Organizing a Real Life Tournament - Advice

[Greyerg]

Hey Everyone!

So I've been tasked with organizing a Risk tournament that will take place in January for my student society. I've played in real life tournaments before, but never organized one so I was wondering if any of you have any advice.

Here is some background info/ideas I've had already:

We have 3 hours for the tournament so I was thinking of doing it in two rounds: a preliminary and a championship.

The way I've done it in the past is to modify the rules so that after an hour(or so) of gameplay, a score is calculated for each player based on
1. number of territories held
2. Which continents are held(different continents having a different score)
3. Total number of units on the board
4. Number of conquer cards still in hand(which must be less than 5 of course)
I was thinking of limiting each player's turn to a maximum of 2 to 5 minutes(what do you guys think?) just so that a good amount of gameplay gets done.

So basically I have 2 main questions.

1. How do you guys think I should weight the scoring? That is, should Total number of units be more important than total number of territories, etc?

2. What time limit should I use for turn length and how long should each round last before scoring? I assume it would be nice to have a break between rounds so like 75 minutes for round 1, 30 minute break then 75 for round 2?

That's what I've got so far. If anyone has any advice it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Grey

[sully800]

You should take whatever steps possible to force the games to actually finish within the allotted time. As we all know, # of cards, # of armies, bonuses etc do not necessarily guarantee a win (especially with multiple players who are relatively equal).

So try to implement some rules to speed up the gameplay and force the games to finish fast (capping the time per turn is a great start). Eventually you will have to institute a hard time cap and you can use a points system as you described, but that should be a last resort.

Ideas:

I would make the first game end within 1:15. That way the championship game has about 1:45 and there is a greater likelihood that it will be finished.

Include frequent time updates so the players who seem low on points know that they have to attack in order to win

Maybe I'll think of more later?