@vodot I’m glad you enjoyed the write-up. Hopefully it provided a counterbalance to whatever BGN had to say. Others have asked me about it but I’m too self-conscious to willingly sit through a hour+ video of someone else using the luxury of hindsight to review my game. If anything I’d probably just get unnecessarily angry over it and leave a 2-mile long argumentative comment, and that wouldn’t do anyone any good.
Personally I don’t enjoy the 2v2 format that gen con and all of BGN’s tournaments employ. All the past cons I went to for A&A over the years have been 1v1, Beamdog’s 42SE client is 1v1 for ranked, League/tournament play on here is strictly 1v1, and basically every Classic/Revised league worth its salt from the old days were 1v1 as well. In basically every game I played I found that all of the “teams” effectively boiled down to “leader/follower” dynamics anyway (not to mention that sometimes the teammates would starting getting antsy with each other over who’s “fault” X/Y/Z thing in the game was), so if anything it just feels like a cheap way to cut the tournament’s runtime in half. I guess that’s fair since the organizers need to work with Gen Con’s schedule/table availability, but IDK, it’s just not an appealing format to me. Hopefully next time I go I can convince either my wife (who is roughly as good as I am) or one of my friends to go just so I can avoid the hazard of being paired with a random.
My gripes aside, I would definitely recommend trying to go to any F2F tournament one day, be it BGN’s upcoming series in the Ohio/Indiana area or something smaller wherever you live. It’s a high-octane version of A&A that is basically a completely different board game than what is played online (due to the turn/time constraints + the fact that calcs are explicitly not allowed)






