Guild Ball: Gameplan Deck

So, what is the purpose of the Game Plan deck? The Game Plan deck has a number of functions; the primary one being a replacement of the Guild Plot cards. By now, the Guild Plots are several years old, and their weaknesses have become very clear. Guild Plots are easy to forget since they all have very different trigger points throughout a turn, and their effects can be uneven. Additionally, the initiative system within Guild Ball has been the same since the game’s original release. Rolling a die to determine who gets to go first feels rather dated. Even allowing coaches to improve their chances by adding unspent momentum points to the initiative roll still leaves occasions where the result of a game falls to a single die roll. All of this led to the creation of Game Plans.

The development team have been working on the Game Plan cards for quite some time. We knew years ago that replacing the old initiative mechanic was something we wanted to do, but we had to be absolutely certain that we were doing it in the best way for casual fans as well as more competitive ones. The Game Plan deck actually went through two distinct iterations prior to the version that we finally produced. Veteran fans of Guild Ball may remember that the Season 3 Guild Plots were not printed within the Kick Off! version of the Season 3 rulebook. That’s actually because we were strongly considering implementing one of the earlier versions of the Game Plan deck way back then. We eventually determined that the Game Plan deck wasn’t ready, but fortunately we’d already created the Season 3 Guild Plots as a fall back.