The village of Buttonville is undoubtedly the most glorious village of all time, aside from one small problem: There’s no one there! In The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville, you slip into the role of a guild master and recruit new residents—quirky inventors, cunning traders, and fearless guards—to transform the sleepy little town into a place full of life and laurel wreaths.
That’s the theme presented for The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville, a card drafting and set collection game published by Ravensburger. Ready to recruit some residents? Let’s go!
Gameplay Overview:
In each game of The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville, you’ll use 9 different sets of cards from a possible 25 options. Each set of cards has 12 cards, and the cards you select for the game will be shuffled into one market deck.
On a player’s turn, they draft 2 cards from the 5 face-up cards in the market (or the top card of the draw deck). They can then optionally play a set of cards to their tableau. A set can be as few as one card or as many as 12, as long as they all match.
After playing a set, they then resolve the card’s power, which will give them various bonuses such as drawing extra cards, earning victory points, or possibly stealing cards from another player. The wrinkle is that you can’t add more cards to an existing set, and you can only have 1 set of each type of character. So while you can play a set you already have down, you’ll need to discard one of those 2 sets at the end of your turn.
Once the draw deck runs out, players get one more turn, and then the game ends. The player with the most victory points wins.
Game Experience:
The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville is a light game that makes a really good family game. As long as your kids/fellow players can read, they can play this game. The rules explanation is really quick: draft two cards, optionally play a set. Easy peasy. The strategy comes from figuring out which sets to try and collect, and when to play them.
While you will be subject to the luck of the draw, rarely in our games was the market cluttered with cards no one wanted to draft. But where things get interesting is figuring out when to play your sets. Some sets trigger off how many cards you play, while others just provide a flat bonus.
But at the end of the game, each set is worth victory points based on how large it is (on a sliding scale). For example, 1 card is just worth 1 point. But 3 cards are worth 5 points, all the way up to 7+ cards in a set being worth 17 points. So it pays to hold off and play a set with more cards.
That being said, you are also limited to only 7 cards in your hand. So you will quickly bump up against your hand limit. Then you have a decision to make. Do you play a set with fewer cards than you’d like, or do you just discard excess cards? This decision isn’t always easy because playing a low card set can sometimes be a waste or even detrimental to your goals, as some powers aren’t options. But discarding cards literally gets you nothing. It can be a tough decision.
The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville has an almost Dominion-like feel to it, where you have different sets of cards pulled from a large pool. However, instead of drafting cards to build your deck, you are drafting to your hand to create sets. I should also note there is no cost to play a card, so players don’t need to worry about spending resources, which makes this one much more accessible.
The downside of all these cards is that setup and teardown can take a bit of time. For the setup, you need to decide on the 9 sets and make sure they are well shuffled into one deck. It’s not too bad, but teardown will require you to split out all the cards back into their individual sets. At the end of the day, it’s not the worst, but it can be a bit more time-consuming than you’d like for such a light game.
Final Thoughts:
The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville is a solid card drafting game that makes for a really good family-weight game. It’s really easy to teach and has a lot of variety. You can mix and match the sets you use in the game, which creates a lot of permutations for the play experience. I’m not a math person, but I assume having 25 different sets creates a big number of possibilities.
If you are looking for a light card drafting and set collection game, The Glorious Guilds of Buttonville is definitely worth a look.
Final Score: 3.5 Stars – A light set collection and card drafting game that’s really accessible with a ton of variety.
Hits:
• Easy to learn
• Lots of combinations of characters
• Light rules but still has interesting choices
Misses:
• Splitting everything up at the end can take a bit of time
• Box feels a tad big for just a large deck of cards
