2024 MOCHALUNT 3rd edition

2024 MOCHALUNT
(MOnda CHampionado de Abstraktaj LUdoj por Naciaj Teamoj)
World Championship of Abstract Games for National Teams
Per abstracta ad astra

Concept and organisation

Cesco Reale, Francesco Salerno, Maurizio De Leo,

Vincent Frochot, Steven Gunawan (Abstrakta)

In collaboration with

Mind Sports Olympiad, PerGioco, PlayStrategy, Boardspace, IG GameCenter

Aim and Spirit of the Event

Create new and strengthen existing human connections in the Abstract Games and Mind Sports international community both between different teams and within the same team.
Introduce participants to as many new different abstract games as possible, promote less known or played games which do not have dedicated events in real life.
Introduce a new competitive team-based event in the international landscape of Mind Sports.
More than anything else, bring some hours of fun!!!

Name of the event

MOCHALUNT is a shortening from: Monda Championado de Abstraktaj Ludoj por Naciaj Teamoj that in Esperanto means: World Championship of Abstract Games for National Teams

Useful Links

Rules

Team Requirements and Registration

All teams must be composed of at least 4 players, with no upper limit.
Every player must be a citizen or resident of the country described in their team name (e.g.: Italy, France, etc.) or belong to the same geographical/geopolitical/linguistic community (Scandinavia, Catalonia, Africa, Rest-of-the-World, etc.). Rest-of-the-World will be created only if no other options are possible.
A nation can have more than one team, regionally shaped depending on the residence or origin of the players (e.g. Northern Italy, Southern Italy) or grouped according to other criteria.
Each participant must register individually by completing the online form at the link here, whether they already have a team or not. Players without a team at the time of the registration will be assigned to an existing or a new ad hoc team at the discretion of the organizing committee.
The registration fee is 20 Swiss Francs per player, with a discount depending on how many weeks before the 1st of January the registration occurs (if the registration fee might be an obstacle, please contact the organizing committee).
New players can still join an existing team during the tournament
Each player should have or create an account in each platform used in the tournament and play through these accounts, not anonymously.

Captains

Each team needs one captain.
The captain must be available to coordinate their team, to share their own email address with the other captains and organizers, and, in case of victory, to receive the prizes and to send them to each other team member (the shipping costs will be reimbursed).

Tournament Structure

The teams will play a tournament in 2 phases. Phase 1 is a McMahon tournament in 5 rounds, where the top half of the teams will start with 3 fictitious points (as for a victory) and the rest with 1 fictitious point (as for a loss). (This is not going to bias the real strengths of the teams because the points added will be lost by playing against stronger teams. Please contact the organizers in case of doubts). Phase 2 is constituted by the last 3 rounds. The best 8 teams of phase 1 will play in phase 2 a knock-out system (quarter-finals, semifinals and finals). The other teams will continue the McMahon for 3 more rounds.
Indicatively, the start date of the tournament will be in January 2024 and phase 2 will be played in September-November 2024.
The top 8 teams after the first phase qualify to the knock out phase with playing seeds for the quarter-finals 1-8, 4-5, 2-7, 3-6, with possible adjustments if some team matches already happened in previous rounds.
Note that in each team match of phase 2 the team who has the higher rank (updated to the last played round) has the following advantages :

a) they choose 3 out of the 5 games listed in the table valid for all the individual matches, while the opponent team chooses the 4th one

b) in the knock out system, the updated ranking is used as tiebreak in case of match draw

Games

In the 1st phase, 4 different abstract games will be played at every round. The games are distributed across the rounds in order to have 4 different families in each round (families are: chess, territory, connection, mancala, alignment, checkers, goal, Gipf, various).
In the knock-out phase, there will be 5 different abstract games available.
The Mochalunt games are abstract games, and almost all are combinatorial games (that is with perfect and complete information, without random or hidden elements, nor simultaneous moves, the definition is discussed in more detail here).
The list of games included in the event, links to the rules of such games and the online platforms to be used can be found here.

Round Procedure

The general procedure works as follow:

The organizers communicate the pairings of the team matches (here and via email).
In the rounds with 5 available games, the captain of the better ranked team (player 1) sends to the opponent captain (player 2) - and copying the organizers - the list of the 3 chosen games, then player 2 sends to player 1 (and copying the organizers) the 4th chosen game. If player 1 does not send the choice by the deadline, then player 2 can choose the 4 games; if also player 2 does not send the choice, then the game list is decided by the first player that sends the choice to the opponent.
The same rules of the previous point apply to knock-out matches in individual categories.
For every round, every captain (or someone else, if the captain is unavailable) shall notify the organizers, exclusively by email (mochalunt@abstrakta.info) and copying all the teammates, of their line-up (list of available players) for that round (as described in the section below), by the scheduled deadline (that is, 5 days after the pairings are published).
If the team fails to provide the line-up on time for a certain round, we will consider the previous line-up.
All official times are in UTC. In case of doubts, be aware that UTC always corresponds to the time in Iceland and Ghana, that are in GMT and do not use Daylight Saving Time.
In the knock-out phase, the captains will have 2 additional days to choose the 4 games out of the list of 5: the captain of the higher ranked team will send the list of the 3 chosen games to the opponent captain, then the latter will send to the former the chosen 4th game.
Then, the individual pairings will be made by the organizers as described in the pairing system section below. The individual pairings will then be published on the official spreadsheet here (check the correspondent round page) as soon as possible, and anyway not later than the deadline.
If the two captains agree on different individual matches, the teams are allowed to go on with the new modified matches as long as the captains notify the organizers via email within 3 days of the previous deadline (that is, 8 days after the team matches are published).
Each player will receive at the beginning of each round an email with images containing email addresses and phone numbers of all players.
Each captain should check that each teammate contacts the opponent player.
Each player should proactively schedule their 4-game match by contacting their opponent by email or chat within 7 days. They are strongly encouraged to share the agreed time and date using the google form here or on social media platforms facebook and discord. The date and time of the scheduled matches shared by the google form will be then visible to anyone on the spreadsheet here. The players should propose by the scheduling deadline at least 3-4 options, e.g. 22.2 5pm UTC, 22.2 8pm UTC, 23.2 10am UTC, 23.2 9pm UTC, always adding also both local times, e.g. Cameroon 6pm, Estonia 7pm.
Unless differently agreed by the 2 opponents, by default they should play all 4 games in one single session rather than scattered over different days, but it is not mandatory, as long as all matches are scheduled and completed by the round deadline. Therefore by default you should foresee 3-4 hours to play the 4 games.
Each player is expected to answer messages or emails within 48 hours. If your opponent does not answer in 48 hours, please send a reminder immediately, do not wait any longer. Do not be afraid to be pushy or disturbing, these are the norms of this tournament, otherwise the times become too long.
If your opponent does not show up at the appointment, if you want to claim forfeit victory you should do the following: call them on Whatsapp (or other app that you used to communicate) after 5 minutes, if there is no answer send them immediately a written chat message and an email, if there is no answer in 20 minutes try a second call, then after at least 30 minutes of delay take screenshots of your actions and send them immediately by email to your opponent, cc to both captains and organisers, including any other useful information, such as screenshot of the taken appointment, etc. Then the committee will evaluate the situation.
In case no player proposes a precise appointment, the default appointment is on Saturday before the deadline at 2pm UTC. The default appointment is there just to ease the scheduling process for not proactive players. But in order to claim a forfeit victory anyway you need to show that you tried to contact your opponent and that you were much more proactive than them.
If the match is not played before the deadline, the committee might decide the result by forfeit according to several criteria, including: proactiveness, first proposal of appointment, number of proposed appointments, number of refused appointments. A forfeit victory can be granted (upon committee's judgement) only to a player that followed these proactiveness rules, while the opponent did not.
When an individual match is over, each player should communicate the final result to their own captain as soon as possible and anyways before the end of the round deadline.
Then, each captain should communicate to the organizers (copying in the opponent captain) all the results of the team match (including each game match and individual match), before the round deadline. If neither of the captains is able to do that before the deadline, the individual matches for which we have no information, will be considered ended with 0-0.
If individual matches cannot be played because of negligence of any player (not showing up at the agreed time, not scheduling the match or replying your opponent’s messages), their opponent must inform the committee about this and provide evidence that this happened (sharing attempts of contacting the opponent). If they fail to do that by the round deadline, that individual match will end 0-0.
The organizers will publish results, standings and next pairings roughly in the next 24h.

Flexible pairing system

Each player of a team will play a set of 4 different abstract games against the corresponding player of the opponent team. Therefore, every team match is made of 4 to 10 individual matches, and each individual match is made of 4 game matches.

Since the number of members per team can vary greatly throughout the teams, we conceived a flexible system to maximise the chances for the players of larger teams to play more often than with only 4 individual matches per round.

1-Priority order. For a given round, captains should only provide this list:

The list of the chosen available players should contain at least 4 players (3 if the roster has only 4 players).
At the end of the list you can repeat the names of the players who are available to play 2 individual matches with different opponents (i.e. the set of the same 4 games given for that round against two different opponents, for a total of 8 game matches).
The relative order of players is freely chosen by the captain and should reflect the priority according to which team members want to play, highest priority (player 1) to lowest priority (last player available). In this way, the captains are able to give priority to players who have played less frequently so far.

Example 1: E.g. Cameroon sends the following list: ABCDEF/DA, so 6 players and 8 slots; in this case, players A and D are available to play twice, in the specified order. Estonia sends the list LMNO/NLO, since 3 players are available to play twice, in the specified order, so the list has 4 players and 7 slots.

The first part of the list (before the slash) is constituted only by the slots of the first match of each available player, and the second part of the list (after the slash) is constituted only by the slots of availability for a second match.

The organizing committee then identifies the individual matches to be played according to the following procedure:

Identify the NAP (number of available players) of each list, so the length of the first part of the list.

In example 1 above, the NAP of Cameroon is 6 since there are 6 different players (ABCDEF) and the NAP of Estonia is 4 (LMNO).

Then, starting from the first players of the two lists, create pairings of individual matches until you reach the higher NAP, as long as there are players available on both sides.
Then, reorder the player according to the first part of the list.

In the same example above, the higher NAP is 6, so both lists will be truncated to the 6th slot (ABCDEF and LMNONL). Then the lists must be reordered according to the first part of the list (before /) and they become ABCDEF and LLMNNO. The individual matches will be then A-L, B-L, C-M, D-N, E-N, F-O. Other possible individual matches after the 6th will not be played. If Estonia had sent the list LMNO (only 4 slots), then the lists would be truncated to the 4th slot (ABCD and LMNO) and only 4 individual matches would be played: A-L, B-M, C-N, D-O.

The number of individual matches can be therefore:

at most, the higher NAP between the two lists;
at least, the number of slots of the team with the smaller NAP.

2-Reduction. In order to avoid the team with the smaller NAP having a too big advantage, (having twice only the strong players), the captain of the team with the highest NAP have the right to choose how many individual matches they want to play. This has to be communicated, within 3 days after the first 5 days deadline (see scheme above), to the other captain and in cc to the organizers. The number of individual matches can be reduced to any number until the smaller NAP.

In the previous example where Estonia has 7 slots, the captain of Cameroon can choose to play 4 individual matches (so the list of Estonia will become LMNO and the list of Cameroon will become ABCD) and the matches will be A-L, B-M, C-N, D-O. Or Cameroon can choose to play 5 individual matches (so the list of Estonia will become LMNON, reordered into LMNNO, and the list of Cameroon will become ABCDE) and the matches will be A-L, B-M, C-N, D-N, E-O.

3-Strength order (optional). As further flexibility, if the captain wants to indicate a different order reflecting the players skills which is different from the priority order discussed above, they can associate a number to each player from the strongest (number 1) to the weakest (last player). The committee will then rearrange the lists according to the strength of the players in the list. Note that this step is not mandatory, and it will only occur if the strength order was provided by the captains in the same email where the priority order was provided too.

In the example 1, Cameroon can send (instead of ABCDE/DA) the list A5 B4 C1 D3 E2 /DA and Estonia can send (instead of LMNO/NLOM) the list L1 M4 N2 O3 /NLOM , so the truncated lists will be automatically reordered as CEDBA and LNNOM, and the individual matches will be: C-L, E-N, D-N, B-O, A-M.

4-Final changes. As already mentioned: after applying the procedure and finding out the default pairings, if the captains agree with each other, they can still change the individual pairings as they wish, as long as it is communicated to the organizers too within 3 days after the first 5 days deadline (at the same time of the reduction phase)

Scheduling and Communication

The deadlines for each round will be communicated before the start of the round. The duration of each round will be 30 days. Deadlines can be extended in exceptional cases at the discretion of the committee, only if the players explicitly request it by contacting the committee and motivating their request.
Players are encouraged to share publicly the scheduled time of their individual matches by filling the following form.
Each player will receive at the beginning of each round an email with images containing email addresses and phone numbers of all players.
Social media groups (facebook + discord) will be available for all players to comment and ask questions (in addition to the email addresses of the organizing committee).

Team pairings will be communicated by email to all players and made available soon after on the results page, on the official page of the tournament (www.abstrakta.info/mochalunt) and through social media.
All players should make an effort to find time to play and be reasonably responsive. In case of unresponsive opponents, please contact the committee that will solve the dispute. Players who do not show up for the scheduled match or cancel the scheduled match, can try to reschedule once more. If no other appointment can be found, the match is lost by forfeit.

Time Control and Settings

Time control employed and platform for each game will be communicated at the beginning of each round and will be available at the link here (Games details) Typically, a ‘rapid’ time control will be used, aiming for a single game to be played within 1 hour.
Time control will be ‘real time - slow’ for BoardGameArena (BGA) and 20’+10’’ per move for the other platforms. Please note that on BGA, the game is not automatically lost when your timer reaches zero, you will need to voluntarily resign (sportsmanship is really appreciated); or your opponent can ask you to resign and claim the victory, taking a screenshot to prove that you reached zero or negative time; if your opponent doesn’t claim the victory, the game goes on and the outcome of that game will be valid.
The preferred (first choice) platform for each game is given here (‘games details’ page). For most games an alternative option is provided as well and can be chosen as long as both players agree on it. In exceptional cases players can play on a different platform, providing the organizers agree too.
Players are strongly encouraged to play using audio-video call and double screen sharing (we suggest www.discord.com or https://edu.meet.garr.it/ as it’s free, easy to use, you only need to share the URL, and allows double-screen sharing). This is to give the match a more human character, to create a community, at the same time reducing the possibilities that people cheat or accuse of cheating. Players younger than 18 years old are not obliged to turn on the video.
Moreover, if the 2 opponents have at least one common language, the first 5 minutes (at least) should be dedicated to introducing each other, talking about where you live, the traditional games of your country, your preferred games, etc..
In case of suspected cheating, the organizers have the right to solve the controversy by having a meeting between the player in question and a known expert of the game played. The expert will evaluate whether the knowledge of the player justifies the result obtained.
In each round players on the odd numbers in the list of team 1 decide who plays the first move in games 1 and 3 of the given list. Players on the odd numbers in the list of team 2 decide who plays the first move in games 2 and 4. The decision is inverted for players on the even numbers in the lists. (Example: Colombia-Cameroon, games: 1) Chess, 2) Go, 3) Othello, 4) Hive. Colombia players 1 and 3 decide for Chess and Othello, Cameroon players 1 and 3 decide for Go and Hive. For players 2 and 4 the decisions will be reversed).
On the platform BoardGameArena the colours are assigned randomly, so if you decided to play with a certain colour and you are not assigned that color, you must abandon the game before your first move and then the platform will propose to replay swapping colors.
By default, the order in which the games will be played should be from game 1 to game 4 (according to the game schedule from top to bottom), unless differently agreed by the players.

Results

At the end of each day in which game matches were played, players must report the results to both captains copying the opponent player (by default via email, alternatively via other means, such as message apps or the Mochalunt Facebook group). Players should add screenshots of the 4 finished games, showing names and final results. The captains at the end of the round will report the results of the whole team to the committee copying the opponent captain (emails оr Mochalunt Facebook group being the main communication channel).
Captains are encouraged to share the results on the Mochalunt facebook group as a comment to the appropriate post of that round or in the Mochalunt Discord server.
Pairings and standings will be available through our website page https://www.abstrakta.info/mochalunt.html in the section ‘results’ (spreadsheet here)

Team scoring system

In each game match, 3 points are awarded for wins, 2 for draws, 1 for played losses, 0 for forfeit losses (example, players on board 1 play the following match: Hive 1-0, Othello 0.5-0.5, Abalone 0-1, Quoridor 1-0. The final score for board 1 is therefore 9-7). The scores of individual matches are then summed up for the whole team and normalized as % of the maximum score.
Main team score. In each team match, 3 points are awarded for wins, 2 for draws, 1 for played losses, 0 for forfeit losses (if no game is played). Example: Germany-France 20-44, France scores 3 points, Germany scores 1 point.
Secondary team score. The standings are driven by the main team score and in case of the same main score, the secondary score is used as tie-breaker.
The secondary team score is calculated as follows.
First, the sum of individual scores of the round is divided by the maximum possible score, depending on the number of players; with 4 individual matches the maximum is 4x4x3=48, so in the previous example: 20-44 divided by 48 gives 20/48= 41.66%, 44/48=91.66%, so the normalized score is rounded to 42-92.
After that, the normalized scores of a team are averaged across the rounds and then multiplied by a coefficient M=((G+100)/(G+200))⁴, where G is the average on the played rounds of the number of game matches for which a team gave availability to play. Let’s see how to calculate G, depending on NAP (number of available players in the line-up, see “priority order”) and roster (list of registered players). These values are considered after the second deadline (so after the reduction phase, once the pairings are final).
If your NAP is smaller than your opponent's roster: you calculate the length of your line-up (including double players) maximized to your opponent roster, then you multiply by 4 (number of games played in each round).
If your NAP is not smaller than your opponent's roster: you should not add double players (because your players could play no more than one match anyway), you calculate the length of your line-up (excluding double players, if any) maximized to the double of your opponent roster (because each opponent player could play at most two matches); then you multiply by 4 (number of games played in each round).
G will include forfeit wins and exclude forfeit losses, so then forfeit losses will be subtracted to have the final value of G.
This coefficient M was added to encourage teams to play as many game matches as possible, and so for each team the longer the line up (including double players) the better.

Individual scoring system

An individual ranking will be created in order to award the prizes to the best individual players.
The individual final score is given by a combination of the obtained score normalized by the total possible score, and the average of the opponent’s score (SOS system). The complete formula is:

FS=(4PS+3AOS)/7

PS= (OP+1)/(PP+2)

Where:

PS = personal score

OP= Obtained points

PP= maximum available points

AOS= Average of opponent scores

FS= final score

Forfeit wins of an entire team are not included in the calculations. However, individual forfeits are considered.
In the individual ranking, in each category we will consider the top player of each team, and among them the best 4 qualify to the semifinals (1-4, 2-3). We will have individual semifinals in round 7 and individual finals in round 8.

Prizes

The winning team will be awarded with one physical copy of an abstract game kindly offered by Supernova/XVgames and/or Gen42 to each member of the team.
Prizes will be also awarded to best individual players: best under 18, best adult (18-64), best over 65, best woman, best man, best non-binary player; in each category the prize will be awarded if there are enough participants in that category.

These rules might still be modified during the tournament if considered necessary to improve the overall experience of the event.

For further inquiries please contact the committee at the following email address:

mochalunt@abstrakta.info

2024 MOCHALUNT

World Championship of Abstract Games for National Teams