Nortrom's Stratego (and other topics) blog

Country teams & Open tournament (sunday - day #4) After the individual WC, the day after, there always are two more tournaments to be played. 1. Country teams. 2. Open tournament. In the country team tournament, the top players, per country, form a team, this is based on the individual results of the WC and the player's willingness to play for their national team. For other players, the open tournament is available, which often features 5 rounds. The country team competition was played between: The Netherlands, United Kingdom and Greece. A shocker happened at the end, the team from The Netherlands(Tim, Max, Anjo, Edy) finished on place 3. Team UK (Richard, Alex, Charlie, Jonathan) took silver, while Greece (John, Gregory, Nikos, George) won the gold medal. Video of NL - GR Video of country team awards In the open tournament, Axel Hangg won the tournament. Yours truly finished on the second place and Ruben finished on place 3. Some players who were not present during the...

Main event (friday & saturday - day #2 and #3) In the previous post the barrage tournament at one of the best if not the best venue ever for a Stratego tournament was discussed. In this post I will take a look back at  the main event of the WC Stratego 2018 in Naarden. The day kicked off for me with one of the things I heavily dislike; an alarm that goes off early. All of this after a bad night rest which could not possibly have happened during a worse time. Moving forward, a quick breakfast was had. Shower. Clothing and ready to go. Upon arriving at the venue, some of the other organisers were present already and it was good to see them. Decorations were present too, for which, we owe great thanks to Jumbo . Despite the actions taken the day prior to friday, there were still some things that had to be done. One of these were the goodybags; all ingredients were present, candies, bags, bottle of water and WCO promotion cards. They now had to be put together into one goody...

What a truly wonderful and remarkable (for many reasons) the WC 2018 has been. In the previous blogpost I've written about the preparations from an organisational perspective which I hope has been an interesting reaad for many. All the preparations add up in time invested, for the entire organisation team. For me the main focus of this WC was to ensure everyone would have a good time, welcoming people, assisting the organisators of the WC days, basically being a good host. Barrage (thursday - day #1) For me, venues usually don't matter much. A simple hall with tables, chairs and some decent lighting will suffice. When we look at the location where the barrage tournament was held, the "vestingsmuseum"   one can only note that this truly is a remarkable location for a Stratego tournament. A fortress, military setting. Cannons, walls, water, soldiers with 18th century costumes to fire the cannon for the opening. It's a pity the logistics would have been...

Tournaments without proper preparations from an organisational side are doomed to fail. Small, local tournaments, may seem as only renting a venue to play at, but a lot of other things must be taken into account as well. Boards, clocks (logistics) must be taken care of. An invitation has to be made. A referee/computer operator is required. In The Netherlands we use a 'tournament owner' system. A player, often a local, will take care of many of the organisational things (venue, invitation, referee/computer operator) while the National Stratego Organisation (NSO), in this case Stratego Bond Nederland (SBN) takes care of the finance, logistics, prizes and sending out the invitation. A specific player (or group of players), with support from SBN, organise local tournaments. While all of this are a lot of background tasks, it can be time consuming and if the turnout of players isn't high, it can be slightly demotivating even for a tournament owner. Onhe year a local tournament...