True and no issues with that call but having an easy access topic for TOs is, IMO, a no brainer.

A page back I asked for a list of rules that new players may not be familiar with in a competitive environment to add to the list of questions I'm frequently asked on game nights: initiative, measuring, etc.

I've written an article covering the basics of these things, and included images from the FAQ & Tourney rules, in an attempt to get the newer players in my area a bit more up to speed on the "advanced rules" and hopefully make them less apprehensive about entering a tournament. It's also my attempt at getting new players looking beyond the core rule book & excited about the deeper aspects to be found in this game, where the Empire doesn't always have initiative.

The article is here on our group's website , if anyone's interested. I'll be adding to it as more questions come up, and of course as things are revised in the FAQ.

Thanks for all the great advise here, folks. I'm running our new store's first tournament this Saturday - wish me luck!

jme,

Thats a really good article ! and your website has come along nicely ! Best of luck on your tourney, let us know how it goes. My first time as a TO is the following Saturday on May 2nd. So any lessons you learn will be appreciated.

If we were to pin a TO help thread, it should probably go in the Organized Play sub-forum.

So how do we get it moved/ pinned? Or should I / we just start a TO resource thread over in organized play?

We just need a mod or admin to move it for us.

I would also recommend the following:

Food and Drink ( for profit! ). Players tend to forget that they're human, and play starts to suffer due to fatigue from that. Something with high protein but low contact-issue (not greasy, not sauced, et c.) should be ideal.

Carrying Trays Some small cardboard boxes that can hold the ships while they're two-pegged (I think the Firespray's the tallest model, but check them all, and also make sure that double-falcon fits), helps to move games from one to the next more rapidly. Plus, if you put any amount of craftsmanship into them, offer them for sale! Utilitarian Merch is a great way to advertise for future events at your FLGS, particularly if you put their logo on the box.

Planned Rest Phases . Again, fatigue is a thing. The occasional 15-20 minute break between matches helps with this. If you're doing a LONG tournament, maybe up to an hour.
These should not necessarily be between every match, as many games don't go down to the wire. However, the shorter your time limit, the more necessary these become.

Deodorizing . Not only for the gamers who don't know what hygiene is, who sadly still exist, but also for the smokers, or anyone wearing way too much perfume/body spray. Some folks (me included) are allergic to that stuff, and nothing drives people away from your event quite like "I can't breathe, and prefer living to playing this tournament".
The cure for this is circulation, not air fresheners, but febreezing the area during the aforementioned breaks is a good idea if circulation is problematic.

jme,

Thats a really good article ! and your website has come along nicely ! Best of luck on your tourney, let us know how it goes. My first time as a TO is the following Saturday on May 2nd. So any lessons you learn will be appreciated.

Thanks a lot, Meynolt. I will certainly let you know how it goes, and will also give you a heads-up on the mistakes I make. Good luck to you as well!

I would also recommend the following:

Carrying Trays Some small cardboard boxes that can hold the ships while they're two-pegged (I think the Firespray's the tallest model, but check them all, and also make sure that double-falcon fits), helps to move games from one to the next more rapidly. Plus, if you put any amount of craftsmanship into them, offer them for sale! Utilitarian Merch is a great way to advertise for future events at your FLGS, particularly if you put their logo on the box.

Pannera Bread gives away cardboard trays for free to people that order "to go" items. I'm not sure how many they may be willing to give away at a time, but....

jme,

Thats a really good article ! and your website has come along nicely ! Best of luck on your tourney, let us know how it goes. My first time as a TO is the following Saturday on May 2nd. So any lessons you learn will be appreciated.

Thanks a lot, Meynolt. I will certainly let you know how it goes, and will also give you a heads-up on the mistakes I make. Good luck to you as well!

Well how did it go? Mine is happening tomorrow ! A bit nervous but I think I got it down. What was your turn out?

Although it seems like this thread has faded away, I promised to post how it went...

We held our Tourney last Saturday. 16 attended which was 6-8 more then I anticipated. No sweat we had plenty of room. Started registration at 10 with first dice down range at 11. One hour almost felt like too much time for registration. I do know in the future I will try to push that people bring a pre-printed list in with them. Hand jamming lists was a time consumer, and deceiphering people's writing is a pain too.

I set up cryodex once I had all the lists in. It was roughly 5 to 11 and everyone was at their table. This is when #15 and #16 strolled in through the door, and I made my biggest hiccup of the whole event. Tables 1-7 were set and ready to roll. Guys were just jaw jacking and waiting for the start signal to start setting up turn zero. I asked everyone if a 10 minute delay is ok by them to get the other two in. They all said yes. I tried to add them to cryodex, I mouse clicked the wrong button and regenerated the entire round. So here I was, tourney hadn't started. I could either ask everyone to move tables, or break out a piece of notebook paper and do it the old fashioned way.

I broke out the notebook paper. it worked. It wasn't easy by any means, but it worked LOL. The remainder of the tourney went smooth. Let me tell you as a first time TO I never expected how long of a day that is. 4 rounds with a cut to 4 at 75 minutes each. I got home at 8pm. Lots of compliments from players on the tourney being well organized, they all look forward to the next one. My big hiccup was largely invisible and did not effect the game at all. So all in all, it worked out well. Thanks to all of you and your advice !

Oh yeah Klutz...your table markers were a huge help. The way tables are organized in our shop it would be hard to know your table without a marker. Thanks again!

Table result sheets

These are letter-sized sheets, meant to be pre-cut along the dotted lines.

Print one sheet per table, and as games finish up, players can fill out the sheets and bring them over to the TO or leave them by your laptop if you're also participating and your game isn't finished. Makes it super easy to enter results in Cryodex and reduces the errors that will inevitably happen if people just tell you their scores verbally. You can even ask both players to sign the sheet or put down their initials before turning it in, that way if there's ever a mistake on the sheet they can't really complain about it afterwards.

If you intend on using Klutz' table score sheets, make sure the text is crystal clear. Don't put in the text 'Points destroyed', because half the players will correctly assume the right thing and mark down how many points of the opponent's ships they have destroyed, while the other half will mark down how many points of their own fleet have been destroyed. Unfortunately, true story.

Well how did it go? Mine is happening tomorrow ! A bit nervous but I think I got it down. What was your turn out?

I'm terribly sorry I didn't post prior to your tournament, Meynolt. Things have been... nuts. Sounds like your tourney went well, though--congrats!

You can manually change the parings in cryodex -- since you had everyone set up already, and added the two late-shows at the (new) last table, I think you could have let everyone start and manually adjusted the accidentally-regenerated 1st round pairings to where you already had everyone. I have no idea if that would have caused bugs in the software later, though, especially regarding cryodex informing you about re-paired matchups.

We had 8 at our tourney. Though I'd posted registration from 10-10:30, Round 1 at 11, we had several people getting in close to 11, needing to fill out a list, get everything out, etc. We started at about 11:20, which wasn't too bad. Also, our store just opened Jan 1, our entire group is pretty new & inexperienced, and I don't think any of them had been to a tourney before. Considering all this, I was okay with it.

Pairings went well, cryodex was great, and all of the rules questions were easily answered by my (not at all vast) experience & preparation. Time between rounds was long -- again, mainly due to inexperience among the participants.

Being the store's inaugural x-wing tournament, I went all out -- I made table numbers, covered the tables in felt (under the mats), created my own score sheets, bought Scimitar Sqd Pilot alt arts as additional participation prizes, and created & framed a certificate for the winner. David (the store owner) also donated lots of additional goodies and put ALL of the entry fees back into the store credit prizes for top 3 -- we picked up the tab for everything else (including the 1/2 Spring kit thrown on top).

The only thing I was miffed with was a bit of slowness from one player -- he wasn't at all "slow-playing", he just plays slowly. I pushed him throughout the day to hurry it up, but I might should have pulled him aside at some point, or maybe even put a clock on his dial setting. Whatever I could/should have done, I feel like I should have done more to mitigate this. All in all, though, he only gave up 92/400 points on the day, and all of his opponent's got tabled or limped away with almost no hull left on their last ship. They didn't get a lot of rounds in per game, but they also didn't kill anything. And this guy was flying lots of Academies, not an MoV-friendly big/tough-to-kill ship list.

A couple things:

*I should have quickly gone over the points in the Tournament Primer article I'd written. A few people hadn't seen it. Things like when you can measure, declaring boost/barrel roll direction, declaring a Target Lock, debris clouds, etc.

*I did go over accurate template placement before round 1: how to ensure the ship stays put, how to get the template properly aligned, etc. I should have also gone over speed . How long it should take you to set dials, as well as not picking them up once they've been placed.

So yeah, it was a great day. I decided on 4 rounds of swiss/no cut, even though we only had 8 players. Everyone loved the huge prize support, and everyone (said they) had a great time.

I worked up a huge recap , if anyone's interested. Thanks for all the help, fellas! And again, my apologies, Meynolt, for not getting this done earlier.

We're doing it again on May 16th!

Great to see how well these tournaments are going for everyone and wonderful to see new stores getting involved.

So I figured I would post the progress of things since my last time on this thread.

We've played X-Wing for the past month now at our LGS. We started on Wednesdays and switched over to Sundays to better accommodate schedules. For the first good while, it was just my buddy and I. Sunday, the 26th, we were joined by a couple Pilots that had seen our post in the Organised Play subforum; both said they would like to attend on a regular basis. One could not make it this last Sunday but we were joined by someone who had been at the shop earlier for the MtG draft. He wanted to try out X-Wing so I was able to teach him how to play. He informed the store owner he would be purchasing a Core Set soon.

So we started out just using the heavy and cumbersome MDF board I had for the 3x3 play area. Recently my buddy and I picked up 1 FFG playmat each and I grabbed a couple 36x48 trifold displays at Target. This last Sunday we were able to test them out and they worked perfectly! There was enough room on both sides for players to place their ship cards/tokens/templates, allowing us to get 2 playmats onto a single table. The displays are lightweight and easy to move around so we didn't have to go through the trouble of getting 4x8 boards.

The store owner has picked up a Spring tournament kit and is just waiting for us to give the go ahead to announce and promote the tournament. We're hoping to get a few more regulars before hosting the tournament but we might opt to running the tournament before that. We think that a tournament with prize support might get more players than just a normal game night announcement.

Things are going fairly well and our X-Wing group is expanding!

Big Thanks to FFGEvan form Pinning this topic in the corrected location.

About how long would you guys say it should take (max) to set dials each round?

I just updated my table results sheet ( as seen here ) so that it state "This player has destroyed _____ points."
This should prevent any confusion with people confusing points destroyed/lost.


Locally, we're trying to get people to bring their squad's VoidState ID with them instead of a printed out squad sheet. There are 3 reasons for this:

• It makes adding the tournament results to List Juggler a lot easier as the squads are already populated.
• It makes validating the squad is valid a lot faster - simply view the squad on VoidState's squad builder.
• It saves trees!

So far, here's the information I'm tracking on the 1/4 page sheet:

• Player's name
• VoidState ID
• Obstacle selection (circle/mark 3)
• A "To be completed by the TO" section:
  • Squad validated
  • Sign up paid

Is there any other pertinent information that I should include?

Here's a preview of the french version of the sheets:

Sorry I have been absent a bit. Lots of good info flowing in here. I have actually seen a couple Armada threads referencing this thread for events. Any word on the rumored FFG software that is supposedly going to be shoved down TO throats for tourneys ?

It is in beta testing at several of the regional events. From what I hear it is VERY beta and not ready for public consumption any time soon.

Planning an event, my first for X Wing, but I've been running other wargames tourneys for years, so just a silly question. Where/how do I get hold of a tourney kit from FFG?

Planning an event, my first for X Wing, but I've been running other wargames tourneys for years, so just a silly question. Where/how do I get hold of a tourney kit from FFG?

It can be ordered from FFG by any Brick and Mortar LGS that sells FFG product. Find a store to host your tournament and they will be able to get the kit for you.

Planning an event, my first for X Wing, but I've been running other wargames tourneys for years, so just a silly question. Where/how do I get hold of a tourney kit from FFG?

If you are really desperate go the Ebay route. I grabbed up a couple older kits to keep our league running since it took forever for FFG to finally announce the Summer 2015 kits.

So as an additional follow up to my previous posts here, I'll link to my report of the Spring Kit tournament we ran.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/175356-2015-seasonalother-tournament-results/page-2

It was a really relaxed, fun tournament with how few people we had attend. We're hoping to bring in more with the Summer Kit tournament. We might have also gained another player for our Sunday X-Wing nights because of running the tournament.

Hello!

I'm a hobby store owner and did a tourney a few weeks ago and used the advice here and wanted to thanks you people for all the info!

Also wanted to know, does Fantasy Flight have some system for registering the store and the participants of tourneys and leagues?

Like a running standing of players or something like that where they can see their pilot points or something?

Or to make a tourney official you just have to get the tournament kits?

Just get the kits. FFG does not believe in ranking players as that puts the emphasis on winning, rather than playing a game as part of a community.

When the regional feeders are announced again get the kit, run your event, and post results here. If you store can show a successful history of events and you ask for a regional you may get one.

Glad to see the OP is working for your store and that we could help you out.

Well come to the boards