Back about 15 years ago I used to be big into the tournament scene particularly for Warhammer 40K but there were times I would play in other tournaments as well. At the time there was a large program that games workshop used to run called the Rogue Trader tournament program. For those of you who were not around back then the rogue trader tournament system consisted of tournament packages that were supplied by games workshop mostly to stores but on occasion to clubs that would run tournaments as well.

Our club at the time had a rather good relationship with games workshop. As a matter of fact, I think at any given time we had four to five people that were Outriders (I will talk about the Outriders in another post). That being the case we would typically run anywhere from four to six tournaments per year and one of those tournaments was the giant Golden Gargant tournament which at its peak had 250 players. Our tournaments at the time were run in conjunction with Scenario Game and Hobby shoppe (I will write a post about these guys at some point too).

For the most part though my experience with tournaments was as being one of the organizers. Even though playing in the tournament was OK I really enjoyed putting them on. Being the prep of getting all the terrain built and put together, to the scheduling, in the actual tournament day I loved it all.

There are many Saturday mornings well I get up early thinking today will be a great day to have a tournament but Alas that is not happening anytime soon.

The way it usually be for us is a term in organizer is we get there probably by 8:00 o'clock in the morning get everything set up. have some coffee and breakfast as we get everything set up. We had a pretty good crew, and we could get A50 person tournament set up with table coverings and terrain in about 40 minutes if that long. Luckily the store was usually well set up so there really wasn't a huge amount of table wrangling that had to happen.

About 9:00 AM is when we start checking people in. A lot of these tournaments we would have people send in their army list prior to showing up so we can get a jump on scoring the army list prior to the tournament. Also, we would make sure that we have all their information so we could start getting the sorting program set up as well. Most of the time everything was good to go a couple nights before the tournament and we do not have to make some minor changes due to last minute drops or ads.

roughly about 9:30 let us start into the intro of the tournament where we would talk about some of the basic rules and how we grade things and how the day is going to go. After went through that we would announce the pairings for the first round and start assigning tables.

Usually around 10:00 AM people would have gotten their tables set up their stuff and gotten ready to play. At that point, the first round starts. as judges the first round usually was our busiest one. Not only were walking around answering rules questions but we would be doing some cleaning cleanup that would be required on the tracking program. The other thing that a few of us judges would be doing during this first round as we would be looking at the armies and taking notes about how they looked.

At noon we declare dice down on the first round and with that there are a couple of things that would happen. First everyone would need to put in their score sheets. Second people would need to get their armies in a state so they can move to a new table and Additionally set them up so they can be judged during the break. Once this happened, we would send all the players away to go get lunch. Essentially, we would tell them they could not be in the tournament room for about half an hour or so. While they were gone, we go through and grade all the painted armies. The cool thing about the rogue trader tournaments was that there was a grading sheet so you could score the armies based off some very objective items. There was some room on those four subjective items, but it did not matter that much. Like all rogue trader tournaments, the point was to have consistency between the different locations where these tournaments were held.

12:30 would roll around then we would go and start getting the pairings together for the next round. A few minutes later people would start coming back into the room and we would announce the pairings and table assignments and have people pick up their armies and move them to those tables.

At about 1:00 we would start play on the second round. During the second and third rounds while we were also walking about the room taking care of rules questions the judges would be discussing the painted armies and the army lists. Most of the time there was a tie for the top armies in painting and composition. The second round would end much like the first but there would not be a long break between the set that and the third round. Just long enough to log the results of the second round and sort.

At about 3:15 the 3rd and final round would start. Usually when the third round had started, we would have a fairly good idea ask who we are going to be the top four or five people in the tournament so we can kind of figure out how we were going to give out the awards. Of course, we would take the third-round results into account. But by then we pretty much had the best army and the best painted army figured out. The only things that were up in the air at that point were the overall winner best sportsman and best general.

There was a hierarchy to the awards and if someone got a high award, they would not qualify for one of the lower ones so the next person in line would get that award. With our spreadsheets it was easy to figure out. The hierarchy was as follows overall winner, best sportsman, best general, best army, and best painted. There were examples where someone could have come out on top on each of those categories. But in that case, they would only get the overall winner trophy. The best sportsmen would go to the next best sportsman and so on and so forth.

After the awards it had been announced we would post the scores for everyone to see. As tournament organizers we thought it was important to make sure that we were around to answer questions from players about how they did and how we scored things. When we did these tournaments there were usually multiples of us that were judging, and so players would have multiple people looking at their armies and grading the lists. that being the case it was hard to argue with the score because someone was scored by multiple people and an average was come up with.  While everyone was checking their scores cleanup is happening and pretty much everybody was pitching in to help out.

When everything was done and cleaned up usually a bunch of us would go out to dinner afterwards usually one of the main topics of discussion was what we are going to do with the next tournament.

Looking back at it the things I miss the most are not so much the playing or the actual tournament, it was getting to spend the time with my friends. No matter what we had going on our lives at the time we always made time to get together to put these on. I keep in touch with some of them but it is not quite the same. I look back on those years miss those times and experiences know that those days for me are just memories