Tournament Recap: Warsaw Open 17-18.10.2015

42 players met last weekend in Warsaw to decide, in a completely gentelmanly fashion, who was the best Infinity Player in Central and Eastern Europe.

It was the highest number of players in the history of Infinity tournaments in Poland, so we, as the Warsaw community, had 2 priorities. One was to make sure that we have enough terrain to provide good tables for everyone, without having to use Boarding Action-style tables (i.e closed spaces). Two was to gather enough prize support to be able to make sure that all our players would be coming home satisfied with what they got.

Work started early in the morning in bad weather

We succeeded on both counts. First goal was achieved by the joint effort of our community and by that of the players from other locales, who brought their most representative tables with them. Thanks to that we were able to provide all players with a similar gaming experience. An overview of our tables can be found in the video and in the gallery, links to both of them can be found at the end of the article.

Second goal was achieved thanks to our many sponsors, who I feel I should all call out because of their generous contribution to our tournament. I would like to thank each one of them for their support and their belief that we can make an awesome event. This year we were able to reach out to many new sponsors and in turn, able to introduce many new companies to our players. In no particular order, I would like to heartily thank the following companies and individuals:

Micro Art Studio

Wargamer

Feldherr

Corvus Belli

RcTrax.pl

Thor Miniatures – Gaming Miniatures & Accessories

Zen Terrain

Systema Gaming

Customeeple

Warsenal

KR Multicase

Kromlech

ES Graf a.k.a Marine Chaosu –

Figurkowe Gry Bitewne

Zippy’s Infinity League in Warsaw

Shae Konnit Games

Sonic

MKF Tawerna Płock

Without them, we would not be able to have the event we’ve had. I am humbled by the amount of support we received. The value of the prize support of this year’s Warsaw Open was more than 4,500 PLN, that is, 1,200 Euro.

All of these items have been provided by our generous sponsors

Over 2 days we played 6 missions. They were: Anihhilation, Supplies, Seize the Antennae, Lifeblood, Emergency Transmission and Cold Sleep. As you can see, we’ve chosen missions that are scored by objectives, rather than those that score by turn (Quadrant Control, for example) as we were afraid of getting skewed results because of players not finishing all rounds.  In order to try and let all the players play all 3 turns, we called out the remaining time at the 30 minutes in, 60 minutes in, 90 minutes in and 15 minutes and 5 minutes left until the end marks.

How much time left in the round you said?

The more missions in the tournament, the more representative the results will be. However, there’s a physical limit to the amount of games you can play. What that means is  that if we wanted to have more than 6 games the only way we can achieve that is by shortening the time for each game – something which we didn’t  do this year as we were rightfully expecting many inexperienced players from various locales. This year we went with 6 games with a 2 hour limit per game. I don’t see us going any further in the future, unless we do a 3 day event.

Can’t think of a caption for this one… Well, just enjoy the table from Baltazar games.

In total, 25 of the 42 participants were from Warsaw itself. Each of the bigger Infinity locales in Poland had sent representatives – players from Chełmża, Wrocław, Gdańsk, Kraków and Poznań arrived to compete in the tournament. We were also lucky to host players from Lithuania, Spain and the Czech Republic, making it the biggest international event in the history of Infinity in Poland.

After a dynamic second day, where the top 3 changed from round to round, eventually Vertor was named the Champion, followed closely by Piotrek and Alri.

Top 3 from right to left – Vertor, Piotrek and Alri

We also ran a Best Painted Army contest, where 9 entrants competed in a General Vote among all players – eventually Neuromotor’s Nomads and Alri’s Caledonia won in that contest in a tied result.  The organizers also decided to grant a special prize to Arbiter’s Nomads and on top of that we raffled a special prize among all the participants – a sketch sent to us from Spain by the gifted Alberto Abal a.k.a Bran do Castro himself. Konuhageruke, a Bakunin player was lucky enough to go home with a Chimera sketch by one of the Infinty staff.

A Bakunin player getting raffled to win that Chiumera sketch was just a stroke of luck 🙂

Unlike last year, there were no extracurricular activities such as the Trivia contest, we simply did not have enough time to conduct it. We invaded the local pizzeria, though, and had a fun time afterwards at Sathuli’s place. No photos of that event, though, sorry 🙂

In general, even though we had enough prize support that everyone came back with the entry fee value back in their pockets, we decided to raffle additional items among all the participants – some very lucky people got their hands on an Icestorm signed by the Corvus Belli team and on one of the Infinity bags provided by Feldherr.

Nomads and Ariadna ruled the charts, but having the top 3 spots taken by Ariadna alone must mean something…

The final ranking looked the following.

All in all, I’m very proud that we have managed to organise and run the biggest Infinity event on our continent – disregarding Spain, of course. Can’t beat those guys. I’m sure that next year, we can do even better.

No, we didn’t play in a prison. Yes, we did play in a basement.

More photos are available here.

The video recap of the event done by Mysza is available here.