Leading up to the World Championships (Worlds), I thought it would be good to spend a little time talking about how I would like to treat my opponents and how I’d like them to treat me. As I’ve noted in the past, competitive gaming naturally can get emotional. People spend large amounts of money and put in numerous hours of practice to prepare for an event like Worlds, so it’s not surprising, rather it’s expected that some players will be emotionally charged. At the same time, casual players are also likely to show up, looking to eat pizza, drink beer, and just talk Star Wars. While this is perhaps obvious, I think it’s important to explicitly state that there aren’t separate tournaments for these players – they all play together.

Which brings me to what I’d like to reflect on this week – what can you do to make playing with your opponent as enjoyable as possible? My assumption is that most people don’t really give this much thought before an event. After all, we generally self-select the people we spend leisure time with, so naturally the likelihood that we annoy or offend one of those people is low.

However, we need to recognize that this is not the case in a tournament setting – you are playing with people you haven’t met and frankly you know nothing about. Now, I think we tend to trick ourselves on this front at a subconscious level, reasoning that because our opponent likes Star Wars, board games, and Imperial Assault, he or she must share our other traits as well. We all know that’s not true, but I think it’s important to explicitly note this because in the middle of a game, your opponent may do something that irritates you and it will probably be difficult to reason: “oh yeah, my opponent doesn’t know of or share my irritations, thus he or she may not realize that I'm annoyed.”

Therefore, I want to spend the rest of this article laying out some “rules” for being a conscientious participant in an Imperial Assault tournament. I don’t anticipate that everyone will agree with these points, but I’ll at least put forward what I find to be some of my preferences.