I don't mean to be dismissive of tournament organizer concerns, I haven't done it (yet). Its just that I feel like there are some improvements that could go a long way for tournament player experience and not add too much more cost to organizers.
I'm glad you're saying what you want as a player -- when I play in Elestan's tournaments the only thing I care about at all is winning the darn thing; my mind is focused so hard on the gameplay that I don't really remember much else about the experience. I've never competed in other IRL tournaments before either, so having this perspective offers ways for me to improve the way things go (and theoretically more people will show up to tournaments if they are happier with them).
Your ideas are things I've never thought of, so of course they're only helpful. Maybe not all of them will work but I don't see you getting butthurt at that possibility. If anything, just make sure I'm not being too dismissive of your ideas
Having some intermission time between the first round and the semifinals (although if its the last set of games to be played, as has been suggested, semifinals becomes a misnomer) isn't the worst thing in the world. Perhaps it is just from my experience with larger Magic tournaments, but I found myself wishing there was even just a couple more minutes between rounds at Adam's tournament. I guess it doesn't help that I think my game was the last to finish in at least 5 of the 7 rounds I played.
We actually did have an intermission at this point, it went from 5 to 6PM, where the first half of that time was spent playing a tiebreaker match. Throughout the tournament I knew we were going to cut it close to a 9PM finish with the pace of the games so I was trying to hurry it along a little bit.
The intent of the timed rounds is to make sure we have enough time to have winners selected before they close the registers at 9PM, that way people can spend their prize money that day. I sort of assume about 10 minutes in between each round, but my current time budget could maybe use some work. It would be good to have time for 8 games, and intermission, and some margin for tiebreaker games if we need them.
I understand wanting to have the trays with the kingdoms all set up ahead of time. But for the second round, if you give a 15 minute break or something along those lines, players can relax/pump themselves up, and you can finish allocating cards/components to finish up the second round kingdoms, which could possibly be partially set up ahead of time.
There may be a way to use only my own Dominion set for the semi/finals games, and only the other sets that I borrow for the other games. Now that I'm removing Mayday sleeves from my life this might be easier, but it could still be a challenge -- I need to give this some more thought and maybe play around with my script a bit to see if I feel like the quality of kingdoms would suffer from some of my ideas. Let me tell you some of the things I do to prepare and some of the things I want to minimize:
- I want the kingdoms to feel as close to full-random as possible, but with some filtering to take out uninteresting or high-luck kingdoms, and I'm especially cautious in 3P junking games because things can just get out of hand.
- I don't want to "tweak" kingdoms to "remove duds" or "make one strategy stronger/competitive" -- I don't feel like I'm good at that, and part of Dominion skill that I want to test is knowing which cards can be ignored safely (or knowing when weak cards can shine); or seeing two viable strategies and determining which one is stronger/what to deny.
- I borrow entire Dominion sets from two other people for the tournaments. I like to make it so I can return their sets to them on the day of the tournament. This doesn't affect kingdom design all that much, but it does imply that...
- I'm not going to re-sleeve entire sets of base cards (basic treasures, basic victory cards, purples) day-of. I'd like to minimize re-sleeving of kingdom cards if possible. I'm hoping this distinction will just mean the difference between sleeved and unsleeved instead of using two different types of sleeves.
- I don't want to re-use the same copy of a card in the prelims and in the semi/finals. I'm not totally opposed to doing this, but I want this to be a last resort (I've tried it before and I think I have enough sets that I shouldn't have to anymore). What are the issues with this?
-- I use extra unplayed kingdoms from the prelims as my tiebreaker sets, so there's a risk of cannibalizing one of those sets and then needing it later for a tiebreaker.
-- Tracking cards becomes more difficult when I have the same card in two different places at once.
-- I like to have all of my stuff in a place where I can keep an eye on it, just to make sure that nobody is peeking at something they aren't supposed to see, and if I go to the bathroom, they'll at least be peeking in front of everybody. Switching out cards is something I'd really like to do away from prying eyes (which is really difficult to do, actually, I have a crowd around me pretty much every minute of these days unless I'm floating around watching games being played -- talking to the people playing is important to me and I like being the center of attention
). The solution to this may be as simple as just asking to store my still-covered trays behind the counter of the store. Actually, I bet they would totally let me do that. OK maybe this one isn't an issue after all, I'll ask the store owner about this.
-- None of these are showstoppers, but they are additional things to deal with day-of and I'd really prefer not to deal with them if it's possible.
So the idea I'm kicking around in my head is like this: I have access to seven sets of base cards, five of them must be unsleeved, the other two can be either. Also, I can call on some people who are attending to bring in their sets of base cards just in case I need them -- I haven't yet but I like to be prepared. I also have my own sleeved cards, which has three sets of base cards. If I used sleeved kingdom cards and my three sleeved base cards for the semi/finals, then unsleeved cards for the prelims (with additional backup kingdoms out of my sleeved stuff in case we need it for the prelims) I could make life a lot simpler. My only worry is that the quality of kingdoms might suffer by dividing my kingdom cards in such a way, but maybe that's not an issue.
I need to think about this some more, but I'm optimistic about this. It abandons the multiple-copies-of-the-same-kingdom-in-the-semis idea, but after thinking about for a bit, coming up with two different good kingdoms is roughly the same amount of work as coming up with two copies of the same good kingdom.
