Tournaments for <5 people?

[yamissflash]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

You can follow the link in my sig to my battle reports. The OP has an index; if you want to see how it plays, you can follow links to the various "multiplayer madness" events.

Yes!

Self-destruct DW7K into DW8K and DW9K. 85% chance of eliminating yourself in one turn, but hey, points are points.

[Dad_Scaper]

If you bring 8000 or 9000 (or even the Zettian Guards) in such a format, you deserve the outcome you'll get. One component of building an army is figuring out how much your own units are worth per wound/squaddie. Obviously bringing a 160 point, 1 life robot is going to paint a big red bulls-eye on your face.

[caps]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

Tournament format with 4 people? Easy-peasy. Round robin. Everyone plays everyone else, compare records at the end. Use partial card scoring for tiebreaks. At the end of the game, the loser gets 100 points for killing all the Krav Maga Agents, but if he killed 2, he still gets 66 points. Similarly, he gets 30 points for putting 1 wound on Kaemon Awa (1/4 of his life). The winners always get the 440 (or whatever) army size, and the losers get points for the damage they did.

If it's you & your buddies, and you're used to each other and share units, why don't you do a draft? 440 points, 24 hexes, 1 unit at a time; keep it very simple.

This is also what I thought of when I saw this thread. Doing a bracket afterwards could be fun if 3 games feels like too few.

[TheSparkleInYourWater]

For 4 players- Round robin is definitely the way to go. You could finish with a 2v2 team game. I think team games are really fun provided you play on a standard 1v1 size map. This gets everyone mixing it up. The first few times I played teams I thought the map needed to be larger to accommodate, but it just ends up largely being 2 different matches on either side of the board.

Instead of a tournament, you could do a special type of scenario game, such as what Kolakoski has posted here. Have everybody come up with 2 armies and play 2 games, that way you get plenty of use out of the set-up and it's enough to fill your game night.

For 3 players- I prefer a round robin here as well, where one player sits out each game. I've done this and then finished the 'event' with a 3 player game of some sort, such as kill the person to your left or a heat of battle free for all.

For 2 players- While just playing a few random games with 2 people is fun, I find it a lot more engaging if you can set up some sort of structured event that goes several games. Here's a couple of formats I've used that have worked well.

1. Ideally you'd have 3 maps set-up. Each player builds 3 armies of however many points you're using, I prefer the standard range of 400-600.

The event is divided into two halves. You play each map 1 time in each half, so each map gets used 2 times and you play a total of 6 games. Before each game you randomly select one of your 3 armies (assign them numbers and roll, or draw them out of a bag, or whatever you come up with). Once you play an army it's out for the rest of that half of the event, so each army will get played exactly twice, same as the maps. For the second half of the event, once each player has used each of their armies once and each map has been played on once, you reverse the whip, swapping army pools with your opponent and play 3 more games for the second half in the same way.

2. This one uses the pod draft format. The pod draft is where you have a pool of 6 small armies of around 300 pts. Before the game one player drafts a pod, then the other drafts 2 pods, then the first player drafts their 2nd, so that each player has 2 pods. This has been used in some of the online events, where each player brings 3 pods and can then draft from their or their opponents pod pool.

So for a 2 player tournament using this, each player comes up with X amount of pods. When we played we did 10, so a total of 20 pods, with each pod assigned a number 1-20. Before each game we rolled the D20 until we had 6 different armies to form our pod pool for that game. We alternated who got to choose who drafts first. We played this over several weeks playing 8 total games (so 32 pods were used over those 8 games). I think we ended up using 16 of the 20 pods and several of them got used twice, with one or two being selected 3 times.

[mtl1998]

Thanks, @TheSparkleInYourWater !!
Something that I thought of just now is something that Legoboy and Captain Canuck did in one of their videos. I think they called it lightweight battles or something along those lines. It was where they had two smaller (320ish points) armies, played each other with one of the armies. The loser then switched armies and faced the army they lost to. A way to do something like a tourney but incorporate that would be to do double elimination, but after your first loss, you would switch armies to your other predetermined army. I think that sounds fun.

EDIT: I think that idea in a bigger tournament would be cool too. Like for the online seasons, you could bring 4 armies, and had to use a new army after every loss or something like that (just brainstorming here).

[mtl1998]

Three of my friends and I are starting the process of another tournament. We decided to each make two 300 point armies. Each matchup there would be the option to play any of the four armies (your two along with your opponent's two). We drafted 16 cards each. We'll probably play everyone twice (so double round robin) and compare records and points killed.