Nortrom's Stratego (and other topics) blog

Why you should participate in the WCO Previous blogposts about WCO: WCO History WCO Improvements and thoughts The World Championships Online (WCO) take place a few weeks after the live WC has concluded. Not everyone will be able to make it due to various reasons. This year's live WC will be held in Sheffield, UK. Participating in either the online or live WC, does not exclude one from the other event. This means you have two shots at winning a world title ;). The WCO uses the swiss pairing system which means that you'll be getting paired up against players that have gathered a similar amount of points, resulting in more equal and thrilling matches. More interesting may be even all players are put into one big group. As a newer player, you have a very good chance of getting to play against a top, experienced, player that you usually would not be matched up against. In WCO #3 (2017-2018) I had to play against Major Nelson in the first round, who at that time, was a rat...

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...

In one of the previous articles I wrote about about the history of the WCO . In this article I will discuss some of the improvements (especially on the organizational part) based on our experiences, aswell as sharing some personal thoughts. Technical During the first WCO, we used a word document which looked like the red text is variable, per match. This means we had to look up all the data from the Excel file and replace it. Very prone to error and very time consuming. I would say this was the most annoying thing about the WCO #1. In order to make things easier for the WCO team, and generally better for the participants (less errors, country flag, etc) I decided to make a small webapplication which with a database behind it. The database contains the following information of a player: - Accountname - Nationality - Skype Address ( not anymore ) A table with rounds (start date, end date) was created too. With this tool we can generate match PMs with ease. From a drop-down ...

As we are currently halfway through the 3rd edition of the World Championships Online (henceforth called "WCO") it is worth looking back at the history of the WCO. By history I do not mean looking at the results, shocking moments and so on, but more from an organizational perspective and looking back at the initial (and current) goals of the WCO. As dramatic as it might sound... it all started when KARAISKAKIS (henceforth called "Greg") had the idea of organizing a tournament which would unite the two Stratego communities, online and offline. At first, I was a bit sceptical to say the least about the idea of organizing a tournament which would hold the "World championships" title. The WCO would mainly attract online players, offline not so much, I thought. Looking back at it, I think this mainly is because of the lack of promotion of the WCO back then. When Greg approached me if I'd be interested in organizing such event, as said, I was sceptical ...