So this tournament happened on Saturday. We had a turnout of 11 people -- this is certainly good enough to get the full tournament experience so I'm happy with it. The weird thing is that I had several people confirm they were coming who didn't show up, a few of them are usually good about coming to things they respond to on facebook events so that was weird, and there were a couple of others that came from BGG I think who were like this as well. Oh well, you can't have everything.
But anyways, we played four rounds of Swiss, then selected the top three finishers from that for a final round -- the final round was two games, with a possible tiebreaker as necessary (it wasn't necessary).
Unfortunately, we didn't have any active F.DS people in attendance, I guess Cincinnati is a bit of a hike for most people. You'll come to your senses soon enough, though. After I get married, I'm hoping to have these somewhat reguarly, but more teasers at the end of this post.
The winner of the tournament was Josh (sirusx, then some numbers, is his Twitch name, you'll see him with the occasional snarky comment in my chat. I also know that he lurks on these forums and said that most of his Dominion ability comes from these forums and watching my streams) -- he's also a good friend of mine so I was happy to see him win (though a lot of people at the tournament were friends from my gaming group anyways). Josh won every single game he played, so his performance was quite convincing.
Second place was Ken, he goes by shiroiken on these forums, but he doesn't post all that much. I've played a game or two with him on some of my old videos but that was quite a while ago -- most of the Dominion we play now is IRL because Adventures. Ken got a lot of second-place finishes, particularly in the games he played with Josh
Third place was Michael Lohr -- he's not really present in the online Dominion scene, but some may recognize the name, he has a couple of published games of his own. He got last place in his first game but won the next three games to make it into the finals.\
Here are the kingdoms I used for the Swiss rounds, and then the two finals kingdoms. I had more put together, but I'll keep them in my pocket for now for use in future tournaments.
1. Throne Room, Council Room, Masquerade, Contraband, Vault, Advisor, Soothsayer, Messenger, Lost City, Peasant, Trade
2. Village, Cellar, Festival, Moneylender, Duke, Tunnel, Scheme, Silk Road, Crossroads, Guide, Scouting Party, Seaway
3. Courtyard, Mint, Goons, Bank, Hermit, Feodum, Storyteller, Swamp Hag, Page, Dungeon, Raid
4. Nobles, Great Hall, Vineyard, Apothecary, University, Hoard, Worker's Village, Catacombs, Stonemason, Artificer, Colony/Platinum
5. Moneylender, Bureaucrat, Gardens, Feast, Bridge, Explorer, Embassy, Candlestick Maker, Treasure Trove, Governor
6. Cellar, Gardens, Harem, Scout, Island, Bishop, Hoard, Counting House, Goons, Market Square, Colony/Platinum
F1. Moat, Festival, Council Room, Fishing Village, Lighthouse, City, Worker's Village, Goons, Horse, Traders Fairgrounds
F2. Village, Gardens, Woodcutter, Bank, Counting House, Hamlet, Embassy, Marauder, Death Cart, Masterpiece , Travelling Fair, Borrow
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This is the appropriate time for thank-yous. I want to start out with Voltaire and Elestan, they both gave me a lot of advice for running IRL tournaments. I really didn't have any issues with organizing this and running it and full credit for that goes to these two -- they helped me prevent a lot of issues they had run into when organizing their IRL tournaments.
I should also thank Kirian -- though I didn't directly reach out to him about IRL details, I learned quite a lot from helping him out with GokoDom III, particularly about Swiss tournament structure. I was able to go back to a lot of his posts about GD tournaments and write up a spreadsheet that helped immensely, so thanks to Kirian as well
Then there were several people who helped design kingdoms -- I had an interesting set of constraints, since Hinterlands, Dark Ages, Guilds, and Adventures only had one copy available in my entire gaming group (right about the time when I started getting into Dominion, imagine that
). Several people helped out with kingdom design: werothegreat, Beyond Awesome, RobertJ, liopoil, Awaclus, JacquesTheBard, Mr.Oatmeal, and WanderingWinder. Thanks to all of you.
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The best part of this experience was the fact that I should be able to put together IRL tournaments like this somewhat regularly. The venue wasn't limited by space or time for us, and we were all really happy with how things went. Everyone in attendance said they would participate in another tournament like this one, and here's the best part:
They're all interested in a 2P Dominion tournament.
The main reason IRL tournaments are 3P only is to get the RGG stamp of approval. While I think it's good to have this, my vision is to do IRL tournaments often enough that we can do one or two RGG-sanctioned tournaments per year, and several "unofficial" 2P tournaments in between.
And that's not the end of the potential for these -- if everything goes well, there is the technological capability present to theoretically live-stream a "feature match" each round on Twitch,
with live commentary. I'm not kidding.
I'm hoping this tournament can be the first of many tournaments in the Cincinnati area. Sooner or later the scene will get big enough that some F.DS people will have to make the drive down here
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Topic: Tournament: Saturday, June 20, 2015 at 1PM -- all expansions (Cincinnati, OH) (Read 4924 times)