Another Scoring System? Why do we need another Scoring System? The short answer is that we don’t! But my answer is that one more can’t really hurt and it fills me with a sense of nostalgia that comforts me in my wargaming veterancy.
The 32 Point score system came about purely from a desire to use an old scoring program written to handle large wargames tournaments a long time ago. Having found this program on a long forgotten USB drive it led me to think about how I could adapt current KoW scoring to fit around the 32-0 scoring.
Originally this system was written with just an attrition scoring aspect, the Wargames the scoring was developed for used attrition based scoring to determine the outcome of a game, game scenarios were rarely used in the mainstream games systems of the Day so an attrition based system was ideal, utilising either the percentage of army destroyed or the number of army segments defeated, this was compared to the opponents score and the difference used to generate a score, the total of which added up to 32. I.E. a draw was 16-16, and a tabling defeat was a 32-0 with varying degrees in between these two scores. As I dealt with hundreds of these scores over the course of a weekend the ease of input was a major concern, this was achieved by the simple matter of entering the player id number followed by his half of the score, the program then checked score when the opponents number was entered as it knew what the score would be J 32-(players ones score)=(player twos score) so if the players had put the wrong scores down on their sheets then at least the rejecting of the players score by the program would start an investigation , rather than posting results up then having shamefaced players approaching you to explain their errors. It wasn’t 100% full proof but went a way to reducing stress and lost time.
Having a simple attrition based scoring system did appeal, but I generally play Kings of War (KoW) and run tournaments for KoW. This presents a problem in that to make the attrition based system fair, there would be no scenario play (which in KoW is a scenario itself, the delightfully titled “KILL” scenario) If I was to run my Tournaments with nothing but “KILL” scenarios I am sure that, although initially there may be interest, eventually people would object to being subjected to playing “KILL” all the time as one of the plus points of KoW is the scenario play.
With this in mind I looked at some of the other systems in use at the moment in the World of competitive KoW at the moment.
The Northern Kings System. This system seeks to reward both scenario play and Army destruction, utilising up to 5 points for Scenario, up to 5 points for army kills and between 5 and 15 points for WDL ( 15 for a win , 10 for a Draw and 5 for a loss)
BlackJack. Using a system of Attrition balancing and scenario tables tailored to the specific scenarios ( thus requiring updates when scenarios are changed) Blackjack seeks to grant scores out of 21 – hence the name – which means draws are difficult to achieve, a situation which is ideal in a Swiss tournament.
BullShroud. A System which initially sought to reward scenario play above all else but then altered due to negative feedback to include an element of WLD score and Attrition to the extent that it has been described as”NK-light”
Black Dragon. A Simple 3-2-1 system that rewards 3 for a win – 2 for a Draw and 1 for a loss with Army rout points as a decider in the event of a tie – however the inclusion of the “Winner Takes All” caveat to the scoring system – whereby tabling an opponent auto wins the scenario- tends to make all the games a glorified version of Kill for some players.
Having played and T.O’d all these systems over the past 5 years, I decided that the easiest thing to do was write my system up and use it myself. So with that in mind and the fact that I needed some extra material to keep justifying the expense of keeping my Blog Page (average readership of Four) going to help boost my flagging Wargames-Ego.
So here it is in all its minimal Glory:-
Win – 6 points
Draw – 4 Points
Loss – 2 Points
Attrition Difference Charts
2000 pts 2300 pts 2425 pts 2500 pts 3000 pts
So there is no extra bonus for winning the scenario other than the WDL score, but there is an incentive to keep the attrition scores as close as possible to increase your share of the points , the bigger the gap then the less points you get and vice versa.
Not the most compelling of reasons to adopt a scoring system for tournaments but if it means I can use my old Britcon scoring program to run an event or two and feel the nostalgia ( it will also involve copious amounts of Beer and Yellow Crocs- but that is another story) then it will have achieved its aim and brought happiness to an Old Wargamer.
Coming to a GT event near you in the new Year !
PS , since I wrote this system it has been warped and altered and will be in use at this Years Swords of Summer Event at Britcon in Nottingham in August of 2023 – Scenario points have been added to make it an “Out of 35 score system” but I will be using this barebones system and maybe I will blog about at a later date J
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