Pitch Formations

For something completely different, today we’re going to show you an alternative set of deployment rules that are still in development. That’s right, you’re going to help us beta-test Pitch Formations, oooh exciting! We’re going to walk you through the inspirations for this alternative format and explain how it works before finally showing you the rules document itself.

*Development Team Note* Please remember that this is a set of test rules and not a finalised document. We expect there to be some teething issues with grammatical rules construction and game balance.

Well, That Escalated Quickly

Here in the development team, one of the things we’d love to be able to give you is a way of enjoying all the different aspects of Guild Ball but in a shorter space of time. One of the most important things in the life of the modern-day gamer is time. A gamer must be careful how they choose to spend their time when also considering a day job, family commitments and so on. Being people with commitments of our own, we understand this just as well as the next gaming fan. The thing is, just playing Guild Ball in a shorter space of time doesn’t really achieve what we want. Cutting the time of a match down can often just lead to unfinished games, and no one wants that!

Pitch Formations are effectively an experiment in ‘skipping turn 1’. Although exciting things do generally happen during Turn 1 of a match, it is also often the case that coaches spend their time jockeying for position and generally preparing to engage with their opponent properly on turn 2. In theory, if we could cut out this ‘turn of positioning’, we could jump straight into the action from the starting whistle! In this way, we would be shortening the overall time spent playing a Guild Ball match allowing for a gamer to spend more time on other things, like more Guild Ball matches!

We Will Be Playing ‘4-4-2’

So, how do we set this up? Well, in order to allow this set of deployment rules to be used in an alternate event format we have used the Regional Cup Pre-match Sequence as a framework. This means that if any of you fancy trying this out in an event, you should be able to do so reasonable easily. What more, we encourage you to do so! A full Pre-Match Sequence can be found in the documents linked below, but for those of you just wishing to try this out in a more casual game, a match using Pitch Formations is set up as follows:

· Both coaches select their Guild and choose the six-player team that they wish to use for the match (including a Captain and a Mascot)

Deal and select Guild Plots from a shared Guild Plot deck as per the rulebook

Determine the Receiving and Kicking Coach. The Kicking Coach selects a player from their team to be the kicker. The kicker must be deployed touching the ‘deployment line’ (the line across the Pitch that is 10” up from that Coach’s edge)

Starting with the Receiving Coach, both Coaches take turns selecting a player and deploying them on the Pitch, however, both teams must meet all of the ‘Formation Criteria’ outlined below

The kicking player performs a kick-off action

The Receiving Coach allocates their Influence, followed by the Kicking Coach allocating their team’s Influence

The Receiving Coach takes their first activation and from here the game proceeds as normal

Formation Criteria



During the course of setting up the match, both players’ teams must fulfil the following:

[2] players must be deployed completely within [18”] of their chosen table edge in base contact with the halfway line. A player cannot be deployed within [3”] of an enemy player

[2] players must be deployed completely within [10”] of their chosen table edge in base contact with the deployment line

[2] players must be deployed completely within [6”] of their chosen table edge in base contact with the Goal line

Pitch Lines