So, there was totally a tournament today. I see no posts about it, so, uh, maybe y'all want to hear about it?
TLDR: It was super fun! No, really. I'm not just saying that. I was amazed out how polished and professional everything was, and I had a lot of fun playing.
I wasn't volunteering for this event, just attending as an entrant. We arrived a little after doors opened at 8am. Greater Than Games continues to expand, having taken over the adjoining space to their HQ/warehouse. That was only a week ago, so renovations are still to come, but in the meantime, they'd set up lots of beautiful banners as decorations.
After picking up badges in the entry area, we entered into a mid-sized room playing triple duty: The main area had three tables for playing Tactics. In one corner was a production control center, and on another wall was a screen showing the livestream. Around the corner was a small studio space from which the commentators broadcast. In the next room was the main stage, if you will, a table set up with a video rig to show top down shots of the board. During play on the main stage there was not only a judge, but two people manning video cameras to get shots of various angles of the players and board. This allowed the livestream to see the cards players were considering playing, as well as see the actions being taken. The production control center was taking in the three video streams from the main stage, the audio from the main stage, and the video and audio from the commentators, plus adding in some really great game graphics that showed the current status and which actions were being taken. They could pop up visuals of player mats and cards. It was just really, really excellent.
Seven teams had preregistered and three other people showed up to form an eight team. The tournament was organized into a double-elimination bracket. Losing teams went down to a secondary bracket. For the semi-finals, two teams from the top bracket played against the remaining two teams from the bottom bracket. The teams from the bottom bracket would need to win twice to advance to the finals. Then, in the finals, games would be played until one of the remaining teams had lost twice. For each match there would be a coin flip. The winner of the coin flip could choose to either have the first move or have the first pick of characters.
We were randomly assigned for the first round, with one of the matches randomly being put on to the main stage. Our team was put on one of the other tables. My teammates and I had little illusions that we would do wll. We were excited to play, but didn't have much experiene and no practice time together. We'd gotten together to discuss some strategies around which characters we would choose, but had mostly focused on picking those characters that were more straightforward, since we didn't know them very well.
Our opponents won the first toss and drafted first. Ultimately they ended up with Baron Blade, Citizen Dawn, and Legacy. We had Bunker, Beacon, and Wraith.
We got _DESTROYED_. The games are played to three incapacitations, with a 50 minute time limit. We lost 3-0 in 30 minutes. Our team name was 'Happy to be Here', and like I said we had little illusion that we'd do well, but that was ... harsh.
BUT, we learned a lot. The main tactics our opponents, The Gatecrashers, had defeated us with were: Use Citizen Truth to take lots of attacks from the main characters, use Legacy to Buff Baron Blade, and then use Baron Blade to do lots of big attacks.
For the second round we were in the bottom bracket and playing a team that had also lost in the first round, still in the larger room rather than the main stage. We were quite subdued, but at least armed with some new ideas. Our second opponent wasn't much, if any, more experienced then us and we were able to draft the exact team that had beat us in the first round (Blade, Dawn, and Legacy). We won that round 3-0! That was great, but realistically, I still wasn't expecting too much. After all, we didn't have lots of experience, just a couple ideas we'd picked up, and the team we beat wasn't experienced. I started thinking about how many teams _WERE_ experienced, though, and realized that it might not be too many.
Two teams were eliminated after those first two rounds. The teams that won both the first and second round got to take a rest while the remaining four teams with one loss and one win played to see who would make it to the semis. For the third round we were again not on the main stage. We tried to follow the tactics that had won in the second round, but the other team took Dawn. We ended up with Blade and Legacy, and for our third took Bunker. So there we were, facing the puzzle of how to get past Citizen Truth to actually damage the other team. Along with Dawn, the other team has Ambuscade and Absolute Zero. Dawn put up her Citizen Truth defense and the other two covered our starting area with traps and glacial structure hazards.
Our answer came in the form of Legacy buffing Blade and then Blade unleashing massive attacks against Truth. I was playing Blade and one-shotted Citizen Truth twice. With that defense out of the picture Legacy, Bunker, and Blade piled on a ton of damage. In the end time was called before we anyone got to three capacitations, but we were ahead 2-1 and doing well.
We were in to the semis! To my surprise, we were the little team that could. We had somehow scraped through -- mostly on borrowing tactics from our first round blowout. And then I saw who our semifinal opponent would be -- the same team that had beat us in the first round. As it turns out, both of the teams that emerged from the bottom bracket were the two that The Gatecrashers had beat in the first two rounds, so they had to play one or the other of us.
All games for the semis and finals were on the main stage, so we finally got to see what it was like there. On the other tables, it wasn't much different than being in the booth at a convention -- lots of background noise from other tables, well run, but not particularly formal. The main stage was a whole 'nother deal. We had precise instructions on where to roll dice and where to put power cards in play. It was a complex orchestration of production that we were mostly free from worrying about, but for which we had to be careful not to cause unnecessary disruptions or difficulty.
We won the draft and took Citizen Dawn. Now we'd get a chance to see what Gate Crashers could do about it. They ended up with Blade, Legacy, and Omnitron. We took Unity and the Wraith. The first round went pretty well for us. Unity sent Swift Bot right up to Legacy and Blade and with some reconfiguration/volatile parts shenanigans, bloodied both of them, with two hits each. I had Wraith use her reach to do three damage to Omnitron. We'd hit all three of them, and left an annoying turret bot creating hazard spaces near them.
In turn, though, we got to see how the Gate Crashers dealt with the Dawn/Citizen Truth problem: Interpolation Beam. Omnitron simply moved up and then used Interpolation Beam to separate Citizen Truth from the rest of us. Then they put the beat down on Dawn, hitting her for four of her five points. Next it was Dawn's turn and, sadly, we made the decision that probably cost us the match. Dawn used Devastating Aurora to knock out Legacy and Omnitron, trying to buy time to heal. The effect, though, was to let the other team get five HP back while still having Blade knock her out on the next round. We were forever beyond from that point. When the game was called for time, we were down 2-0. It was far closer than the first beat down, but still not particularly close.
The other semi-final match was also won by the team from the top bracket, the Mighty Morphin Chronorangers, so the final would be a best of three series of matches.
In the first game the Might Morphin Chronorangers took Dawn, but the Gatecrashers got Blade and Legacy. The Gatecrashers also took Omnitron -- their answer to Dawn's protection from Citizen Truth. The Chronorangers also took the Wraith and Ambuscade. The Gatecrashers did the same thing to the Chronorangers that they did to us -- push Citizen Truth out of the way and then just pound away. With Wraith slipping into shadows and Ambuscade using the cloaking device, all three incaps were done against Citizen Dawn. The final score was 3-0.
That was a massive defeat. The previously undefeated Chronorangers were left sitting dejectedly at the table. They hadn't lost the tournament, but they'd been blown out so badly, how would they come back and win not one, but two matches?
The next match, however, had something we had not seen before -- two teams who both knew how to stop Citizen Truth's protection of Dawn. The drafting went: Chronorangers: Blade. Gatecrashers: Dawn. Chronorangers: Omnitron. Gatecrashers: Legacy. Chronorangers: Ambuscade. Gatecrashers: Beacon. The Gatecrashers had Dawn and Legacy and had chose Beacon as their damage dealer, since Blade wasn't available. The Chronorangers had Blade, Omnitron as the answer to Citizen Truth, and Ambuscade. I wasn't quite sure why they kept taking Ambuscade. Sure, he's hard to hit, but how much damage was he doing?
The match started out as most of the previous ones had, with the Gatecrashers setting up Truth to be their protection. As expected, the Chronorangers brought up Omnitron and first separated, then knocked out Truth. Then the game started to get interesting. The Gatecrashers abandoned the use of Citizen Truth and went on the offensive. The board was filled with bruisers and a lot of mobility. The attacks were flying quickly. Along the way Chronorangers unleashed a suprise move from Ambuscade. Instead of filling up a bunch of spaces with traps, they put ALL of the traps and decoys on the same space, next to an enemy, and then moved a _different_ enemy on to the stack, causing all four explosions to hit both of them. It wasn't always super effective, but it sometimes was. This game also saw Blade get pushed into the middle of the volcano. It came down to the wire. The Chronorangers pulled out a win, 3-2, but would probably have lost on the next turn if they didn't. The Chronorangers had now dealt Gatecrashers their first lost, just one game after having their own, first, stunning, demoralizing loss.
Final game. With both teams having seen the Citizen Truth gambit be defeated, how would they react? Chronorangers took Blade. Gatecrashers took Legacy. Chronorangers took Omnitron. Gatecrashers took Beacon. Chronorangers took Ambuscade. Gatecrashers took ... The Wraith?! I did not understand that choice. Why not Bunker and get some great firepower, or even Dawn, who can be deadly on the attack.
As they took their first few turns, it seemed that the strategy was to use Legacy to build up buffs on Beacon and Wraith and then unleash both of them to make big attacks. Unfortunately, Baron Blade got close enough to them in the first round to punish their build up with attack+1 tokens with his oneshot that deals damage to an area using as many dice as tokens. The results were devasting -- two characters down to one or two HP each. The Gatecrashers put up a fight, but never seriously contended from that point on.
Chronorangers had done it -- coming from a loss behind to win two consecutive games and claim the victory.
The last match finished around 5ish, I think.For reaching the semis we received a small cash prize: $75 for the team. Finalists got $150 to split. Champions got $600!! to split. The top two teams earned the right to compete in the nationals at GenCon next year. There are other qualifying tournaments planned , but I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say anything about that, and I don't know definitive information anyway.
It was a fantastic day. So happy to have played, done better than expected, and seen some really exciting matches. There were eight teams and I counted about 16 staff and volunteers -- about forty people in total. Well done, Greater Than Games.
I would love to hear what people who watched games via Twitch thought of what they saw.