A short post to finish this/last years Northern Invasion posts. As always the tournament was good fun and everyone attending seemed to have had a good time. The chat was flowing and the food was as good as ever.
The Saturday tournament was well run, there were a few little issues but then I don't know of any tournament that doesn't have a few little issues. It feels bad to focus on the negatives when the over all experience was so good but I feel that they need to be acknowledged in order to correct them. So what were these issues? Well, there were three that I feel are in need of attention.
Firstly, painted armies points. Some people were very strict on awarding the points, while others, including myself, were quite not. This meant that some people got points one match and not the next. Simply having all the armies judged by one of the TO's game 1 and handing out a token or similar means that everyone knows what does and does not score the points and there is not arguments or bad feelings about who gets the points and who doesn't.
Secondly, missions. There were 8 tables, each one had a different mission set up on them and this means that your overall points score can be very dependent on which missions you ended up with. With some of the missions, it is easier to score primaries, some deployments are better than others.......I can go on and on but I feel that if everyone is playing different games that will affect the overall score. Some one may get three games where scoring primaries is easy, and someone else may get three games that are very hard. As such, I think that all the games in a single round should all be the same, so everyone is playing the same mission and deployment. Yes, secondaries will change between tables and players but at least everyone starts with a level playing field. Now I realise this is harder to sort out, with a lot of shuffling between rounds to reset tables and it's not an ITC tournament or anything but its something that bugs me.
Finally there was scoring the games. What do I mean by this? Well a lot of games didn't go to 5 rounds, several did but not all of them. So how do you score them? Well there seems to be half a dozen different ways! Say for example a game only goes to turn 3, as all mine did, do you;
A) score turn 3 as a normal turn 3 and take the score as you would for turn 3 in a normal 5 turn game.
B) score turn 3 as if it was turn 5, i.e. score primaries at the end of the 2nd players turn.
C) finish turn 3 but mathammer out the remaining two turns to give you a full 5 turn score.
In most games it doesn't make much difference which you do, but for a tournament where overall scores combine to give a total score which effects your final position, which method you choose does make a difference. There was no clear indication as to which method to use and so people did different things. I for one believe that the score should be taken as is at the end of turn three, with no modification to the scoring system. This means that those who did play 5 turns are not penalised for playing faster.
Despite these minor issues the tournament was well run and there was no real issues that required the TO's to step in.
There was only downside to the whole thing that I can say, and that is that the Sunday was a bit slow. This was not the fault of the organisers but a bit of a miscommunication between parties and the main Sunday activity, a Shadespire tournament, was cancelled fairly last minute, due to unavoidable factors. This was really the only negative point to the weekend that I can see, so not bad I think. The Sunday was not a total loss though, as idle minds create chaos, or in this case, a Knight off.
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