Fundamentals:

Skill and experience help bring an important depth of play, so first and foremost we’re aiming to have tournaments unlock at close to the Tournament Rules level. This also gives a really exciting and achievable short to midterm goal for new players to aim for. Additionally, all tournaments are played using the Tournament Rules.

Proximity:

We created Clash Royale by playing together in the same rooms around the office, soon discovering that this was one of the most fun ways to play. The idea of being able to run local ad-hoc tournaments with friends at the pub, work or wherever is really exciting – so location became a core element of the design early on.

Playing with nearby people is the best for fast, active matchmaking and more spectators. Every tournament has a location based on where it’s created – precision can be improved if you allow it, but it’s not required. This is how your location will appear to others:

Inclusiveness:

After you’ve unlocked the feature, the idea that anyone can turn up, play and win a Clash Royale tournament – both online and in person – is the feeling we’re looking for. This concept made us re-evaluate whether a traditional brackets and elimination system would work. Several internal play tests showed us that requiring people to be online at the exact times of their matches didn’t work as well as we wanted.

We decided to go with a closed matchmaking system instead, meaning each tournament has a leader board and matchmaking pool of its own. Similarities to the global/local leader boards are beneficial for ease of understanding and it scales really nicely for big tournaments, too. This approach felt like the most flexible and best fit for all players to participate at their own pace. Bonus: You won’t need to leave your clan to play in a tournament any more!

Creation:

Every tournament is free to join, but will cost Gems to create – starting small and going all the way up to some big numbers. We’re anticipating varying needs and desires for tournaments, so we wanted to allow for many different sizes to be held. The creation cost becomes the prize pool – in the form of Tournament Chests – the bigger the tournament, the better the prizes!

Prizes:

Following on from “inclusiveness” in Part 1, we want there to be lots of winners in every tournament! The prize pool is distributed so that at the end of a tournament, almost everyone who placed in the top half of the tournament leader board wins a Tournament Chest. Unsurprisingly, the #1 placed player gets the biggest chest. Spoiler Alert: In the largest tournament, the #1 player will win a chest containing a whopping 15,000 cards! Also, the biggest Tournament Chests contain a lot of epics and legendaries!

Balance:

You can play in one tournament at a time, but you can leave and join a new tournament at any time (although progress is lost from any tournament you leave). However, you cannot join another tournament while you’re opening a Tournament Chest. This is to give a natural pause between tournaments, prevent burnout and make sure people still want to go back and play regular battles. You can hold one Tournament Chest at a time and it doesn’t take up a slot in one of your main four spaces.

Version 1:

This is just the first version of our tournaments feature. There are lots of ideas for things we’d like to add, but we wanted to launch this version first and see how you get on with it. Once it’s in your hands and we can get some feedback, we’ll have a much clearer idea of which bits to focus on next.

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