I’m pretty proud of this one. As a local drawmaster at my curling club, one of my favorite activities is to come up with rules of play that are fun for everybody — experienced and new curlers alike. It came to my attention over the years that I am in the minority in that I think rules are fun and exciting. Apparently some of your wackos think they are just boring and complicated? However I think some of you are just used to extremely unfun rules. Not here.
I run one clubspiel (translation: a bonspiel where only members can attend) at the end of our season and it generally has been well-attended. It’s low-stakes, high fun. You get in a couple games with people from other leagues, you have some sandwiches, and everybody has a good time. Hard to mess up. But can it be improved upon? You bet.
First off, with 10-20 teams involved in these things, a standard bonspiel schedule is far too much, especially when teams only play three games in two days. So this format is basically a “pointspiel,” meaning teams get partial credit for points scored and ends taken in addition to the win/loss/tie. Likewise, margin of victory gets rewarded a little bit. Here’s the format I use:
Win: 50
Tie: 20
Loss: 0
End scored: 5
Point scored: 1 (up to 8 points max, to discourage massively lopsided games)
Every team played three games over the weekend. Here’s how the teams looked like after the first set of games:
Team 1: 7
Team 2: 68
Team 3: 71
Team 4: 78
Team 5: 83
Team 6: 24
Team 7: 19
Team 8: 13
Team 9: 12
Team 10: 7
Team 11: 78
Team 12: 78
Team 13: 82
Team 14: 13
So from the looks of it, it appears that Team 5 is leading the way, followed by Team 13.
Here’s where it gets fun. I merged these teams into four super-teams or groups. Depending on the theme of the spiel, I referred to the groupings something different. One year our clubspiel was Harry Potter-themed, so there were four houses. This year the theme was baseball, so they were all put into four different leagues. For the purposes of this explainer, I’m going to call them groups.
Group A (Teams 1-4): 224
Group B (Teams 5-8): 139
Group C (Teams 9-11): 971
Group D (Teams 12-14): 1732
So it’s not necessarily the goal to be the best team in the entire field, but the goal is for your group to have more points than any other group.
This creates a slight bit of randomness, but from an entertainment perspective this ensures that every team, whether they won or lost their first game, has an incentive to play their best, because their performance can directly affect who wins the whole thing.
And in fact that’s what happened in our clubspiel. Here were the standings with one set of games left:
Group A: 545
Team 3: 144 (1 game left)
Team 4: 156 (1 game left)
Group B: 340
Group C: 394
Group D: 592
Team 13: 242 points (0 games left)
The final matchups had Teams 3 and 4 play games against Group B and C, with two winless teams from Group B and D playing a match. That meant every single game had meaning.
And readers, let me tell you — this was tense. If I didn’t have the groups, this final draw was meaningless — Team 13 runs away with the thing. But if Teams 3 and 4 won their match, and the other Group D team couldn’t win their game, things were going to get messy.
Team 4 was the first to finish things up, taking a pretty lopsided loss, meaning they were out of it and also further muddied which group was in front. The other two games were one-point affairs in the final end, meaning Team 13 was watching Team 3 rooting for very specific outcomes. As it turned out, Team 3 won, while the Group D team’s game ended in a tie. Was it enough? Even I didn’t know, as I quietly tabulated the standings in front of the crowd of onlookers.
The final results:
Group A: 630
Group B: 403
Group C: 505
Group D: 637
So Team 13 was crowned the champions by the narrowest of margins — seven points, equivalent to a two-ender.
It is likely that if I continue to run this clubspiel that I will retain the same format. And I am by no means squatting on this format. If you have a members-only spiel that needs some sprucing up, by all means forward this to the event organizer. They will, in turn wow their club with all the rules, and your members will come to enjoy the rules. Everyone wins.
Group 3 got a 33 percent point boost because they had one fewer team.
So did Group 4.