Episode 5 – A New Beginning: Tournament Game Master Basics

In this episode, I restart my podcasts with a series covering the basics of running a game tournament.  I realized that only a handful of people know how to organize and run a board game tournament. We learned by apprenticing and osmosis, but that is not an effective way to spread competitive play. I asked my very experienced friend Rob Kircher to co-host with me to explain the basics.

We will also include links here to other information sources we mention.

I apologize for the long interval between episodes. Now I have a goal. I’ll try to get out an episode every 2 weeks. In addition to Tournament Basics, I’ll cover my Cult of the New games and tournament news and events.

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Useful Links:

The WBC provides lots of information for GMs, but you might need help finding and understanding it, so I put together some links to the most useful info. There is plenty more at their site.

World Boardgaming Championship Previews  see the special rules and format for each event. Copy for any game or adapt to a similar game.

For example: Puerto Rico, the tournament I GM.

The WBC GM Guide is a treasure trove of GM info, but assumes you already understand a lot of it. These podcasts try to encapsulate and summarize some of the info in here. That should give you the foundation you need.

The WBC Event Form is intimidating, but also explains a lot about being a GM.

This article explains how to avoid bad things from the player’s point of view. It is very useful for new GMs to be exposed to this info.

The Meeple League is trying to expand tournament play to new events and venues. Follow along or help out! Rob and I hope you’ll join us.

Total Confusion (Totalcon) is a great New England convention held in February. Rob Kircher runs the board game events. We have the New England Regional championships in several games (sanctioned by the publishers) and numerous Meeple League events.

Euroquest, sponsored by Games Clubs of Maryland, is held near Baltimore in November and provides lots of tournament action and some very competitive play. It is also part of the Meeple League.