BPA Through the Ages PBeM Tournament 2018

This is the home page for a Boardgame Players Association “Play By Email” 2018 tournament for Through The Ages. It is open only to members of the Boardgame Players Association (BPA). It you attend the World Boardgaming Championship (WBC), and are up to date on your registration fees, then you are already a member. If not, you can purchase a “PBEM Membership” for $10 from this website: www.boardgamers.org. This tournament will award laurels and contribute to the annual Caesar award, all of which is tracked through that same website.

GM: Randy Buehler

Format

All games will be 4-player games using the “New” Story of Civilization edition which was published in 2015. 

Heat Stage: Everyone who joins the event will play in 3 asynch games, which will launch simultaneously. They will be paired randomly within the constraint that we will do our best to avoid putting people into multiple games together. If you win any of your games, you advance to the semifinal.

Semifinal Stage: You will be placed in 3 simultaneous asynch games. They will be seeded based on the results from the Heat Stage such that we will attempt to have each game contain one player from the top 25%, one from the second 25%, one from the 3rd 25%, and one from the bottom 25% while also avoiding repeat opponents. Depending on the number of competitors, it may not be possible to accomplish both of these goals.

You will be awarded 10 points for winning a game, 6 for finishing 2^nd, 3 for 3^rd, and 1 for 4^th. The top 7 point-earners will advance to the finals. (This stage will be eliminated if there are 7 or fewer heat winners.)

Final Stage: You will be placed into 4 simultaneous games. Each of the other finalists will be in 2 of them, and you will have each starting position exactly once. We use the same scale of points for each finish position as in the semifinals and the final standings go by these points. (Ties in the overall standings will be broken first by points in the semifinal stage, then by points in the heat stage, and then by % of winner’s scores.)

Note on Ties: We will not use the in-game tiebreakers for finish positions. In the heats, anyone tied for 1^st gets credit for a win. In the semis and finals the points for tied positions will be divided evenly among the tied players.

Pace of Play: You are expected to check your games and take your turns (at least) once per day. It’s OK to have an occasional break of a couple of days, but we expect most games to finish in less than two months. Games that haven’t finished in 10 weeks are likely to be adjudicated, and the adjudication will include demoting slow players to lower finish positions.

Client

Not enough competitors had the (awesome) new app from Czech Games so all games will take place on the free website boardgaming-online.com.

Schedule

(Registration Opened: November 2017)

(Registration Closed: January 15, 2018)

(Heat Stage Began: January 22, 2018)

(Semifinals Began: April 16, 2018)

===> Finals Began: June 19, 2018. Congratulations to John Corrado for winning the tournament! Stay tuned for news about the 2019 iteration of this event.

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