This comp has just been run and won, with twelve players taking part (well, actually thirteen but this included two people tag-teaming). Play was generally good-natured with few rules questions, although there was a little unpleasantness in one game regarding the arrangement of elements in an ambush, as well as the usual grumbling about the unfairness of the dice.
Results were as follows:
Greg Russell (Ottoman Turks - 1514): 108
Michael Gray (Seleucid - 250BC): 96
Aaron Russell (Dynastic Bedouin, Hamdanids of Mosul - 900): 95
Zach Russell (Thracian - 200BC): 86
Lawrence Greaves (Patrician Roman, West - 452): 84
Liam Spires (Patrician Roman, West - 470): 76
Dave Quilty (Alexandrian Macedonian - 331BC): 66
Karl Hamlyn (Early Burgundian - 1431): 62
Tim Montgomery (Welsh - 1130) and
John Garvey (Sui Chinese - 602): 62
Craig Stevenson (Early Ostrogoth, Radagaisus - 405): 52 (4 rounds)
Julian O'Sullivan (WOTR English, Yorkist - 1455): 46 (5 rounds)
Grant Snowsill (Later Sargonid - 630BC): 30 (Umpire's Choice Award)
It was great to see such a big range of armies in such a small competition, including a couple of pike armies, a couple of Roman armies and a couple of Book 1 armies. The Thracian was a monster with massed LH (O)/(F), Ax (S) and Kn (I). The Welsh under-performed despite a mass of Bw (S), while the army of Radagaisus sometimes had terrible luck in the face of a target-rich environment (in one game triple-ranked Wb were wiped out by double-ranked Bw (S).
Grant Snowsill won the Umpire's Choice Award for his willingness to dive into the competition despite last playing ancients before DBMM existed.
Other observations: One player's experience of the comp was spoiled by having three games in a row in which he was the invader but had to deploy first - a 1 in 64 chance. This then led on to more general discussion involving a few of us about how a few games were affected by either weather or time of day factors - things that neither player had much control over - and that even when these factors had no effect on the game they still took some time to resolve, which slowed down the start of the game.
Roughly half the games remained unfinished due to time. This may suggest we need to add another 15 minutes to each game to provide enough time for a definitive result. Certainly enough games were close enough to a result that an extra 15 minutes might push completion rates up to something like two-thirds.
It was pleasing to have another DBMM newbie in the comp, as well as having another relatively new player return for another dose; I'm confident they'll both return. But DBMM numbers in Australia remain perilously low, and I'm not sure what to do to encourage more people to return to the colours - Australia is a large country and the big cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are all far away from the DBMM hubs of Canberra and Rockhampton...
