The Bullshroud tournament scoring system – a load of BS?

[Guest Article by Steve Hildrew]

A little while ago, I collaborated with the mildly insane, yet utterly brilliant Mark Cunningham (who runs the Shroud of the Reaper site) to make a new scoring system for Kings of War. We called it Bullshroud, after my tournament (the Birmingham Bullrun) and the Shroud of the Reaper system, on which it was based. 

Then, out of nowhere, The UK Masters committee decided to use it for the finale of the 2022 season of UK Masters, which was both hilarious and terrifying, so I thought it’s probably the right time to take a look at the state of the system. What it was intended to do, how it’s done, how players have liked it, and what’s next for the most BS system in the game.

What is the Bullshroud system?

I always found it so frustrating in tournaments when you might have the closest game imaginable, but then you tot up the scores and somehow you’ve gotten a 17-4, or a 25-7. It just didn’t seem right that we so heavily weight a “win” when you might only have gotten a few objectives when you can get a higher scenario score in a draw, and be penalized for it.

So the first version of my system did away with scoring for a win, your score was just simply based on how you do in a scenario on a 0 to 7 system. You can then score an additional 0 to 3 for how much of your enemy you kill. This positive scoring is in keeping with the popular Northern Kings system, there’s no reason to hold back and conserve troops for attrition, an all-out bloodbath is preferable all round, which makes for exciting games.

Keeping the points low also has the benefit of making it just plain feel more achievable. If you lose your first game, I don’t know about you, but if I look at the scoreboard and see the top score of 25 or whatever, and look at my score of 5, and think well ok, I’m out of it then. There’s just no point in carrying on. A max score of 10 means it just doesn’t feel so far away, no matter what you score. I am of course fully aware it’s exactly as far away, but this system just feels better for some reason. People are funny animals.

The only downside is that the top player in the tournament might not have the most wins at the end of the day. But they will absolutely have achieved the goals of the scenarios the best. This is similar to the goal of the Australian blackjack system, which also heavily weights scenario scores, but having spent some time playing blackjack, I do feel it can be a real ballache to fill in the BJ scoring sheets, and confusing for some people. Bullshroud was super-simple as there were only 2 variables.

UK Masters

Ok, so as far as I’m aware, UK Masters was the system’s second-ever outing, the first being my own tournament. It ran very well at Bullrun, and everyone was very complimentary. But of course, it being my tournament and English people being famously polite (to your face), no one was going to outright tell me it was horrible. 

UK Masters is a different kettle of fish. Masters players are fierce, open, and frank. If they don’t like it, they tell you, and loudly. So the system got a real run-out.  Plus, since I’ve kinda sorta joined the UK masters committee for 2023, I have access to the feedback from the 2022 tournament, so I get it in the face. (also, I straight out asked people for honest feedback).

And the reception was decidedly mixed. Thankfully not all negative, but enough negative to think hard about the system. In fact, in a poll of “did you like the scoring system”, 35% liked it, and 65% didn’t. So definitely a good hard think about what went wrong is needed. 

  Here’s a brief summary:

Positives mentioned:

• The fact that purely winning is not such a massive boost was specifically noted
• Boosting scenario play was liked by some players
• Smaller points available means it was very close – down to the last game

Negatives mentioned:

• Some players feel very strongly that if you win, you win. It doesn’t matter how much by
• The system produced some distinct irregularities in final outcome – two players in particular ranked quite lowly, despite going 4-1-0 and 3-0-2 (W-D-L).

*** IMPORTANT NOTE!***

On looking into it, some of the more negative experiences were fairly heavily influenced by an unfortunate mistake in the TO pack, where for reasons I won’t go into (because they’re not relevant), the final scenario ended up being worth double points. This meant if you lost or drew the final game, your loss was heavily impacted. 

Also going into the final game, there were 4 players on the same score at the top of the table. In terms of closeness, that’s super exciting (although the player on 3 small wins and a draw in position 7 felt rather rough about it) however the situation was exacerbated because it turns out there was also an error in the bullshroud system itself. The kill points available were unevenly distributed, which means there was an increased likelihood to score a 2 for kill points, making it even more likely you’d get little separation.

So what now?

So I’m not going to deny, I feel a bit sad about the outcome. Particularly because us UK gamers are notoriously temperamental and once we’ve signed out of something, you can generally forget it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bullshroud didn’t see the light of day at any more UK tournaments (except mine, where I will stubbornly stick to my guns 🙂 ) simply because there’s… if you’ll forgive me… a shroud over it now. 

I think that’s a shame because my initial reasons for creating the system remain the same, and I think there’s a lot going for it, even if I know in my heart I absolutely will not win over those who feel “a win is a win”, no matter how small it is. I call this the football mentality. Because it’s like football (or Soccer if you’re weird).

To me, this is the core of the system – imagine you’re fighting a battle on two fronts, and on one of them you defeat the enemy, but only win a few feet of progress overall, whereas on the other, you fight to a bloody standstill but you do make it out with key intelligence on the enemy. To my mind, the “draw” is worth more in the war overall, and that’s the kind of feel I’m trying to get. You might lose or draw, but you’ve done bloody well. Is it really a victory if you’re entirely destroyed and only got one objective?

So while Masters wasn’t exactly a fair outing for the system, what you do get if you run something past the country’s best players is some very clever brains giving you helpful suggestions. In particular, the current UK Master, winner of the tournament and all round nice guy Chris Lynch, gave me these thoughts:

Pros:

In the end, scoring was very tight as a result of low points available. 5 people going into the last round were in close contention to win, so that’s a very good thing. Under NK it would 2, maybe 3 at that stage for an event this size.

It definitely did encourage me to play each game slightly differently than a system factoring w/d/l. At the start and during I was always looking to maximise scenario, sometimes in ways that were quite risky, and I wouldn’t have done otherwise. So, for me at least, that objective of the system worked. Although I felt that some of my opponents were not playing that way, and were still setting up with a 4-3 “win” in mind.

Cons:

I still think the system favours weight of victory over consistency of victory. Which to me is a lesser indicator of who “played the best”, and strength of schedule becomes a disproportionately important factor (which tbf should be less of an issue at masters).

Also, while it worked out well this time, when points are so low you do run the risk of someone running away with it and being essentially uncatchable final game.

Middling:

Is a scenario only focus (with a few kills) a better reflector of how things went on the battlefield? Not sure. I take the point that phyrric victories do still reward well under other systems when they shouldn’t, and Bullrun system by and large punishes those instead. But from my games I don’t think the points result was always reflective of what happened on the table, or at least no more so then any other system. So not sure the system really achieves its goal there.

Possible changes:

I also think a w/d/l component would help. Even if it’s just a small “bonus” – 2/1/0 could be enough.

I think the kill point brackets should probably be increased. Maybe 700/1300/1900

I’ve included his thoughts in full, because they’re so spot on, and he gets his due for being UK Master.

Bullshroud 2, return of the Bullshroud!

So I’ve gone back to the system and added a small W/D/L incentive score of 2/1/0. While this steps slightly away from my desire for simplicity, I think adding two to a score is within the grasp of even the most numerically challenged KoW Gamer! 

I’ve also evened out the kill point brackets so they are now ¼ of the total for each bracket, which if you think about it, makes sense. 

I don’t have access to the full scoring sheet for masters, but I do have access to the final scores. So if you’re interested or particularly motivated, you might be interested that adding even just a 2/1/0 for victories evened quite a few of the complaints about the system. In particular, the two players who ended up in notably odd positions jumped up the table due to their wins – from 7th to 6th for Ed who scored 4 wins and a draw, and 19th to 16th For Si who scored 3 wins and 2 losses. I don’t have access to the per-game kill scores to calculate that, so let’s just pretend that it fixed all the complaints and everyone would have loved it.

I honestly feel that with a balanced 5th scenario, and the amended kill values, we’d have seen much more acceptable separation and no one would have blinked, but we are where we are. I remain grateful to UK Masters for giving it such a trial by fire because if they hadn’t I wouldn’t have been able to identify the issues and fix them. 

The new and amended Bullshroud is available here:

https://www.shroudofthereaper.co.uk/death-by-bullgaloo

We’ve ended up with a very simple, easy-to-handle, and ultimately fair system that I would love more TOs to give a shot. You can also find it on mantic companion, where it will soon be updated to the new version.

I want people to give it a try not least because I invented this system as the one I’d like to play. As it stands, the only tournament you’re likely to find it at is one run by me! 

So what do you think? Is W/D/L all that’s important in a scoring system? Am I the only one who finds blackjack overly complicated? Is Northern Kings really the king?