1447: From the Game Shelf: Guildhall

Guildhall

Publisher: AEG
Designer: Hope S. Hwang
Released: 2012
Players: 2-4
Recommended Ages: 12+
Play Time: 30 minutes

Theme: Medieval/Dark Ages
Mechanics: Set collection, hand management
Randomness: High
Luck factor: Moderate
Strategy: Moderate
Interaction: High

Guildhall is a card game themed around the concept of you opening… well, a guildhall. Your guildhall will play host to a variety of different professions, ranging from dancers to assassins; farmers to traders. The aim of the game is to score 20 Victory Points through a combination of point cards and individual points, and in order to do so you’ll need to collect sets of professions. There’s six different professions and five colours of each.

The rules of Guildhall are simple, straightforward and easy to follow and all the special mechanics are depicted through simple icons rather than text. Once you have your head around what all these icons mean, play is quick and snappy, making this an ideal filler game.

How it Plays

On your turn in Guildhall, you can take two actions. Your options from each action are to play a card to the table, which may trigger its special ability; to draw cards into your hand; or to use a completed “chapter” of your guildhall (all five colours of a single profession) to purchase one of the victory point cards, five of which are on offer at any one time. You are not allowed to play a card that is identical to one already down on the table — if you already have a red Dancer down, for example, you are not allowed to play another red Dancer, but you may play a blue Dancer instead if you have one.

Each of the profession cards in Guildhall has a different effect when you play it to the table, and each becomes more effective — or at least different — when you have more copies of that card in your guildhall already. For example, playing your first Dancer simply allows you to take an extra action; playing a Dancer when you have three Dancers in your guildhall already allows you to draw three extra cards and take an extra action.

Many of the profession cards allow you to mess with the other players to some degree. The Assassin card, for example, allows you to destroy cards that are in other players’ guildhalls, while the Trader forces another player to swap one (or more) of their guildhall’s cards with one (or more) of yours. Collecting sets is often a matter of manipulating what other players have available without annoying them too much — piss off an opponent and it’s very possible for them to exact amusing revenge on you with some well-chosen cards. If you want a quiet life, the Historian, Farmer and Weaver cards are handy — Historian lets you go through the discard pile, Farmer simply allows you to collect victory points at a slow rate, and Weaver allows you to play extra cards from your hand, perhaps in exchange for picking something up from your guildhall.

Take care with one rule when playing: cards played from your hand to the table do not go into your guildhall until the end of your turn — until that time, they are considered to be in the “action area” and as such chapters are not completed until your turn has ended. This means that you can’t play a card to finish a chapter and then immediately spend that chapter on a victory point card of sufficient value to win the game, for example. (You can, however, use special abilities of cards such as Weaver to complete a chapter before the end of your turn.)

Bits and Pieces

Being a card game, Guildhall’s box is largely taken up by, you guessed it, cards. There are two decks — a large one of all the profession cards and a smaller one of victory point cards — differentiated from one another by different backs, and separated into two distinct areas of the box insert, which leaves space for expansions. The only other components are a stack of victory point chips, used when playing the Farmer to acquire small quantities of victory points without buying cards.

The cards are good quality, of a satisfying thickness and pleasingly glossy. They’re standard-sized, too, which means they may be sleeved if you so desire. Artwork on the cards is distinctive, attractive and in keeping with the box art, while the lower half of the card is devoted to iconic descriptions of the various special abilities. It takes a little time to learn what all these mean, but there’s a handy guide in the instruction leaflet, plus all the card special abilities are helpfully summarised on a single page, too.

Cards can also be quickly differentiated by the icons in their top-left along with their large, prominent title text, and colour-blind players are catered to with the pennant down the left edge of the card, which displays a different piece of heraldry for each of the five colours.

Is it Fun?

Guildhall’s theme is mostly irrelevant to its mechanics, but the “collecting professions” concept helps put what you’re doing in the game into context, and the professions themselves mostly have thematically relevant special abilities: Assassins “kill” cards; Historians look back at what’s come before (i.e. the discard pile); Traders trade cards. Dancers, Farmers and Weavers have a somewhat more tenuous link to the theme of the game, but at least each of their purposes is clear and distinct from one another — every card feels like it has a use, and there’s little in the way of underpowered, “dead weight” cards to clutter up your hand — unless, of course, you just can’t get your hands on the right colour.

It’s a fun game that maybe takes a play or two to get your head around, but once you do it’s an enjoyable, quick and surprisingly cut-throat competitive filler game that’s well worth having in your collection — it’s just a bit of a shame it doesn’t support more than four players.