How to run an IceDice Tournament

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How To... This page is one of a series of "How-To", answering questions about what rabbits can do. All How-To Pages Some helpful pages: ...be a good Demo Rabbit ...run a scheduled event ...run a floating tournament ...run a Fluxx tournament ...run a Treehouse tournament

Contents 1 Structure 1.1 Ice-offs 1.2 Finals 2 Examples

[edit] Structure

1. The rules used will be the standard IceDice rules, for 2-players. The tournament organizer will oversee all games and make official rulings whenever they are required.
2. As other games, the tournament will consist of two phases: The Ice-Offs, and the Finals. All players will compete in the Ice-Offs; of these, some number of players (2-4) will advance to the Finals.

[edit] Ice-offs

1. For the Ice-Offs, players will be distributed among games so that the number in each game should always be 2. If there is an odd number of participants, adjustments may be made to get a third player in a game, but this should be the exception, not the rule. Almost better would be to give a player a bye, in which it is assumed that they won that round.
2. The winner of each game will be recorded by the tournament director. Alternatively, the winner may receive some sort of token or marker to track the win. Players will be "shuffled" among the tables between rounds as directed by the tournament director.
3. Ice-Offs rounds will continue until somewhere around 2 to 4 players have X wins. These players advance to the finals. All other players are out. The value for X depends on the amount of time allotted to the tournament, and number of participants in the tournament. Values of 1, 2 or 3 are reasonable.
4. If the tournament is very large indeed, some sort of bracket system may be needed, in which players who get X winning tokens advance to a second set of Ice-offs.

[edit] Finals

1. Because IceDice games should preferably be 2-player only games, the Finals will consist of either:

• One round of elimination "semi-finals" followed by a Final round
• Or a sudden-death, 3-player all or nothing round, possibly to whoever has 2 wins.

The format of the bracketing system, and number of games to be played, will depend directly on how many players are in the tournament, and how much time is available. If there are only 4 people in the tournament, then skipping to two-out-of-three "semi-finals" may be most appropriate.

The most important thing is that two player games should usually be preferred. The game bogs down with more than two. We do note that three player games might make for an interesting Final Match or something.

[edit] Examples

At two players per game, 60 starting players (which is a large group) down to 30 to 15 to 8 with one bye, to 4 to 2 is five rounds of qualifiers, which may be a substantial effort, and may use all of 2 hours. Pacing becomes important.

Somewhat more likely is a starting group of about 10, which may be quickly reduced to 5 (or less). Then a semi-final round would be played, and a Finals game. Or maybe a "2-win token" minimum system, and then the Finals, may be more preferable. Either way, this should amount to about 4 rounds, total, which is pretty good. We encourage whatever system seems both equitable, and enjoyable to all participants.

A small group of just 2 or 3 entrants may call for a series of plays until any one player has won a desirable number of games, probably 2 or 3 wins.

Icehouse Game This page is about a fun game! This, and many other games, are to be be played with the Icehouse gaming system. You can learn more about Games like this on The Icehouse Wiki. Listing of all Icehouse pages on this wiki.