Effective immediately, four is a Buffy Tournament. That’s right, gather just a few of your best friends together and spend an evening playing a WCA sanctioned Buffy Tournament. The WCA recognizes that many areas have seen players stray away from the game, and we don’t want that to stop everyone else from enjoying what we know is the best CCG around.

To qualify as an officially sanctioned tournament, you need to keep two more things in mind:

* You’ll need an official judge.

If you don’t have one in your area, you can see the related article about having someone in your area become a judge.

* You need to play a minimum of three full rounds.

With four people, that’s easy, you just play each other player once.

So, why do you want your tournament sanctioned? Sanctioned tournaments get a couple nice advantages. First, the judge can request a tournament kit to hand out prizes for participation and finish. Also, once the results of your tournament are submitted, they’ll be factored into a worldwide ranking system. The details on the ranking system are still being worked out, but you can look forward to hearing more in the near future.

“So, what’s the score?” A common enough question. In Buffy tournaments, we’ve grown accustomed to a system that awards 25 tournament points for a full win or points earned to everyone else based on a calculation of Destiny Points plus two times consecutive Park turns at the end of the game. Over the years, this has led to some interesting tournament results and on occasion, a little confusion.

As a community, we have an excellent opportunity to revisit this system. The WCA would like your opinion on a couple of proposals. Please check out the “Buffy CCG Polls” forum and let your voice be heard.

One proposal is in regards to potential changes in how tournament wins and losses are scored. The second relates to how a winner should be chosen in a timed game, and how points should be totaled for tie-breaking scenarios. The intent is to try a new system for six months, and evaluate whether the result is a positive change. At that time we could decide whether or not to make the change permanent.

So, make your voice heard, and help us guide the future of Buffy Organized Play!

Recently, it’s come to my attention that several people, myself included, have been receiving odd e-mails from various members of the Buffy CCG community. These e-mails seem to come from a person we correspond with regularly, or whom we have at least talked with in the past. These messages are not so innocent. They apparently contain a variant of the “bagle” virus.

The bagle virus is a Mass Mailing worm virus, which means, when your system is infected, the virus replicates itself, attaching itself to existing programs (which can become irreparably corrupted) and automates a series of e-mails to anyone it might find in your address book. The e-mail itself is very clever and uses the e-mail address of a person on your address list as well, making the mail seem legitimate. If the attachment to the e-mail is opened, the new system becomes infected and the process starts again.

As a precaution, never open an e-mail attachment that contains an “.exe” file, unless you have verified that it is virus free, and the person listed as the sender actually sent it.

Proactive With Pep [BL-SoC #19], (a.k.a. the card Josh Smith had a title for a year before it was made,) is frightfully useful. Not only can it serve as a mini-Confrontation, refreshing all those characters with wacky traits, like Supernatural Assassin, but it’s the second part of the card that I find super-beefy. It can move one of your characters during the Conflict, and with that magic “or” separating it from the rest of the card, that means they don’t have to have those wacky traits, so you can use it with Kakistos, or Faith, or even Buffy, and increase their “I’m gonna get you sucka”-style mayhem! Plus, it’s the handiest way I’ve yet seen to avoid the carnage of a Day of Ascension, because you can play it after everyone’s been forced to the Park! And, as dgjedi mentioned to me, it makes it super handy for using someone to beat a challenge at one of your locations, and then slipping them into the Park to get that Park Control. The possibilities are boggling. Well done, Mr. Smith! J