Tabletop game events come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. We have tournaments, leagues, conventions, weekly game nights, and more. There are also demonstration events and hobby events, but those are topics for a future post (wink wink ...).

For the purposes of event management, people usually group events into two categories - tournaments and leagues. However, people often don't agree on exactly what those words mean and which events should go into which category.

Longshanks has long supported both tournaments and leagues. When league support was added, we decided on the following definitions:

• Tournaments are events with games organized in multiple rounds.
• Leagues are events that have no structure and allow games to be played between any players in any order.

What's in a name?

These definitions have worked fairly well over the years but there have always been some events labeled "tournaments" which people thought of as "leagues" and vice versa. This causes enough confusion that we have decided to make a change.

Starting today, those terms no longer have any specific meaning on Longshanks. An event may be labeled a tournament or a league at the discretion of the event host with no impact on how the event operates. If you are hosting an event, use whichever term you think will explain the format best to potential attendees.

What happens to leagues?

To replace the functionality of the event format formerly known as a league, we have added a new pairing method: Free For All. It does exactly the same job as the former league format - the event has no formal rounds and games may be submitted between any two players at any time. Just like the former leage format, the Free For All pairing method must be chosen when an event is created and cannot be changed once selected.

All historical and upcoming "league" events have been reassigned to use the Free For All pairing method. This should preserve the functionality that was expected and intended for those events.

Closing remarks

This change has one additional effect that will impact how events are managed. New events now choose a pairing method when the event is created. This isn't a big change to the event creation process but it will make it easier for players and potential attendees to know how the event will be run.

This change also makes it a bit easier to properly run a Bracketed event. When creating a Bracketed event, the event host can choose the Bracket pairing method from the beginning and no longer needs to remember to choose that method when creating the first round of games.

We think that this change will make event formatting easier to understand and communicate for both players and event hosts. Events that have long been called "leagues" because they had weekly or monthly games rather than being all on a single day can now actually be designated as a "league" on rather than needing to use the "tournament" term. This should allow more events to be labeled in the way their hosts and players expect.