Empire Deluxe Tournament 2019 – Preliminaries

It’s that time of the year again when we play the annual Empire Deluxe tournament. For those unaware, this is a tradition started 11 years ago by a few of us tech geeks that were scheduled to work in a data-center with no access to an outside network.  To pass time we played a game that wouldn’t require setting off alarms, and thus the annual Empire Deluxe Tournament was born.

The years of us taking the holiday break in a locked down bunker watching over servers is gone, but the tournament remains.  The tournament will last an entire week and will not end until we determine the true winner.  Yes, we take out Empire Deluxe seriously.

In anticipation of this year’s event, here is a bit of information on what is changing this year.

This year we have two unique events that haven’t happened as far as I can remember.

First we have six players confirmed for our tournament.  This will significantly increase the complexity of the tournament play as well as the turn lengths.  Last year with four players we easily saw turns reach 800 to 1200+ turns before we called it.  We haven’t had six players in a long time, but we all agree this is likely to make the number go up not down.

Second, due to Christmas and New Years Day falling on a Wednesday, and because the initial reason for this tournament is still a real life requirement for us, the tournament will cover two weekends.  We will also be starting on Friday as a result, which means this tournament will be at least four days longer than our usual session.

I want to extend a welcome to our newest players, hatchel and wyvernsbane.  Wyvern is a former player who took a break due to some life-changing events and has returned.  Hatchel is new to our group, mostly because of he is stuck in a room with us and we didn’t want to exclude him.  I’m also looking forward to rekindling my fight with mara, the winner of last year’s tournament.

Finally, the group has agreed to play the Meer Sea.  This map has already been posted to EDIBLE to give the players enough lead time to prepare their strategies and review the map.