SKABB Sunday Sevens

 This past Sunday marked our first tournament held outside of Chaos Cards in Folkestone. It was also the first tournament that I have been responsible for.

I am going to write a little about how this came to be, how I prepared for the tournament, how the tournament went and what I learned from it.

As Assistant to the Commissioner, I am mostly tasked with what is known as "Charlie Work." This is the sort of things that are difficult to mess up - putting out pitches, taking photos, keeping the punters occupied whilst the Commissioner does the important stuff. 

However when I suggested we run a tournament elsewhere, I offered to do all the complicated stuff as it was an event out of the norm. The tournament was held at Board at Home which is owned and managed by Adam Jemmett. 

Adam was previously the manager of Chaos Cards which is how we got to know him and he decided to branch out and set up a store of his own much nearer to home. As someone who used to commute nearly two hours each day, I don't blame him for wanting to work just around the corner from his house.

I visited the store in the summer to talk about the possibility of running a tournament there. It is a lovely little store, not quite in Ramsgate town centre but near enough that if you wanted to get a game it isn't too far of a trek. Most of his customers aren't casual browsers and generally make the journey specifically to get ot the store. 

Upstairs there are a wide range of games to buy in a nice bright well decorated store. The games room (known as the Board Room) is downstairs along with refreshements to buy. There is a window that allows in some natural light so the room doesn't feel too dark, and a number of tables to play games on.

Whilst it is a great room, BloodBowl is a game that can take up quite a bit of room and we would have struggled to have more than 3 games going on at once without getting on top of each other. Sevens pitches being much smaller, we are able to easily fit 6 pitches on the tables, meaning we had capacity fo 12 coaches. On top of this, the opening hours on Sunday are 11am-4pm. Adam kindly offered to open a little earlier, meaning we could fit 4 games of Sevens into the day. Had we opted for full BloodBowl we would have struggled to fit in 3 games in that time scale. Sevens just seemed like the logical choice.

With the venue and format decided, I had to come up with a ruleset. This is rather grandiose for what I actually did which was copy and paste the rules for the Sevens tournament we ran at Chaos Cards earlier in the year with a couple of very minor tweaks (notably the location and removal of a free desparate measure for each team). 

If you want to see the full ruleset, it is here, although it seems fairly standard for Sevens tournaments with a team captain being given the Pro skill and then prior to each game you being able to add an additional general skill onto one of your players.

 With that in place, it was time to get NAF approval. This didn't seem too much of an issue - fill out the form on their website and check back in a week or so to see if it was given the ok. It would be nice to have some sort of notification that it had been approved but checking wasn't an issue.

We could then start getting players signed up. We got half full fairly quickly and then signups slowed down until there were only a few left and then they all just seemed to vanish! I was quite pleased to get 12 signed up, especially as it meant that I could just organise the event and didn't need to play due to odd numbers.

The rest of the preparation involved arranging prizes, gifts, software and score sheets. 

For prizes, one of our league members has a 3D printer and very kindly prints them for us. 

With the gifts I wanted to do something I thought would be really helpful along with the standard dice, so I decided to come up with a Sevens Cheat Sheet printed on card. We had picked up some of the Black Orc Down ones when were are at the NAFC earlier this year and I thought something specific to Sevens with the different kick off tables, prayers to Nuffle etc. would be helpful to save having to refer to Death Zone and interrupt the flow of the game. They proved quite popular and I'm happy to share the template if anyone wants them for their tournament. 

The Commissioner kindly brought along his laptop with Score pre-loaded, and I printed out some score sheets the day before (albeit in blue because my printer had run out of black ink!)

On the day, I picked up a couple of our league members and drove up to Ramsgate. Despite leading them the wrong way on the 2 minute walk from the car park, we managed to arrive and get set up ready to go by 10am. 

We had two players not there at the time, so we drew them against each other for round 1. If one had turned up then I would have given them a game with my halflings but as it was, neither of them showed and I got to spend the day focussing on running the event. 

After managing to get everyone's attention (I'm not a naturally loud person so this took a while) I gave them a brief reminder of all the rules and annouced the first game. 

Everything went pretty smoothly. There were no major issues with time - I didn't have to hurry anyone along which I was worried about as there was a tight timeline. There were no major rules queries that I had to make a ruling on, and I mainly got to hang out with some friends and watch them play BloodBowl.

Tommy's troll was the early star, dodging away from some orcs into the endzone for a 2-0 victory against Damian's orcs. However the excitement clearly got to his head and the goblins didn't do so well during the rest of the tournament.

With casualties being awarded for any injuries being caused by your team, the goblins were rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of getting their hands on the shiny trophy, however with 5 casulaties in his final game, David's undead scored 10 on the day to pip Oli's khorne at the post.

Most touchdowns went to Marc's skaven who finished the tournament top of the table after getting the draw they needed in the final game to against Oli to clinch the title. It was looking touch and go, and the touchdown they scored to take the lead relied on a lot of good dice.

On the day, I awarded the wooden spoon to Damian who was showing at the bottom of the table but a results query meant that it should have been Marianne gaining a new cooking utensil - which I have promised to provide her with in due course. 

Post event, Oli sent me the file from Score which I edited slightly with an xml editor to remove the game that wasn't played by the no-shows and uploaded it fairly easily to the NAF website. 

I thought it was a great day and I hoped others had fun. We will look at running another event at Board at Home in the future if it works for everyone as the size of the room I felt provided quite a good gaming atmosphere. The best day for them is Sundays, which isn't ideal for me personally, but hpefully something can be arranged. 

Having now ran an event, I think I would be less anxious about running another - I had lists and lists of things I needed to remember down to a level far more detailed than was probably needed. 

I also learned that I don't watch enough BloodBowl. Watching other people play, trying to guess what they will do and learning from the decisions they make is a great way to improve your game. It is actually also quite a nice game to watch as a spectator, provided you know what is going on.