Our Sealed Box Tournament was scheduled right after the 4 hour Saturday Demo of RangeWars, Red Alert, and DiskWars. From all the interest in the demos, we could tell that our tourney was going to be of goodly size. People just kept coming into the CONduit 10 Miniatures Suit and asking us about army construction, what boxes to buy, what armies were the best, etc. We had our hands full! It was a great tournament and introduced about a dozen new people to the joy that is competitive DiskWars.
We started promptly at 4:30 with each of the 18 participants clutching an un-opened box of DiskWars and a matching DiskWars Button. Thanks to our local Garrison #156 store, Hastur Hobbies for having lots of DiskWars on site at a reduced price, everybody was able to build a worthy 100 pt Army Stack to battle in the Doom Hill Scenario. And thanks for FFG for sending along so many extra DiskWars Buttons and tons of Official FFG Prize Support for every tournament participant. We used our Sealed Box Tournament Rules, but instead of our more complicated Bracketing system, we simply used a basic win/loss ration to seat winners vs. winners and losers vs losers in the subsequent rounds until there was only one undefeated champion.
Of the 18 players we had 1 Knight, 2 Acolyte, 2 Undead, 2 Uthuk, and 2 Elves, 3 Orcs and 6 Dragonkin Army Stacks. Thankfully, we had made prior arrangements to not allow any Dwarves (i.e., a Good vs. Evil Sealed Box Tourney) and Hastur Hobbies was more than happy to pass along this news as folks starting buying up his entire stock of DiskWars. Otherwise, I do believe a Sealed Box Tourney will go to the dogs, aheeem Dwarves.
In the end it was a combination of the Army Stack, the skill/luck of the draw (see Sealed Tournament; Draft Rules) and the players skill that netted James Hunt the winners seat. Javier Mixco (a pseudo-newbie) did give him a run for his money and the rest of the participants did not got down easily.
4 Wins & Champion: James Hunt - Elves
3 Wins & Runner-Up: Javier Mixco - Undead
2 Wins: Ed Rubin - Acolytes, David Trip - Uthuk, Amy Gillispie - Dragonkin, Jason Lauman - Orcs, Jareld Tripp - Dragonkin and Brad Hawks - Dragonkin
1 Win: Samuel Ricci - Acolytes, Jimmy Davis - Elves, Shawn Putman - Orcs, Seth Pierce - Undead, Dennis Vaigt - Orcs, Tina Pierce - Dragonkin, Skyler Sampson - Dragonkin, Amy Dalton - Uthuk, Nick Ricci - Dragonkin and Aaron Dalton - Knights
Throughout the Tournament, it was fun to see each player with their Army Stack in hand and Army Button positioned on their chest, like a medal of honor and pride that they represented one of the 10 factions battling for the bragging rights of Sealed Box Tournament Champion. Everybody who gamed in the tourney, got their choice of a Good, Evil or Neutral Big Disk (read: Roc or Tree Ent - Zolo Hexx or Marizyak - Firbolg or Garnoth). Whereas the Grand Champion received both a TRex and a Helspanth. The biggest comment was: "We want more t-shirts and those cool FFG Rulers as prizes!" (PS: The GenCon/Origins promo-disks would do nicely too... :-)
All in all, Saturday was a very busy, exciting, and hectic day full of demos, tournaments, and pick-up games. It was exciting to see so many new players all at once, and we hope that they will find DiskWars as fun as we do. It was a great weekend/convention and fun was had by all...