Tournament Recap: Warsaw Open 2016

You might have heard about a relatively big tournament that took place in early December in Central Europe. Seeing as how I had the pleasure of organising it, I think it is only fitting that I do a recap here on Data Sphere for the larger Infinity community.

The Club that helped me organise the events in the previous years had to move venues. Long story short, we eventually ended up in a Christian foundation that was kind enough to take us in. What that meant for me, however, was that I had to organise a tournament with only around 30 days left until go-time – as the usual slot for Warsaw Open is November-December of every year. That might not seem like a major problem, but was a headache for two reasons. First, we didn’t know exactly how many tables we could fit in the new venue, so I had to limit the attendance to 30 people (which I now know was too much anyway) and two, there was a limited time window to contact potential sponsors.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get in touch with everyone I wanted to, but I still think we managed to get a very respectful prize support of over 1,000 USD. More on that at the bottom of the post, closer to the tournament pictures. It turns out that being located at a Christian foundation has some unexpected advantages – we were able to participate in the local Christmas meet-up, tasted some amazing Polish specialties such as bigos and even participated in the vote for the best cake!

We even got to vote on the best cake

Talking about the sponsors, I would like to heartily thank, in no particular order, the following companies:

Zen Terrain

Esgraf

Thor Miniatures

Army Case

Micro Arts Studio

Systema Gaming

Customeeple

Kromlech

Wycięci

Deep Cut Studio
Wargamer

Corvus Belli

Reycast

Nanit Project

It is thanks to our sponsors that we were able to make sure that each and every player went home with more than they paid in their entry fee. They provided us with tokens; markers; measuring tools; scenery  elements both pre-painted and unassembled; a gaming mat, a carrying bag for your army; models; modelling tools; decals and trophies. Some of them (thanks, Koni!) have even paid for overnight shipping to Poland – it blew my mind when I had the package at my doorstep just 18 hours after the shipment notice!

Similarly to the big tournaments out there in the world, we decided to present each player with a Stuff We ALL GET Bag. In our case, it was more of a SWAG Envelope  – taking the best practices coming from Spain. The envelope included:

– Tokens for Mission Objectives with an engraved tournament logo
– A keychain with the tournament logo
– Plexi tokens and an army badge
– Last but not last, an HVT model sculpted by a local artist

Mold created by a friend of mine

Having so many prizes meant that each of my players went home with more than the entry ticket’s worth, which is always the ultimate goal for me as an organiser. We raffled the most expensive prizes (the gaming mat from DCS and the Army Case Bag – it was the fairest way of distributing it) and we had a very simple system for the rest – we divided the prizes into separate levels and players would come to the table one after the other, according to their tournament standing, and take one thing from each of the three prize support levels.

Prizes, part 1

Prizes, part 2

Prizes, part 3

Prizes, part 4

We tried to draw in some of the artistic crowd with a separate Best Painted Army competition – in the end the competition there proved nearly as fierce as in the tournament itself, with a very close call between two beautifully painted armies – an Acontecimento force including all the newly released models and a Haqqislam force consisting of the models released with Red Veil.

Traditionally, like every year, we had some guests from abroad. This time, two players each from Germany (Warcors MacBain and Dakara) and Lithuania (Warcor Karolis and Marukas) arrived to compete for the title of the best player in Warsaw – we also had several less familiar faces from the Silesia region of Poland, but I am very happy to say that the bulk of the tournament crew were my locals.

Being a minimalist myself and wanting to draw in some of the local casual crowd, I  chose the easiest ITS missions such as Supplies or Seize the Antennae. I think that they show the best what Infinity is about – a tactical engagement on a small-scale in order to capture local objectives – and they are fun and easy to play at the same time, too.

In the end, after penalty points were awarded for some unsportsmanlike behaviour in a very heated last game, we found out that we had an unexpected winner – Dakara managed to score #1 with his Hassassin Bahram. I guess that Leila Sharif that he assembled on the day before the tournament must have helped! He scored 12 TP and 27 OP.

The table was provided by ZEN Terrain, the owner of which played in the tournament

This table came to us all the way from Lithuania

In the end, it was one of the best events I had the pleasure of organising and I can only encourage you to mark November 2017 in your calendars.

The top 3 players were Dakara, Sathuli and MacBain and were playing Bahram, Neoterra and USARF, respectively.

Thank you all for coming and thank YOU for reading!

P.S: There’s a short video/picture-dump by a fellow player available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3k3eDdnQz9M&feature=youtu.be