[Germany / Berlin] Hack the Egg 1.0 (Fun Tournament)

Deutsche Version hier: AlwaysBeRunning.Net - Tournaments - Decklists - Netrunner

What: Hack the Egg 1.0 (Fun Tournament for Beginners & Regulars)
When: 9-Sep-2017, Registration 10:00, Start 10:30 (break around 14:00 - 14:30, end around 18:00)
Location: KahveRengi, Wollankstraße 99, 13359 Berlin, Germany
Participation: 5 EUR + minimum 5 EUR (recommended 10 EUR) which you should consume at least in the location
Deck lists: not required
Registration: When possible, please use alwaysberunning.net, so I know the number of participants. Otherwise register here in the forum or send an e-mail to: 5N00P1.ANR@gmail.com
Maximum participants: 30
Tournament Organizer (TO): 5N00P1
Card Language: English or German (printed quality Proxies allowed)
Legal Cards: all Data Packs including Crimson Dust
Questions discussion: here in the stimhack forum

Format:

Ultra Cache Refresh: 1 Core (e.g. only 1 SanSan City Grid, 2 Magnum Opus and others!) + 1 Deluxe (or Terminal Directive) + all data packs from red sands cycle tournament legal. Differently to Cache Refresh it means 1 Deluxe for Corp & Runner and only the latest Cycle! Please keep this in mind.

This tournament is supposed to be fun and encourages newer players to participate while playing with the more regular players. That means you might play against more experienced players but based on the tournament structure you will also play against players of the same power level. To accommodate this we are using 1 side tournaments, meaning you will bring 2 decks (Corp & Runner) but only play one against each opponent. The tournament software will decide which side you are playing in a match, and ensure that this is balanced through the tournament.

So, we are playing something comparable to regular 5 rounds of swiss which is 8 rounds of swiss in this short format, each round with a maximum time of 40 min.

Hack the Egg:

Each player will build his standard Decks. At the venue you will get 2 additional cards, the eggs (it’s a proxy so please bring sleeved cards, additional sleeves and regular cards that can be used as the back of the proxy). These are 3 advancement, 0 point agendae that each player will include into his corp deck. This might be your 50 & 51th card, which is ok, for the egg the deck building rules don’t apply.
If the runners steals an egg, he takes it and includes it into his corp deck so the deck might get more and more eggs. To secure his eggs, the corp can simple score the agendae. The best egg hunter will get a special price at the end (see below)!

Beginners:

You expirience with Netrunner ist limited? This will be your first tournament? You just started with Netrunner? Come and join us!
If this is your first tournament or you have questions, please feel free to ask any question! We help to answer them and you will have a fun event and meet nice people! Am I a beginner? This is something you should ask yourself and you can answer by yourself, we wont judge your decision, be fair!

Regulars:

Please bring decks that are fun to play against. Please avoid Siphon Spam, Asset Spam, Prison and other decks that you might have in mind. Focus on decks that might be strong but or not creating frustrations on the other side as the other side can’t play their game any more. Please respect the MWL, it applies to you, not to Beginners!

Price pool:

There is a special price pool for Beginners, just for participation you will get a special card (promo) one which is a “The Supplier” (En) from the Dutch Community. And on top we will randomly assign
3 “Same Old Thing” / “Der selbe alte Kram” (De) between all Beginners.

Every participant will get a regular promo from a GNK (Q1 2017, Sunny & Mushin No Shin, (De)) the remaining promos will be randomly assigned to all participants. On top we will randomly give one “Chronos Project / Chronos Projekt” (De) to a participant. So it’s not so important to bring the best decks!!! It should be fun!
On top, the best egg hacker will get one portion of scramble eggs in the venue to show all his opponents how many eggs he has hacked!

6 Likes

Really glad to see this idea taking off! I ran the original one of these in Norwich a few months back and we really enjoyed it. If you’re interested I can share the art we used for our eggs, although I understand if you prefer to use your own.

The main thing we found from running it was that 1 egg wasn’t really enough. They rarely changed hands and when they did it was too easy for people to end up in a game where there were no eggs to steal. I’d suggest going with 2 eggs each if you can, as it makes it more likely they will turn up in game.

Also it’s worth reminding people to bring extra sleeves for adding eggs to their deck!

This is supercool :slight_smile:

1 Like

Totally stole it from you post, found the idea intriguing and want to do something for new (er) players. Happy that you are five with it!

Will follow your advice totally, 2 eggs and would be happy about a template!! And not sure how it will do in a one-sided tournament…

Will update the text about the sleeves!

Looks like loads of fun. Wish I could be there (or do I just want scrambled eggs… hmm.).

Updated the text of the sleeves and it’s 2 eggs now!

Stolen from my friend’s facebook post (he put together the files):

These are the links to the files:
https://www.dropbox.com/.../0zd9vbp0.../Easter%20Egg2.xcf
https://www.dropbox.com/.../Easter%20Eggs%20Printable.doc

Hopefully they work, as not tried this before.
If you are familiar with Gimp the .xcf is pretty simple, each egg is it’s own layer so you can hide/show the layers one at a time. There are 8 eggs, we are also using the ‘Teeth’ layer for each to give 16 variants. Also pretty easy to add your own ‘egg’ designs as an additional layers if you wanted.
The Word file is sized up correctly so you can just print and slide them into sleeves with a proxy card straight away.

1 Like

Just refreshed the links and tried again, hopefully they will work now.

Good luck with the tournament, would be really interested to hear how it goes.
Planning to arrange a Halloween themed one later in year for our group.

1 Like

Thanks so much, this worked!

Happy to provide feedback afterwards. If I miss it, let me know.
Currently 8 people registered, so I’m hoping for ~ 15.

Just a short reminder! Currently 10 registrations and looking forward for the tournament.
Happy to get additional registration on Always be Running.

We took some photos of the event, I hope I’ll get them in the next days and can add them to the ABR page!

Thank you everyone for attending and supporting the tournament! I really enjoyed the tournament!
Special thanks to dome_ for being the judge and offering price support & Miri & JoJo for adding prices.
The e-mail I setup for the tournament was obviously not working, I apologize for that, only realized this during the tournament

You can find the standings here:

Report about the tournament from a TOs perspective. If a paticipants would like to write some words I’m really happy about it.

This was my first tournament as a TO (I organized one back in Jan-2017, but some one took over the TO) and we had 14 participants. I deem this a big success! We had fun, many eggs changing the owner and a lot of first time tournament participants. One player agreed to step back to make the number of players even if required, so we don’t need to give out byes as I had the feeling I need the time to focus on the tournament and not being the one to make it even and this was absolutely the case.

Some days before the tournament I had 12 applications on ABR, in the morning of the event there where only 10 left, 3 have dropped one was new. No idea why yet. At the end we had 14 players.

I used a software called Excalibur, which was working, but I would call it very basic. It was even hard to see the standings in details, but I used a version which was to old. :frowning:

I was hoping for a bit more feedback and enthusiasm upfront to the tournament. I got lot’s of positive feedback during and after the tournament.

So…
14 people, 6 of them newbies of different level of experience and 2 players from the past (one of them wasn’t playing for 2 years the other one for 6 Months. This was a surprise for me and I’m really happy about that and they are not part of the 6 newbies!) 3 of the 14 where from other cities, 2 from Leipzig (2 h away), 1 from Magdeburg (2 h away). You know some of them, some of them where totally unknown to us and it was a good idea to post it also on the not so common places for German Netrunner (like reddit). I got the feedback from some regulars about the surprise of all the new faces :slight_smile: he expected something like 6 people.
So tournament run from 11:00 to ~ 18:00 for 7 rounds.

I think one main challenges was to motivate regular players to build a deck for this specific event. Otherwise they might have participated. On the other hand I’m not aware how many people where motivated because of the limited card pool. And for many of them it was the first time they build there own deck.

We started around 30 mins later as some people came late due to issues with there bike and others sleeving cards. Thus we “only” played 7 rounds of swiss. Which was nice as more people meet and know each other. We allowed proxies which was used by some players and we told the veterans to take the required time with newer players and allow take backs, if they have no impact (e.g. running into Archives into a breach dome, or rezzing a useless ICE).

I think to slot 2 eggs instead of only 1 as suggested was a good idea, they changed quite frequently. Some people had 5 eggs as the maximum during the day and it played out some player tried to focus more on the egg hunt instead of the points, but this is kind of unreliable as a strategy with only 2 eggs in an average deck. But one of the 2 with 4 eggs at the end was the last one, which I think was a nice thing.

One big questions was, what to do if you forfeit the eggs, which I decided is still a secure or stole so it will stay there.

It was good to have 40 min time for a one side tournament, for the newer players this was still a challenge and almost every round there was one game going into time. On the other side I had some matches ending in the first 10 min, they often switched sides and just played for fun (once I encouraged a veteran player to switch decks with the newbie, which was a good experience!). While I like that you only play 1 side, I’m not sure how good it matches to the egg hunting, because the eggs are only in the corp deck, perhaps not the best fit, especially if you are playing corp or runner the first 2 rounds… but this is something I have expected and would consider running another format with a single round tournament. On the other hand this is a fun tournament, does it really count?
Players reported it was a really relaxed atmosphere as winning was not so important. I think still everyone was trying to win, but not as hard as in a competitive tournament.

I enjoyed it very much and I’m sure I’ll think about this or similar events in the future. And for sure we will look in our meta for more casual events to have different kinds of players motivated and to make it easier accessible.

What would I do different the next time:

  • Have 2 different prices for entry, announced for registrations until 2 weeks before & later
  • Bring the correct software :wink:
  • Should track the number of eggs per player to make this more visible
  • Also advertise on BGG and CardGameDB

Thoughts:

  • I don’t like about the format, that the players need to bring sleeved cards + extra sleevs (> 50) with them. This is a challenge for new players at least from my point of view.
  • We had extra sleeves at the venue, but they would have other colors, which we said would be ok for the day.
  • But for my gut feeling this was creating another hurdle

Questions?

5 Likes

included this in the previous post

To add to this:

  • Players reported it was a really relaxed atmosphere as winning was not so important. I think still everyone was trying to win, but not as hard as in a competitive tournament.
  • The e-mail I setup for the tournament was obviously not working, I apologize for that, only realized this during the tournament
  • Also advertise on BGG and CardGameDB

Total tournament n00b perspective:
Basically I’ve told all this to 5N00P1 in person already, but want to quickly post here too, because it would just feel mean not to comment here after all the good organisation and it’s always nice to have something in writing for later. The main points for me as a total beginner were:

  • Swiss 1 Side Tournament
  • Seems ideal for beginners! Due to the one-sidedness of the tournament the games can be longer (40 minutes), which puts less pressure on beginners, who still have to read most cards, etc.
  • Hack The Egg
  • This is also a brilliant idea for a beginners’ tournament, since the eggs add a clear fun vibe to it. Maybe not for the serious tournament players (my opponent was totally baffled when I scored an egg), but for me they did for sure. In the end I even won the scrambled eggs, while coming last in the actual tournament (that’s what you get for scoring eggs :wink: ). So I think that was a pretty good outcome. :slight_smile:

Probably lots of other things, but I think these are the most important ones. Organisation was solid all around. If I wouldn’t have known that this was a first time for the organiser, I wouldn’t have noticed. If there’s ever a second edition of this, I’ll be game! :slight_smile:

Oh and: giving out and raffling off little perks throughout the day was a great thing to do! I never really cared about the alt-art cards, but now that I have them - I find them really cool! Will probably never play them, but I like to see them in my binder and they are forever connected to Hack the Egg in my mind. :slight_smile:

4 Likes

This is included in the original post:

  • I don’t like about the format, that the players need to bring sleeved cards + extra sleevs (> 50) with them. This is a challenge for new players at least from my point of view.
  • We had extra sleeves at the venue, but they would have other colors, which we said would be ok for the day.
  • But for my gut feeling this was creating another hurdle