Here are the challenges to having an AnA tournament (even though I've started one already :) ).

- It doesn't seem that a traditional "Team" play option would work because Allies have 3 members and Axis have 2 members.  Moving onto the next round would present a problem if you played Allies the first round and then had Axis the second time.

- Without teams, the elimination style of tourney has a minimum of 125 players (which is a lot to ask for this niche map).  This leads to the potential of a winning team only having one "winner" that moves on to the next round.

So, what I'd suggest is to have a team option whereby you would choose "Axis" or "Allies" throughout the life of the tournament.  The system would have to fit the players to the team size and # of rounds.  This would solve the problem of having teammates have to switch teams between rounds.  HOwever, this would also present a new problem if two Allies teams won (or two Axis teams won) within the same "bracket."  Then you'd again ahve a situation where the team size difference doesn't work.

Any thoughts/ideas on how to setup a great AnA tournament?!

We had one or two manual AnA tournaments on WF, I think it's been discussed how cool it would be to have a Tournament system that supported that board's team formats specifically and I even want to say tom was big on the idea.

So I think it's a good discussion to have and hopefully if it can be hashed out then maybe it can be implemented.

I think one suggestion would be all teams have 3 players, all 6 players join each game and then the system randomly chooses 2 of the 3 players for Axis.  Problems for this would be that players probably wouldn't get to choose Seats.

Yertle wrote:

I think one suggestion would be all teams have 3 players, all 6 players join each game and then the system randomly chooses 2 of the 3 players for Axis.  Problems for this would be that players probably wouldn't get to choose Seats.

All 3 get invited, first two to respond get to play.

Yeah, but then what about the guys hat really wants to play but he's an accountant and this is tax season so he only gets to check once a day when he gets home.  That guy would never get in a game.

Now, you could do it with the 6 players and then one of them is selected to have a bye for that round.  I haven't worked out the math on that, but it may not actually solve any issues...

When I set up the tournaments on ToS, I random number generated the player positions and then slightly tweaked them to ensure that each player played each seat position and that the team-ups were distributed as evenly as possible.  I wouldn't want to try and figure out how to do what I did with an algorithm; I can barely even figure it out now upon reflection.

Amidon37 wrote:

Yertle wrote:

I think one suggestion would be all teams have 3 players, all 6 players join each game and then the system randomly chooses 2 of the 3 players for Axis.  Problems for this would be that players probably wouldn't get to choose Seats.

All 3 get invited, first two to respond get to play.

 I had thought that at first too, but then:

Toaster wrote:

Yeah, but then what about the guys hat really wants to play but he's an accountant and this is tax season so he only gets to check once a day when he gets home.  That guy would never get in a game.

 What Toaster said.

And if you wanted the Teams to be Random as to who is Axis and who is Allies then all 6 would need to be present.  Although that may not be wanted.

Yertle wrote:

And if you wanted the Teams to be Random as to who is Axis and who is Allies then all 6 would need to be present.  Although that may not be wanted.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. 

I get Toaster's point, but I don't think that is a compelling enough reason to not implement what seems like the easiest fix. 

How would you handle points allocation to the player who had to sit out? If it was done on a first come first served basis then some players (accountants!) may get very few games. If you give them half points then they could even end up winning in some scenarios (or it could be advantageous to deliberately sit out a round!)

I see a lot of problems with the "sitting out scenario" and once again suggest the scenario where you choose Axis or Allies for the life of the tournament.  Any other option leaves you with the decision to make a "scramble" at some point to re-allocate from 2 to 3 or from 3 to 2.

If choosing Axis and Allies teams beforehand then a team Swiss-style ranking could occur for the winning team so that the next round always has an Axis and an Allies team.  Of course here the problem is once again what if only Axis or only Allies wins the previous round?

tom wrote:

How would you handle points allocation to the player who had to sit out? If it was done on a first come first served basis then some players (accountants!) may get very few games. If you give them half points then they could even end up winning in some scenarios (or it could be advantageous to deliberately sit out a round!)

It would be a team tournament - they are team points.