If you’re not yet in the SpyParty beta or if you are but don’t check the (awesome) private beta forums,1 you may not know there was a tournament going on for the past few months. As usual, since I’m too discombobulated to do much of anything, it was a beta-tester organized tourney. This time around, bloom put it together, and decided it’d be the first ever “New Art Tournament”, so it was played entirely on the two maps in the new art style, New High-rise, and Modern.  Two maps is not a lot, but there are two different competition-worthy game modes on these maps, “Any 4 of 7” and “Any 3 of 5” on New High-rise, and “Any 2 of 3” on Modern and “Any 3 of 5” on Double Modern.2 These modes play completely differently, so there’s a fair bit of variety even give the limited number of maps.

We’re putting the final touches on a new new-art map that will be released imminently, but that’s for another post.

There were some awesome matches played during the whole tournament, and I’m sorry I didn’t have spectation implemented yet.  Some of the matches were streamed by the players, but spectation, which I will hopefully do Soon™ will allow casters to stream the matches with play-by-play and color commentary, which is always more fun.  For the final match between kcmmmm and scientist, though, we came up with a cockamamie hack to work around this using the replay system and DropBox’s directory watching, so toboshi and warningtrack could live-cast the whole thing, and it worked pretty well!  It was an amazing match, especially since scientist fought his was back from the losers bracket, and kcmmmmm was the one who put him in the losers bracket earlier in the tournament!

Here’s the video from the cast.  It’s long, at about 2 hours, with a pre-game show and everything. Some amazing elite-level SpyParty games and great analysis here:

Here’s the whole bracket if you want to see scientist‘s long voyage…

1. which I plan to make read-only-public at some point soon since they’re such a great information resource for the game [↩]
2. which is just Modern with another conversation circle, 10 guests, and a known Double Agent [↩]