starting teams, your novice adventures that you have in this game, they have a really obscure way of kind of figuring that out. They say you've got, you know, all these tokens for the different skill upgrades that you can have. So you've got six of those, lay it out in this specific layout, it has to be looking like this. And then depending on how many players you have, you can either pick one row, one column or two rows from that layout. I don't know why it has to be that way. I feel like you could just pick two or three or four random skill upgrades, the way that it's laid out, doesn't seem to have any kind of balance,

Jake: 43:44

I think it's based off of the team that you're getting. So you want your team's upgrade. So for example, in pretty much every single game we've played, I somehow ended up with the team that's based in Guile, like that's their strong suit. So I want the Guile upgrade to be available for purchase, so that I can actually upgrade that

Rachel: 44:06

we played it wrong. So the thing what's available for purchase later on is not it's not a thing that's applicable, but it determines what your starting team is, we could randomly select one of those tokens and you could get guile. And that will give you the guys that are Guile based for your starting team. Okay, that's what determines your starting team. It's not, I want to be able to have that upgrade. It's like, that's how you figure out who your novices are. So I don't see why it has to be like these specific rows and columns, the way that it's laid out. There doesn't seem to be any reasoning behind that. And the way that it's worded in the rulebook, it's just very confusing about how you follow that based on the number of players that you have. And the reason that we played it wrong is because say We're playing for with four people. So you take two rows from that. And then you shake those up and you randomly hand them out to people. That's their initial starting upgrade. And that's the team that they get to start with. And then it doesn't tell you what to do with the other ones. What do you do with the two tokens that you didn't select? It doesn't say, yeah, it doesn't. So I think we made an assumption or jumped to the conclusion that Oh, those are just not available for purchase. And that's not correct. There's nothing that says they're not available for purchase. So I think the better assumption would be, everything's available for purchase, but it's just very poorly written and executed. And I don't see any purpose behind it just seems to be complicated for the reason of wanting to be complicated.

Jake: 45:53

Okay. I mean, that makes sense. When you were saying about the rulebook not being well written. I was thinking about the DM screen that they give you to obscure during the order phase, that honestly, on the back of it has so much information that if you really paid attention, and you were, and you're very familiar with board games, kind of like this, you know, more advanced board games, you could probably just look at that, and get a very good idea of how to play the game.

Rachel: 46:25

That's what Matt did. Yeah, I mean, so like, I'm flipping through the rulebook trying to look up something. And he's like, Oh, it says right here on the DM screen, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, okay. I mean, that was way more well organized, and better put, then, this entire rulebook that's way over written. Anyway, I think the game itself is really not really not difficult to learn. If you have someone explain it to you, if someone already knows the rules, it's really not. It doesn't play as difficult as it sounds in the rulebook. But I have to knock off points for the way the rulebook is written. That's fair. So I'm gonna give it like a six, I think on the difficult scale,

Jake: 47:08

I think, yeah, I was gonna give it a five or six as well. The next rating section is simple versus complex. If you're not familiar with our show, in our rating section, you might be confused as to why simple versus complex is different than easy versus difficult. But this section is really based on strategy on how to use the mechanics to win the game, how many viable strategies are there for the game, and I feel like this game has some viable strategy. And there's definitely a balance on using the mechanics like when to bid, how much to bid, what kind of teams to send, but I do feel that the strategies, or the number of strategies is limited. While you may be able to kind of mix and match what you focus on you do I feel have to kind of diversify your portfolio. In each game, I was kind of talking earlier about only focusing on purchasing heroes. And I don't think that that is actually a very viable strategy. Because at most, I think you get seven victory points for the legendary ones, and they are expensive, yeah, it's just, I

Rachel: 48:14

don't feel like for your money, you're not getting the fame, you're not getting the points that you really need out of that.

Jake: 48:22

So I do feel it's a little bit limited, but I do feel like there's definitely some strategic elements, especially with your orders, and what you prioritize, especially when you have more opponents and vying for those different order spots. So I will probably give it a six, maybe a five,

Rachel: 48:42

I was gonna say that, I don't feel like I did a very good job of like, adjusting my strategy from playing with just the two of us to then playing with four people, because there was a lot more competition. And you know, I lost out on several terms of not being able to build something. And that was kind of just a team wasted that I could have done something else with, you know, so I could have sent them somewhere else, I could have focused on something else. So there definitely is some nuance, I think, to the strategy. But at the end of the day, there's really only a couple of things that you can do. You can build and you know, add on to the structures. You can hire more adventurers, or you can go complete contracts. That's it. That's all there is. Yeah. So I mean, I think really, it's not complex enough to be a like point salad type of game. There are a couple of different places that you receive points from, but the majority of them are most likely going to be coming from your contracts that you're completing. Yes, I agree with that. So I agree. I think I'm gonna give it a five

Jake: 50:00

Okay, so yeah, we got a five, five and six. So I think we're on the same page there. Our last

Rachel: 50:06

reading section is wrote versus random. So this is just what makes each gameplay a unique experience, what randomization elements are there in the game. So we already talked about how there's a lot of dice rolling in this game, and how there are components that are really very luck based, and a lot of things that are kind of just up to that. You do have a little bit of mitigation that you can do for that. But I feel like this is still a fairly highly random game. I think I'm gonna give it a six. Okay, I think that's fair.

Jake: 50:43

I would probably also give it a six. There's a lot of cards that get shuffled there's, there's a lot of rolling of the dice for all your different skill checks, and then the contested skills. So I think it is pretty random. You can have an amazing team that you are rolling 10 dice, which is the maximum that you can do for a skill check. And you can get a crappy roll versus somebody who's rolling six, and

Rachel: 51:07

they can plan. It is possible. Although and statistically, less likely, right?

Jake: 51:13

It's improbable, but it is possible.

Rachel: 51:17

So one thing that I think is really cool about this game is that on the back of the rulebook, it actually has a table telling you the statistical chances of rolling X based on however many die, so it says how many dollars so you're rolling, and what's the skill trek, you're trying to reach the percentage chance that you will roll that skill check level is whatever, 54%. And I thought that was really cool. It's a neat addition. So that, you know, you can kind of figure out, okay, you know, I can take that into account. Like, if I'm rolling this, you know, on my own, should I conflict? Or should I cooperate with this person on this contract? And you don't have to be a mathematician to know what, or to figure out what the best option is? I thought that was kind of

Jake: 52:05

Yeah, I did like that. I thought I didn't actually notice it until Matt pointed it out. But I think it's cool.

Rachel: 52:12

Same, like I saw the table in the back, but I never looked at it close enough. And Matt was like, Oh, hey, look at this. You know what, that's actually really cool. I've never seen a game do that before. All right. Well, I think it's time to answer the question, Jake, would you rather play Guild Master than going out and picking up all the hedge in Bush trimmings that you had so much fun cutting off in the yard, but now they're just littering the ground with thorns? So you should probably just go pick them

Jake: 52:40

up? is turning the AC back on an option? Yes, please. I would much rather do that over anything. But if the AC is already on, I would much rather play this game to pick up a bunch of crap off the ground.

Rachel: 53:00

Just for our listeners to know, we turn the air conditioning off when we're recording because it just creates background noise. And it's nice to eliminate that but we live in Arizona, and it's

Jake: 53:12

hot. It is 10 o'clock at night right now. And it is 98 degrees

Rachel: 53:16

outside. Yeah.

Jake: 53:19

Today was 114 degrees.

Rachel: 53:22

Anyway, so yes, you prefer to play this game. That's great. So there you have it. That's Guild Master. Thank you guys so much for listening. As always, hit us up on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at snowboard podcasts. That's S O Bo AR D podcast. We love hearing from you. I love hearing what you guys are doing what you're up to any fun house rules that you have fun experiences you have playing this game, or maybe the fact that you just discovered this game and you're gonna go check it out. You'll also be able to find pictures and short stories of the games that we've been playing recently. And a lot of times I post things that are like, Hey, did you see this on Kickstarter? This looks cool. And you can just interact with us all things, tabletop gaming. You can also email us at We are so bored. That's w e a r e s o b o ar d@gmail.com. And make sure that you subscribe so that you receive notifications when new episodes are available. And if you leave a rating that's super helpful to us. It's super helpful to other people to find our podcast. And just you know, you could do that on Spotify now. Yeah,

Jake: 54:31

leave a rating. Yeah, that would be awesome. We also want to give shout outs to the people who knew that we were reviewing Guild Master based on the picture we posted last week. And there's only one of you so congrats to tabletop gaming deals on Facebook. Yep. Somebody knew somebody saw it this time. And we want to thank a&t podcast management for the editing of this episode. We just hired them as our new editors. They are professional podcast editors and can be fun found at eight N T hyphen podcast management.com. That's Alpha Nov Tango hyphen broadcast management.com.

Rachel: 55:09

Let us know how this episode sounds if you think it sounds amazing, then we can tell our podcast editors like hey, you guys are awesome. Yeah,

Jake: 55:17

yes. We also want to thank Michel Mims, the designer of our art. He is currently accepting commissions. So check him out at m i s c o SAR, a on Instagram, or on his website, Michel Mims. That's mi ch e l m i m s dot c ar rd.co.

Rachel: 55:36

And of course, check us out on Twitch. We are streaming regularly we're getting back to we're not streaming tomorrow. We're out of town. We're actually going to go see a live show of another podcast. So yeah, you know, got to share the love. But we will be back to a regular schedule. And you know, just hanging out and doing all the things. And Jake also streams, video games instead of board games video games. Yes. So we're both on Twitch. So that's twitch.tv/so board podcast and twitch.tv/naughty Doc 541 Nau gh t. Why do sci fi for one? Yes,

Jake: 56:21

I'm doing a lot of retro games lately. So come check it out. We have a good time on both streams. Alright, and that's it, folks. Thank you all so much for listening and we will see you next time. Bye bye.