Sunday, 12 July 2015

BIG the Second

Last weekend I ran another BIG Tournament in Bristol and this time sixteen intrepid Infinity players showed up from as far away as London and Exeter to take a crack at the competition.

The size of the event was definitely a surprise to me as there was another tournament happening in the Midlands that same weekend which a fair amount of 'regulars' were attending. In fact I had only planned for a dozen players and had to hastily request extra tables for us!

There was a decent distribution of players for this event with a mixture of seasoned veterans as well as those playing their very first event. Most importantly, I think everyone had a good time!

Side art on new winner's box.

I charged a whopping £10 for entry to the event with just over half that amount going to our hosts in exchange for a roof over our heads and a chunk of scenery to use. Very reasonable indeed.

I managed to bring down one table worth of scenery and the rest of the was kindly provided by our players, so a massive thank you to everyone who was able to bring some with them!

The remainder from the entry fees went on prize support for the event so with a decent chunk of cash burning a hole in my pocket I cleared my local retailer (Excelsior Games) out of new releases. This did a great job of bulking out the standard tournament pack which I was happy to note didn't have a Keisotsu with Missile Launcher in it this time....

The prizes were allocated as follows:
  • 1st place - ITS Winner's Pack (Armand) plus one blister.
  • 2nd place - Highlanders plus one blister.
  • 3rd place - Two blisters.
  • Most Crits - One blister.
  • Last Place - Wooden Spoon, silhouettes and weapons pack.
  • Patches were handed out to everyone who did not otherwise receive a prize.
The Wooden Spoon also has the added benefit of halving the entry fee of the holder for our next event as long as they return it. Hopefully it acts as a good incentive to take another crack at a future tournament and they will have better luck next time!

The spot-prize for most critical hits suffered was intended as a way of spreading the prizes out a bit further by being an effectively 'random' reward. Little did I know that the only two players in contention would be two of the most veteran!

Not a bad haul I think. Not pictured is about a dozen patches!

In the future I'll need to consider if increasing the entry cost is worthwhile. Even just upping it to £12 would give substantially more prize support (another big box, blister and accessory) for a relatively meagre increase. This could mean that prizes end up going to top 4 or even further. If anybody has any thoughts on this, then I'd love to hear them.

Alright, enough blathering for now. Time for some results!

Results for the day, including number of critical hits suffered and caused.

So a big congratulations to Rich, Adam and Ian for taking home the top prizes and commiserations to Javier and Ian (again) for acquiring the Spoon and the 'Most Crits' awards respectively.

For those curious, Rich only used one of his lists throughout the day and it featured a pair of Yan Huo and Sun Tze. Definitely unconventional, but apparently effective as he only dropped 1 OP and 94 VP all day!

You can find the list he used here.

I also noted some other interesting things about the event:
  • The faction choices were heavily skewed with five Nomads (including Corregidor) and four Tohaa players competing. At the other end of the spectrum, there were no Aleph players in attendance at all.
  • Vanilla armies were by far the most common, with only two players opting to play sectorials. 
  • Players suffered on average of 5.875 Critical effects each on the day. The top two players had the best ratios of Crits Scored to Crits Suffered, but after that there was no real correlation.This was counting all Face to Face rolls and any Normal rolls with weapons.
The average scores for the missions (with some rounding) were as follows. Although, do take them with a pinch of salt as some round 2 and 3 games were cut short due to slow play.
  • Supremacy: 4.25 OP, 168 VP
  • Antenna Field: 4.25 OP, 147 VP
  • Annihilation: 4.94 OP, 138 VP
The missions were run in this order so that I could set up objectives with the least amount of downtime. Supremacy was set up the night before and Antenna Field over lunch.

Annihilation was clearly the bloodiest, but also yielded the highest average Objective Point results. Ideally I'd like to play it first so that everybody starts the tournament with some points on the scoreboard, but it's low setup time and brainpower requirements meant that it was the obvious pick for game 3.

In contrast, both Supremacy and Antenna Field had lower average scores, but more victory points retained as people were able to focus on objectives instead. Surprisingly, Antenna Field was substantially bloodier than Supremacy!

I intend on recording these stats for future use and would be grateful if other TOs would send me their data. It would be interesting to see what these results look like over a larger pool of games.

Hopefully others will have posted up their thoughts of the vent by now, so nothing left for me to do but dump some pics of the tables. See you all next time. :)

Table 1 - My MAS-ville
Table 2 - Abandoned outpost.
Table 3 - Wasteland.
Table 4 - Shipping station.

Table 5 - Yu Ching town.

Table 6 - Hab block 811.


Table 7 - Ruin excavation.


Table 8 - Backwater village.

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