WarGamesCon by the Numbers: Let's Get It On!
I want to start off with a big THANK YOU to everyone that attended WarGamesCon this year! It was a fantastic event and I sincerely loved every minute of it. I hope to see each and every one of you next year!
TOURNAMENT BASICS
Both BOLSCON last year and WarGamesCon this year is a "seven-round, modified Swiss-system tournament with objective-based scoring and a second-day split into a Championship and Consolation bracket". Each 2,000 point game is two hours in length with four games on Saturday and three games on Sunday.
INITIAL PAIRINGS
In most 40K tournaments events, the first round pairings are completely random. But for BOLSCON last year, we seeded the list using by excluding matches where the players' home town matched (to prevent you from traveling across the country and playing your buddy in your first game).
This year at WarGamesCon, we made the initial matching a little more sophisticated. Not only did we not match you with a player from your hometown, but we also made sure that you didn't play any of your opponent's from the previous year!
Interesting Tidbit: WarGamesCon attracted over 75 players from outside of Texas. The furthest came from Germany to attend!
SUBSEQUENT PAIRINGS
Each round (after the first) the players are ranked by Battle Points and paired accordingly (i.e., the #1 ranked player plays the #2 ranked player, and so forth). For the first six games of the tournament, we prevented you from playing the same opponent twice.
SPLIT TOURNAMENT
At the end of the first day, we ranked each player by Battle Points and broke the tournament into two separate events. The top tier (the top 18 tables this year) were put into the Championship bracket to continue the tournament, while the bottom tier (the next 60 or so tables) were matched in a new 3-round tournament called the Consolation bracket.
Scoring details for these events were slightly different -- and you can get all that information from the WarGamesCon website (or you can ask me questions here, if you want). Each tournament brought some or all of the previous day's results -- and each led to a separate awards at the end of the event.
MISSION 1: "LET'S GET IT ON"
As BOLSCON veterans know, Jwolf (our intrepid tournament organizer) likes to theme the missions after song titles -- this year was no different and our theme was "Hits from the 70s".
MISSION OBJECTIVES
The Primary objective ("Set the Mood") was to control more objective markers than you opponent. If you had 3+ more, then you gained 20 points. Two got you 15 points, one earned 10 points and a tie gave each player 5 points.
The Secondary objective ("Get Your Groove On") was to control more table quarters than your opponent. If you won this objective, you walked away with 13 points. A tie would net 6 points each.
The Tertiary objective ("Get Comfortable") instructed you to control 3 or more terrain features. If you met this objective, you earned 9 points. There were also 5 Bonus Points (called Modifiers) available.
(Click on the image for a larger version.)
Commentary: "Let's Get It On" is an excellent example of an all-or-nothing mission; rewarding dominating players with domino-style objectives. This mission is ideal for clearing the wheat-from-the-chaff. If you don't gain momentum early in the game, then you will likely end up being the chaff in this match-up.
SCORE DISTRIBUTION
The total available points in "Let's Get It On" was 47 points. The below graph shows the count of players at each point level.
(Click on the image for a larger version.)
The average player scored 20.7 points. The largest group of players were ones that scored only a few modifiers (34.2%) followed by players that swept up every available point (17.4%)!
Bottom Tier (scoring 0-13 points): 48.4% of players
Middle Tier (scoring 14-29 points): 18.7% of players
Top Tier (scoring 30-47 points): 34.8% of players
Interesting Tidbit: 74% of the players with perfect "Let's Get It On" scores were from new attendees. Veteran BOLSCON players only managed to scrape up 26% of the perfect scores!
GAME COMPLETION
85% of games finished all six turns in two hours. Only 5% failed to finish at least 5 turns in the allotted time.
Interesting Tidbit: A total of 3,205 Battle Points were earned in Round 1!
SPORTSMANSHIP
WarGamesCon uses a simple sportsmanship system. Three ratings are allowed: Bad, Good and Great. If you score your opponent as either "Bad" or "Great", then you are required to speak to judge to explain your rating.
In "Let's Get It On", 64% of players rated their opponent as "Great", 36% rated "Good" and 0% rated the game as "Bad".
Commentary: We were a little surprised with the number of "Great" scores -- especially considering that each player had to justify their rating. But it was the first round of a big tournament and everyone was matched against a new player, so perhaps we'll chock this one up to enthusiasm.
>>Well, that's Mission 1 by the numbers. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments (or email me at mkerr@chainfist.com). The next time I sit down, we'll take a look at Mission 2: "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" by the numbers!