Assignment 4: The best-of-three

Five of you, a drafted best-of-three against another team from the course, and a written review of the decisions that decided it

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 40%

The brief#

Form a team. Draft. Play. Then explain what happened.

This is the assignment the other three have been preparing you for, and it is the only one where the course stops being about you. Eleven weeks of decisions made alone in a lane become five people making decisions that constrain each other, starting before the game does — Captains Mode means the draft is itself a sequence of decisions, and week 11 teaches it precisely so that this assignment is playable.

You will probably lose at least one game, which is fine and is the point of a best-of-three. What is marked is not the result. A team that loses two games and can say exactly which decisions cost them each one will do better here than a team that wins and attributes it to the other side playing badly.

The review is the assignment. Three things have to be in it: the draft, and what you were trying to build with each pick and each ban; the lane assignments, and what you expected each lane to achieve; and the decisions that actually decided each game, which will usually not be the ones you planned. Where a game turned on something nobody on the team noticed at the time, say so — a review that admits an unnoticed decision is worth more than one that pretends to a plan it did not have.

The individual reflection is separate and is written alone. It asks what you contributed and what you got wrong, and it is read against the team review. A reflection that disagrees with the team’s account is not penalised for disagreeing.

Teams#

Teams are five, and you form them yourselves. Teams choose their own captain, and the captain drafts.

Where the cohort is not a multiple of ten, tutors fill the empty seats so that every team fields five and every team has an opponent. A tutor also joins each team as a coach: they will answer questions, tell you when a plan is unworkable, and decline to make your decisions for you.

The winning side’s most valuable player goes on the course’s Hall of Fame, which explains what that does and does not carry — see the policies page for the other rules that apply here.

What you submit#

• One team review, submitted once per team.
• One individual reflection per person, submitted separately.