Tournaments are a fast and furious test of your ability to think quickly, find new strategies, and deal with all manner of variant games. You get real time head to head competition with other players playing exactly the same games. Sound fun? Here's what you do.
To play in a tournament, simply do the following:
Select "Tournament" in the Game option select box in the upper left of the game board. Then click the Play button.
A tournament consists of 8 to 48 randomly chosen NetCELL games of various shapes and sizes. Some will be easy, some very difficult, and some impossible. The winner will be the person who solves the most games in the least time.
Note that you can only get on the tournament scoreboard while the tournament
is "open". This will be evident both from the posted time for the
tournament and from the Tournament selection box in the game
itself. You may still play games from a "closed" tournament
but you will not get on the tournament scoreboard. The game
will continue to keep track of which tournament games you
have won and will gray out those game selection buttons in
the Tournament selection box in the game.
In addition, there are two optional modes of play which affect the dynamic of the tournament competition: deadly mode and blind mode. The former only allows on try per game. If you get into a losing position on a game, that's it, no further attempts on that game are allowed to count in the tournament. In the latter mode the usual game statistics are supressed. This prevents what is known as drafting where the players watch the list of tournament games and only attempt the games that others have already proven are winnable.
You can spot a deadly game because the tournament title will contain the word deadly.
A blind game will be evident because the game number will always be reported as xxxxx,
win/lose dialogs will supress game statistics, and the tournament current results page will
show no results for the list of tournament games. In additional the tournament schedule
will reflect the use of these optional modes of play.
Why are tournaments so short?
Tournaments will last from a fraction of an hour to two or three hours tops.
We want to encourage people to play these games
without the aid of any of those Freecell solver programs (yes,
such things do exist).
I can't be ready to play at the tournament start time. That's
not fair. Why not just measure elapsed game playing time?
Tournaments are actually "races" in many ways. Being present
at the start of the tournament is therefore definitely important.
The reason for the "race" format is that we don't want folks
practicing games under one name and then logging really fast
play times in the tournament with another name. So the Finish
Time shown on the tournament scores pages is the total time
the player has used as of their last win, measured from the tournament
start time.
I've only been playing the tournament for 20 minutes. Why does
my time show over an hour?
Your finish time is measured from the start of the tournament, not
from when you started playing and not from total game play time.
See the question above for why we use this "race" format.
What about my streak(s)?
Tournament games do not affect any of
your active streaks.
What happens if you lose a tournament game?
Normally nothing. You can
replay a standard tournament game as many times as you need until you win.
This definitely can affect your style of play. You may want to
dive right in, play quickly, and take risks; something you probably don't
usually do when trying to build streaks. In deadly mode however, only
one chance is allowed per game so if you lose on your first attempt you will never be
able to get credit for that game.
Why is the Masters Tournament going to be on the weekend?
Our server logs show we are over twice as
busy on weekdays during core work hours. We can't suck any
more productivity out of the workplace, now can we?