Guildhall is an award-winning card game of set collecting filled with interactive, CCG-style combos that allow players to take amazing turns which make them feel powerful and clever as they advance through the game. This July, a new Guildhall Fantasy expansion will be released: Advanced Guildhall Fantasy: The Gathering comes with a few rules tweaks, two mini expansions that can be used with any version of Guildhall, and six new professions that provide a great play experience alone, or can be combined with other Guildhall Fantasy professions for custom play experiences. Advanced Guildhall Fantasy: The Gathering is 100% compatible with the three previous editions of Guildhall Fantasy: Fellowship, Alliance, and Coalition. Each expansion can be played separately with previous editions of Guildhall Fantasy, or with custom-built decks of Guildhall and when playing the ‘Mega Saga’ format, where all the decks of Guildhall Fantasy are combined into one epic deck.

Guildhall, at its heart, is a game about moving cards from one location to another. The deck, players’ hands, players’ guildhalls, players’ action areas, and the discard pile are all locations a card can be moved from, or moved to. The immediate goal is to transfer your cards into your Guildhall in groups of five, with each of those cards being a unique color. This completes ‘chapters’, which may be cashed in for Victory Point cards (VP cards). The first player to 20 victory points wins the game. Card abilities in Guildhall move cards to or from different locations to either help you achieve your immediate goals faster, or to hinder your opponents’ plans. Sometimes, with the right combos, you can do both!

A simple little addition we made to the game was the introduction of the ‘Master Houses’. These three cards are the same size as our card dividers/reference cards (and come with a reference card of their own) which are added to the row of VP cards. When players discard a completed chapter and it matches one of the two chapters listed on the Master House, a simple ability may be activated which resolves after the resolution of the VP card’s ability. The Archeologist House (Acrobats/Mystics) allows you to steal a card from an opponent’s hand and move it to your hand; the Journeyman House (Leaders/Warriors) allows you to take a VP token from an opponent and return it to the stack of VP tokens; and the Sage House (Mage/Priest) allows you to look at the top seven cards of the deck and add one to your Guildhall. Each of these abilities are great bonuses that make players think a little more tactically in choosing which chapters they cash in, as well as getting them to consider when to cash in those completed chapters.

The bigger and more dramatic of the mini-expansions is the addition of the ‘Chapter Masters’. There are five copies of six Chapter Masters that can be added to any deck of Guildhall Fantasy. Chapter Masters may be played as any color of their respective chapter (as noted by their Archetype). Currently, all Chapter Masters have an ability that activates when you have at least two other cards in their given chapter in your Guildhall.  Chapter Masters make it easier to complete chapters and thus can speed up the game, but their abilities and flexibility also add a lot to the experience. Additionally, when playing games of Mega Saga, where all of the cards from two or more expansions are shuffled together, they can help players complete some neglected chapters and advance them towards victory.

Advanced Guildhall Fantasy: The Gathering is a standalone product that can be played right out of the box with or without its mini expansions. That means we’ve added six new professions to the pantheon of Guildhall Fantasy: The Duelist (Acrobat), Warlord (Leader), Arcanist (Mage), Alchemist (Mystic), Invoker (Priest), and Avenger (Warrior). Having reused all of the professions from Guildhall: Old World Economy and Guildhall: Job Faire, we were left with an open canvas with which to design a new experience from the ground up. We started by mining ideas from Hope S. Hwang’s concepts for an unproduced set of Guildhall, which led to a slight change in the rules. Hope had designed some cards that played with the Action Area, both adding cards to your own Action Area and your opponent’s. In classic Guildhall you can’t play a card into your Action Area if you have played that Profession (or Archetype) during the turn, whereas Advanced Guildhall you may not play a card into you Action Area if a card of that Profession is already there. This minor change, which does not negatively affect any previous Guildhall cards, allows a few different things to occur. For one, if you can clear out a specific profession from your Action Area, you may play that Profession again. The second is, if you place a Profession into your opponent’s Action Area, they may be prevented from playing that Profession during their turn, though they will have the benefit of gaining another card in one of their chapters (because you can’t place or play a card into an Action Area that duplicates a card in any given player’s Guildhall). We also introduce the concept of “split locations”, where a location (Hand, Guildhall, Action Area, etc.) may be presented as black-and-white with a slash through it, meaning that you can choose either your own location or an opponent’s location when playing the ability. Currently, there’s only one card that plays with this concept, but its introduction leaves some design space for future sets and expansions of Guildhall Fantasy.

Advanced Guildhall Fantasy: The Gathering releases July 2017 and comes complete with 120 profession cards, 30 chapter master cards, 30 victory point cards, three master house cards, ninbe reference cards, 25 victory point tokens, and a rulebook, and retails for $44.99. Guildhall Fantasy: Fellowship, Guildhall Fantasy: Alliance, and Guildhall Fantasy: Coalition are currently available from your FLGS.