The Gauntlet 2023

As part of Intrigue Industries, I helped design and proctor the finale round for Gamers Engaged’s 2023 Gauntlet charity fundraiser tournament.

We were given the challenge of designing a finale round that had to:

• Be engaging for up to 64 players split across 16 teams
• Excite an audience of Twitch viewers and encourage additional donations during the event
• Reward success in the previous rounds while still giving each team an honest chance at victory
• Remain quick to learn and playable in under two hours

The goal was to not just design a finale round for this year’s Gauntlet event, but to provide a structure that can be iterated on and re-used in future events. To that end, we spent a lot of time thinking about the meta structure of the finale to make sure that individual parts could be altered or replaced in future years while still fulfilling all of the same requirements.

After proposing several possible options, we settled on a finale built out of four games that would all play simultaneously. Each team would split up to send one member to each game, and each game was designed to emphasize a different skill set, allowing each player to self-select into the game that they felt they were best suited for. Three of the games generated resources that were spent in the fourth game, with the final winners and losers of the tournament determined by each team’s success in that fourth game. This arrangement meant that every team member had an important role to play, but the viewers at home only needed to closely watch one game to follow the high-level narrative of the finale.

The entire Gauntlet was broadcast on the GenConTV Twitch channel. You can find archival footage of the finale itself here.

The Gauntlet 2023 benefited Game to Grow, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the use of games for the purposes of therapeuty, education, and community growth.