The 20th Challenge

It’s nuts to think that this year, if I bring it back, will be the 20th running of this weird little pre-Christmas competition.

I’m definitely bringing it back, by the way!

For some it’s a thing that they enter just out of a strange sense of loyalty, for others it’s full on part of their festive tradition, and there’s no doubt the full spectrum in-between. We’ve had 125 different people play it over the years. Only two players have played in every edition, and there’s a whole load of people for whom once was enough. It’d be nice if we could mark the milestone by having as many players return as possible, but, well. It’s tricky.

The easiest way to try and get a crazy huge field of people would be to email everyone who has ever played and invite them back, explain my thinking, etc etc, but I am very keen to not do this. Worried about bombarding people with emails about a thing they most likely don’t care about, it has always been my policy to email player details only to those people who actively played (that is, registered a guess) the previous year. There’s no mailing list, as such, but if you can’t be bothered with it just ignore the email one year and you won’t hear from the challenge again, unless you pro-actively email in yourself.

I cannot bring myself to change that, so this blog post is going to have to be the way. I’ll lazily tweet and FB this post a few times in the next four weeks up to starting day. Pass it on, if you know someone who has previously played but DIDN’T LAST YEAR give them a gentle poke so it’s not me who’s bothering them.

In summary:

This year is the 20th running of the Advent Calendar Challenge, and to mark this crazy occasion I’m looking to welcome as many returning players (and indeed new ones) as possible. If you have played in the past but didn’t play last year, get in touch and I’ll get you entered for this year. Thanks all, and I look forward to hearing from you!

If you haven’t played before, and I know you, also get in touch. New players traditionally do very well for some reason, so this could be your best shot at winning! 🙂

Let’s see how unsuccessful this campaign is…