There will be no world record for Outpost Games and the Battle Badgers this year. So, what happened? Did the Badgers just wimp out? Nope, in fact we stayed here past Midnight last night teaching Tim and Nick from Great Lakes how to play the game (Tim and Nick left with a free copy of the rulebook, two stugs, and three shermans courtesy of Battlefront). When we first decided to try to set a record with this event, we were presented with a decision, we could either shell out 7 grand to have an official from Guiness on hand, or we could do the record keeping ourselves with some strict rules about what was required. Unfortunately, we weren't able to sell enough cupcakes (I'm an awful baker) to get to that $7,000 dollar mark so we decided to try to do it ourselves....whoops.
To describe these rules briefly, we had to have a 'steward' on hand at all times. This steward is responsible for officiating the event, further all record keeping is the steward's responsibility. We also needed to have two witnesses present at all times. Witnesses had to 'work' for 4 hour blocks, and no further. Meaning that if John was one of the two witnesses between 4 and 8 PM, John can NOT be a witness for the 8 to 12 block. Further, the witnesses must be of majority age. Finally, a steward could not be a witness.
The witness side of things is what killed our attempt. We had 7 players (not including our 2 stewards and 3 record breakers) planning to spend ALL NIGHT with us last night. Unfortunately, 4 of them were under the age of 18, leaving us 3 people who could act as witnesses. This wouldn't work with the rules we had to keep, as we needed at least 4 to be able to rotate back and forth. Knowing this was the case, we chose to pull the plug on the record attempt to allow everyone to get some sleep and provide a better event for all of our guests the next morning.
So that's the bad news. The good news is that we've got a bunch of people playing Flames of War at Outpost right now. We are still running the campaign, and the charity raffle.
We're certainly a little disappointed, but this weekend was really about playing and teaching the game anyhow.