PROVE YOUR MOVES
PROVE YOUR MOVES
One of the rare bright spots for the Ninja Challenge League during the COVID-19 pandemic was the creation of the Australian Ninja Open.
A fresh approach to team ninja competition, it aimed to bring the same level of fairness that most professional team sports seek to achieve in terms of talent distribution.
In other team ninja competitions, a group of elite ninjas who train together could simply team up and the results could be fairly one-sided (has there ever been a stronger collection of talent than the Peninjas circa 2019?).
To address this, we took a common mechanism in team sports and applied it to the sport of ninja: a draft.
Instead of the top ninjas being free to create a “super-team”, the top ninjas would be distributed amongst the teams, yielding combinations of athletes that might never have even trained together, but knew each other by reputation alone.
It was one of the most fun experiences we’ve had, seeing the drama of a live draft and the bragging rights doled out as teams progressed through each round.
In this version, the event included a relay round, followed by a one-to-one match-up series in the latter rounds.