Tournament Planning

At the worst, we'll have great tables to play on.

For any of you out there in the San Diego, I and one of my buddies will be running a tournament at At Ease Games on July 21st.  Check in kicks off around 10, games at 11 if you're interested.

It will be my first official tournament experience with sixth edition, which makes being the boss of it kind of intimidating.  Someone has to be the first, I suppose.  Of course, that comes with a can of worms in the form of the lack of a successful, preexisting template already being in place.  Because of that, I have a myriad of concerns in my head racing to be the biggest and they're all winning.

With the newness of the edition, we've decided to stick mostly to book missions.  The theory is that nobody has played (half of) them enough that they've gotten particularly stale, so why go out of the way to create a wholly different framework?  That said, how do you best string a chosen three of these missions together to promote a healthy, balanced competition?  Especially when it has been made abundantly clear that the intent of the edition is to push for more narrative gameplay.  Though perhaps that's not the best point to bring up when trying to sell a tournament invitation.  Mostly, it's been a process of trying to pick and choose between the new stuff that seems to provide something close to equal footing, then filling in with the holdovers.

Wanna team up, bro?

One decision I'm content with is excluding allies and fortifications for the first tourney.  I know it's in the rulebook.  Three weeks in, it's just more complication than I want to deal with.  I don't know the edition nearly as well as I'd like to for judging, let alone the way all the extra interactions from new combos will work.  Players haven't had a lot of time to experiment or see what is out there either.  Give it a bit more time, and then we'll get real crazy.

Theoretically, it should be that simple, but with a positive turnout, we come to one of the common problems faced by three round tourneys.  Obviously, I'm referring to how to stratify multiple undefeated players in an equitable manner.  We have room for roughly twenty players, meaning three 3-0's is in play.  And while one of my racing concerns is no one showing, I'd guess we'll be running out of space before we're struggling to fill tables.  In 5th edition, I typically rotated the three missions as primary and secondary, with something a little funkier for tertiary.  I used the system both as a way to score battle points and to break ties.  With six missions, it seems odd to leave any of them out, and with so may of them being objective based, they tend not to combine quite so well.  That is to say, how the heck would play The Scouring and Crusade?  Not a lot of folks bring eleven scoring units, even with Fast Attacks thrown in.  That would pretty much tip the scale all the way to MSU style armies before a die gets cast...  Though if it means no Draigowing...


So that's kind of where things stand.  I'll have more about mission selection and the actual format after the tourney, plus whatever observations I have as far as results and data.