As our league is a 40k league, the verbiage will be in that vein, but know these things should be able to apply to any type of tabletop game that has a winner. Also know I am not getting any payment from Warscore for this or any other article.
What is Warscore?
Warscore is a free Java program available at Warscore.net that you run on your computer. It will track many things such as battle points, sports, paint, teams, and more. It is essentially a hyped up version of Excel that has a lot of things built into it to make running a tournament or league much easier. It takes a little bit of work through on the front end, but once you get the hang of it is a great tool for TO’s and organizers to run their events. You can download it at Warscore.net.
Setting Up Warscore
I won’t go into the main setup of Warscore as I went into that already in another article here. The main thing to talk about here is what you want to track for your league. We track it very much like a tournament with each week being a round of the event. We track battle points, sports, and paint via a sheet we use that players fill out each week.
Our tracking sheet covers the victory points for the game which is based on the win/loss/draw system of 40k. Then we take a look at sports. Players rate their opponent on fun on a scale of 1-5 with some bonus and minus points as well. If you get salty, you lose a point. Keep your cool and don’t gloat? Gain a point. Last we look at paint, again on a scale of 1-5 and award bonus points for having your army fully painted and playing with something newly painted or worked on.
You might track other information like factions, Imperial and Xenos for a narrative league, bonus points to track week to week, or other things you can think of.
The Power of Warscore for our League
I would say Warscore has two big things that I use all the time in our league and has saved me a ton of time and headaches in our league. Withdrawing and Returning players and Rematches.
Anyone who has worked with gamers know how fickle they can be. They say they are coming, then 10 minutes till you get a text saying their cat looks mangy and needs to be watched or you get a lot of people to come out week one of your event, but drop off as the month goes on and have new people showing up mid-month. What to do? This can be very tough an annoying but Warscore has a great feature in the program of withdrawing and returning players.
Our previous organizer has the problem of making matchups and then finding out that player A had already played player B and needed to rework it on the spot. This way, you just see how is there, add new players like you did originally, remove players not there that week, and then make matchups.
The flip side of this is that you can then return the players the next week into the system in a similar fashion. Click the “Tournament” tab at the top and then “Return Player” underneath. You will have a list of players that you’ve removed and can select from there. Nothing gets messed up and the player is ready to go for that week’s game and matchups.
The other feature I love about Warscore is disallowing rematches. You don’t have to think about a player not playing the same guy twice with this box checked. This takes a lot of headache out and makes it easy to make matchups for that week’s game.
Conclusion
Is it a perfect system? Probably not. We’d love a way for players to enter in their own scores so it can be run at a larger tournament like LVO. The BAO put it at its max of 100+ players for the TO’s to enter scores and get the next game running in smooth amount of time. For your weekly league, it has been a great tool for me and I think will be a great asset for you as well.
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