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London: The biggest, most important and richest city in England in the late medieval and early modern periods. The guilds played a major role in the lives of London's citizens, controlling the way in which trade, manufacturing and business were conducted in the City. The members of the guilds, the liverymen, were rich men who were appointed to the most influential positions in the community and wielded immense civic power. The chief representative of the guilds became the Lord Mayor of London, and the leading delegates of the guilds became its aldermen. The guilds ran the City and controlled its commerce; each had its own Hall and its own coat of arms (livery) and the chief representatives met at the Guildhall to discuss the great issues of the day.
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Guild tiles: Incomplete and complete sides visible
Before I go on, this diary will not be going into full detail about how the game plays, so for more information, please read these blog posts from mid-2015 (noting that the pre-Tasty Minstrel Games artwork is used):
Part 1: A Brief Introduction Part 2: The Guild Tiles Part 3: The Action (Main Deck) Cards Part 4: The Board and the Plantations Part 5: The Mayoral Rewards (Game-End Scoring) CardsGuilds of London is a card-driven area control game in which the timing and the application of combinations ("combos") are key; if I were to make an "elevator pitch", I would suggest Blue Moon City meets El Grande meets {insert name of trading card game here}. During the game, you recruit, place, and manipulate your Liverymen in newly-forming guilds, building your power base so they can achieve the status of Master. Achieving control of guilds provides victory points and, importantly, additional (free) actions that you can exploit, aiding your future developments in the City. The player with the most points at the end of the game becomes the Lord Mayor of London.
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Noble (Crown) action cards (from L to R):
• Gain 2 VPs,
• Resolve the Plantation at the end of this Round, and
• Spot two Guilds you have a Master on to move the Beadle to a non-Crown Guild and resolve
it at the end of this Round (even if it doesn't have the required minimum of Liverymen on it)
Designing Guilds of London
Due to the passage of much time, my recall is a little fuzzy, but Guilds of London was already an on-going project by the time Surprised Stare Games had a railway conversation that led to Snowdonia. I had just started working in London and was required to live away from home during the week; evenings were taken up with games — almost exclusively Magic: The Gathering — and, indeed, the first prototype was stickered on to M:TG commons. You don't need to wander very far in London to be smacked in the face with its incredible heritage and a little background reading revealed a rich historical world with an intriguing hierarchy of powerful, curiously-named organizations and their ornate, ostentatious rituals and traditions.
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Compass (Artisan) action cards (from L to R):
• If you have hired four or more Liverymen this turn, gain 3 VPs,
• Every time you move a Liveryman with a card, you may move two Liverymen instead, and
• If you have moved three or more Liverymen this turn, then draw three extra cards at the end of the turn
Researching the Guilds
I do love to immerse myself in Theme when researching a game, preferably via collecting rare and unusual books about that theme. The history of Guilds of London begins with the book on the right; as well as being chock full of facts, it has a double-page spread with tiny photographs of the Company Liveries. This was the seed:
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Discovering the Guilds (from the Discovering Series)
My next is another book-in-an-historical-series, this time from the 1950s and 60s; there is plenty in here about the Plantations, a key scoring element:
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Other tomes available include: British Islands, British Architects and British Seasides
On my travels to-and-from London, I found the following close-up exploration of the form and functions of the Guildhall, the meeting place of all the Senior members; this inspired the "special buildings":
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Gog & Magog, Giants, in resplendent carved glory
I also picked up this complete guide to how the Armorial Bearings — the Liveries, the "shields" — are structured, what the symbols are, and what the symbology means. I used this book to redraw all of the Guild shields for my prototypes. It's a beautiful book to just peruse:
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Shields and Woodcuts
The piéce de resistance, though, is this rarity: one of just 500 copies, turning its thick, textural pages requires reverence:
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Careful, now; a delicate treasure
Developing Guilds of London — 1
The very first prototype was a large deck of multi-function cards and nothing else; they could be played out as Guilds, be used as money, move your liverymen (your area control tokens), and (try to) take control of Guilds already in play. The range of card effects was very limited, though, and the first playing — with long-time pals Richard and Jimmy, prior to an M:TG booster draft — was rather lackluster.
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Church (Cross) action cards (from L to R):
• Spot 2 Guilds you control of different colors and draw two extra cards at the end of the turn OR
Spot 2 Guilds you control that share a color and draw three extra cards at the end of the turn,
• Look at the top 5 cards of the draw deck: keep 1 and discard the others, and
• Move the Beadle to an unresolved Anchor Guild and/or draw 1 card immediately
However, from such inauspicious beginnings have many great games arisen, and I couldn't let this rich and delicious subject drift away, so I set about re-building: I separated the Guilds from the deck of action cards, giving them tiles of their own and hugely-increased the variety of card effects, tying them to color/suit themes:
Anchors (Blue): allowing special movement to "the plantation", a Guild that can be "mastered" more than once in the game; Scythes (Yellow): recruiting new liverymen to seed across the City; Crosses (Green): boosting your card-drawing and card-flow; Compasses (Red): boosting your area control effects; and, Crowns (Purple): all the other things that you'd want to do that don't really fit, thematically, into the other colors!The second playtest, a few months later, was with Jimmy and another regular gaming pal, Jon Challis. We three chaps hunkered down for the evening and it proved a hugely-important session; the game not only worked, but it worked fantastically. I came away from that session with 80% of the game you see today and a little bounce in my step!
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Maritime (Anchor) action cards (from L to R):
• Red (compass) cards are wild for the rest of your turn,
• Every time you use a card to move a Liveryman, you may move the Liveryman to the Plantation instead, and
• Move 1/2 Liverymen to/from the Plantation
Becoming Part of the Guilds of London?
On a whim, after another positive session at Jon's house, I contacted one of the Guilds: the Worshipful Company of the Makers of Playing Cards. I was getting hooked-in to the theme and given that I now, regularly, played games at The Red Herring Pub in Gresham Street (one hundred yards from the Guild Hall), I found out it might actually be possible to become a real Liveryman! After a tentative e-mail exchange, I took the Master of the Company out for an expensive lunch (£25 for the cheese board alone!) and was, then, invited to one of their official Suppers. The Supper was a very posh event for which I bought a brand new tuxedo; feeling rather out of my depth amidst the great and the good, I small-talked, sipped champagne and nibbled canapés, feasted in the Apothecaries' Company Hall, and listened attentively to all the speeches. Rounding off the evening was the ancient ritual of "The Loving Cup", for which I was given a brief "what to do" from my neighbor; here's a helpful video (NOT from that evening, I hasten to add):
Goodness! I don't think I've ever felt more out of my depth in my entire life!
Developing Guilds of London — 2
Life, work, gaming (and the tweaking of GoL) went on as normally as it could while I was split between Home and London. With the core elements from that second session in place, I concentrated on refining the cards; any shared deck mechanism stands-or-falls by the relative powers and distribution of its cards and, if power comes with a cost, the costs must be absolutely right. Fortunately, I had a gaming group with extensive trading card game experience, so we were able to spot the broken and/or under-costed combinations, beef up the weaker cards, establish effect templates, and improve the distributions quite quickly.
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Common (Scythe) action cards (from L to R):
• Every time you hire a Liveryman with a card/effect, hire two instead,
• Hire two of your Liverymen OR one neutral Liveryman, and
• Spot a Guild that you control to hire two of your Liverymen and one neutral Liveryman (this is awesome!)
An aside familiar to designers everywhere: We often refer to "The Integer Problem" in game design, i.e., setting something at value 1 is broken/a "no brainer"/over-powered, but when set to value 2 is now neutered to the point of unplayability; in this instance, the value 1.5 would be absolutely PERFECT. Costing the powerful card effects suffered from this particular issue and it was one of the most focused parts of the game's development.
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A selection of the Mayoral Reward cards: gained during the game, scored at the end
Something was still missing from Guilds of London, and as time marched ever onward, my attention was being drawn elsewhere. Over the next few years I designed and released Scandaroon, Fzzzt!, Totemo, Paperclip Railways, Snowdonia and Ivor the Engine — though, to be fair, in the gaps between those releases I would return to things GoL for brief periods. Then, as you can imagine, when Snowdonia took off, I could barely bring myself to think about anything else! GoL would come out at the occasional Surprised Stare Games designer day or informal games evening, eliciting a Boydellian cry of "I must get working on this again!" And back on to the shelf it would go.
During the final preparations for Ivor the Engine at the end of 2013, Guilds took its rightful position — front-and-center — in my priorities. I had brought both games along to Spiel for blind testing with some of my international pals, and as I laid out the Sheep tiles on the Top Left-Hand Corner of Wales, I realized how fighting for a Guild could be made more enticing, i.e., by adding randomly-placed "juicy" second-place bonus chits. I immediately borrowed the Ivor pieces and played a couple of games through that evening: It totally rocked! The next day I was visited by Richard Ham (rahdo) for an "overview video of what Tony is doing next" (which we ended up recording TWICE, thanks to a dodgy microphone):
I love the ENERGY in this video!
Such a positive reception spurred me on, and by the time Spiel 2014 rolled around, I had tested the bottom out of the "second place chits" and was ready to pitch it to potential publishing partners. As I was driving home from Spiel, I got a call from one of them (Intrafin) saying that they wanted to take it on and, within a few weeks, Klemens Franz started work on the layouts! I threw myself into helping Klemens because there were a LOT of different elements that needed doing: original box art, templating for 48 Guild tiles, standardizing the iconography of all the cards (105 action, 21 Mayoral Reward) and — of course — the rules. As if the volume of work wasn't bad enough, a posh spanner was also thrown in to the mix; I'll let the rulebook take the story from here:
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Here are some of the "alternative" shields I put together (Christmas, 2014):
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The greater part of 2015 progressed in this manner: questions, clarifications, checking and double-checking, and — all the while — my excitement for the coming Spiel increasing. Imagine, then, how hard the fall to Earth was when, on August 3rd, 2015 — the deadline day for committing the project to the manufacturers — our partner decided to pull out. At the point when I thought the long climb was over, it had all proved to be a false summit!
When the rage had subsided, Surprised Stare Games regrouped, made several full print-on-demand demo copies, and got back on the horse! And it's a bloody good thing that we did because otherwise I wouldn't have met Seth Jaffee or Andy or Michael Mindes or Daniel or Mischa! Tasty Minstrel Games has restored my Faith in the process and this game, set firmly in the Past, has gained itself a bright Future!
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After ten years, I finally hold it in my hands!
Annex: The Guilds of London Chronology
v1.0 (early 2006): A homogenous, multi-function card flopper with no particular saving grace apart from the theme being intriguing to everyone.
v2.0 (mid-2006): A varied, interactive and TCG-tastic card-driven, area control extravaganza with a dynamic board (the Guild tiles) and a card list that needed some serious balancing.
v3.0 (2007-2009): Playtesting with pals (deck-tuning) and outside of my normal group at the London On Board club where we removed an entire type of action ("PLACE") by putting hired liverymen straight in to the Guildhall to be moved about instead. Reduced delay, reduced complexity — all the more satisfying.
v4.0 (2010): The introduction of the neutral liverymen who, during resolution of area control, can "swap in" and mess with majorities and tie-breaks. This mechanism also added additional effect options to the cards for more "agonizing decisions" — essential for a game with multi-use cards! Player interaction steps up a notch.
v5.0 (2011-2013): Lots of work on getting the two-player variant correct; this led to the decision to have a fixed board for two as opposed to the "grow during the game" board for three and four. I rejected the idea of making GoL a five-player game during this time: It simply made the game go on far too long, i.e., more than 75 minutes!
v6.0 (Spiel 2013): Player interaction takes a further step up by introducing randomly-placed, lucrative "second place" chits and reducing the restocking of Guild tiles to tighten up available play space! A final, increased, set of (now) unique game-end bonus cards was added to offer many more options for scoring.
v6.0 (Spiel 2014): A partner express their desire to publish Guilds of London; I commence graphical work with Klemens Franz.
v6.0 (Pre-Spiel 2015): The partner expresses their desire, at the last possible minute, to postpone everything until 2016. I got to Spiel anyway...with PoD copies!
v6.1 (Post-Spiel 2015): Tasty Minstrel Games contacts me and expresses its desire to publish Guilds of London!
v7 (Pre-production, 2016): With re-jigged components, Klemens revisits his files and we run through an extensive proofing cycle one more time — deja vu?
Final version (UK Games Expo 2016): The launch!
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