"I Left My Heart In Malifaux" Wrap-up

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Malifaux – The February tournament went off without a hitch. We had a respectable 15 players show up. Several players made the drive up from Toledo and other parts of the Metro Detroit area (as well as RIW regulars). 

Every faction was represented with at least two players per faction. 

Rounds lasted 90 min with about half of the players able to complete a full 6 turns. I'm still wrestling with a way to allow players enough time to complete their games and still have a decent sized list. 35 soul stones seems to be the right size for tournament games, but I'm wondering if 90 mins is enough time. I'm going to continue to track the last turn played per round for the next few events I run to see if it improves.

I'm a big fan of the lotto system for large prizes. It gives all players a chance to win something cool regardless of skill level. For this event the players daily average determined the number of tickets they were awarded, and players were able to purchase additional tickets for $1 each. Store credit and pins were awarded to the 5 best in faction winners, and the other categories were awarded pins.

The final results were as follows:

Best in Faction, Outcast; Overall Winner – Vincent Curkov

Best in Faction, Neverborn – Dave "nerdelemental" Bowen

Best in Faction, Arcanist – Sheri Chap

Best in Faction, Guild – Dave Kruger

Best in Faction, Resurectionist – Jonathan "shortman" Mann

Best Painted – Scott "Griff" (Gremlins)

Best Sportsman – Ryan Romans (Seamus) [Ten way tie randomly determined]

Biggest Loser – Jaimie Mitchell (Kirai)

City Table Lotto – Amber, Arcanist

I liked the addtion of "soft scores." Thirteen of the fifteen crews were painted to some extent. I noticed that the players marked down for bad sportsmanship had multiple judge calls. What was interesting to me was this changed the dynamic and actually worked against players that tried to be "cut-throat" or "rules-lawyers."

I also tried to be sure that match-ups would actually determine best-in-faction to prevent any ties which can be common with true round-robin events. Also to keep things interesting the first two rounds no one was matched up against their friends/regular opponents.