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Hello all dakka friends,

I am based in South London UK and would like to plan to try to organise a 40k tournament.

wondering if anyone would like to give me some opinion.

I guess it will be hard work, but if one dont try one will never know.

so I need all your tourny-organiser/ tourny-go-er's opinion:

what have you find work best? what point-age (1k, 1.5k, 2k?)

at this moment I am thinking of a one day event at most (9am to 6pm), how many games should fit? I think three 2k games probably will be okay, may be able to squzee four 1k games in with break in between.

how do tourny-organiser resolve to gaming board issue? even with a small tournament, say 8 boards 16 players, how do you get 8 board? where to store them, what to do after the event?

apart from the player playing the games, what should / could also happen during that day? raffle? tuck shop? other sponser (like gw, independent stockist?)

how much (cost) was the tournament that you've been? I know thorne of skull is around £60 over 2 days five 1.5k games, plus food, overnight stay, travel it can cost around £300 for the weekend. what about 1 day events?

that's all that I can think of for now, thanks for your help in advance.

Number of games depends on point size for the games.
You'll easily get 4 1000pt and maybe 1500pt games in 8 hours (there will be time needed to setup, explain matchup and so on, so at most, with a 9 hour bracket, you'll have around 8 hours game time). I wouldn't try cramming in more than 3 games @2000pts in that period.

My club runs an annual 5 game 2000pt 40k tourney over 2 days (but we also do smaller doubles tourneys (2x1000pt, 3 games 1 day). When I started helping with it, we were lucky to get 25 players. After 6 years, we are now hitting 65-70 players for that 2000pt tourney. This is a problem for us. We can't supply enough terrain and tables for this many people.

Our club has 19 boards (6x4) and terrain to fill them. This will do 38 players. We need more boards and terrain to handle the rest of the 32+ players. We do what any moderately large event does. We ASK the players if they can help out. Most of them are willing to do it, as they like our relaxed layout (and we have beer) so losing the event because of not helping out doesn't come into it.

We offer a prize for "best table of terrain". More tables means more chances to win it. It's peer judged (the players vote on it). If we get more terrain than we need, then we use theirs in preference to our own. Two years ago we needed 8-9 tables more than we had - we ended up with 21 of them.

As to price. Most 2 day events here go for around $50 (£25 or so) with $25-30 for a one dayer. This covers venue hire and prizes. We have a range of accommodation available around the venue and in that area (from $25 a night pub rooms - multiple occupancy - gamers from different clubs try to book out the pub's 6 rooms first). Otherwise, we're only a 2hr drive from the nearest capital city (and some people do drive up and back both days).

What are you going to do for the reward?

thanks for the reply so far, I suppose to run a tournament it is better to run it as a club then a individual (?) I wonder how other tourny organiser out there how they deal with board and terrain. I suspect many of these organiser have a store or a shop such that providing some of the material is not an issue.

say if I run it as an individual and only have 2 board, I am more likely to be dependent on the player to bring their own board... therefore I probably have to target clubs / local games store.

as for the prize, for £15 / 20 a day of playing it is hard to get enough extra for any cash prize; may be a trophy or something small and symbolical. but I suppose if I manage to get a "sponsor" they can give thier store credit as prize, but that probably limit to inde stores (not sure if GWS is up for it).

thanks and keep the commend coming!!

Anything less than a battleforce is a real cop-out for a tournament with that high an entree fee.

We give out box sets as prizes for 2nd-3rd place (1st gets an engraved plaque mounted "decorative" axe - our club is called the "Slayers" and was named after the short, bearded ones, so the axe was thought to be appropriate). It usually costs us around 2 entries just for it.
Most of the money for ours goes to prize support, venue hire and sundries (we hire a cleaner afterwards) as well as drinks and snacks.
Half of the "profit" is kept for the club - it helps to bankroll the next year's event - the rest is donated to charity.

for £300 venue hire it will be classroom size for 10 hours. say charge £15 a head for 4 games (1k or 1.5k).

that needs to have 20 players to cover the hire, but 10 tables probably will barely fits 6x4. smaller game may be able to use 4x4, then we can fit more players perhaps.

It is up to the organiser to provide tables and terrain. So if you don't have the tables and terrain, you'll need to either buy and make some, or ask for loans. It's not unusual for tournaments to ask if people have terrain they can lend for the weekend, but boards are hard to transport so unless you are part of a club that can supply them for the weekend, you'll need to make/buy your own boards.