Guilds and Brawls, Without the Spreadsheets
The best part of a card game like this is your guild. The worst part is running it.
For years those were the same sentence. Assigning people to brawl slots in a Discord thread. Chasing six players who forgot to submit. A results screen you could not actually read. We looked at all of it and decided the management layer is the product. So we built that first.
Guilds and brawls are where this genre is most fun and most neglected. We treated the clunk as the bug, not the price of admission.
Guilds are a colony, not a chat room
A Stellarch guild is a small organization you build with other pilots. Not a name tag over a group chat. A colony with moving parts:
- A real rank ladder. Six ranks out of the box, Leader down to Recruit, plus custom ranks you name yourself (a Treasurer who can touch the bank and nothing else). Thirty-three separate permissions, each one a toggle.
- Five stations you raise together. The Citadel, Hangar, Crucible, Foundry, and Vault each level up from the guild treasury and open more as they grow: bigger rosters, more brawl slots, deeper upgrades, more card sharing.
- A shared vault. Deposit a card, a guildmate borrows it for their team, it auto-returns on a timer. No handshake, no trust fall.
- Real-time guild chat, with moderation tools for officers built in, not bolted on.
- A heraldic identity. Pick from 100 affinity emblems, a four-letter tag, a motto. Your guild page reads like a faction, not a settings form. The guild directory is open to browse.
This whole system is built. It comes online when we open the closed alpha.
Roles are not a flat list either. Every rank is a grid of permissions you set yourself.
Quality of life is the whole point
This is the bar: the quality of life you expect from software in 2026, not a web-1.0 spreadsheet with a submit button.
The management runs on settings, not on someone nagging the group chat:
- Contributions are automatic. Set a weekly or monthly due in the guild settings and the system collects it. Opt in to auto-contribute a slice of your ranked winnings and you never think about it again. Nobody chases anyone for dues.
- Frays you self-pick. Members claim open slots themselves, officers assign with a data preview, and a reminder in the nav tells you when a slot you could take is still open.
- Permissions you actually configure. A grid of ranks and toggles, so a Treasurer touches the bank and nothing else, and you see who can do what at a glance.
- Members who flee are handled for you. Set the policy once and the system tracks misses and acts on it. No manual purges.
- Real-time guild chat, with moderation for officers, built in.
- Everything live. Chat, joins, and the treasury balance update over websockets, and the whole hub works on a phone, because half of guild life happens there.
That is the difference between a guild tool you tolerate and one you actually like. None of it is loud. All of it is the reason running a guild stops feeling like homework.
The money side is configured the same way, through settings, not spreadsheets.
We are building this in the open, and the Discord is where the guild and brawl design gets argued out in real time.
Brawls: the weekly war, minus the parts that make people quit
Brawls are the heartbeat. Guild versus guild, every week, your members fighting in parallel slots while the whole guild watches the score move. We held this one to a hard "no rough edges" bar. It is the centerpiece of what we are shipping next.
Here is the week.
Fill (Monday to Wednesday). Officers assign members to frays, the individual match slots, each with its own rules and mana cap. When you go to assign someone, you get a preview card: their collection for that league, their maxed cards, their past brawl record, their win rate, how many frays they have missed. You pick with data, not a guess in a DM. Members can claim leftover frays themselves, and a small reminder in the nav tells you when a slot is still open that you could take.
Battle (Thursday to Sunday). Every player previews their matchups (same rules, same mana, same seed for both sides), then submits all their teams blind. Some frays are best-of-one, some best-of-three, depending on the tier. Results stay hidden until you choose to see them.
The reveal. This is the beat we cared about most. You either hit reveal-all for the instant result, or you watch the match replay and let it land. Every replay is deterministic, byte-identical for everyone, so a brawl result is something you can rewatch and learn from, not a number that appeared.
The quality-of-life calls that matter here:
- Notifications only reach people who can act right now. Managers get pinged Monday. Eligible members get pinged Tuesday when fills open. Players get pinged the moment their own match resolves. Nobody gets spammed about a thing they cannot do.
- Rewards scale with participation, so a smaller guild that shows up still gets its fair share, and no brawl runs with fewer than three guilds, so you never load into a dead bracket.
- Fleeing has a cost. A member who never submits a single team takes points off the guild, and their missed-fray count is visible. The silent fleer is the thing that quietly kills guild brawls everywhere else, so we gave it a number.
- Gladiators. A planned set of brawl-only pit-fighter cards you earn by playing brawls, not by opening your wallet. The roster is still being shaped.
This is in the build now and switching on when the alpha opens. It is roadmap, stated plainly, not a live claim.
A treasury that runs itself, and a better way to start a guild
The guild economy gets the same treatment: make the money side legible and low-friction.
- A dual-currency bank. Crown from brawls, plus a guild SGC balance the members fund. The bank's only job is upgrading your stations, so there is nothing to drain and nothing to fight over.
- Four honest ways to fund it: a one-tap voluntary donation, optional recurring donation cycles (with a 48-hour heads-up and a five-cycle standing strip so contribution is visible at a glance, never a witch hunt), a new-member entry fee held in escrow with every refund, forfeit, and mature case handled automatically, and an opt-in skim from ranked winnings.
- A vault that pools by value, not by slot count. Instead of a hard cap on how many cards a guild can lend, the vault governs total collection power on loan per week. Lend as many cards as you like; they share one sane budget.
And founding a guild becomes a shared event instead of a solo button. A founder stakes 25,000 SGC and opens a seven-day petition. Co-founders sign on and chip in. Hit five signers and 100,000 SGC raised, and the guild forms on its own, whole founding roster already inside. Every screen says plainly what is at risk and what is non-refundable, because hiding that would be exactly the kind of thing we are trying to get away from.
Why we keep harping on the boring part
Every feature above started the same way: the old way annoyed us, so we fixed it. That is the entire philosophy.
A card game lives or dies on its loop. A guild lives or dies on whether running it feels like a game or a second job. We think the second job is where this genre quietly lost people, and that getting it right is worth more than bolting on another mechanic.
The economics stay honest while we are at it. Every member fights, not just the whales. A sharp, well-built collection earns a brawl slot, not a four-figure one.
A real question for the Hive and TCG crowd: what guild or brawl chore do you want gone for good? We are still building this. Tell us where it still hurts.
Enlist & stay in the loop
- Join the closed-alpha waitlist → https://stellarch.io/en/#waitlist
- Follow @stellarch on Hive → https://peakd.com/@stellarch
- Join the Discord → https://discord.gg/K3geA9hD28
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