The Firm - Another Guild Ball Podcast

Hello! Your favourite infrequent Guild Ball podcast is back. 

The current hotness is the Field Test and Ryan's put a fair whack of time and effort into taking a run at some proposed changes. Most importantly the first half of the episode is about why these changes should/could be made. 

It took us a while to get them on the board. But we are in love!

Alex's dogs got excited during Hook and Crook chat so expect to hear them join in.

A podcast is never late. Nor is it early. We've used that line before.

It's been a while! Alex has finally shaken a long loss streak. Ryan hasn't been let out. We haven't had time to try the Shepherds.

Welcome to The Firm!

How are you finding the new captains? Enjoying them? Ryan is thoroughly enjoying Soma. Alex not so much.

Lead Guild Ball Developer Bryce is here to talk about the new captains and their development.

Merry Christmas!

The Firm steps out of its cave of hibernation, blinking against the bright winter sun. We're joined in this episode by Steamforged Games Design Lead Jamie Perkins to talk about the new Game Plan Deck. 

No Knuckles or Layne chat here, folks. We're still getting to grips with these guys.

A is for Alchemists! Determined to stop knowing nothing about the Alchs we got them on the board and played around with all of them.

It's been a while friends, but hot (...lukewarm?) off of Scottish Nationals we're back to talk about our last few games and new feelings about Guild Ball.

We've ran the new captains out. They're good!

Sherwin very kindly joined us for a meandering frolic through this wave of captains releases. 

Spoilers: Sherwin has a disappointing favourite episode of Stargate SG-1

So this was meant to come out in the first week of March while the takes were hot. Now they're slightly warm.

Vet Boar, Mourn and the Miners all get a run out onto the pitch in this episode.

Excuse the dogs, please.

Mourn, Boar, Steeljaw and Yukai are the topics of discussion for The Firm today. 

There's a pretty deep dive into Steeljaw and Yukai as they're the ones we got on the board, but if you listen closely during the Boar chat you'll actually hear Ryan's eyes widen with glee as a new Butchers six starts to fall into place in front of him.

No errata or Miner's discussion from us in this episode, catch that next time when we've got the board feel from the Miner's and have digested the errata.

A late tournament report from December. 

Ryan was nursing a hangover so Alex rode solo into sunny Leeds.

Recorded this last year but only just got to editing it. Hope you enjoy!

This is part two of a two part episode - hit up The Rookie's Podcast for Part 1.

Now the housekeeping is out of the way, Ryan and I (Alex) would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

May 2019 be full of perfect sculpts and dice trays full of 6's for you all.

It's finally here. Wiping the briny sea spray from its brow the Navigators Special looks down from the deck of the ship to the waiting crowd. It doesn't apologise for being late. 

Thanks to Bryce from SFG and Dan Harwood for their time as we sit down and speak to them both about the Navigators!

Our audio with Dan failed, as did the back up. This is the back up back up and it's super echoey - very sorry about that.

Late again - look's like we need to get rid of this Navigator's watch and buy a new one.

This is our pre and post SteamCon UK chat about the game. 

Right, so this is super late. We recorded this around October 13th. 

These Season 4 hot takes are now super cold.

I've (AJ) been busy. Hope you enjoy it even though it's late!

In this episode we basically run down how our tournament went at Leodis Games. It was a really fun friendly tournament and we want to thank everyone who came down!

Eagle eyed listeners might spot this is episode 25, not 24. We recorded a 24 but I (AJ) have had some family stuff going on and basically didn't get around to editing it. I was hoping to get it live on the same day as this but haven't had the chance so we're skipping 24 as we said episode 25 in this one.

Hope you enjoy the episode.

Listener caution is advised. This episode is incredibly off script. 

We just had a chat about Season 3. Properly just a chat. 

Bryce joins Alex to talk Season 4, if you want actual content you can skip to that at 01:02:38.

See you in Season 4.

Sorry this is a little late. 

We round up the last of the solo cards spoiled in blogs and then talked to the Hypetrain himself about WTC and why you should go next year.

All aboard!

**Apologies for the trash tier audio. We were almost at our max storage allowance for the month - AJ**

We hit up a local tournament this weekend and came first and second after a not so heated battle on the top table. 

The better man won.

Well I did, and I sort the uploads so I can put whatever I want in this episode description - AJ

With some new blogs out it's time to talk about some Season 4 models with zero context again. 

It's an exercise in futility, but one we enjoy.

Get the popcorn ready. This is one hell of a salty episode.

Our inability to play into the Blacksmiths makes us sad about Anvil & Sledge and Ryan tilts hard about Alex's constant Navigator rerolls.

We liked Ploughman though. So there's that.

We kick off this episode rattling through the new Granite and Salvo before getting into the real meat. Dave Millington joins us to talk about his upcoming campaign, The Coin Wars.

It's really exciting.

Sorry we're late! 

We're having a catch up after missing last week.

Alex went to a tournament and we tried to play Chess as some kind of learning mechanism. It didn't work.

Rise and shine! We recorded at half five this morning to get this out only a little late.

We talk Big League, Rookie League, Apps, Navigators, Minor Guild Bonuses, Alex's best ever performance and Ryan gushes about fighting games.

**Oh, at one point we said Singled Out when we meant Strictly the Worst in this episode. Sorry.

First things first we catch up on all the blog posts we've missed. Horizon, Fathom and a whole host of Season 4 changes.

Then we chatted about the Cooks and their reveal before moving on to talk about a cool Tournament format addendum by Alex Botts based on someone else's idea where you can mix Major Guilds with their partnered Minor in your Roster.

Lastly, we're doing a giveaway! Head over to Facebook for more details.

This weekend was GB nationals.

We did not do well.

It's finally here, the episode before British Nationals.

Ryan does what he does best and wheels out a pep talk. Be sure to download this for Saturday morning.

In all seriousness we spoke about what our aims are for the weekend and how to react when you lose.

There's some good questions too.

I wrote a load of episode notes and timed out during the upload  so these haven't got quite as much effort in them.

Firstly sorry for Alex's attitude. We played a game of Fish vs Blacksmiths just before hopping on the mic and it really put him in a bad mood.

We bought the Smiths so we can learn to break them. After a game we've learned that a lot seems to weigh on the draft. It'll be interesting to see how wrong we are in a few months.

Alex cheers up once we change topic and start talking about that he thinks he's outgrowing the 6 man roster mindset. It's served its purpose though.

Then we have a bit of fun and Ryan rattles off a guild he's had a bit of fun making up - we know it's busted, don't hammer our inbox.

Then we round off with VCalculus and the Alchs. We don't have much experience with them so it's a bit of a freeform chat.

So in this episode we started off talking about Veteran Fangtooth and The Church. Then it sort of went freestyle.

We've sad before, this podcast is just us chatting after games and we hope you enjoy it. This is definitely an example of that freestyle chat.

Sorry this episode is a bit late. We will donate all downloads to charity.

In this episode Alex talks about Ultimate Frisbee, Ryan talks about boxing and we get around to Guild Ball at some point.

Vet Chisel looks great. SeaSpig looks great and we answer some questions from an America TO Deity.

We round it out explaining that hopefully you don't think we think we know what we're talking about. We basically take it in turns being wrong. 

So we tried to talk about Vet Sakana. We really did.

It turned into a chat about killing the ball. Then guessing about what's gonna change in S4. 

Then we went back to Sakana. Then we went talked about what makes a good model in general.

I think we went back to Sakana one more time?  

Structurally this episode is a nightmare, but we hope you enjoy it.

Recently we've both made a lot of improvements in our Guild Ball game. To see how much we've really progressed we've gone back to our first sixes to see if we see anything we didn't see before.

Please forgive us for this episode. Ryan was incredibly hungover. 

Alex is back from Vengeance and reports in to coach Ryan. There's a lot of chatting about mindset and being your own worst enemy.

Then Alex gets too excited about Navigators because he can use his sweet baby girl Angel.

This episode goes around the houses a bit. We keep wandering off topic, backtracking and wandering off again but it was fun to talk through so we kept it all in.

We've dropped a message at the start of this episode as after we talk about a couple of games we've played and the newly revealed Falconer captain we meant to talk about how Alex has been preparing for Vengeance, but instead Ryan just gives him one hell of a pep talk and there's an epiphany moment we weren't expecting.

We went to a great tournament at a great venue recently where nothing exciting at all happened in the final round so you should skip that bit.

Then we get into the meat of this episode, Mataagi and Pride.

Welcome to The Firm.

We're two Guild Ballers who chat after every game and every tournament. Unfortunately for you we've decided to start recording these chats.

In this introductory episode we introduce ourselves, our guilds and our preferred players.

We hope you enjoy.