Your favourite league format...

[Loki]

Hi All, our (Bristol) 'Winter' Legaue is come to an end and thoughts (espically for those of us unlikely to be in the play-offs ) turn towards the next league iteration; cunningly titled the 'Spring' Legaue

I have come to ask for your 'collected wisdom' on the quirky leagues you have run and enjoyed.

To give a bit of background we have been running leagues for few years now. Barring a few exceptions the leagues tend to be 'Open' i.e. people can join late; basically in the mould of the 'Perpetual' league idea. They run for 3/4 months with a playoff at the end for the top teams. We have just had a Vanilla league with 1M gp starting value and no extra starting skills. Some of the leagues have had extra cash and/or skills for the team start-up. We have also done a Bashy tournament with bounses for CAS/RIP and a Chaos League with a bespoke Kick-Off table with many (D66) weird and wonderful happenings.

So as the title says, What's you favourite legaue format?

[EDITS: for spelling mistakes]

ps I will steal any good ideas

[lunchmoney]

Ours is very straight forward.
Play everyone once, play a knock out cup of some kind which isnt just for the top teams, but for everyone, then reset and play everyone once


At the start of each season and cup I allow people to change teams. They can start a new one, or bring back an old one.

Simples

[Gaixo]

Scheduled 8-week league. 2 conferences (store locations), with multiple divisions within those conferences,the number of which varies based on the number of participating teams. Regardless of total numbers, the top 4 teams from each conference advance into a 3-round elimination tournament.

[Blammaham]

Thunderbowl runs two divisions, one only for new teams and an experienced division, with a set schedule minor leauge in between. A coach can have one minor league team and one rookie or experienced team. The season is ten games long with one game day per month where two games are played. Then in the sixth month a grand extravaganza is held with (numbers depending) four separate tournaments, two for each division, with the rewards being the same as the majors in the rule book. After a team has completed a tour in the rookie division they can then go to the minors or to the experienced division. All scheduled, of course, and all 40mm boards! S.

[Glowworm]

Swindon Cakebowl league:

Each coach takes 1 team, duplicates allowed, 1mil starting, up to 2 per season "friendlies" everyone plays everyone once, draws are draws (no O/T) winner is the coach with most points. Easy

IIRc it's been won by 4 different coaches the last 4 seasons.

[bound for glory]

planed league NHL/NFL stlye. you design a team at the begnning of the league, retire it at the end. i never understood playing high tv teams vs beginners. whats the interest in that?

[Darkson]

My favourite is scheduled play.
But I only get to play open nowadays.

[sann0638]

My favourite is scheduled play.
But I only get to play open nowadays.

You're only an hour from Swindon!

[Darkson]

10pm starts don't make travel easy.

[Axtklinge]

Our first two seasons were schedule and were such a pain to finish (games postponed over and over), that we decided to have a go at open, and thats how it has been ever since (about 10 years of those).
With 'open' every coach is able to play when he feels like (or when 'life' lets him), and we can actually manage the league without many stops.

[Manuel]

We at Blood Vall (because it is hosted in Valladolid, you know?) use to do it a little bit complicated:

There are tree phases, being the last of them the playoffs.

In phase 1, teams are distributed according to their Team Value. The reason for this is that we usually allow teams from previous leagues or summer tournaments to participate (with a maximun of allowed seasons, of course). At the end of these phase, the first 2 teams from each group go to group A from phase 2. The next 2 teams go to group B from phase 2, and the last ones go to group C. These numbers mary be altered according to the number of participants we have each season. These year, we are 27.

In phase 2, teams are already distributed according to their merits in phase 1, so it has to be much more demanding than the previous one, plus everyone wants to be on the playoffs. You play against the other teams in your group, but not against the one you've already played in the previous phase. At the end of the phase, a certain number or people from each group promotes automatically to playoff (more people from group A, less people from group C), for a total of 12 teams in playoffs. The remaining 4 teams required for the playoff are picked from the remaining teams, according to their results in phase B (so yes, their tend to be from groups C and B, but there might be some interesting last minute variations).

I don't know if I've been able to explain it correctly. It's kind off complicated... but the organizators are a mathematician and a physicist, so... ^_^ We are actually in the middle of phase 2, and it's running really well.

[Lycos]

ECCBL in London UK is 1M and new teams for each Spring season (12 games) & Autumn (10 games). Depending on numbers (anything up to 30 or so) we split in to 3 divisions and you play everyone in your "conference". Then a random draw is done for inter-conf games to take you up to the right number.

Top 2 qualify (so that is 6) and the four next place in terms of points have "play off games" and then those 2 winners make up the 8. Division winners pick. Games are when you can over the next 16 or so Tuesdays.

I have done 17 seasons so far I think, this my 18th (could be 19?) and we have seen it evolve as you can expect. We used to have no stars, cards, wizards but over the years they have all come in. And for the better. Recently there has been an attempt to get a mix of races in as one season was over bashy for some.

The only downside for me is that we create this mass of decent teams, mine usually 12-15 games in after QF, SF's etc - only for them to sit there doing nothing for evermore. I would like to see a longer term format of using these old teams and push them on to 30 games or something. Running alongside the main league of course, I wouldnt change that as it works well.
One day, hopefully, we will get a long term format going as well.

[Olaf the Stout]

A scheduled league with finals is definitely my preferred league set up. I like the little rivalries that develop between teams, as well as looking at the games scheduled and trying to plan potential skill-ups for them.

I also like the little league round events and rules that the Commish would introduce each round. Nothing major, just things like this round is sponsored by Orcade, so all KO rolls are made at +1 this round, or this round the Ice Wizards Conference is on, so all games start in a Blizzard.

That said, due to other real life committments, I haven't played in a league for over a year now.

I did get to play in a 24 Hour Ironman tournament though, which was basically a regular 8 game scheduled progression league held over the course of 24 hours. That was a lot of fun, especially playing a final at 4am in the morning, having not slept for almost 24 hours.

Olaf the Stout

[Dave]

I would love to be able to play sceduled but our league, mainly the irregularity some coaches can play, does not allow that. We play open instead with a final twice a year and a cup once in a while .. still enormous good fun

[Gideus]

My group usually does round robin or double round robin depending on number of players.
3 points win, 1 point draw.
If a lot of teams we do european football style, most points at the end wins, no playoffs as this usually just gave a buff to the already top teams by letting them play more games (our teams usually go more than one "season")
If only a few players, or quick tournaments, round robin plus playoffs like the world cup (groups of 4, play 3 games, top two in each group advance).

Had as few as six teams, as many as 16.

We're about to do a 10 team, double round robin league, most points at the end wins.
18 games per team, we'll see how it goes.