Background

In September 2019, discussion started in the online Dominion community about a possible in-person tournament taking place on the United States’ east coast. A member by the name of truffles stepped up and began organisation for a tournament to take place in New York City later that year.

The 2019 NYC tournament was called TruffleIT, a play on words combining truffles’s handle with the company that runs the online dominion client (Shuffle iT). On 16 November 2019, the tournament took place; many people attended and it was a fun time playing Dominion with real cards and awesome friends.

Before another tournament could get organised, a few things happened that hampered in-person gatherings… until…

The Planning Stage

February 2022. I, as someone who’d organised many tournaments online by that time and happened to live near NYC, polled for interest in the community’s tournaments chat and got a highly positive response.

The idea lay low for a while, but by April 2022, I had re-opened the original NYC tournament discussion channel to plan out the event with community input. I decided to call the tournament CheeseIT, from my handle MuensterCheese and as a humorous reference to the Cheez-it brand of snacks. (In fact, I actually sent an email to Cheez-it requesting a sponsorship, but they politely declined.)

The planning process for CheeseIT was very similar to that of truffles’ TruffleIT:

Publicly:

  1. I posted an interest form in the tournament’s channel, inquring which dates people were interested in attending, what time of day was preferred, and whether people preferred play with physical cards or “LAN party” style.

  2. A few days later, I selected the most popular date/time combination and posted a form to RSVP. As people opted to play with paper cards, this form also inquired which sets of cards people could bring to set up play tables with.

  3. In the days leading up to the event, I messaged attendees with venue information, posted rule sets, and helped make sure everyone who was bringing cards knew what to bring and had let me know.

Behind the scenes:

  • After the date and time were set, I started looking at venues and found a nice studio on Peerspace, which I was able to reserve for the event (costing me approximately $500).
  • I purchased nametag stickers, sharpies, and pens.
  • I made a results sheet in the same manner as I would for an online tournament. However, instead of players filling an online results form, I collected scores on pre-made paper slips to make the event experience smoother for the players and myself.
  • To let people following along online in on some of the action, I made a bot for announcing scores in the tournament channel.

The Event

On 4 June 2022, it finally happened. CheeseIT was attended by a large group and it was amazing getting to play Dominion in-person after [certain events] had stopped another tournament from happening for several years.

I had a blast organising the event and definitely plan to organise more, though probably in Boston, where I’ll be spending the next several years.