Archive for Jay LaFountain
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Jay LaFountain
United States
Coldwater
Michigan
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So, Wings of War Campaign. Basically, I took Wings of War, a simple, elegant game, and threw a load of crap on top of it. Fun, sure, but also fiddly.
The main fiddly thing is not the ace skills, not the keeping track of stuff, but a much direr thing - the novice skills.
The novice skills, once taken, were easy to track. But before they were taken, it was just a hassle. -1 to shots, no shots after an immelmann, So, the idea will be tossed out.
Next season, if there is a next season, there will only be Ace skills, and they will be tiered. So, you can get Sniper (draw an extra card for damage and give the ones you want to your opponent), and then Sniper 2 (draw 2 extra cards) etc.
I think this will make the game that much easier for the newbies, while still allowing for fun pilot upgrades for the veterans.
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Jay LaFountain
United States
Coldwater
Michigan
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In my last post, we developed into an actual discussion on the merits of the swiss tournament, points as rankings, etc. This was great! That's what I'm trying to get at, because in order to run an effective tournament in the future, I need to know what kind of scoring makes sense. I want to take a moment to thank everyone involved in that discussion for putting in their two cents.
Thanks!
Okay, now that that's over, you all have reminded me of a tournament structure that is used in Diplomacy.
In Diplomacy, a win is a huge feat. The game is set up to produce ties, so winning is a big deal. Therefore, there is a tiered system, which was mentioned in the comments of my last post by a different name. Basically, a score is given for the final position. If you win the game outright, capturing 18 SCs, you not only get your score, but you go up to the next tier. For scoring purposes, if you are on a higher tier, you automatically win.
While this isn't necessarily a swiss system, it could be used in that environment as well, with ranks decided by points but taking into account number of wins first.
Of course, a lot of Diplomacy scoring methods simulate this by giving the winner a lot of points. It also penalizes players for losing, as the losing players on the board should have been able to stop the winner from winning.
This is the way I would want to run a tournament, I think. This would allow seeding similarly tiered opponents together to produce that final victor, and also allow for either seeding opponents of similar ranks together, or seeding the better vs. the worst on the same tier to move up the better players.
This solves the problem of the player who doesn't win beating the player who wins one, while still allowing for standings amongst players who didn't win.
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Jay LaFountain
United States
Coldwater
Michigan
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So you want to bring your swiss style, similarly ranked players system into a multiplayer game. How do you run that Dominion tournament?
Well, there are several methods here, some better than others for certain games. For example, chess vs. Dominion.
In chess, there is a winner and a loser, and not much else to the score. In fact, the 'score' doesn't even always match the winner, such as when a large sacrifice wins the game. In Dominion, the winner is determined by the score, always. However, in chess, a win is a win. In Dominion, the winner could have vastly different final scores across two games.
Please note, at this point, I am using Dominion as a placeholder game for any game with variable score victories.
How do we utilize this point difference in a Swiss tournament?
Well, we could say that the best players will have the highest scores, but that's not always true. In games such as Race for the Galaxy, there is wide variety between winning scores. For example, I could win board 1 with 66 to 33, 30, and 27, and another player could win board 2 with 25. Does that make my victory better than his? Does that make the scores of the player that lost better than his winning score? No way!
There are several ways to deal with this. One can use a points system, giving standard amounts for each place. To take better into account individual scores, one could use a differential from the average score. Take the mean of the scores, and then subtract that from the actual scores. This takes into account the wide variety of scores while also rewarding large margins of victory. The problem comes when a good player is seeded in with bad players to start, and gets such a large score against them that the best player cannot catch up even over a number of rounds.
The last method I will discuss is probably more complicated than it needs to be. It involves ranking based on the average differential method, and then assigning a point value to each position. The top players will play each other in the second round, and the best of the best will stay on that board.
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Jay LaFountain
United States
Coldwater
Michigan
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The Wings of War campaign I am running involves multiple players of different levels of involvement and different entries into the war. We met and did 4 missions the first night, and then 1-2 missions on other nights followed by open gaming. So far, that's working pretty well.
Most Wings of War scoring systems focus on kills, and ours is no exception. However, as the campaign tends to be mission-based, we have further scoring based on completing mission objectives. Completing mission objectives not only increases your team's score for the round, but also increases the team's overall score which gives your side plane upgrades.
The downfall of that is that the objective score does very little for your pilot's individual score, so it isn't a huge draw to shoot at a bunker when you could be shooting at a plane. When I run it next time, objectives will go to personal score directly and also to team score, instead of always being shared throughout the team. Team scores are split amongst players at the end of the round.
Another way to earn points is by getting kills, which also gains the team points as shooting down enemy aircraft is always an objective. In patrol missions, they count double for the team. This is the main way to gain personal points.
The secondary way of gaining personal points is just by shooting at something. This is an important thing, as you can't control the damage you dish out, but you do have control over positioning your aircraft to shoot at an enemy.
What I take away from all this is two things:
1. Encourage behavior that you want by giving out points for it.
2. Reward good play within the game, as well as the result.
Examples of this in sports is statistics in baseball, where one can win the batting title by leading the league in average, or win other titles by leading in other stats, such as homeruns, rbis, wins, era, fielding percentage, etc. Even if the team loses, the individual still has a goal to fight for.
Now, Wings of War is special and distinct from most other games I play in that it does have this team aspect, where you are on the Allied Powers or the Central Powers.
Perhaps this is more game scoring system design, however, and not necessarily tournament scoring system design.
In my next post I'll discuss how to bring the Swiss system into multiplayer game formats. You may already know this. I'm still going to blog about it. 
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Jay LaFountain
United States
Coldwater
Michigan
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In the comments of my last post, I found that I completely left out a system that is used in many tournaments - the Swiss system. This oversight was particularly bad, as the last tournament I was in used the Swiss system.
Swiss System:
A tournament which makes players with similar results play each other, with each player playing the same number of rounds.
Basically, it's a knockout tournament without any knock-outs.
This style of tournament is beneficial for finding a winner, but the middle ranks tend to be jumbled, as you end up playing against players of the same skill level. For example, you could win one, lose one, or lose one, win one, and players have completely different skill levels, as the losers were pooled and the winners were pooled.
So, jumbled.
On to the actual post:
I'm familiar with a very narrow variety of games. The game store owner who introduced me to strategy games beyond Diplomacy was a huge fan of Martin Wallace. I think he owned almost every Age of Steam map. Whether or not this was the perfect fit for me or whether I was just influenced by him is irrelevant. I really enjoy most Martin Wallace designs.
I have developed my own personal preferences now, though. I mostly lean towards money-strategy games with final ranking based on the money you make as opposed to separate victory points, the major decisions being valuation via auction and the amount and timing of major investments. There should also be major player interaction in the form of cooperation for a common goal of making money. Examples: Chicago Express, Indonesia, Container, Genoa, Chinatown, etc.
But I also like Race for the Galaxy, Through the Ages, and Wings of War.
So I will be focusing on games I know.
I would be interested in running a tournament over Boardgaming-online or boardspace.net for Through the Ages or Container, respectively. Currently, I am running a Face-to-face campaign for Wings of War which takes up a lot of gaming time.
I'll be going over how I'm running the Wings of War campaign in the next post. I will be applying some things I have learned there into the scoring and methodology of competitions for other games. At least, that's what I hope I can do. Time will tell!
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Jay LaFountain
United States
Coldwater
Michigan
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I would like to start out this on the right foot. That is, with a description of tournaments I already know about that work. Most of these will be sports tournaments.
Single Elmination:
Arguably the simplest tournament style, players play head-to-head matches in order to determine who moves on.
Double Elimination:
A much more robust tournament style, this tournament allows for a more accurate placing beyond first. In single elimination, the team that should be in second place can be eliminated by the team that is first in the first round. In double elimination, the second-best team still has the opportunity to show that they are the second best team.
This style of tournament also involves head-to-head matches, with a winner's bracket and a loser's bracket. The loser's bracket is fed from the losers of the winner's bracket and winners of the loser's bracket. The winners bracket gets smaller quickly. A champion who has survived the winners bracket is considered to have taken the easy path, as there will be much less games than someone who loses their first game and then wins the rest.
Round Robin:
A round robin tournament is a tournament where each side plays each other side once. This is often used to determine seed as opposed to determining a winner, but is valid for either. This is one of the best ways to determine a ranking amongst many sides when there is no advantage given to a certain side in a match (i.e, going first, home stadium advantage, etc.) There are several variations of scoring in situations where ties can occur, such as -
Winner gets 2 points, ties get 1 point, losses 0. (this is the same as chess, 1 point/ 1/2 point)
Winner gets 3 points, ties get 1 point, losses 0.
Double Round Robin:
This is the same as a round robin, except each team plays the other twice. This is used to mitigate the problems that occur in situations where one team has an advantage, such as home field, or going first.
Rankings System:
This is used in racing. Ranks are given point values, which is used to determine a ranking at the end of the season. Whoever has the most points wins!
Well, these are some that I am familiar with. I will be using these and combining these to try and envision tournaments for games, which people often seem to want.
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