Time for another trip!

Continuing the theme of exciting ASL trips around the world, my next destination takes us to picturesque Switzerland for the Alpenfestung IV tournament.

The tournament is in perhaps the prettiest location I've ever seen for an ASL event (having been to both Blackpool *and* Ohio, I appreciate I'm coming from a limited perspective!) but take a look at the venue below. 

Marc Blume first contacted me to talk about his project about timing scenario play lengths, and we had a brief chat about how the algorithm works for the Scenario Archive.  He's taken a different approach, namely using both a statistical and algorithmic approach, somehow factoring in other people's reported playing time too.

It's clever and there's some heavy maths behind it all, which interests me because I took the lazier approach of sticking to a formula for the archive's predictive time for scenarios.  It's interesting to me because I was hoping to see whether the times for each site can be comparable, and if they differ was there an obvious preferred approach.

Here are the scenarios on offer, and a comparison of the Archive's time to play vs Marc's time:

Scenario	Marc	Archive
Ham and Bloody Jam	2:30	2:36
The Men from Zadig	2:39	2:12
88s at Zon	2:30	2:24
A Desperate Affair	5:11	6:00
Gabriel's Horn	4:47	5:12
Sherman Marches West	5:06	6:42

So, you can see with the exception of Sherman Marches West, they all fall within Marc's predictive 11% range - it will be interesting to see how close we both get.

Anyway - back to the venue, because the photos are more interesting than playing time predictions!

So, the tournament revolves around 2 rounds, between 4 players.  We play one scenario from the "long list" and one from the shorter one.  I've played only Ham and Bloody Jam from the list, it's a classic night scenario from the Pegasus Bridge module. It's a little dicey, and can often come down to whether the British can land their gliders without heavy casualties.  Lose more than a squad or two, and the Germans will most likely succeed in defending the bridge.

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is Marc's incredible efforts in organising the event.  Through the use of his wiki, he's meticulously planned everything and if the weekend runs as smoothly as it should, it will be a great trip.

I leave for Switzerland at an ungodly 3am tomorrow morning...