Sentinel Tactics league in Indianapolis

I envision meeting on a Saturday, starting late morning and going to late afternoon. 

Players would be matched at random at first and by ranking later on. We'd simply play as many games as we have time for. We'd have to figure out what map to play on.

Ideally, we'd find a place with plenty of tables and comfortable chairs, good lighting, free parking, and ready access to food and drink where we could play without being disturbed by others or disturbing others. For myself, I'd also like to be able to bike there from downtown.

Best place I can think of is the Lockerbie Pub, where we used to meet for Sentinels. It only scores moderately well on some of those criteria. It opens at 11am.

How about Sat May 16th, Lockerbie Pub at 11am?

OK. Who else can/cannot make Sat May 23rd?

Executive decision time. We're going to meet on May 23rd at Lockerbie Pub at 11am. Everybody who's got a game, please bring it. I'd rather have more than we need than fewer.

Expected attendees at this point:

Me, Bharyn (and friends?), TheJayMan, Metlarcturus, Cropcircles (maybe)

The more the merrier. Please give a shout if you're planning to join us.

Yay!

When we meet, what board should we use for our matches?

I'm thinking it would be fun if we settled on a particular configuration that all matches that day used, though I'm open to doing it differently.

I figure we'll change the board we use for each meetup.

If we want to simply assign someone the task of coming up with an arrangement of tiles for a particular meetup, I don't mind having the responsibility, but am also happy to defer to others.

Doesn't matter to me. I suppose a setup from the comic book has the advantage that we can easily refer to it when doing our setup.

I don't think we can count on what we've seen in previous tournaments necessarilly being what we see in future tournaments.

This sounds fun. Perhaps each team places a tile until one person chooses not to place a tile, then the other team can either place one more tile or stop. We'd have to figure out how to determine who places first and who chooses which tile to start on in what order.

Another idea: We take turns designing a map for the day. Keep a record of who has designed maps most often. Whoever's done it the least gets to design today's map. For ties, roll dice! 

I'd like to devise a text-based way to record what map we're using. How about:

* All tiles are oriented so there is a flat edge facing north.

* The tiles will be described in a series of rows. Each tile will have a position (1, 2, 3, etc representing the order, left to right, in the row), an identifier (ME3, IP6, etc. where ME is Megalopolis, IP is Insula Primalis, and the number identifies which tile of that set is being used), and an orientation (A-F, where A means the arrow for the tile is pointing north, B means north east, C means south east, D means south, E means south west, and F means north west).

* Position 1 of the second row of tiles will be the tile that is between positions 1 and 2 of the first row of tiles. Position 1 of the third row of tiles will be due south of position 1 of the first row of tiles.

* If there is no tile in a position, use NONE

For example, an all insula primalis board arranged as seven tiles forming a circle might be:

Row1: 1NONE, 2IP7A, 3IP4C; Row2: 1IP3F,2IP5A,3IP2D; Row3: 1NONE, 1IP8E, 2IP1B

(NOTE: I don't have the actual tiles in front of me, so don't know what this map would actually look like)

Not entirely sure how useful this would be. I was thinking it would be interesting for stats purposes to see what kinds of results we get on different maps, but given the difficulty in envisioning what these maps look like, I'm not sure how useful it would actually be.

New notation: Like

Minimum map: Not sure .... I mean, have you tried playing on a one tile map? Maybe it's boring, but ... maybe it's interesting? It will certainly inform which characters are chosen. Imagine getting out Champion bot on a one tile map. Imagine if that tile is the volcano and you have Absolute Zero's ability to ignore hazard spaces.

As for how to determine starting tiles, current tournament rules are 1st ban & choose starting locations <OR> 1st draft & 1st move. I think we should expand/alter the definition of 'choose starting location' to mean that you get to chose _BOTH_ of the tiles that the teams start on, as well as placing the first tile.

Not sure these are better, but I was wondering if there were ASCII characters we could use for the six facings that LOOK like those six facings. Here's the best I came up with. If you can't tell which is which, they fail:

Row1: - -  Pr7/\ Pr4\.

Row2: Pr3^\ Pr5/\ Pr2\/

Row3: - -  Pr8./ Pr1/^

Nah. Don't think I like those better

Please let me know if you'd prefer to play at Lockerbie Pub, as we've currently planned, or in the Factulty/Staff lounge of my building (Informatics/IT - ICTC) on the IUPUI campus (SW corner of West & Michigan St.).

Advantages of Lockerbie: Free parking. You can buy food and drink. You all can be there and play whether I'm there or not. I don't have to reserve the space.

Advantages of of the Faculty/Staff loung of my building at IUPUI: Good lighting. Quiet. Good tables and chairs. Won't be sharing the space with anyone. You won't be _expected_ to buy any food/drink.

Parking on the IUPUI campus costs money and may be a bit of a hike. I actually don't know much about where you can park w/out a permit. Looking at http://www.parking.iupui.edu/Visitors/VisitorHome.aspx, it looks like there are no meters anywhere near the IT, which is unfortunate as the meter rate is $0.75/hour, while the garages are $4 for the first hour. Visitors can apparently park in the garage on the north side of Michigan St. closest to the IT/ICTC building. I think you might also be able to find some free street parking along Indiana Ave.

EDIT: There is a special rate of $6 listed for the Law School, which has parking in an underground garage and is located due south of the IT/ICTC building. Not sure if that is per hour or per day or what.

Indeed. Just checked. Four metered spaces next to ICTC. Six spaces next to the Law school. Eleven more spaces on the far side of the lot next to ICTC. Hopefully there won't be many other people using them on a Saturday. People would have to deal with bringing a bunch of change and worrying about feeding the meter.

Are you saying you think it costs money to park at Lockerbie Pub? It does not. They have a modest-sized parking lot. Just in case, please note that I'm talking about the pub at the corner of College and Michigan, not the apartments near the IUPUI campus.

Friendly reminder that we're meeting next Sat. I will put logistics in the first post.

Final reminder. Sat 11am. Details in 1st post.

Good meetup! More later when I have some time.

I've created a Google spreadsheet to record results of games and calculate both a leaderboard (currently by player record, but eventually by player ranking) and a ranking of which characters are chosen most often during ban/draft.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rS3MH6bRVsU_2KL80f6kqUxyj78UNen45gPo_C2Mc-o/edit?usp=sharing

Opinions on what should/shouldn't be recorded for each game? Shown on the leaderboard? Let me know. 

We decided for our next meet up that we would take polls of which Saturdays people are available, so for now I'll be sending out a poll covering about three months at a time.

PLEASE FILL OUT this poll so I know when to schedule the next meetup: http://doodle.com/pekdb8d5icszgdhu

We want to gather our league rules that differ from official tournaments and then make a handy reference guide of them.

Rules:

• The board - The player that chooses to ban first gets to place a tile first. Players take turns placing contiguous tiles. After one player decides to stop placing tiles, the other player may place one tile. There must be at least four tiles.
• Starting locations - The player that drafts first chooses which two tiles will be used for starting locations. There must be at least one other tile between these two tiles. The other player chooses which of the two tiles their characters will start and places those characters anywhere on that tile. The other player than places their characters anywhere on their own starting tile.
• Choosing which player gets to decide whether to ban first or draft first - Instead of a coin flip, each player rolls a die. High roll gets the choice. If there's a tie, roll again.

Resulting order of ban/draft/starting locations:

• Roll off to determine 1st ban/1st tile vs 1st draft/1st move
• Place tiles
• Ban and Draft
• Choose starting tiles
• Hand out turn tokens
• Choose hidden starting powers and place characters
• Reveal power cards
• Roll movement
• Turn 1

These are all open to discussion. In particular we're not sure what the best way to determine starting locations is and when that should occur in the order above.

(NOTE: Edited to change when movement is rolled, per Spiff's Tactics FAQ)

We had five in attendance for our first meetup. Having a small group was actually quite nice, as we could come to consensus pretty easily about such things as figuring out who places characters first, or what to do about the fact that the Pub we planned to play in was closed.

Yup, that's right, it's advertised hours weren't very accurate. We solved the problem by walking a couple of blocks to The Rathskellar and then playing in their beer garden. Not an ideal spot (loud, crowded, wind occassionally blowing cards, worrying about chits falling through the slats of the tables, unrelenting sun), but it was actually pretty great overall. When not distracting, the music and crowds were fun. I enjoyed the sunshine and great temps. The wind was only rarely a problem. The beer was great.

Still, we decided to try the City Market for our next meetup. It has the potential to be fantastic. We're hoping there will be lots of free tables on a Saturday afternoon. It's indoor. There's lots of great food options. Parking will cost money and might on some dates be problematic. I doubt there's any alcohol to be purchased, though I'm not sure I care. We'll see. 

Anyway, a small group was nice. Having an odd number was, I imagine, annoying for those who had to wait to play. I got lucky and didn't have that occur, though I think that the occassional break might be welcome, and the person who had to sit out the first game took advantage of that to get some food.

I can't speak to the games the others played. With no spectators watching everything and the game not being recorded, it's a bit hard to get a sense of the games as a whole. I know Proletariat came out in a couple of games and I gather was effective, but I was not in either of those games. I got to see Visionary (combined with Legacy) cause me a great deal of trouble in my first game 1-3 loss. I had chosen Operative as my last pick thinking that I would pull Visionary to the other side of the board, away from Legacy's support and away from Omnitron's reach, but after I realized that Legacy could just take Visionary's place, I wasn't as keen to try that. A fizzled Fission Blast and not-so-focused Focused Blast certainly didn't help my team's cause, but I think I lost that game primarily in the ban/draft.

I was much more keen about my 13.5 min, single round, 3-0 win. Tachyon did all the things, Bunker fired all the guns, and The Operative got off a 7-die attack to get three successive incaps. It was after that game that we collectively decided to add the rule about starting tiles not being adjacent. I also really enjoyed using Blood, Sweat, and Tears in my middle game. They weren't exceptionally effective (though they did just fine, inflicting some damage and drawing fire), but it was just great to get them on the table.