At Tabletop Royale, we believe in trial by glorious combat. Our goal is to determine winning decks and strategies through brute force methods.

The first game through our meat-grinder will be KeyForge, a new unique game from Fantasy Flight Games. We have 100 decks that will be forced to compete and only one will emerge the victor.

The plan is to run the decks through a preliminary phase of small ‘pods’ of 4 decks each. The decks will be played round robin: every deck in the pod will play each other deck. All decks finishing with a record of 2-1 will advance to a double elimination bracket, which will be used to determine the eventual winner. Round 1 matches will consist of a single game while Round 2 matches will be best of three.

Bonus content will include the ‘Worst of the Worst’ elimination series where we try to determine which deck is the reverse champion.

Our primary goal is collect a lot of data on KeyForge and hopefully we will answer questions that can only be backed by empirical evidence. Are the Horseman worth the hype? Is Shadows as broken as everyone thinks? Is it better to go first or second?

To control for intangible elements like play-skill, we will make sure that each player plays a deck at least once in the pod. We will be keeping a running tally of each player’s record as we play, and we will retroactively determine if there was a play-skill gap. We would like to think that the players are roughly equivalent in skill, but we will have data to prove it later (or not)!

Another element that needs to be controlled for is the luck of the draw. The first round’s round-robin style of matches will hopefully control for this to a degree. This will give us a good sense of how the deck performed and if it got hosed in a game due to a bad draw.

If you are looking for information about the Tabletop Royale Championship, you can find it here.