Aaaannd the results are in! Tonight was the MQ2010 Finals game and Jon won! He beat out 3 other players in a hard fought, 3 hour game that for the first time included
Portal Combat. I'd invited the top 6 players who earned the most XP through the year, only 4 showed up, but they were the top 4 players so competition was fierce.
For everyone who's asked over the year how the campaign was going, here's the results... Around 18 games got played involving 14 different players. Of those, 4 players were the most persistent playing in anywhere from 6 to 10 games each. Two players tried hard to accomplish everything on the list, but only managed to get about a dozen XP each by the end. Their last couple of games they went out of their way to not win and to instead do more exploring and killing. There just wasn't enough time or games played for them to fill out the whole list. In hindsight, I now realize that it's
very difficult to do everything on the list. Especially killing 5+ monsters. They just don't group up often enough to make it reasonably possible. That plus the randomness of the tiles & monsters made it tough to check off the entire list. On the other hand, it was easy for even casual players to get a couple of XP in a game or two, so most folks who played a second game had XP to spend and didn't feel shut out.
Overall, the campaign was a lot of fun. Through the year, players looked forward to playing the next game of it at my demos and wound up talking other players in the store to join in games of MQ, just so they could rack up more points on their sheets. I lost track of the number of times folks played curses on themselves or enhanced their own monster just to get an extra checkmark on their lists.
To all the players who've asked if I'm going to run it again next year, Sorry. This was a one time event for me. But you're welcome to run your own at home with your friends.
...For me for 2011, I'm thinking of a Frag campaign...