A STuG Life Tourney Recap
By Troy Hill (Photos by the author and Jeff Wiertalla except where noted)
Sixteen players gathered at the Rumble on the Rivers game convention in Fort Wayne IN this past weekend (November 11, 2023) for a three-round, beginner-friendly, Bolt Action tournament.
Many dice were rolled. Many FUBARS did occur (four at one table!), and much fun was had.
So, what happened?
My goal with this was to make a beginner-friendly tournament. That’s more difficult than it sounds, and I had to open a few cans of worms… or as Penn & Teller said a few times, a can of BEES. No one wants to open a can of angry bees. One player from a neighboring tournament (not Bolt Action) said he’d have no desire to participate in our tournament because of soft scores counting in the final results.
He basically only wanted wins and/or kill/attrition points to count. While I can see that for highly competitive tourneys, billing this event as newbie-friendly, figuring in sports scores as well as paint and avoiding army meta-cheese scores, gives new players a fighting chance to place higher if they haven’t learned the ins and outs of their lists and the game.
Players will gravitate to their preferred level of competitiveness. I enjoy tourneys that don’t cater to the curb-stompy meta-gamers. So this is the type of tournament I want to run. Hopefully, I succeeded in that this weekend. Advertising the event as “beginner friendly” did bring in three bystanders who came to the convention specifically to see the game in action, chat with the players, and help decide if they wanted to get into the game.
Hopefully, they’ll show up at one of our local game days soon.
Players in the hobby come in the same two flavors: Competitive Meta-meisters, or painters and hobbyists looking for fun games. Fortunately, Bolt Action tends to draw the latter hobbyist side more often than not. But many newer players have told me or other tourney organizers that they shy away from tournaments because of the Meta-competitiveness of such competitions.
We, overall, had a good bunch of players at this event. I had to ask players to dial a couple of lists back down from the min-maxed side. That’s not to say that we only allowed puffball lists. The lists often included engineer squads, with one list featuring three flamethrowers between a dedicated FT team and two in engineer squads. We had a couple of Japanese lists and one Finnish list. As well as one player to brave an Italian list, despite their abysmal national special rules in the game.
Instead of just going on scenario win/loss record, or the even more meta-stompy win-plus-kill points variations, I opted to include a five-question opponent rating with each game. Add in paint scores, and the field should spread out, right?
Well…. not so much. We still had a lot of max scores on the five questions. A LOT. Fortunately, paint scores had a lot more variation. This is understandable in a tournament with a lot of new players who haven’t gotten their entire forces painted. We had about five players with less than a dozen games behind them.
With a theme like It’s a STuG Life, I included a request (not required) that players got extra points for bringing an assault gun or tank destroyer. Again, a few such vehicles had to be removed from consideration due to a further requirement for no heavy howitzers. It’s just not beginner-friendly to use a HH to drop a building on a new player’s squad.
One other aspect of the awards, beyond the usual podium, was Best STuG. As well as STuG Ace. The Ace needed kills by the TD/AG of other armored vehicles. Matt S edged out the field with three kills by his Semovente.
After all, the goal of any TO is to have an event where the players, beginners, intermediate, and experienced all have enjoyable games to play. Players on both sides of the table should enjoy the game, not just the one who wins.
For table pairings, I tried to get our new players not opposite each other in round one. I even asked a couple of experienced players to take on the real new players. Huge shoutout to those who did! Thanks for helping to grow the hobby.
For advancement, I kept the scoring simple and just used Wins, Draws, and Losses to pair players, trying to keep players from being matched with their local compatriots until the last round. That was easy in rounds one and two. But we did need to have one or two such in the final round.
Prize Pack:
A HUGE Shout Out to our sponsors
for their support of our tourney and hobby.
Since this was a beginner-friendly event, the only awards connected to the prize pool were the Best STuG (Assault Gun or Tank Destroyer from any army), as well as Best Table, both voted by the players.
Awards
The winner of the Best STuG (any TD or AG) was James Napier of Kentucky. His SU-85 was the talk of the event, and he received 11 out of 16 player votes for his “STuG.” It’s a STuG life, after all.
James had this to say about the most prominent feature of his SU-85, the banner. “[W]hen I started painting my Soviet Army for Bolt Action, a friend of mine… sent me a meme photo of Stalin making heart hands, an image scattered all over the internet. I immediately decided that this would be the focus of my SU85 build. I’m not a huge fan of old Joe from a philosophical standpoint, but making a bombastic silly banner just feels right.”
When I was chasing down prizes for the tournament, I reached out to Rubicon USA and asked if they could provide a STuG model for the Best “STuG” winner. They sent FIVE models. And James was able to choose his favorite as the first draw from the prize pool.
Best Table was also a walk-away winner. Jeff Wiertalla, who loves the art of table terrain production, supplied about half of the tables for our event. Two other players set up several tables. Three-quarters of the votes were for Jeff’s Japanese Airfield table.
Things from the Basement provided a terrain pack of a building and accessories, which I had slated for the Best Table Award.
Best Painted Force was chosen by our guest judges from the SAGA tournament (two gents I know as excellent painters from the local Fort Wayne Indiana group, who also play Bolt Action).
That army was Jackson Horigan’s German force, featuring a variety of different elements, including a STuG with riders, an 88 gun and crew, as well as various troop and support options.
Best Sportsmanship was a tricky one. I had hoped my five sportsmanship-oriented questions for each round would have a larger spread at the end of the day. Instead, we still had a lot of perfect scores. So I asked players to rank their opponents for the day. We still ended up with a three-way tie, and I had to go into soft scores for a tie-break.
Kory Fitzsimmons was the winner of the Best Sport award.
My favorite award, the Wooden Spoon, the one I always try to win by having fun games and not worrying about winning or losing, was awarded to Joe Palazzolo. He got a nice trophy, and a set of new No Dice No Glory dice to help his next game.
Podium winners had one stand out, thanks to soft scores plus the win/loss/draw standards. But second and third place was crowded. Even without the softscores, the top five would have stayed the same.
Both Jackson Horigan and Matt Spinner finished with equal Base Scores for Wins, but the paint and other soft scores drove Jackson into first place.
Here’s where a TO faux pas occurred. When looking at final scores I didn’t catch that we had a tie for second, with a one-point difference to get to third place. This was with another person checking my work. We both missed it. I noticed this only when I finally remembered to sort the spreadsheet by point totals for the reverse (bottom-up) prize pull draw.
Since I’d already awarded Second Place to Jeff Myrom, I added Matt Spinner to make a tie for second place, and another trophy is already in the works and will be mailed to Matt, along with the other accolades.
Third place went to James Napier.
We then went into the prize draw, in reverse order. Since this was a beginner-friendly tournament, letting those who finished low in the pack have the first crack at the prize pool seemed fitting. Our newer players ended up choosing something to expand their own forces, or launch into a new army!
TO Notes
The balance of finding soft score questions is always a difficult task. Most players simply award max points to their opponents. Out of our players, almost half received perfect ratings (74 or 75 points out of 75 across three rounds). A full three-quarters were over 72 points. The few outliers were mainly below that due to having a rate your opponent’s painting (on a scale of fully, partially, or not painted).
Talking with other TOs, this isn’t uncommon. No one wants to be “That Player” who rates someone truthfully. Fortunately, we did have players sharing their soft scores to help others better understand their play styles.
The quest for a good method for breaking ties with soft scores, that doesn’t encourage players to go all meta-stompy is an ongoing battle for those of us who want to run beginner-friendly tournaments.
What’s next?
We’re waiting to see if another Rumble on the Rivers happens in 2024. Either way, I’m already planning for A STuG Life 2… Big Cat edition… yep. We’ll feature those BIG tanks players purchase early on, then never field because they are a point sink. No, you won’t be able to bring the Maus. But, King Tigers? Probably.
Start painting now!
