Hello all,
as this year ends and we enter a new one, we also end a new competition on the Playroom, the Playroom World cup.

This post will talk a little about how it started, what is the future, and give some interesting statistics/other related thoughts.

Before we begin talking about anything though, first the most important...

The champions

We begin by congratulating Canada and its representatives. Blaise, Pj64, Jose, RoyMunson and GeorgeWu. You've earned a trophy for this year.

They aren't the only people we are congratulating though. Let's congratulate the 11 champions as well. Maybe you didn't earn a trophy for your country, but you did win a tournament:

• January Uno: Guido,
• February Duck racing: Negaar,
• March Ninety Nine: Nikola,
• April Cribbage: Angelina-Princess,
• May Farkle: GodSaveTheQueen,
• June Yahtzee: Fawaz,
• July Citadels: CoffeeLover114,
• September Spades: Cristina,
• October 1000 Miles: Paulius,
• November Scopa: Bavarezi,
• December Golf: Golden

Finally, here are the complete rankings of the countries:

Position	country	number of points
1	Canada	36
2	Serbia	31
3	India	25
4	Iran	23
5	Nauru, Trinidad and Tobago	22
6	Romania	18
7	Pakistan, Vietnam	17
8	Albania	15
9	Argentina, Yemen	14
10	Egypt, United States	13
11	Fiji, Lithuania	10
12	Bahrain, Czech Republic, Qatar	9
13	Ukraine	7
14	United kingdom	6
15	Bolivia, Slovenia, Switzerland	4
16	Bulgaria, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Spain	3
17	Jordan, Turkey	1

The idea

In January of 2023, I thought to myself, "It seems we have much less tournaments on the English side compared to before, maybe I should host something interesting".
Originally, it was just going to be me holding a few tournaments during several upcoming months/weeks, but then I decided to change my approach completely.

What better way to give us more tournaments, but encourage competition than organizing a competition between countries?

Then I wrote a draft of the rules, similar to what you can see in the Central World cup topic.
I have asked several people for feedback and what they think, and after receiving encouragement, I decided to go ahead and try it out.

It wasn't always great. Even though I think we were in general quite successful and had a lot of fun, there were a few failures I would also like to highlight, but let's talk about what we can improve at the end of this post, and first start with some positives.

Statistics

Not everybody is a statistics fan like me, but since I find this quite interesting, I wanted to include it here. If you don't care much about the numbers, feel free to move to the next heading.

• In total, 66 players participated in at least 1 tournament, from 32 different countries. Unfortunately, 2 countries never won a point, so this is why in the rankings you will see only 30.
• The most successful tournament was, obviously, Uno, with 20 players, and the least successful was Citadels, with 8, in July, having the same amount as the latest Golf tournament

As a final statistic, this table shows the amount of players from each country, sorted from highest to lowest:

Country	Number of players
India	10
Canada	5
United States	4
Egypt, Romania, Serbia, United Kingdom	3
Argentina, Czech Republic, Fiji, Indonesia, Nauru, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Trinidad and Tobago, Yemen	2
Albania, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Bolivia, Bulgaria, France, Iran, Jordan, Lithuania, Qatar, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam	1

Issues and ideas for the future

As said, not everything was perfect. Let's talk about what could be done better:

• Unstable rules: As this was the first time we did something like this, the rules had to go through a major change at one point. Originally, I decided to allow people to register from any country.
However, this gave people the opportunity to constantly change countries, and sign up for a country leading in the rankings, or to help one friend for one month, and then another the next month. This wasn't the original idea, the idea was to represent a country, either where you are from, or the one you feel strongly about.
So, it had to be clarified in the rules that if you sign up for a country once, you represent that country for the entire competition.

• Possible poll issues: Originally, the idea was to use the polls feature and allow people to vote for a game. In practice, I still think this worked quite well, but we had two problems with it:
• Lack of dice games: The original concept gave 2 card, 2 board and 2 dice games in the poll, so that people always have something they like. However, obviously, once we were done with Farkle and Yahtzee, only two more dice games remained, so we lost the variety there and two of the 6 votes remained the same each month.
• Poll cheating: There were certainly some obvious cheaters. Cheating, in this case, includes asking 6 friends to vote for your favorite, even if 6 friends will never participate or don't care about the tournaments. Note that I will not accuse anybody of doing so and won't give out any names, those who did it already know, and it's not exactly something horrible, it's just something that breaks the representation. If we see 26 votes for a game, and 12 people sign up for its tournament, the other 20 who voted for something totally different could feel annoyed. In my view, if you decided to vote, it's because you will most likely want to play this month, of course unless real life obligations get in the way.
• More players for a country: Originally, I decided to set the gap of players per country to 2. This is because I wanted to avoid the issue of one country having 6 players, easily winning the rankings, while other countries have 1 or 2.
However, obviously, this meant that we had to be quite selective, especially about certain more popular countries. To be clear, I wanted this gap to be flexible, and the very first idea was that if we, for example, get 3 players from 4 different countries, we would not exclude them but would extend the gap to 3 instead. However, typically, only 1 or 2 countries had this problem, so the gap was never extendable under those rules.
In the future, it is probably worth considering some kind of qualifications system for a country, if it has more than 2, give them a mini competition to choose the best 2, or remove the gap entirely and take some kind of average score for each country instead. This is worth discussing. I am not a fan of the average scores, in that case 1 player from a country will generally do much better against 4 players from a country. As can be seen in the table above, only a few countries have this problem, so it should not be too hard to solve.

• Better promotion: Even though 66 players is certainly not a bad number, in the future, I would like to promote it better even to those who don't read the forums. Perhaps some Playroom features could help with that, but we will leave that for a different topic. What can certainly help is announcing the tournament on different lists/in different communities. I didn't do this for this one because I had no idea how successful it will be, and it was also a kind of test for me as an organizer, but if and when I do this again, I would definitely feel more confident to do so.
Giveaways and other possible prizes could also be considered, but to be honest this is a complicated issue. Giving prizes encourages cheating even more, and so I am not sure if going there would ruin the fun.

Have anything else you didn't like and would change for the future tournaments? Now is a good time to mention it.

So, when are we doing this again?

The big question is certainly going to be: Will you host it again next year?
For now, this isn't planned. I think taking a break isn't a bad idea, but of course, this isn't meant to discourage anybody who would like to try hosting it. The concept is here, you can feel free to take and improve it, and of course, to ask for any help or tips.

Perhaps it could be interesting to instead do a mini World cup, for 6 months, and to start a little later, during the second half of the year.

That being said, Even the first tournament was not something I have planned for months, the idea just came up within a couple of weeks. So, don't be surprised if you see a completely different idea take place instead.
I was thinking about several possibilities, such as reviving the Uno league, but for now nothing is definitely planned and decided.

Again, if you have an idea, now is also a good time to mention it.

Conclusion

To conclude, it's time to thank everybody. Not just the champions, but all the players participating in the tournament.
It's impossible to hold a tournament without the players, so, huge thanks to everybody who made the competition as exciting and as interesting as it was. Your dedication, both in playing and in voting for upcoming games gave us all the fun we wanted.

Thanks, and see you in the next competition! Of course, happy New year to everybody!

Thank you Nikola for brinking and realising this idea to organize this worldcup tournament, and for well organizing all these tournaments. If it will be tournaments again next year, the only thing I want to change, is the value of matches, I think that group matches should be valued 1 point, quarterfinal 2points, semifinals 3, and final 5, or maybe something similar to it, Because I think that group matches are not the same value as Elemination rounds.
Merry Christmas all, and happy new year!

thanks for hosting the World Cup. Hope we can do something similar in the future. Have a nice first day of the new year. And thanks for giving the trophy for Canada.

Can we have a score board to see over the world cups who has won etc? I’m not sure if that can be implemented. And the World Cup could be every 3 or 4 years with different people hosting it the way the World Cup goes to different countries …. Not sure? Just an idea

congratulations nikola for organising a great tournament i have ever played till now. it is not so easy to conduct a huge tournament like this so minor issues are to be definately ignored. we hope to play more and many games like this.
thanks again

Unfortunately I was not able to take part in most of those tournaments as I was traveling a lot. While browsing through the games and months it's nice to remember what I was doing at that period of the year, so it is even a nice recap.
I really like how it all turned to be and I would love to help with the organisation of the next one, since you gained some experience and we all together as players, perhaps we can think of something to make it even more fun and fair.
Something like the UEFA coeficient calculation came to my mind. For example if in the tournament there are 5 players from the same country, the amount of points they win has to be divided by 5.
Maybe even something like managers should be implemented, the Manager of the country should speak to the organizers and decide who will participate in that tournament from the certain country. Perhaps quite difficult because for example India got always the most registrations while I was the only one to play for Switzerland, and if there would be a rule to sign up a minimum of three Swiss players, I would not be able to find two more.
I'm just thinking out loud here and hopefully providing to the discussion how future world cups could be managed.
Congratulations to Canada and all the tournament winners.