SpielByWeb

sedge · Joined: 15 Nov 06 Posts: 79 Location: Sydney, Australia

Well, I’ve given up waiting for someone else to do it, so I guess I’ll just have to go ahead and pull my finger out and arrange it myself!

So, here I am, sending out a call for 32 players (well, 31 others Smile

) to enter a 4 player Tikal tournament.

It’ll be the standard random-draw non-auction variant.

Open to anyone who has at least 10 plays under their belt, and who can commit to playing out all their matches (between 4 and 16 games).

The tournament (assuming there’s enough interest and enough players sign up) will initially consist of 8 groups of 4 players.

Further, in each round, each group will play 4 matches at the same time, so if you can’t handle 4 matches at once, then please re-think entering.

The first 31 entrants to meet these criteria and post against this thread will form the tournament participants.

If there’s not enough interest, I’ll re-jig the draw to suit 16 or 24 players (I hope we get that!)

Groups will be formed according to seedings. Seedings will be determined by the players’ “%win minimum 10 games” statistic at the time of the draw.

Matches will proceed in the following manner:

1st round: 8 Groups of 4 players. Each group will play 4 matches within the group. Top 2 players from each group will proceed to the 2nd round.

2nd round (16 players now remaining): Top 2 players from each group will proceed to the semi finals.

Semi finals (8 players now remaining): Top 2 players from each semi-final will proceed to the final.

Final (the final four): Do I really have to say what happens from here? Smile

Each group in each round will play 4 matches, with points allocated for finishing order, with finishing positions determining the number of points a player gets thus:

1st: 4 points
2nd: 3 points
3rd: 2 points
4th: 1 point

At the end of the 4 games, points will be totalled for the players in the group and the two players with the highest totals will progress to the next round.

Tie breaks will be decided by the player who has come 1st the most number of times in this round. If this is tied, the number of 1st places throughout the course of the tourney will be counted. If still tied, to be decided as above, counting the number of times players came 2nd. If still tied, the winner will be decided by the players’ average scores over the matches played in the tourney.

After the 32 entrants have been decided and seeded, the groups will be formed by the seeds thus (sorry 'bout the formatting, but I'm sure you can figure it out):

Group A Group B Group C Group D
1 2 3 4
16 15 14 13
17 18 19 20
32 31 30 29

Group E Group F Group G Group H
5 6 7 8
12 11 10 9
21 22 23 24
28 27 26 25

The first 2 players from each group will the progress to the 2nd round. Example, the player with the most number of points from Group A will be ‘A1’, the player who came 2nd in group A will be ‘A2’ etc.

The 2nd round will be comprised of:

Group I Group J Group K Group L
A1 A2 C1 C2
B2 B1 D2 D1
G2 G1 E1 E2
H1 H2 F2 F1

The Semi Finals will be comprised of:

Group M Group N
I1 I2
J2 J1
K2 K1
L1 L2

And the final:

M1
M2
N1
N2

After each game is completed, the winning player will PM me with the scores.

After all 4 matches from each group have been completed and the outcomes sent to me, I’ll post the results and the resulting draw for the next round.

Now, assuming that the tournament won’t start for at least a week, and I can’t see it lasting much less than a month once it kicks off, if you intend to have any significant breaks away from the computer over this period, please reconsider signing up (I’m not talking about a few days here and there – we all have a life after all and sometimes things pop up which we can’t control – but if there’s any anticipated extended delays perhaps you could reconsider)

Further, all entrants need to commit to playing out all their matches and should hopefully be able to make moves at least daily, if not more. Again, I’m not talking about the odd slow period we all get from time to time, but if you regularly only make moves twice a week or so given the volume of games involved in this tourney and the turns needing to be made, please think about the impact this would have on all the other players and the ramifications for the rest of the tournament.

Complaints about consistently excessively slow players may result in serial offenders being removed from the draw.

Now, in an effort to head off at the pass some likely banter regarding the format of the tournament, here are a couple of other points you should consider before signing up:

4 games per round. For no special reason, I’ve chosen 4 matches to combine the results over to determine who will progress to the next round. Seems like a reasonable number. I’ve also decided to send the top 2 from each group through to the next round. Both of these are to help mitigate (is not possible to eliminate) getting a bad starting position, the bad tile draws that inevitably happen, etc. It’s NOT an Auction Tournament and if the 4 games of random draw doesn’t suit you, then please reconsider entering.

Next, and contentiously: The format could potentially be open to some degree of abuse in the form of kingmaking. For instance, in the last match of 4 from the group games, I could have enough points to be confirmed at making it through to the next round. Further, I may have the potential to affect the outcome to determine who would get the points to carry them forward to the next round. I could choose to send the player through who I perceive to be the lesser threat for the rest of the tourney.

Is this right? Well, it’s a question every gamer has to answer for themselves I reckon. For me, I’ll play the game the way I would naturally as a 1-off game. However, at the same time I understand that this ISN’T a one-off game, and it IS a tournament with the objective to win the war, not the battle, thus I understand the perspective that there IS a meta-game here and all’s fair in love, war and trying to increase your chances of winning the whole event.

Further, a little bit a meta-gaming is possible during inter-round matches with entrants taking the other games into account in a current game (“In that other game he stole ‘my’ temple off me…. In this game I’m going to make him pay”).

Now, that being said, I seriously doubt whether there’ll be any of this kind of play taking place and am confident that the tournament will be played within the spirit of the game and the good sportsmanship that I so regularly see here on SBW.

However, it IS an unavoidable possibility (without having to play a prohibitive number of games in a massive round-robin), and if the chance that this could occur in the tournament is too much of an issue for you in joining up, then that’s fine, but please don’t tell me the whole thing is wrong, flawed, evil, etc, please just don’t enter.

So, now all that rubbish is out of the way …….. are you ready to rumble?