How to start on tournaments

Thanks to more or less good developments of vaccination-rates, at least ideas and thoughts about real life tournaments are present. Even with the pandemic the community grew, so that now new players ask themselfes, if torunaments are the right place for them and how to start with them in the best way, but also experienced players may want to refresh their memory. This shall be the startig point for this guide on how to start on tournaments! First I want to give you an overview about where to find tournaments in your area and how to subscribe to them, followed by tips for the strategic planning for the tournament, leading to the tournament-day itself, so that you can fully focus on meeting new people and having some great games of Infinity.

 1. Why visiting an Infinity-tournament?

Maybe you already have some experiences with tabletop-tournaments or you are completely new to the topic - A tournament itself always implies a certain competetivety and with that some stress/challenge. So if you are not very experienced with Infinity yet, why should you directly join a tournament? From my experience, Infinity-tournaments are something special and just the aspect of connecting to the community and meeting each other to have some games in a row is all of the deal. Even if you are new to a community, you are always welcome and your current level of experience is taken into account, so that the more experienced players often talk you through the game after it is done and show you some new tricks. These new tricks are also a good argument for joining a tournament. It seems like there are no two communities playing the same Infinity and everyone gets stuck to some routes of playing from time to time. In a tournament, you will meet different players and see different approaches and game plans and also get some misunderstandings on rules corrected. You can't learn more than on a tournament. An other aspect are the more or less secured set games you will get. While you get in one or two games per game night, on a tournament you will have at least three games and a complete day dedicated to the hobby, so you can really dive into it and enjoy this time. In conclusion there is no need to be worried about a high level of competetivity or some kind of gatekeeping. Moreover you will get to know many cool new guys and ways to play Infinity and enhance your experience.

2. What is an Infinity-tournament?

Before we dive deeper into the topics about tournaments, a short description of the overall system and what you may expect shall be given. Tournaments for Infinity most of the time follow the official ITS-rules (Infinity Tournament System). These rules are updated annualy with seasonal extras and slight changes to the mission set. It also adds some additional rules. For the moment we are in the 12th season, which will end in late September and will reset the official ranking. Each tournament following the ITS-rules can and should be reported in the official system (OTM), where your own ELO is calculated and your ranking on different levels is done depending on the number of tournaments played and of course your scoring. In most cases you will play the ITS-missions by default on your normal game-nights, so you will already know most of them. Nevertheless some tournaments will add one or more custom-missions or missions from previous seasons. The missions themselves are not changed. One special thing of ITS is the opportunity to bring two lists to the tournament. Both lists need to be from the same sectorial or vanilla-list but may contain completely different profiles, which will be discussed later. You may play both lists in the tournament but you don't need to. This adds a great opportunity to have the right tools available for each mission and evens out some scisor-rock-paper moments you may know from other tabletops.
Besides the rulewise factors, there is the event itself. Tournaments tend to be organized as one-day events with three rounds or as two-day events with four to five rounds. In Europe most two-day events have three games on the first day and two on the second and are held on weekends. One-day events are also organzied on weekends, mostly on Saturdays but also on Sundays. Depending on the organizer smaller events will be held in private rooms, local game stores or community-rooms with eight to 24 players. Bigger events may also be held in bigger locations. Most of the time a certain kind of catering (coffee up to lunch) is given or at least there are places to get some food nearby, so that you won't starve on a whole day of gaming. In most cases you don't need to bring terrain by yourself since the organizing team has enough terrain by themselves or someone else will also bring some terrain, leading to good and consistent maps in most cases. To pay for catering, the room and prizes, one-day events are priced around 10€ per participant, while two-day events are more expensive, depending on what is added to the whole event.

3. Finding tournaments

Infinity-tournaments of differenz sizes are held in many regions of the world, while the density depends mostly on the number of players in the region. Normally most urban areas have at least a small community, which has a WarCor or other motivated members, organizing tournaments from time to time. So the first and most important way to find local or regional tournaments is to connect with your local or regional community via messanger-apps, facebook, table-top forums or whatever community-place there may be. If there is a game store nearby, you probably could ask there, if they know about Infinity-players in the region.
To search directly for tournaments, the official tournament manager from Corvus Belli is your best friend. There you not only have to subscribe to a tournament and register your lists, which will be described below, but also can search for organized ITS-events. Since most of the organized tournaments will follow the ITS-rules and will be officially reported, they should be listed there. Only some may be missing, mostly smaller, more or less private events or tournaments which are organized via an other software and will be reported later.
Many tournaments then are shared via regional platforms like T3 in Germany, facebook (national groups, continental groups,...) or over forums. Maybe there are hobby-forums where you can also look, depending on where the national community is mostly organized around. Greater events are also often shared in the official Corvus Belli forum.

4. How to prepare for a tournament?

The preperation for an upcoming tournament maybe is the most important part, since here you set directions for your success and your enjoyment in the actual tournament. This covers of cours your list and the practice, but also the soft-factors and surroundings you should take care of. But lets start with the crucial points: Your lists and your practice!

What makes Infinity-tournaments special is the opportunity to bring two lists instead of just one to the event and don't be forced to use both of them. On the one hand, this makes the preperation a bit more difficult, since you need to build and practice two lists, but on the other hand it helps you to reduce the stress of only one list. Here you are able to to prepare one list for one set of situations and have a second one, which covers the other situations (missions, table set-ups, opponents,...). But what is now the best approach to list-building?

As you already know, Infinity is a game of playing to the objectives instead of killing whatever moves across the table. In a tournament, you want to score as many tournament-points (TP) as first score, objective points (OP) as second score and victory points (VP) as third score. Especially the new scoring system of season 12 implies that it is always a good idea to score as many objective points as possible, so the most important requirement for your list and the practice is to fit to the played missions. For this you need to know what missions are played and what are the win-conditions of these missions. There are several ITS-go throughs and mission-focusses available on the internet for your help.

Once you know what is needed to score points in the played missions, the big question is, how to build your lists in regard to this. In most cases you start to build one list, which will work well in one part of the missions, while your second list will cover the rest of the played missions. But there may be occasions where missions are quite similar or your first list turned out very flexible. In this case you could build a second list designed to cover a table set-up your first list may won't fit well (open terrain/dense terrain), or a certain list-archetype or faction your first list will have bigger troubles against (camo-spam, TAG-lists, guided-missiles,...). This one is a bit advanced, since you need to know the strength of your first list very well and you need to know when an opponent will pick one of the uncovered lists etc.. So I would advice you to focus on the missions for your first experiences.

Before you now start clicking together all you need and find interesting, pay a little attention to what you have already played some times and what you are familiar with. Of course that may be something sub-optimal, but in the end you at least have an idea how to use the pieces with the expected outcome, while new toys may need extra concentration and practice to be used properly. While looking back at my first tournament-games, I had to focus a lot to at least play the game in a way I normally do and not screwing completely due to exitement. Maybe you are more focussed (I really wish you are), but nevertheless experience is king here, so stick at least to some extend to what you already know!

In the best case, you don't go alone to the tournament and have one of your regular opponents ging there, too. This gives you a good opportunity, to practice your lists and the missions before the tournament to get a better feeling and understanding of how the mission works and how your list works to this. From my experience especially the missions play quite different than you read them and to get the right timing for clicking the buttons and stop killing stuff often needs some practice. Based on this, I would advice to try and practice each mission at least once. This gives you an idea of what will happen and you will have played each list at least once. If you don't have the time for this, focus on the most unfamiliar things. If one mission-type is completely new for you, practice at least that type once. If you play a quite unfamiliar list, have at least one game with that list. The goal here is to give you a bit more auto-pilot-feeling in the tournament and reduce the impact of nervousness.

 
Besides this, there is a list of items you should prepare before the tournament. This should help you as a check-list:

• Arc-marked miniatures (all of them in some way, but in a clear way!)
  
• All tokens you may need in the needed number (unconscious, prone, wounds, orders, ...)
• Silhouette-markers, since you will see new terrain and want to check LOF reasonable
• Measuring tape
• 5 D20 dice
  
• Printed out version of your lists
• Printed out versions of the responding courtesy lists
• All miniatures and maybe holo-decoys you may need (including HVTs)
• Classified deck
• Comlog-app on your smartphone
  
• Pen and some paper to note hidden information etc.
• Something to eat and drink for yourself to stay energized
  

5. The tournament itself

All of the previous advice and the few following only lead to one, very important advice: Have fun and enjoy the tournament! Many struggles and problems may be already dealed with, so now there are only a few to keep in mind on the big day.
Arrive in time, better a bit earlier than too late. Infinity-tournaments life from no long speeches and introductions as well as a more or less calculatable time-table. So if you arrive too late, you either create a delay in the whole timeplan or you will miss some important information and clarifications on the tables etc. But even more important is that you will miss the chance to have a chilled arrival, grab your first coffee and have a chat with the participants already there, talking a bit through the tables or ideas you had during practice.
The time-table is also the most important thing to keep in mind but don't be stressed about. If you look at the schedules of the most tournaments, there is only a little lunch-break, while the rounds flow into each other. Most of the time, one round will have a duration of 2 hours and 30 minutes, translated in 30 minutes for deployment for both players and one hour playtime for each player. Sometimes chessclocks are used, but not that often. Thanks to your practice, you will be able to direct your lists through the game in the given time, since you may have a plan, know your rules and don't have to look everything up. In my experience, the time is long enough, if you are no really slow player. If that is the case, you should add some practice to get your games done in 2 hours 30, which will also benefit your regular gamenights. Often your games will end much faster than expected, since the outcome is clear and everybody played their hands, adding the needed and wanted time for some snacks, coffee and chats with your opponents and the other players. So you don't need to fear starving or having no time to get to know new people.

Hopefully I could answer some questions regarding Infinity-tournaments with this guide and give you an idea about those events and why to join them. Some aspects around missions and list-building are described elsewhere way better than I could give it in this guide, so check out all the other ressources available (Bromad Acadamy, The Dice Abide, Goonhammer,...). Nevertheless, let me know if you have further questions, want to share your experiences or have something else to share to this topic!