We had a bit of a late start setting up because the keyholder had to travel all the way from Wrexham in the morning! Thankfully the sun was out though 🙂
People started drifting in past 11am, starting with the usual catch ups/mingles. We had the main screen set up, and about 3 dockable TVs further into the room. Of course the big table in the middle filled up with people playing in portable mode, and if the main room was overwhelming, there was always the quieter spot on the sofa by the front door.
We started the main schedule with round 1 of the league: Equestrian.
Caught Cat practicing before being called to play for real! (Which is fine by the way, we don’t reveal what it is before the event, so people can’t practice/give themselves an advantage)
People were struggling to get the timings right, but I think everyone enjoyed giving it a go! Dylan kept telling people to make sure they weren’t breaking their horses’ necks! (There was a lot of drastic left/right/up/down movements)
Once round 1 was completed, we moved on to the main tournament: Salmon Run (Splatoon 3) – we wanted a way to mark The Grand Festival that was this weekend on the main game. (An 8 player turf war isn’t really feasible these days)
It turned out that we only had 3 copies of the game. (Jen, Dylan, John) and the other two possibles had forgotten to bring their cartridges. Therefore everyone was in groups of 3.
We ended up with a group of 4 on the end, so we had to split into 2 x 2, then add one of the players from a previous group back in!
Dylan was basically telling most people how to play. Splatoon used to be a mainstream game for our community pre lockdown. How times have changed! There were clear winners though – basically the team that actually owned the game (We’d let people choose their teams this time, in the hope that communication might work better for teamwork!)
The team of 3 won a set of Splatoon goodies, including an official Splatoon 3 notebook, Splatoon 2 sticker sheet, and a pink or green squid keyring!
After another short gap we were ready for round 2 of the league. We did mention/hint at the “horsey” theme, but people were still surprised when we pulled out “Ultimate Chicken Horse” – Apparently so was the Switch itself because neither Jen or Dylan realised there had been a large update! Thankfully we were able to postpone the update (because the internet couldn’t cope with trying to download it) so we could get on with round 2. We allow people to enter even if they missed round1, so this time we had exactly 16 – four groups of 4, perfect!
This was by far the most entertaining game, and it was just as fun to watch as to be the ones playing it!
The “Rooftops” stage was the chosen stage.
We handily had a 4 way tie breaker at the end, so the final 4 battled it out on a custom stage that Dylan had designed a few years ago when he’d first got the game!
It was clear past a point that Glyn was the only one who was going to actually get to the end on this one, so he took the session victory! (Which puts him currently top of the league after today’s event, but it’s quite close between the top positions at the moment, with 2 league sessions still to go!)
We had the raffle, and were able to make sure everyone who entered won “something”
A couple had to dash off before the group photo, but the rest of us managed to get in on it.
Thanks to Finn for taking the group photo for us!
