Want to Learn Arcade Games? Start a Club!

I’ve attended MAGFest six times now, and one of my favorite events each year are the tournaments. Regular head-to-head genres tends to monopolize the proceedings – fighting games, action puzzle games, TCGs, etc. – but they also put an emphasis on featuring less common tournament fare, including score-based games! In some cases this may be implemented through simultaneous play (a Typing of the Dead tournament I was in once was structured this way), but for others, the format allows everyone to watch each competitor play through a game superplay-style and mark their scores on a local leaderboard. I loved this concept so much that I started participating in online variants of the same concept with friends over the last two years, and it’s been a rousing success.1 My friends and I have played many more games off the beaten path, gained competency in the “prestige” titles, and explored some score systems that people rarely talk about. Below I’m going to offer a few reasons why an arcade…