Welcome champions!

Those of you may remember we did a survey (check it out HERE) and one of the main requests was more focus on organised play. Today we’re going to talk about our approach going forward.

Why is Organised Play Important?

Organised play for a game like Godtear forms the bedrock of supporting the existing community and expanding the playerbase. It supports the existing community by providing them events to attend to play games and meet other players. These events in turn provide visibility for the game allowing its audience to grow.

Aside from all of this, tabletop gaming events are just fun. There’s nothing quite like going to an event and having a day of fun games with the community. It’s why we want to support organised play and why many staff members participate in organised play events.

Little Bit of SFG Organised Play History

Here at SFG we have always tried to promote organised play with various organised play packs as well as providing player run events with exposure and prize support. Additionally we supported our games with our own official events and at conventions. These events help build communities around our games.

Unfortunately COVID-19 impacted organised play and we feel Godtear didn’t get the chance to get the organised play support it deserved.

Our Aims For Organised Play

With organised play for Godtear we want to focus on providing a fun experience that brings players together regardless of how they play Godtear. Our main focus will be tournaments because it was what the vast majority of players wanted. This was irrespective of whether they considered themselves casual or competitive. Most people just want events that allow them to play a lot of games of Godtear and tournaments serve that perfectly. Regardless of your experience and how you enjoy Godtear tournaments are for you.

If you are someone that is looking to seriously compete and is up for the challenge, tournaments are for you.

If you are someone who infrequently plays but wants to get in a lot of games, tournaments are for you.

If you are someone looking to just show off your cool painted miniatures, tournaments are for you.

If you are someone who wants to play Rangosh in every game, tournaments are for you.

Our Approach Tournament Rules

With Godtear we update and maintain a set of tournament rules (you can find them HERE). Our approach with these rules is to provide a system that is as accessible as possible.

Each player brings up to 4 champions. Each round a random scenario is chosen and then each player secretly chooses 3 of their champions to play that game once they know their opponent’s 4 champions.

This system has a few key advantages:

The barrier to entry is low. Though a player may bring 4 champions there is an option to just bring 3 champions.
Getting to the table is very quick. Choosing your champions isn’t an intensive process and keeps the event running smoothly.
Players can play whatever champions they want. We want players to be invested in their favourite champions and to show off their awesome paint jobs.

Though there are formats we could adopt that would require larger champions or make the pre-game choosing of champions more involved, these would run counter to trying to support players of a variety of experiences. Additionally, we want a player's experience at a tournament to be as closely aligned to their games outside of events and more involved pre-game sequence moves us away from that goal.

Our Ongoing Support

There are a few different ways we are going to be supporting organised play for Godtear. Firstly we are going to be running our own events. You will hopefully have seen the first of these at Adepticon (you can sign up HERE) and the UK Games Expo (you can sign up HERE). It’s important to lead by example of how events should be run.

Secondly, we are going to be looking to provide support to event organisers that run their events by the official tournament rules. We’ll address this on a case by case basis but will most commonly in the form of promotion and prize support. We’ll give more details on this in a future blog.

In addition to tournaments we’ll also be running incentivised open play at conventions to fit in better with peoples busy convention schedules and to provide them with exclusive prizes for just turning up and playing such as exclusive boon & blight tokens and champion specific dashboards.

Fancy your hand at Organised Play? Check out our top tips here!