so, through brute force and ignorance, there are now 8 of us that meet on a regular basis at my local UFLGS to play x-wing and while not all 8 are there each week, everyone is there over the course of a month or so. There are too many people who can't play at weekends to really enjoy tournaments so we've been discussing how to have a casual league and I was hoping to get some advice from the community on how best to go about that.

Initial thoughts:

• played out over 8-12 weeks
• each player must play each other player 1 time
• a win gets 5 points, a draw gets 3, a loss gets 1
• total points winner at the end of the time-frame wins the league

Are there better ways to organize or run than the above? Thanks in advance

Organized Monkey

In my local area we run a league about once a month. The league is actually a tournament with each round lasting one week. At the start of the week, the pairings are posted and then both players in a pairing have 1 week to coordinate and play a game. At the end of the week the scores are entered and the pairings are generated for the next week. We typically do 4-5 rounds of swiss like this and then do a progression cut at the end to the top players and meet up for a single elimination tournament.

It's been working pretty well for the most part. There are a few people who grumble about coordinating schedules being too difficult, but we've found it generally makes it easier for more people to participate since you don't have to get everyone in one place at the same time.

There aren't any draws anymore in X-Wing, so unless you add that back in for your league I wouldn't worry about it. You can simplify with 1 point for winning, 0 points for losing. You could track MoV for tiebreakers or just have any ties require a playoff. If you have enough people and the scheduling ability you could also cut to a top 4 or 8 for an elimination playoff after the season.

With 8 people do you want everybody to play everyone else once and use that to determine a "winner" or are you going to allow multiple matches between two people to count together in some manner? With one matchup against each other player there are only 28 games total to worry about and the best record could be 7-0.

I guess another question to ask is if these are going to be timed games or full if they will always be played to the death. If played to the death scoring is easy and I'd put it at 2 points if you win, 0 points if you lose, and 1 point each when you have an actual draw with both sides dead. The thing is I'm not so sure TtD play is always the best so I'd probably use timed games with a 75 minute-90 minute timer; when it comes to scoring I say go back modified wins (and with it loses) and draws with some new/different lines getting drawn. I'd have you say a "full win" is 5 points and requires killing 25 points more than your opponent OR completely eliminating the opposition in time. A "modified" game would be one where the difference in points killed is 12-24 where the winner is awarded 3 points and the loser gets 1. I'd define a Draw as any game where the difference in points killed is 11 points or less, which is fewer points than one ship, and award 2 points each in those situations. MoV could also be recorded in all cases but may not be a big factor if there are more intermediate scoring opportunities beyond just win or lose. I'm sure some people will hate this suggestion but if two players can't meet it should be scored as a draw unless it is clear that one player is trying to avoid the matchup; what's "clear" is up to you.

While you may be looking at each person playing everyone else once you could allow rematches to figure in as well. In this case the two players would just average their results to get the numbers to go into the league scoring. Now if you win the first match there may not be any reason you'd actually want to play someone again if you get 5 tournament points and they have 0 but if things are casual then it could happen and you see that 5-0 split turn into something like 4-(1/2) or something like that.

With 8 people needing to play 7 games each I'm thinking 8 weeks should be enough time.

Forcing a round robin league is not the way to go. The contrast in availability between players is intense sometimes. Do something like this instead:

-play x games to qualify for end of season prizes / elimination rounds

-attribute points for playing, a tiny bit more for winning (favor having games over having people stomp others with meta lists)

-attribute points each time you play a new opponent. Someone can show up and only play against the same 1-2 opponents but he'll be lower in the ordering

-attribute points for playing each factions 3-4 times. Someone can still only choose to play empire all the time, but he'll position lower than a jack of all trades person

Our league is self pairing, so over the course of the league we play however many games we want with a minimum of 2 games a round (1 per week). Can't play any player more than twice per round. Makes it really easy to meet up and play games. We just post on our Facebook page asking who is up for a game that day. We use average MOV per round and add each round together at the end. There's also an incentive for playing more games such as 2 extra points for each game you play that's added to your average MOV score.

I would tell you to look at Corellian Conflict for Armada it has some great week to week stuff and a snappy map for keeping track of a campaign . Check out the papers that came with the epic ships because I believe the Transport has some campaign focused materials.

Also Figure out right now what happens when a person does not show up or drops. I cannt tell you the amount of heartache that causes for just about any gaming group if you dont have that piece figured out. I am a fan of making people put in a few bucks they get back at the end of it so there is an investment towards showing up. I cant tell you the amount of headaches I have dealt with trying to get a group of people to do something over the course of a month or two even when its a friendly thing.

Last thought make a facebook group or start a google doc with the rules and scoring so everyone can see everything up to date. Make a play schedule, I can tell you from years of being a leader at college youth group and being in the business world, if you dont set a date on paper "whatever" will never happen.

Also check into Cryodex as I think you can run the whole thing with it. I am to lazy to google the answers on it.