After completing a a few first plays of this game i thought i wouldn’t like it. But Guildhall grew on me over time. At first it seems appears too chaotic and depending on luck. It also often has a very abrupt ending. I have changed my mind about the former. But the ending.. I’m still trying to learn how to be prepared for it and finish rapidly. This is a card game. There are 6 professions types cards and those are of 5 colors. And there are a number of same type and color cards in the deck. It’s hard to explain the mechanisms in a few words. But in general you are collecting those types of cards in piles in front of you. Every card of the same type you place into a pile (chapter) has to be of different color. When you place a card into a pile, you get its special ability/action, which strength is based on the number of same type cards in the pile. You can get additional action, swap cards with other players or straight kill cards in their piles. When you place the fifth card of the same type into a pile it becomes a completed chapter. Essentially 1 “coin” which you can by point cards with. Those point cards can also have special abilities (although such will cost more “coins”), but in essence their give various amounts of points toward the winning number of 20. You have a choice to either spend your collected chapters to buy cheaper points cards with less points or save up for those bigger cards. Although you risk that someone will rush to 20 with lesser points cards. Or someone can steel that precious huge points card from under your nose before you manage to collect enough chapters for it. And there come unexpected endings. Often it seems that the game is only halfway to end, but then someone buys 7 points card, gets a few more points with card play and here you go – 20 points and she wins. Various combinations of cards and ways of playing them together is the most attracting part of this game. Although i don’t like some of the abilities that much, but i get that all of them are useful in some situations. Of course, there is also luck of draw. But you can also discard and redraw as many cards as you want (as one of your two actions per turn). This game is perfectly suited for expansions, as it is easy to refresh it by mixing in a few new professions. The only flaw of this game, which unfortunately seems to be even worse in the latest Guildhall Fantasy releases – the artwork. New games have striking not matching colors and ugly gradient backgrounds. As you can see the box cover of the original game is a bit weird and often receives snarky comments. But this flaw can’t spoil the enjoyment of getting a chain of good moves and winning by a nose. 9/10
The game works great on Yucata. The only minor nitpicks are that it doesn’t fill the screen on my 7 inch tablet completely, so you have to scroll down a bit to press Finish or Next and it stutters while scrolling. But that’s not a problem at all. And of course, when it shows the abilities, it covers over cards in my hand and you often need to see what you have, but it would be hard to somehow fit it other way on a small screen.