Karel's Wrapup

Thanks to everyone who played in the tournament last weekend. I know both I and C. had a great time, and I think everyone present would be willing to play another in a couple months. Overall, the game size (1500) and random missions worked pretty well, but we may want to retool the way we pick the pairings. Eric was a really good sport and I think he learned a lot, but experience-wise his second round was a bit of a mismatch.

In the future, I think we should consider pairings based on seeds for the 1st game. A player’s seed could be determined by rank in their last tournament, and maybe have newcomers always start out at the bottom for their first tournament. For second round pairings and overall tourney ranking, we need to decide whether we want to use total victory points or have folks earn what I’ll call “juju-points,” based on what type of victory/loss they experienced. I think the latter is most common at normal tournaments; it’s normally used at Dragon's Lair to good effect. The two methods produce slightly different results - in the Karel's Folly tourney, using the total VP method resulted in this ranking (the official results):

1st: C.
2nd: Mack
3rd: Bully
4th: Marcos
5th: Pat
6th: Eric

Just for the sake of providing an example, using the sliding scale the result would be:

Tied for 1st: C. & Bully
2nd: Mack
3rd: Marcos
4th: Pat
5th: Eric

In this case, it didn't make much of a difference (ok, besides bumping me past Mack - suck it, Necrones de Guerra!), but it decides the 2nd round loser/drawer brackets a bit better. We can still draw for pairings in cases of juju-point ties or to keep folks from playing the same person twice in the same tourney.