[review] Guildball - Kickoff!

Guildball's new boxed game, Kickoff!, is both an excellent introduction to the game of Guildball, and also a wonderful self contained game.

The contents of the box are of a high quality, featuring two full teams of single coloured, one piece, plastic miniatures, die cut, thick, card components, mini rulebooks, and a playmat, and of course dice.

Lets start with the minis. They come sat in a vacuum formed holder in their own box. The Brewers team, are in orange, and the Masons in blue. Both teams consist of their season 1 roster, including a team captain, and a mascot. This means there are 12 miniatures in total. The single piece plastics are well made, and perhaps or a better quality than those made by Privateer Press currently. This bodes well given that Guildball is shifting over to this type of plastic in for all future releases. Something that they are also using for their upcoming release, the board game of Dark Souls.

Each miniature of course comes with their associated card that details their stats, abilities and playbook. These have been updated for season 3, with some teams and characters being re-balanced, with an overall improvement in the layout of the cards.

The thick card components are great too. They have a nice non-slip finish, and there are many. Again there are plenty of coloured counters for influence for each of the teams, and coloured tokens for abilities the characters are able to activate. Then there are counters for status effects, like poison, bleed, and knockdown. A useful set of templates, are the measuring templates. There are a good number of these, and they measure a range of distances. Both these and the scatter templates have been printed so there are enough for both players.

The rulebooks included is the full rulebook in a compact form, which is also available for free online. Perhaps it could be produced to a better standard like the mini rulebooks the Privateer Press provides in their boxed games, but still it is a good thing to have. The other books included are overviews on how to use the teams included in the box, and how to expand upon them in future, and a quickstart guide, that goes through a full first turn of the game, demonstrating how everything works.

Finally there is a 3 foot square play mat, that is double sided. The one side is a generic green pitch, which the other side is printed with a thematic field with goal markers for Brewers and Masons. This pitch is marked for 3v3 starter games and of course for larger games.

What was a surprise to me was the quality of this playmat. Rather than just some printed poster, what we get in the box is in fact a fold up card mat. The mat is in fact in two pieces, with when folded out and lain together forms the 3 foot square. Again the finish is tactile and non-slip. To go with the mat there are number of card tokens for terrain.

Overall I was really impressed with the contents of the boxed game, given that it is a great introduction to game, and for the price point, is a great self contained game that is not going to break the bank are require further investment, unlike some of the competitors out there.