Pre-Announcement: The Axis & Allies Cup

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

I’m also open to suggestions for this Cup.

@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.

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.

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 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.