Some reflections on organizing the demos and tournament:
I arrived hours early on Friday to get oriented and make sure the setup of tables and chairs would work. Sure glad I did. I'd asked for three tables and 16 chairs. What I got was three SETs of three tables and 16 chairs. Each set was arranged with the three tables pushed together to make one massive square with the 16 chairs around it. While ridiculous looking, I'd certainly rather have more than we need than less. Once we got rid of the excess, we were left with a comfortably large space, electing to keep a fourth table. This allowed us to have a 'support' table for each game table. That was particularly helpful during the tournament games as we could array all of the character panels, cards, and minis for a game on their own table.
Who's Yer Con continues to grow every year and this year they'd outgrown the previous hotel and moved into a larger one. Unfortunately, unlike past years, all of the gaming wasn't down the same hall. We ended up, sadly, away from a lot of the other action and, in particular, away from the open gaming area, the game library, and the dealer hall. This meant very little foot traffic and greatly reduced abilities to find people looking for a game to invite into the demos. Even so we were able to find a few people. We had a number of demo games that went from being a single person to being five or six because we were able to encourage some people to play. I was also quite pleased to see a number of people show up from having found Sentinel Tactics in the program.
Our games were allocated to one of the smaller rooms, so we took up about a third of the space in there. I'm not sure if that was a blessing or a curse. From a sound standpoint we were often doing quite well, but we occassionally were competing with a Pandemic tournament or other games that got very loud. Unfortunately, the loudest times corresponded to some of our tournament time.
Since I knew we could only judge two games at a time, I'd scheduled two Round 1 events -- one at 1:30 on Saturday and the other at 3 on Saturday. Since we had ten people come to the first event and only one to the second, it's tempting to conclude that the best way to handle this would have been to find a way to make sure we knew before the tournament started exactly how many people wanted to play, so we could organize teams and first round events all at once. Doing so, though, causes some problems. If we say that round 1 is from 1:30-4:30, there may well be people who think that a game will last that long, or unable to commit all of that time. Still, I think it would have been better to have found some way to determine all of the teams before announcing the first round games.
I also wonder if we should have maybe called an audible, given that we only had four teams, and changed the tournament to a round robin or double-elimination tournament. We couldn't really do that during the first round 1 timeslot because we didn't know how many people would show up for the second one. Not sure whether or not it would have occured to me to do so if we'd determined we only had four teams total. Also not sure Rabit and I had the energy and motivation after all those demo games to run more tournament games than we needed to.
I found, to my annoyance, that after I'd judged a game I had virtually no idea of what had actually happened in the game! I'd been so focused moment to moment on making sure that all of the rules were being followed that I hadn't been tracking any of the drama or story of the match! That's why I can't recall for the stats above who won the coin toss, for instance. Frankly, I'm not actually sure what the final scores were -- even for the games I judged. The results above are pretty confident guesses, but guesses nonetheless. We kept a list of which characters were banned and drafted, but not who won the coin toss and not what the final score was.
For this tournament, we used copies of the tournament map from the inaugural tournament last year at the GtG warehouse. Rabit and I had attended that and GtG had graciously allowed us to take a map each, since they weren't planning to use them again. We used gaffer's tape to secure them to the tableclothes on the game tables. Sadly, when that tape came off they ripped up the edges of the map. Rabit's fared better -- he used less tape and carefully folded the tape under the map rather than ripping it off. I could probably still use my map, I'd just need to be careful to tape offer all the discolored sections if I didn't want it to look ugly.
Rabit brought a whiteboard and easel with him on the second day and set that up outside our room with a message that we were doing Sentinel Tactics demos and a tournament. That helped attract a few people.
If you're running a tournament, I'd recommend preparing the following in advance:
- A signup sheet with spots for team name and each player's name
- A bracket and/or round robin sheet where you can record who is playing whom and what the results are
- A stats sheet where you can record who was banned and picked (and who won the coin toss!)
We found that instead of using a coin toss we liked rolling a die to see who would get the choice of first ban/first draft. For one thing you don't have to figure out which of the teams gets to make the call on the coin flip. For another, this is a dice game. Use dice!
If you can swing it, I highly recommend having at least one assistant to help out the people judging. We didn't NEED one, but it would have been nice to have someone else who could encourage people to play demos, find a pen when the ink ran out, help clean up/set up games, take stats during a game, etc. We'd tried to arrange that for this tournament, but were foiled by a whole variety of circumstances.
Whew. Glad I did it, but also glad to have some time to decompress today.