Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup

[djensen]

To celebrate both Axis & Allies month as well as the 25th Anniversary of this very website, we will hold the first ever Axis & Allies Cup, a team-based, year-long competition. Get a team of 5-6 of your best players together and find out who is the best Axis & Allies team in the world.

Details to follow but it will basically work like this:

• This will be an event that takes place over the course of several months. Ideally, no more than 12 months.
• There will be two rounds to the tournament. The first is round-robin-like and the second is a elimination.
• In the first round, every team will play other teams in various versions of A&A
  • Each team has 3 squads and squads from different teams play each other. This makes it a team sport and it allows us to play a ton of A&A in a shorter period of time.
  • Versions under consideration: Classic, Revised, Guadalcanal, D-Day, North Africa, 1914, Battle of the Bulge, 1941 (maybe), old Pacific, old Europe, Zombies (lol, j/k).
    might be a tie breaker but that is TBD.
• The second round will be single elimination
  • The eight best teams will play a Quarter Final in 1942SE
  • The four best teams will play a Semi-Final in Anniversary Edition
  • The winers in the semis will play a Final match with Global
• Matches can be played online, in person, via Zoom, whatever you like
  • If you play in person, we might so something special for you. In person matches

If you can’t find 4-5 fiends for a team, we can work on putting folks together.

Ideally, we start in early February so folks can plan their matches.

This is a pre-announcement because I don’t have the details worked out. If you’re interested, please shout out in this thread.

Posted: Jan. 16 at 11:35am PT
Updated: Jan. 16 at 3:00pm PT

[DoManMacgee]

@djensen Sounds cool to me. Is 5-6 people too many for one team? Maybe 4-6 instead?

[djensen]

I’m also open to suggestions for this Cup.

[djensen]

@DoManMacgee said in Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup:

ounds cool to me. Is 5-6 people too many for one team? Maybe 4-6 instead?

I clarified it in the description. You really need 6 people because you’re going to have squads of 2 people playing other squads of two people.

[djensen]

For instance; for the round robin let’s say we have three teams:
Amazing Armada
Brilliant Bombardiers
Cruising Corsairs
Deadly Dogfighters

AA Squad 1 vs. BB Squad 1: Guadalcanal, AA win
AA Squad 2 vs. CC Squad 1: Revised, AA win
AA Squad 3 vs. DD Squad 1: Classic, AA loss
BB Squad 2 vs DD Squad 2: Revised, BB win
BB Squad 3 vs. CC Squad 2: Classic, BB loss
CC Squad 3 vs. DD Squad 3: Guad, CC loss

Of course, it would be more randomized.

Team	1	2	3
AA	Guad	Revised	Classic	2-1
BB	Guad	Revised	Classic	1-2
CC	Revised	Classic	Guad	1-2
DD	Classic	Revised	Guad	2-1

And of course I created a scenario with a tie. With more team and more games and sending 8 to the knockout round, it should be less of a problem.

[DoManMacgee]

@djensen
Some clarification/interest asks:

• If there ends up being a lack of interest for whatever reason, might it be possible to downsize to 3-person teams to keep the same general format, just with 1v1 games instead of 2v2 (this is more of a hypothetical than an actual request)?

• When two teams play each other, how does picking the game edition(s) to play on work (beyond the restriction of 42SE for T8, AA50 for T4, G40 for finals)? Do the teams mutually agree on what editions get played, is it randomly generated, or a mix (i.e. team A picks 1 game, team B picks 1 game, 3rd game is picked randomly)?

[djensen]

@DoManMacgee said in Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup:

• If there ends up being a lack of interest for whatever reason, might it be possible to downsize to 3-person teams to keep the same general format, just with 1v1 games instead of 2v2 (this is more of a hypothetical than an actual request)?

This could happen. Let’s start with 6. If we can’t get 12-16 teams, then we can allow teams to split if they so desire.

• When two teams play each other, how does picking the game edition(s) to play on work (beyond the restriction of 42SE for T8, AA50 for T4, G40 for finals)? Do the teams mutually agree on what editions get played, is it randomly generated, or a mix (i.e. team A picks 1 game, team B picks 1 game, 3rd game is picked randomly)?

The tricky part here is if teams want to get together in person but none of the 12 people have a copy of the game, then what do you do? Otherwise I would prefer random.

What I’m thinking is that I would randomly assign the team pairings and the game they must play but not the squads.

For instance:
AA vs. BB Guadalcanal
AA vs. CC Revised
AA vs. DD: Classic

…and so on but you should have 3 games going at the same time at any given time.

[DoManMacgee]

@djensen said in Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup:

The tricky part here is if teams want to get together in person but none of the 12 people have a copy of the game, then what do you do? Otherwise I would prefer random.

What I’m thinking is that I would randomly assign the team pairings and the game they must play but not the squads.

For instance:
AA vs. BB Guadalcanal
AA vs. CC Revised
AA vs. DD: Classic

…and so on but you should have 3 games going at the same time at any given time.

Might need to back up a bit on this one.

Say Team A is scheduled to play Team B. Do each teams pair their three squads against the corresponding three squads of the opposing team, or do they only send out one squad each?

If it’s the former, do all 3 squad Vs. squad matches take place on the same edition?

If it’s the latter, what’s stopping a team of just putting their strongest two players as one squad and only using that squad for the entire tournament (effectively rendering the other four players as benchwarmers)?

[Slip Capone]

@djensen

Sounds like a great idea.

I have had a bit of experience in running both online and live tournaments across various games.

I have a few suggestions.

Use games that have built in timers.

For games that do not, use tournament rules and instead of a time limit the game last X rounds. (I have found in the past players are less likely to drop if the game a ser amount of rounds as turtling and 20 round slug fests cannot occur).

With versions:
1914 has tournament rules and is the most balanced at 6 rounds of play. Bid of around 12 to CP.

Revised with tournament rules from WBC is awesome and again is most balanced at 6 rounds. Bid 3-5 allies.

Anniversary 41 scenario has tournament rules in the works and this would be a great platform for it to be tried and tested. Very excited for these rules.

I am sure there are others but the above I am very confident that they are great options.

[djensen]

So, I think I’m going to push this out another several months. To celebrate 25, I think I just want to get back into the swing of things. Maybe do a giveaway. Go to a bunch of events. And play lot’s of A&A. Be more active here.

It may be an open secret but I just don’t play a ton of A&A these days.

However, I really, really enjoyed playtesting Stalingrad last Fall. I played som D-Day with @The_Good_Captain recently. Two games in a row; first one he shut me out. Second one was closer but he won hands down. Despite the loss, it was awesome. The next day @rmorel and I played Anniversary edition with Dale (not sue if he’s here), my dice were on fire but even if they were not; it was a great time.

I’m going to do more of that. Work on the website. Run an event at GenCon, etc.