BAR OPEN 2019 – a teeny tiny tournament

Hey all, here the BAR OPEN 2019-tournament report from sunny San Diego, CA.

Last weekend, Sunday to be precise, we rung in the 2019 tournament season with a teeny tiny BA tournament at Game Empire San Diego down here in SoCal.

What is BAR OPEN? Well, a first time event for starters. A couple of friends and I sat down at one of our usual Friday night game sessions and brainstormed how to bolster our ranks and re-ignite the fire with some of the ‘semi-retired’ local veterans. We figured a lighthearted, friendly and less competitive event might do the trick – special gimmick being that all of us would bring up spare/extra armies for new players or interested bystanders to join in and get their hands dirty in a real tournament. All the while showering everyone with prizes thanks to our generous sponsors.

All said and done the planning commenced. On rather short notice of about a month, shops & companies were contacted, trophies ordered, a venue secured and prize support arranged – Warlord being one of our main contributors!

We managed to get 8 players together that day, roughly doubling our usual suspects numbers. And better yet, two of which borrowed armies, proving our idea at least a small success. And that’s not all, one of them two players, an obviously experienced and very friendly fella who had just moved down here, but without his trusty USMC, wiped the floor with all of us using borrowed Americans. He went on to taking home ‘Best in Game’ and ‘Best Sport’ awards, while the other actually was brand new to BA and played his first game(s) with us, ending up taking home several boxed sets and using Warlord vouchers to order the rest of his Russian army.

We hope to see the two now more regularly around the club.

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The tournaments format was 1000 points made up by up to two generic reinforced selectors or a single theatre/campaign selector.

armored/tank platoons, special characters and experimental rules were not allowed.

We would play 3 rounds of each 2.5 hours (up from our usual 2 hours, intended for new players to get a better grip on the rules and more time for explanations). We also had a short 30 min lunch break.

The tournament was planned to be casual. Going to Adepticon later this year, we adapted some of their ideas for evaluating the performance – not just by how well you played, but including the other aspects of the hobby.
There were voting categories for paint job, theme and sportsmanship.
This turned out to work well and people seemed to enjoy that approach. Seeing the awesome armies everyone brought I didn’t bother proof-reading anyone’s lists – everyone had clearly paid extra attention to bringing something out of the ordinary and/or well researched to play with a theme.

There was a strict WYSIWYG rule, and with bonus points through separate categories people were encouraged to bring fully painted assembled forces (including basing).

To execute the voting I had planned about 10-20 minutes in the very beginning for everyone to say a few words about their assembly and then cast anonymous votes on a purpose-prepped sheet. This worked OK, but as predicted the first round started with a little delay and ended up being cut roughly 20 minutes short.

The missions were taken from the official Rule Book, but with a few optional missions, a custom special rule and secret objectives every round. To keep it simple all special rules were optional and could be ignored to keep it simple.

every mission had 3 optional objectives counting as tie breakers:
– kill the highest ranking enemy CO
– kill the most expensive (points) enemy unit
– get one of your units into the enemy deployment zone (or off the table); empty transports/tows excluded

Each game would be scored like so:
win by RAW = major victory (4 pts)
draw with more optional objectives = minor victory (3 pts)
draw with equal optional objectives = draw (2 pts)
draw with fewer optional objectives = minor loss (1 pts)
loss by RAW = loss (0 pts)

To score the last point for maximum 5 points per game every player would draw a ‘secret mission’ that I had printed out on small cards ahead of the event. Much like your secret objective in Risk or similar games you kept this mission to yourself and tried to fulfil its conditions. And if you managed, regardless of how the round went, you would get one additional point.

As it is common with such events we had a few people call out or not making the event for other reasons, so I had to fill in to even the numbers and partake in the carnage. On the upside this way I got to have a set of great games against players I just met.

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Best in Game: Borrowed Nisei
Best Sport: Also the borrowed Nisei
Best Painted: Early War Japanese Invasion of China Force
Best Theme: Early War Belgian Defense Force

At the end the day was a great success, no cheesehammers were brought down, everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves and moreover everyone left with both pockets full of new toys!

PS:
On a final note I would like to add that the voting section for ‘Best Sport’ turned out to be the highlight of the whole event for me. Everyone seemed to have had a great opponent throughout the day, as there was nobody who scored less than 4 (of 5) points on any game!!

PSS:
There are more pictures of armies, prize table and battlefields, but I just realized I can only publish 4 pictures, and only the smaller ones at that, sorry.