Thanks for the feedback Danthrax. How'd your tournament go?
It went pretty well! I got to the store about 45 minutes before registration opened up so I could set things up, print out sheets for the players, etc. The owner had a cool setup in which I could hook my laptop into an HDMI cord and it would double my screen onto a large TV hanging from the ceiling, which I used to show player standings and, during rounds, display a giant timer counting down the time left in the round. Here's what it looked like:
My laptop is sitting on a shelf on the left. A couple games of X-Wing are being played just behind the big TV and there were three more games (plus the store's front door and counter) behind me as I took the photo. Very cool setup and very easy. There also was wifi, which the owner let me log into. That was very helpful.
We ended up with 10 players, which was a little low considering there was no entry fee whatsoever, but oh well. It was a manageable number for me — not a tiny four-person thing, but not some huge 32-player event, either. Everyone seemed like they had a good time and thanked me for running the tournament. The store owner said it looked like it went smoothly, and when I tried to buy a comic book and a Pokémon booster (my girlfriend likes opening one now and then), he bagged them up and gave them to me free of charge! So that was cool of him.
I probably got asked ruling questions about four times per round, and I knew the answer three out of four times. About once per round I had to pull up my iPad, which I loaded up with all the PDFs pertaining to the rules and the FAQ, to look up something I didn't immediately know. I think the only ruling I missed was one about Pushing the Limit off of a critical hit damage card action. The player got the crit that disallows you from doing the actions in your action bar but lets you perform an action to roll a die and try to flip the card face down. Well, he did the card's action and successfully turned it face down, then he asked me if he could Push the Limit after that. The FAQ entry for Push the Limit said nothing about that interaction and I didn't find the crit in the FAQ, so I told him no because I'd never heard of someone Pushing the Limit off of a damage card's action so I assumed it couldn't be done. But thinking about it later and Googling to see if anyone on a forum had brought it up, I found a Reddit thread that convinced me that I probably was wrong and since the damage card's action still counts as an action, and it just got flipped face down, the player should be able to Push off of it. Thankfully that player won anyway or else I would have felt super guilty...
Heading into the tournament, I was all set up with Excel spreadsheets, intending to essentially pen-and-paper the tournament instead of using an app or Cryodex. But one of the players who showed up (who I know from seeing at lots of X-Wing events) convinced me to download Cryodex right there before the tournament was set to begin because it's "so easy, it does everything for you." Well I would have rather done things myself because the damn thing didn't pair people properly. It ignored Margin of Victory when pairing people with identical records; it randomly paired people together as long as they had the same record. So in round two, when I had five players with one win and five players with zero wins, it paired the person with the highest MoV against the person with the third-highest MoV. I believe it paired the person with the second-highest MoV and a win against a person with no wins. It was stupid and it could have been avoided had I just done the pairings myself. The players didn't seem to mind but it annoyed me.
Another complaint about Cryodex: I misspelled a person's name (wrote "Matt" instead of "Mitch") and I couldn't fix it. There was no way except to wipe out the whole tournament, delete the person's name from the list, enter the correct name and start a new tournament. The player didn't point out that I got his name wrong until the second round, so it was too late at that point. Very stupid, though; it should be an option in Cryodex.
So the worst part about the whole event was using Cryodex, haha. Oh, and the information sheet that Fantasy Flight sent with the kit listed the wrong contents: It said there should be five sets of acrylic tokens and nine dice bags, but the actual prize support in the Store Championship kit is five challenge coins and nine acrylic range rulers. It's like they copied and pasted that part from their Winter Kit sheet. SMH...