I forget what the appropriate Board for Tournament AARs is so apologies in advance. @Panther just move this wherever it needs to go. I don’t mind.
Intro Junk - Feel free to skip to the next section if you just want the game information.
I had the opportunity Gen Con this year to play in their AA50 tournament (dubbed the “”“World Championship”“” by Renegade, even if such a grandiose title is a bit absurd IMO). It was a very nice experience as I haven’t been to a IRL convention since 2023 (and haven’t performed well at one since 2018, when my local convention stopped hosting A&A Events). The players I met were polite/good sports, even when the dice started going sideways as they tend to do. As with the AARs I once did for the Revised Tournaments I performed decently at in the past, this post is going to be a series of AARs breaking down the various games I played with a decent amount of detail.
This is also an attempt to preemptively explain/defend my own strategies/decision making process for my games in the event that other coverage of this tournament misrepresents them.
DISCLAIMER: This is purely meant to be a review of the games I played for data collection and/or reflection purposes. No harm or insult is intended. If you were one of my opponents and something I said here rubs you the wrong way DM me (or post here) and I’ll edit this post to accommodate.
Tournament Format/other notes - Feel free to skip if you just want the game data.
The tournament ruleset was (roughly) as follows (a more comprehensive rules list can be found on the TO’s website: https://headlesshorseman2.com/gen-con.html):
-Game: AA50
-Scenario: 1942
-Intercepts: On
-Dardanelles: Open
-Tech: Off
-NOs: Off
-Battle Calculators: Not allowed, but you are allowed to write-out battle forecasts by-hand and attempt to reason out the odds for yourself.
-Time Limit: ~5:30 in theory, but in practice varied greatly. Players were expected to self-police how many rounds would be played. Games only end at the end of a full round (i.e. USA/China’s turn). Games can never end in the middle of a round, even if the 5:30 time limit technically expired. Generally, this means that games are expected to last 6 turns, but this is not a guarantee, as you will see in this report and in other coverage of this event (particularly the final, which I understand only lasted 5 turns).
-Entry Cap: 32 entrants, but technically up to 64 players can enter. Players are highly encouraged (but not required) to form 2-person teams. Players who elect to play alone may be highly encouraged by the tournament staff to partner with another single player to form an impromptu team for the sake of creating an even number of participants.
-Tournament Format: “Single Elimination, but after the first round some losers are allowed to advance to the second round via random selection in order to make the number of players in the second round a Power of Two (i.e. 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.)”. This is to ensure that no player/team ever receives a bye.
This year, 2 teams were “revived”, meaning the total number of participants was 30 Teams (2 solo players + 28 teams = 58 entrants, a very large turnout for an A&A event to be sure).
These two above points were personal sour spots given the tournaments official designation as the World Championship for F2F play. Past conventions I attended were purely 1v1 and used Swiss style preliminaries to determine the top 4 players for the playoff. This I would argue was a better format given the luck factor A&A is notorious for (doubly so given that the ~6 turn time limit will force many medium/large scale battles to be taken at ~60-70% odds, as there is not enough time for either side to build sufficient forces to take ~99% decisive victories unless one side played extremely poorly). If single elimination must be used as the format for whatever reason, I would at least advocate that the “advancing losers” be chosen via VC count (as in, a team that lost a 9/9 tie has priority to advance over a team that lost a 12/5 blowout or an outright concession).
That being said, the TO should be the one with final decision-making authority, as he runs tournaments for almost every edition of A&A in-print alongside the “world championship”, so I imagine at least some of these seemingly-questionable decisions are made as time-saving measures more than anything else.
The match schedule was as follows:
-Day 1: Round 1 @ 4PM Eastern
-Day 2: Round 2 @ 4PM Eastern
-Day 3: Quarterfinal @ 9AM Eastern, Semifinal @4PM Eastern
-Day 4: Final @ 9AM Eastern
The requirement to play two games on day 3 (and the requirement to wake up early for the first one after a late night on day 2) made for an interesting experience, as it took a physical toll on the players involved. This will become evident in the report, as both sides in the semifinal make a fair number of mistakes to the point where, as the chess saying goes, “the winner was the one who made the second-to-last mistake.”
Now, with all of that out of the way, the actual game reports:
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