Howdy, friends, Craig here. Ray and I have spent a ton of time thinking what to do with Season 1 of the US Faux Tour. It launched in September of 2019. In the first seven months (through March 7th), we scored 52 events with 334 unique players. That all stopped in March when national lockdowns began.
In the 6 or so months following most conferences stopped in-person tournaments and, by default, USFT was on hold. We scheduled Season 1 to end on the last day of August with the Malifaux Masters Invitational and Season Ending Open events ready for October of 2020.
Season 1 only has half the months of play we wanted. Spending thousands to schedule two grand tournaments in October is too risky for us and for anyone who would buy plane tickets to attend.
We considered many options – including moving it to online play. We went back and reviewed our goals for USFT. The first was to encourage people to go out, in the public, and play Malifaux. We want USFT to promote players to converge and attract new players while out there. Online play doesn’t help with that.
We do not want to cancel Season 1. 334 people played, scored, and ranked over the 7 months. We do not want to discard all that play. We, like you, do not know when things will return to “normal” across the country.
One of the mechanisms in USFT is for conferences to compete for Master slots. This is determined by the number of events and unique players in the conference. We can’t start scoring some conferences as lockdowns lift while others cannot hold events.
We decided on the following:
- Season 1 will NOT end in August of 2020
- We are scheduling Season 1 to end August 2021 (subject to change)
- Until announced, we will not score events for USFT
- When we feel that conferences can compete on a level ground for holding events, we will make an announcement and begin scoring again
Is this ideal? No. Are there other possible approaches? Yes. After much deliberation we know this is the best of so many poor options.
While we wait for USFT Season 1 to continue, keep building, painting, playing (safely), and preparing. We hope to see 32 of the best players in the country at Masters in October of 2021. We hope to see 32 more of you then in the Season Ending Open tournament then as well.
