How we allocate games
Here is the process that we use to allocate players to games. The process is owned by the ‘Games Tsar’, a committee member who owns the end to end process for allocating games. Since 2009, our Games Tsar is Elaine McCourt. Elaine provides the detail of the system that she uses below.
GM Pre-bookings
Once the timetable is fully populated, a message goes out to say that the timetable is open for GM pre-bookings. GMs can pre-book 1 game for every game they run. They have a week to provide their pre-booking choices. Any game can only be half pre-booked by GMs to allow regular attendees a chance to play it too (e.g. a 5 player game can only have 2 GM pre-bookings).
Most of the time, there isn’t so much demand for a game that a GM can’t get their pre-booking choices. If there is, we use the randomiser as detailed under player pre-bookings.
The spreadsheet is updated to confirm GM pre-bookings.
Player Pre-bookings
Once GM pre-bookings are done and the spreadsheet is updated, a message goes out to all attendees to say that the timetable is open for all pre-bookings, with a deadline of 1 week. Players are asked to provide three choices per slot, ranked in order of preference. The pre-bookings look something like this once everyone has filled it in.
| Name | Slot 1 choices | Slot 2 choices | Slot 3 choices | Slot 4 choices | Slot 5 choices |
| Player 1 | 1. The dance of dreams 2. Fenrir’s Pups 3. The Raven Stone 4. Slaughter in Spittlefield | 1. Adrenaline is the best medicine 2. Against the cult of the Nazi Gods | 1. The Mysterious Case of the Bloody Altar 2. King for a Day 3. Paris – Exposition Universelle -1889 | 1. Cats vs Cultists, 2. Curd Your Enthusiasm 3. Banquet of the Damned | 1. Trial of the Bookwyrm 2. Hardware malfunction |
| Player 2 | (1) The Journey Home (slot 1/2), (2) Never Mind the Blood Drops, (3) Slaughter in Spittlefield | (1) The Journey Home (slot 1/2), (2) Last Watch, (3) Isle of Icarios | (1) Duty & Horror, (2) The Mysterious Case of the Bloody Altar, (3) King for a Day | (1) Agon Isle of Soros, (2) Cats vs Cultists, (3) Curd Your Enthusiasm | (1) Operation Horatio (2) The Hessian, (3) Hardware Malfunction |
| Player 3 | 1. Fenrir’s Pups, 2. dance of dreams | 1. The Isle of Icarios, 2. Against the cult of the Nazi gods | 1. The Mysterious Case of the Bloody Altar, 2. Paris – Exposition Universelle -1889 | 1. Cats vs Cultists, 2. Curd Your Enthusiasm | 1, Trial of the Bookwyrm 2. The Tower of Ajhaskar |
Note in this example that players 1 and 3 have only provided 2 choices in some slots. This might limit them getting into a game!
After 1 week, the randomiser is set up. There is a different randomiser for each slot. WE use a RANDBETWEEN() function in Excel – usually RANDBETWEEN(1,70) depending on the number of attendees and end up with this:
| Name | Randomiser slot 1 | Randomiser slot 2 | Randomiser slot 3 | Randomiser slot 4 | Randomiser slot 5 | |
| Player 1 | 67 | 36 | 55 | 24 | 69 | |
| Player 2 | 23 | 9 | 68 | 70 | 2 | |
| Player 3 | 1 | 24 | 49 | 37 | 21 |
There’s some manual tweaking at his point if things are unbalanced. In the example above, player 1 is in the middle or bottom of the pack in nearly all slots. We re-roll their numbers in that case. If a player’s average across all slots is in the region of 25-45, that’s about right. We then sort the list low-high, slot by slot, and assign games.
Using the submitted games above, Player 3 is top of the randomiser so gets the first spot in the Slot 1 game, Fenrir’s Pups. Player 2 is middle of the pack on 23, and so might get into The Journey Home, but it depends what people on the randomiser from 2-22 have picked. Player 1 is near the bottom of the randomiser list for slot 1, so if their first choice happens to be a popular game, they might not end up in their first choice, but instead in their second or maybe third choice.
You’ll also notice that in this example, Player 1 is at the bottom of the randomiser table for Slot 5 too. They’ve only put two game choices for Slot 5, Trial of the Bookwyrm and Hardware Malfunction. If both of those are popular games, they’re without a game – for the moment!
Popular games
How about games that are popular? Let’s say we have the following scenario, where Game A has only 4 spaces, but 6 people have it as a first choice.
| Player | Slot 1 | Randomiser |
| 1 | · Game A · Game B | 13 |
| 2 | · Game A · Game B | 22 |
| 3 | · Game A · Game B | 1 |
| 4 | · Game A · Game B | 70 |
| 5 | · Game A · Game B | 45 |
| 6 | · Game A · Game B | 3 |
In this scenario, players 3, 6, 1, and 2 get the four spaces, in that order. Players 5 and 4 might get into Game B, if they’re not as similarly popular as Game A, or they might end up with a Game C (if they’ve chosen one!).
How about games that are popular, AND have had spaces taken by GM pre-bookings too? Consider a similar scenario above. Game A, our four player game, only has two spaces left because GMs have taken the first two. The only players that get in the game in that case would be players 3 and 6.
Red across the board
By the time we’ve gone through it, there’s a sheet full of games. We colour code it so people know if they’ve got into their first choice (green), second choice (amber), or third choice (red) games.
| Name | Slot 1 choices | Slot 2 choices | Slot 3 choices | Slot 4 choices | Slot 5 choices |
| Player 1 | The Dance of Dreams | Adrenaline is the best medicine | The Mysterious Case of the Bloody Altar | Curd Your Enthusiasm | Trial of the Bookwyrm |
| Player 2 | Slaughter in Spittlefield | Isle of Icarios | King for a Day | Cats vs Cultists | Hardware Malfunction |
Yikes, that doesn’t look good. Despite having some decent or even high numbers on the randomiser, Player 2 chose the most popular games in nearly every slot – it has happened before! They’re not gonna be impressed that they don’t have a single first choice, especially when they’re right next to Player 1, who got their first choice in every single game. That doesn’t mean the first player got high numbers on every slot in the randomiser either – just that they didn’t choose all the most popular games, so even when they had slots where they were low on the randomiser, the games still had places left. Sure, they might have gotten 1st on the randomiser for the most popular game of the con, but they might have been 67th on the list for one that was less popular and still got in.
This is where a bit more manual tweaking comes in, and we take a look at rows that are all green, or all red. Player 2 had The Dance of Dreams as their top choice. Player 1, lucky duck that they are, got the very last space in The Dance of Dreams. Sure, let’s give that space to Player 2 instead. Player 1 can have their second choice. And so it goes.
I Don’t Have a Game in Slot 3!
Sometimes a player just doesn’t get any of their first, second OR third choices in a slot. Generally, by the end of allocations, there are games with spaces still left. We let people know what these are and they can tell me what they want to play in. Or they can grab other people without a game and start something. Or they can go to the bar. Or just sit out the slot and go do something else. Or ask a nice GM if they can take an extra player.
Sometimes, a GM will drop out. That’s harder, because there just won’t be enough spaces in the remaining games. Then the Games Tsar has to do some desperate rallying (Elaine still has nightmares about the LurgyCon of 2016 when multiple GMs fell ill!). These things happen. But wherever possible, we try to resolve it.
Final Thoughts
The sign up system for Furnace and Revelation has evolved over the years. In the very early days of Furnace, A3 paper sign up sheets went up on flip chart boards in the Upper Jailhouse in advance of the slots. People would, I kid you not, reach over or under my shoulders to get their name on a sheet for a game in a Jailhouse Cell whilst we were still sticking up the sheets for the games in the Dungeon.
A few years later, we taped the sign up sheets onto the windows of the deck outside at a certain point in advance of the slot. There were still elbows, but with more space between them.
Some time after that, we put up the sheets but made people queue, only ‘opening the gates’ at a certain time over lunch. People would queue for the whole of the lunch break to be first to the sheets. Not great. People with anxiety or disabilities were disadvantaged too. We introduced partial pre-bookings after that, around the same time as we moved to using Google Sheets.
And then, a couple of years ago, we finally reached the current system – fully online, and fully pre-booked. It’s not a perfect system. But we’re not perfect – we try our best. On the most recent questionnaire about possible changes to the sign up system, 96.6% of respondents said this system generally worked. We’ve gotten it down to a fine art now, too. Takes us less than a day to do the allocations, once everyone has provided their choices (plus a bit of mopping up for people without games). We generally have a flail and moan at some point in the process each year, but (shh) Elaine enjoys doing it.