I’ve only played 2 games. The first one was cut off at about 3 hours when the WotC event ended but I think it might’ve ended in another 30-45 minutes either by victory or zombie apocalypse. My second game ended in a stalemate about about 4 hours.
I don’t think folks will play a tournament for 5 hours like 1942 SE.
In the games I played, the zombies didn’t get to far. 8-12 IPCs controlled. I feel like it should be more pressing.
My suggestions:
Play time: 3 hours 45 minutes + 15 minute stoppage as needed.
Victory conditions are:
1. Capture and hold an enemy capital while holding all of your own capitals. (OOB rules)
2. At the end of play time if there is no victory, use the zombie apocalypse rules to determine a winner.
New zombie apocalypse rules:
I also think the tournament should either have a consolation round or be a compass tournament. (The problem with compass is you need to have a number of players/teams that is a power of 2). But the idea is to keep newbies to the game interested in continuing and not get discouraged if they get a beat down from an experienced player. I think a sportsman award should be considered as well, to encourage the experienced players to help the newbies.
I’ve played 4 games so far with one Apoc. happening and I forced it so Japan couldn’t win it for the Axis. Point is that capturing a capital wins for your side, Apoc. for yourself so making that happen should be a strategic move, not fate.
Greg had a good idea with restarting the invitational tourney, to pull out the top 8 national players from regular play.
An economic VC might be a good approach, by team, there are plenty of reasons to grab the small money or fight over it already, which is why I like the slow introduction of more territories across the board.
It is an interesting point, that with the individual victory, you would probably need to skyhook your team into the next round, even though your partners technically lost. That could lead to an interesting bi-level format (winners v winners losers v losers) or where individual winners became team leaders or won byes….you could integrate that into a pool of players being assigned seats rather than strong players playing as a consistent team in every round…
For a tournament setting, I would toss the “individual victory” clause of the zombie apocalypse completely. A&A is best played 1 Vs. 1 or with preset teams and allowing for situations where team members could betray one another could create some really nasty situations.
I forget how Zombie Apocalypse rules work but aren’t they just “whoever has the most uncontested (i.e. Zombie-free and under their control) territories wins”? If so, wouldn’t that just mean Allies win every game without a lot of lucky zombie cards?
IPC Swing is a perfectly fine method of determining a winner once time expires, unless you want to go for something crazy like what WBC does for Revised:
Tl;dr version of WBC Ruleset:
-Strategically important locations on the map (Not always the OOB “victory cities” but they could be) are determined by the TO/community in advance. These are called “Victory Territories”. The Victory Territories are selected in such a way that both factions have an equal number of them at the start of the game (ex. 6 for GER/JPN = 12 total for axis, 4 for USA/UK/USSR = 12 total for allies)
-The Victory Territories are explained to all players, and counters indicating where they are location are placed on the map (these can be homemade for next to 0 cost, or can even be taken from other games, like AA50’s Victory City Tokens).
-Once time expires, whoever holds more VTs win. If VTs are tied fall-back to IPC Swing.
Greg did the Master’s invitational last year but there are still a lot of strong players not in the Master’s yet.
That why I was thinking a consolation bracket would be cool.
And if you’ve never done a compass tournament, literally everybody plays until the last round. I’ve done this with tennis: http://www.compassdraw.com/CompassDrawOverview.html
As an FYI, earliar statements on the OOB rules having an individual winner in case of apocalypse turned out to be wrong. It is the “side” that wins in that case. Having an individual winner would be a tournament house rule.
