Thanks for the great ideas, everyone!
Wait, is this really a hypothetical? Just in case it is not, and you happen to be a billionaire (or your friend is), and you're posting this as part of your planning of such a tourney... then please consider this my sign-up.
Even though I'm way early, I'm proud to be the first to register for your tournament, sir. Anything I can do to help organize it?
No comment.
Make it two player.
This is something I'd be conflicted about. Multiplayer definitely occupies some of the space of "Dominion", but it definitely has increased variance and will take longer to complete games. I think I would be for acknowledging its existence and the fact that there is skill in adapting your play for more players. Perhaps have multiplayer take up 25% of the swiss rounds (2 matches out of 8, for example)?
Contentious suggestion: Goal: Try to eliminate mirror games where players execute the same obvious strategy. These games are either decided either by the luck of the draw or tactics, but I think the tactical decisions aren't usually that hard or interesting, and so are not good player skill differentators. Implementation: Use rejection sampling on kingdom sets. Both players see the randomly drawn kingdoms, get 5 (2, 3?) minutes to analyze it, and then privately write down a kingdom card that the opponent can't buy/gain. If they write down the same card, start over.
That sounds like a really fun variant, but I wonder if it may stray too far from "pure" Dominion for most people.
As a random aside, how often does the mirror match come into play with the highest-ranked players (say 40+)? Among those, how often is it a fairly exact mirror match, and how often do they vary by 1-2 support cards?
Randomly, no, yes, no. A year ago I would have answered yes to the last question, but I've changed my stance there. The singular exception might be Possession due to its likely effect on game length, not game play.
Hmm, along those lines, would it make sense to try to limit the number of Colony games as well? How about other time-heavy cards? (I don't know what they would be off the top of my head)
Edit: Also, 100-0 is not an edge case at all. KC-Bridge available with enablers? Neither player will buy any VP until they hit KC-KC-Bridge-Bridge-Bridge, and you will get a final score of 57-3 or thereabouts, even if the other player could have won next turn.
So points as a tie-breaker seems like it could give inaccurate results. How about opponent record as a tie-breaker? I know some tournaments do that when making the swiss cutoff for the next round / playoffs.
200 people in 2 days is impossible without luck.
It's also pretty simple to understand that a game of Dominion between two equally skilled players will be decided by luck 100% of the time, otherwise they wouldn't be of equal skill, get it?
This is true because luck plays an inherent factor in Dominion. There is shuffling, hence luck.
It's not true in chess where I'm pretty sure there is no luck. Well, you could be lucky to be white but you can just play 2 games to solve that.
If there is a 1% skill difference between 2 players, the part that luck plays is still close to 100%.
So you really can't throw luck out of the equation no matter how hard you try. This means you have to accept that it's a factor and by the end of two days you're not really crowning the luckiest overall, but you are crowning the luckiest of the best players.
I think that would be an acceptable outcome. Poker, for instance, never really crowns the best player, but a combination of the best play + best luck. You still see a lot of the same faces at the final table, so striving for that should be good enough for Dominion.
And someone else made the point that sometimes the better player overall may not be the better player on any given match. Maybe that combination of cards fails to inspire him as much as it does the lesser player. Maybe he overlooks some weird corner case card interaction that proves to be the difference. Maybe he's distracted because his girlfriend broke up with him due to jealousy over his true love (Dominion).
Do you guys think a 20 hour tourney length would help? I could see 2 10-hour days being feasible.