A league of your own

Last Spring, my gaming group lamented the loss of the March Madness basketball tournament.

After that, there was a dearth of live sports to watch. So, we decided to come up with a way to make our own tournament using online tabletop games.

April Anxiety

We started with Ticket to Ride as a gateway for the newer gamers in my group. One of my friends stepped up to be the commissioner (his nickname to this day), and we scheduled a single-elimination tournament that started with the quarterfinals. It grew to includes friends and children of my group as well, and pretty soon the competition boiled down to East vs West Coast. We started in April, and in an homage to the hoops tournament, we called it April Anxiety. May Mahem followed, and so on.

League of Catan

Then a few of us wanted to get back to our roots and play more Settlers of Catan. I didn’t feel it fit the tournament model we had used previously, however, because you’ll always have one bad game playing Catan. Often it’s because players gang up on you or the die rolls are far from a Gaussian distribution.

So I created a league that ends with a tournament, and you can download a template to play it yourself.

Double elimination

I came up with a template for eight players to play seven games over a season, so each player plays everyone else at least once. I value your final place in the game over the points you scored, giving three points for a first place, two for second, and one for third. The cumulative points you score become the tie breaker.

Example

A scoreboard after five games in a Catan league.

At the end of the season, your cumulative place determines your rank in the tournament, and everyone makes the tournament.

I created a double-elimination format to create more plays for everyone and lots of second chances after one bad game. The higher ranking players benefit from playing into a winner’s bracket; otherwise, you have to play more games in the loser’s bracket to make it back to the winner’s.

In the end, I gave out a trophy for the tournament winner: A yellow ”Hexatower” premium dice tower.

Let me know what you think of the league by using the #SpielMas tag on social.

Published on November 10, 2020.