Dungeon Crawl
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) is the best roguelike game out there. Once or twice a year they hold a tournament to coincide with a major version release.
Tournament Play
I'm still playing a lot of dcss. You can read more about it in my previous review of dcss. Recently I tried out one of the tournaments. You join a team and play for about two weeks. Your team gets points based on what it achieves during that time.
The whole concept is a bit silly. An experienced team might be able to cover all of the achievements and try to figure out how to optimize score, but an intermediate team probably just wants to get as many wins as they can.
Some of the points categories are wildly disparate. Like, "fastest real-time game" vs. "fewest turns taken". Those are quite different because to minimize turns taken requires more thought, while a fast game will be very inefficient. Other categories require exploration, getting runes, or arbitrary challenges, all of which conflict with being fast or efficient.
Furthermore, DCSS is about the most solitary game I can think of. Most of the game is made of quick almost-obvious decisions where a different choice is only marginally better or worse. When you make 1000 decisions in six hours, there isn't much room for collaboration.
Why Play Tournament?
Despite the silly and contradictory nature of the tournaments, they are great fun. The different achievements encourage new types of play, but since winning is important you don't want to flex too far from your comfort zone. Teams might seem silly, but they give some community and make it easier to ask for help in rough spots.
So, overall, the tournament was great and I plan to play more in the future.
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