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I’m pleased to formally announce STAR BOWL, a side event available from May (?) 2019 until October 2019. This will be an all-tossup event on things related to "space," mostly science fiction in film, TV and video games. Each tossup will consist of 6-7 lines in 10 point TNR. As of now, I am planning to produce eight packets, of which about 50% of that is written. The cost per person will be $10.
I cannot really classify the difficulty of this event, but I can say that there is a heavy emphasis on clues relating to content depicted on screens, and not books or fan fiction (with the occasional exception in Star Wars). Because of that, this tournament should be very accessible to the casual viewer - you don’t need to know the geography of Naboo or every villain of the week from season 3 of Star Trek: The Original Series to convert questions, although you can expect a handful of tossups in each category to put you on your toes. If you're a huge fan of certain franchises, don't worry, the lead-ins should still satisfy you.
Here is the current distribution. This may change at some point prior to April, but not substantially, and it definitely depends on who will be joining me to write (see below).
Core (13/0)
1 Battlestar Galactica
1 Firefly
1 Star Trek: TOS + films 1-8 + 2009 reboot series
1 Star Trek: TNG + films 8-11
1 Star Trek: VOY + Star Trek: ENT + Star Trek: DIS
1 Star Trek: DS9
1 Star Trek common link
4 Star Wars (split roughly between prequels + Clone Wars, originals + Rebels + Legends, and sequels + anthology films)
1 Stargate
1 core common link (almost exclusively drawn on the above franchises)
Outer Rim (8/0)
4 movies
1 TV series
2 video games
1 whimsy (tangentially space-related, and nothing to do with standard sci-fi fare)
I would like to run this at PACE NSC, possibly at ICT, and it will be made available for anybody who wants to run it between April 2019 and October 2019. I don’t intend to be at HSNCT, but if there’s significant demand to run it there, that may become a possibility. I've created a doubles matchmaking spreadsheet here.