South East Tournament Series (SETS) 2024

Like Martin Luther King, I had a dream.

And like all good dreams, it was borne out of jealousy.

I had seen that the North-East and Wales had tournament series, and I was disappointed that they were too far away for me to compete in. Therefore, I decided to try to put one together for the South-East.

After chatting to a number of tournament organisers (TOs) that I knew or knew of and also badgering a couple of people who hadn’t run events to run them, it started to look like a viable proposition. There was enough interest to make it a reality.

I thought it might be interesting to document the process, what happened and my thoughts on it. The NAF has started to promote tournament series a bit more now including providing pins for the winners, and it might be useful for anyone wanting to put on a series to follow through what happened with the South-East Tournament Series (SETS). Hopefully it will also be interesting for other readers too.

What is a Tournament Series?

A tournament series is a lot of tournaments which, for any you compete in, you will earn points towards an overall series score with the player with the most points being the overall winner.

There has been a resurgence in the last couple of years with the NAF having done a lot to promote them including appointing Topas to oversee tournament series and providing pins for winners. Further information can be found on the NAF website here (https://www.thenaf.net/tournaments/naf-tournament-series/).

Setting up the series

I had a chat with the tournament series organisers (TSOs) of the other UK series to find out what they had learned. Whilst they were helpful, as they’d either only been running a short time, or only been the organiser for a short time, they didn’t have a lot of advice to share.

To create a rulespack, I looked at the NAF suggested rulespack, as well as packs for all the series I could find, and then collated what looked to me like a good rulespack. I shared it with the TOs and we went with that.

The next step was making something to use to collate the scores. I’ve been an accountant for about 20 years, and have spent pretty much every day playing with Excel (or similar – now Google Sheets is a lot more prevalent), so it was natural to use that. It took a little bit of time, but I had something feasible prior to the series kicking off.

At the start of 2024, we had 12 events lined up for the series although not all of them had dates finalised. One of them didn’t go ahead for personal reasons so we ended up with 11 events, and I was able to/foolish enough to make them all. It involved a fair amount of travel on my part, as the region covered is quite large, however I met a lot of new people, played coaches I’d not played before and had some great games.

We’ve expanded to somewhere between 19 and 24 for 2025, so I definitely won’t be making them all, but I will be trying to make as many as possible.

For 2024, you needed to attend 5 events to register a qualifying score, with your 5 best scores counting. I thought this would be achievable for any competitive players who wanted to try to win a series prize. We ended up with 20 coaches competing in enough events, and a total of 251 coaches took part in at least one of the events.

In order to be a bit more inclusive, the number of events needed will be reduced to 3 in 2025. Whilst it would still be great to have a lot of coaches travelling for events that they might not have considered otherwise; it will also be great to have a lot more coaches hitting the qualifying number of events and therefore hopefully making it more competitive. I’m hopeful that the additional competitiveness might drive coaches to a few additional events knowing that each one could have more of an impact on the scores.

These changes have been brought in after collaboration with the other TSOs of English series, with Nazgob in particular being really helpful having created a snazzy website that we can all use to share scoring updates.

2024 SETS

For the 2024 series, we had a mixture of regular BloodBowl and Sevens. I thought it was nice to be able to have a variety of events, although this is perhaps not standard within a tournament series. Variants scored the same number of points as regular BloodBowl events, although this has changed for 2025 as there is now a multiplier applied.

The first event of the series was the Kent Team Championship 2024. Due to the number of coaches at the event, anyone who scored highly had a big boost right at the start of the series. The scoring allowed you bonus points for every 10 coaches below you on top of your regular score. The top two coaches in the whole series finished 8^th (14 points) and 6^th (16 points). This is roughly equivalent to winning any other event in the series, so it really put them off to a great start. For 2025, the number of bonus points for coaches below you has been capped at 5. This means that whilst a lower placing will still allow you to gain a small number of points, hopefully it won’t lead to runaway leaders who it is difficult to hunt down.

There are a few things that the scoring in a tournament series needs to do in my opinion – firstly it needs to fairly reward good players, and secondly it needs to allow for a competitive competition. Hopefully the new scoring approach will do so, although obviously we will review collectively before any rulesets for 2026 are published.

With events following across the whole of the very generously defined South-East including places such as Oxford to the North-West, Portsmouth to the South-West, Ipswich to the North-East and Folkestone to the South-East, eleven events that I personally enjoyed allowed us to crown the best players in South-East BloodBowl.

As well as 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and Stunty we also had awards for Most Touchdowns, Most Casualties and Top Junior player.  These additional awards are being dropped for 2025 – partly due to it being difficult to write a fair ruleset for them, and partly because it is additional admin work logging all of them.

TotalFuzzyLogic came first overall. He was leading almost the entire time – I believe after the second event in Addlestone which he won – and it was just not possible for second placed Mr_Frodo to catch him up. It did all go down to the wire at the final event in Bexley, though, which did make it rather exciting.

Third place was hotly contested. Going into the final event, there were around 5 coaches who could take that spot. Ultimately it went to DimmyGee who – whilst probably disappointed with the outcome of that event – managed to take the spot from MisspelledTree on the second tiebreaker of most touchdowns scored.

Top Stunty and Junior both had runaway winners – Insidious and MiniMorg respectively.

The two categories which I’d found it difficult to come up with a fair ruleset for – most TD and most Cas – were the ones where the lead changed most frequently during the year. In the end, we settled on these going to the coaches who managed the most TD and Cas overall across the series. Obviously, this was going to reward attendance, but as this was one of the overall aims of the series, I was quite happy with this compromise.

In the end, both awards were won by a coach who managed to attend 10 events. I just snuck most touchdowns by 1 – with SaltySeaWench impressively coming in second place having attended 3 fewer events. She was unfortunately sick for the final event, otherwise I’m sure she would have taken that having needed in hindsight just 2 touchdowns across 4 games.

Most Casualties went to Mr_Frodo who beat me by 1 casualty. This was much closer than perhaps it should have been due to him barely causing any with Norse across 4 games on the final day.

Outlook for 2025

I’ve mentioned a lot of the rules changes already, so I won’t reiterate those. The South-East Series currently has 19 events booked in with a further 5 potentially to be added if dates and/or venues are finalised.

The expansion is partly due to meeting a lot more TOs this time around, as well as just the general growth of the game. There is also a lot more interest among TOs to put events in, and I’ve been approached by some. Obviously in the first year with no history, this didn’t happen as much, so with more and more people hearing about the series, hopefully it will continue to grow positively.

Whether we have to cap the number of events at some point, I’m not sure. We’ve got a rule of only 1 event each weekend, so there’s obviously a hard cap of 52, but I think we will also need to be cautious not to oversaturate it with too many events.  It’s not the worst problem to have though, but obviously it’s not nice having to deny TOs entry to the series.

With the new spreadsheet, it is much easier to enter information and hopefully with the new output from Tourplay feature and pdf downloads from Score, the admin side of it should just be effectively a copy and paste exercise.

The collaboration with the other English TSOs on ruleset, website and possibly an event featuring the best from each series has also helped with development rather than me just trying to work out what to do on my own.

With all of this setup in place, it should be relatively forward to hand over to someone else in the future. I’m not in any major rush to do so, and I’d like to see how we can grow the series and embed all the new processes over the course of the coming year, but I’d definitely like to hand it over at some point – if only because I find it difficult to say no when asked to help out in the hobby and I have a lot of other things that take up my allotted hobby time! If anyone thinks they might be interested in running it in a future year, don’t hesitate to reach out and I can train you up over time so know everything you need to know.