by Matt | July 16th, 2009
Today we’re switching the beta flag on Tournology, just as Google’s removing the beta flag from Gmail. If you’ve signed up for the waiting list, you can now start using Tournology for your own nefarious purposes.
Currently, we’re looking for beta testers who fill these niches:
- If you’re a manager of a team or tournament
- If you’re organizing or participating in a Single Elimination or Round Robin tournament
- If you’re excited about trying out new, sweet applications for free.
We’re always on the lookout for new features, bug fixes, or anything else you’re interested in seeing Tournology accomplish.
We’ve got big, big goals for Tournology. Some of the ideas on our A-list:
- Leaderboards. Want to know the top softball players in Texas are this year? We’ll keep track of your history and show you who’s hot.
- Notifications. Easily send participants news about upcoming matches, results, and schedule changes.
- Hassle-free registration and payments. We’re not in the business of trying to upsell you for DVDs and other junk you don’t need.
- Free during the beta. We’re still working out our pricing structure, but beta users will be grandfathered into special accounts as a thanks to helping make Tournology great.
Convinced? Create an account and check us out.
by Matt | May 18th, 2009
With the recent collapse of 3d realms, we’ve decided it’s time to get out of the vaporware business and release our first version of Tournology.
Currently, Tournology is in a private beta. That means you can register on our VIP list, and once there’s a critical mass to run a couple tournaments, we’ll set you loose on the site. You can start a tournament (we currently support Round Robin and Single Elimination) and create your teams of destiny.
We’re really excited to get Tournology available to as many people as possible. And in accordance with Linus’s Law, there’s likely features we haven’t thought of, or bugs we haven’t tweaked yet. So we’ve added a link at the top of the page for you to send us feedback, both positive and negative.
So be cool like Duke and come get some beta-y goodness. We promise we won’t disappoint.
by Zach | December 13th, 2008
Deep in the bowels of a small-town financial institution, new life was born. Data Models, ORM classes, View Helpers, and a Round Robin split gave birth to something we never could have expected when we started bootstrapping this web product in April 2007.
It began with a simple description of house rules and kiosk etiquette, and the competitors got down to business: registering their teams, signing up for the tournament, and the games began!
The great thing about Tournology is that it hasn’t been difficult to find excellent testers. We provided a location, a few decks of playing cards, and set up a few computers to access the application, and they were more than happy to go to town.
One of the most important pieces of any test is reviewable evidence. We set up two kiosks for our eight teams to use, and also utilized a simple screen capture program to record our end user’s every move. Their stumbles through our foibles would ultimately provide us with the precious evidence we would use to improve our workflows, streamline our interfaces, to reach our end goal: a great application.
After the first few rounds, the tournament began to run itself. As teams entered scores, they found their next match, identified their competitors, and sat down at an empty table.
After 13 matches, victors were crowned and the competitors dispersed. But our job is just beginning. We’ve got enough usability reviews, UI tweaks, and new features to keep us elbows deep in code for a while. We’re looking forward to running the next tournament, it’ll stack up to even more greatness!
PS: Want to take a look at the tournament?
by Zach | October 7th, 2008
We’re very excited to announce that we have our nearing the deadline of our first project milestone: hosting our very own local tournament using a closed alpha version of Tournology! After many long weekends and after hours development, we’ve ready to let a few of the locals kick the tires on our project.
Pitchology, a local Pitch card game tournament, is set for November 22, 2008. We’ll be playing the Oklahoma Ten Point Pitch variety, a variant popular in our neck of the woods. Keep reading for the full ruleset.
Given the scale of participants this time around, we’ll be sending invitations to known interested parties. If you’d like to participate in future open tournaments, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified of new events and project status updates!
Pitchology will be a small tournament to grease the wheels on the core features: score entry and winner promotion. The Tournament will be a Round Robin split into two groups, with the top team from each group moving to a Single Elimination final playoff round.
For the pitch specialists in the audience, the house rules will be:
- First to 52 points (Teams needn’t bid to win)
- Negative scores shoot the moon to 0
- There will be no time limits on rounds, but teams are asked to keep things moving along.
“…all players are dealt nine cards and everybody draws back to six cards. The winner of the bid will go through the undealt cards one at a time until the hand has six trump. The remaining cards are then given to the partner to go through. If the partner is full of trump, the remaining cards can be given back to the winner of the bid. If anyone has more than six trump in their hand, a non-point trump can be ‘buried’ on the first trick. If a player ends up with more than six point cards in their hand, the hand is considered a mis-deal.”
Source: Wikipedia
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