OWR Newsletter, May 2026
Roll with your mates
Team tournaments launched, Battle Hub got fresh new look, secondary scoring added, mobile apps hit private beta, and the first sponsors are live.
Published 8 May 2026
A lot has shipped this past few weeks, and a lot has happened around the Old World. Adepticon ran 71 players in the US. Spanish qualifiers cracked 75. The TOW 6 Nations Team Event packed 54 across the UK. The scene is growing.
Excitedly, tournaments hosted directly on OWR (a platform built for the Old World) are growing fast. The mobile apps just hit closed beta. And Battle Hub got some neat new additions off the back of a couple of months' events and player feedback.
Here's what's new and what's coming.
Team tournaments, enabled & ready to go
The single biggest ship this cycle. Team tournaments (pairs, doubles, full team events) have launched on OWR. TOs pair the teams, captains pair their own players, and captains can pay entry for the whole team in one go. We display both team and individual ranks and awards, side by side.
If you've been holding off on running a team event, maybe now's the time to jump and give OWR hosted tournaments a try.
Battle Hub - Mobile first player pairings & scoring entry
Battle Hub is the screen players use during a tournament. Find your next pairing, see your table number, log your score, confirm your opponent's, keep up to date on standings updates between rounds, and look back at past rounds and matchups. It's the on-the-day app for players.
Battle Hub shipped about 6 weeks ago, and this is its first major iteration based on real-world use. Cleaner mobile-friendly BIG-button design, better information density, faster jumping between pairings and standings, dedicated flows for captain pairing in team events, and tighter score entry with secondaries and soft scores now split into separate flows so you can submit soft scores whenever the moment suits.
The not-so-secret goal here is to keep moving toward what we cheekily call eradicating TOs, i.e. making the platform handle so much of the day-to-day running of an event that TOs can finally play in their own tournaments. Battle Hub doing more for players is a big step toward that.
Battle Builder, sharper
Battle Builder is the bundled army builder in OWR. The first class sync support means edit a list on your laptop in the morning, open Battle Builder on your phone on the train, and the latest version is just there. We worked on a few simple improvements, though:
Improved sync. Faster, more reliable, and quieter. Fewer conflicts, less waiting, devices stay in agreement.
Better folders and pinning. List organisation got a proper rework. Pin the lists you actively play so they sit at the top, and group the rest into folders.
Secondary scoring, with templates for Matched Play Guide
Our goal is full phone-based scoring, turn by turn, with no paperwork at the table. Secondary objectives are a big step toward that. Templates for the official Matched Play scenarios are built in (Baggage Trains, Domination, Strategic Locations, etc), and on top of that, you can configure fully custom objectives with your own VP or BP values.
Per-round scenario setup automatically pulls in the correct secondaries. Players score them in Battle Hub during the match (no spreadsheet, no scoresheet, no TOs chasing players), and standings can rank by secondary BP as a tiebreaker on top of the usual battle points and SoS.
From sign-up to standings, on OWR
TOs are already embracing OWR for the whole pipeline: registration, payment, pairings, scoring, the lot. It's still early days, but the first proper events have wrapped.
The headline: Old Hammer Cold Combat in Australia ran 47 players over three rounds on 1 May, fully on OWR. That's the biggest OWR-hosted event so far, and it landed inside the global top five tournaments for the past six weeks. Massive credit to the Old Hammer crew for backing the platform on a real event of that size.
Two more for the shoutout list:
🇮🇪 Exploding Dice Old World GT 2026, full 5-round GT format, run on OWR, 17 to 18 April. Proper grand-tournament shape.
🇨🇳 Guangzhou 2: Electric Boogaloo, 16 players, 5 rounds. The Chinese scene is one of the quiet success stories.
It's been great to see all the positive feedback from TOs and attendees alike - so a big THANK YOU.
Coming up, hosted on OWR (and increasingly global)
A spread of upcoming events running fully on the platform, across four countries:
🇳🇿 Hell Games (16 May). 48-player cap, 6 already in.
🇦🇺 Winter In The North (22 May). 33 of 30 spots filled. They run a top-notch event, so no wonder it's full.
🇮🇪 Exploding Dice Old War RTT (5 June). Same crew as the April GT, back for an RTT.
🇦🇺 SNAKE EYES: More Mulchy More Cakey (5 June). 100-player cap, 30 in already. Probably the biggest OWR-hosted event on the calendar right now.
🇨🇳 Guangzhou 3: March into Summer (10 July). The Guangzhou series keeps rolling.
If you're a TO and you've been on the fence about running your event on OWR, our tournament hosting docs walk you through everything. It's a lot less than you think.
Mobile apps, now in private beta
The iOS and Android apps are now in closed beta. Pairings, standings, score entry, list submissions, and live tournament updates, all on your phone. The TestFlight and Play Store internal tracks are open, and the first wave of testers is in.
We're putting them through their paces ahead of the public launch, with an emphasis on team tournaments (the newest feature, most surface-level to verify) and the on-the-day scoring flow. More on this when we open it up wider.
Player profiles look great when you share them
You know the preview cards that pop up when you paste a link into Discord, Bluesky, or Facebook? That little image is generated by something called an Open Graph (OG) image. Until recently, we used a third-party service to render ours for OWR player profiles, and they went dark with about as much warning as an Ungor ambush. That kicked off a slightly frantic few hours of building our own.
The result is better anyway: every player profile now generates and self-hosts its own preview card on our side, no more upstream surprises. Each card shows the player's name, region, global rank, faction rank if they're top-10 in any faction, and recent achievements with podium derivation.
Paste a link to oldworldrankings.com/players/[your-handle] when chatting on Discord or Facebook next time to try it out.
Sponsorships are open
We have decided to open up regional sponsors to help us with our growth plans too. Friendly local game stores & 3D print vendors, and other hobby-related entities can book ad placements that rotate across tournament pages, stats pages, and key flows.
We hand-pick every sponsor. They have to actually care about the Old World, not just treat it as another scene to advertise in. That filter is the whole point. The first two sponsors are live, and we'd back both of them in our own hobby spending - So give them a visit.
The pitch is simple, and it works both ways. OWR has thousands of Old World players across 22 countries who care deeply about this game. Sponsors get to reach an audience that's genuinely engaged with the hobby, and players get to find the stores, makers, and event organisers that care just as much about the Old World as they do.
Interested? Sponsor deck here.
And if you'd rather not see ads at all, OWR Pro users browse the entire platform ad-free.
The little things
A grab-bag of quality-of-life improvements that won't get their own headline but make a real difference:
Pay for another player. Mostly comes up in singles events: a parent paying for their children, or a mate covering someone.
Battle Board projector themes. Two new high-contrast theme variants for the in-hall display, picked from a TO dashboard selector so you don't have to fiddle with the projector mid-event.
Hide my player name. A new privacy toggle in profile settings if you'd rather not appear in public rankings or leaderboards.
Bulk army list download. TOs can grab every submitted list as a single PDF from the attendees' screen.
Quick hits coming up
A few things on the way that we wanted to flag early:
Faction vs faction stats, round by round. Including an Over Representation chart and an auto Tiering system, so you can see at a glance which factions are actually showing up and how they're performing across rounds.
Clubs and players. First-class support for the clubs that hold the scene together, with players linked to the clubs they roll with. Browse clubs on OWR, see who plays where, and find your nearest scene.
Battle Scorer. Ad-hoc and tournament scoring, game by game, round by round, fully integrated with tournament secondary objectives. Snap photos and notes mid-game, and keep a full history of every match you log.
Run your tournament on OWR
The team-tournament work, the Battle Hub redesign, scoring objective templates, Best Painted voting, secondaries scoring. It's all built. Old Hammer just ran a 47-player event on it. The tools are there.
If you've got a tournament coming up, even a small RTT, give it a try. The setup flow walks you through everything, and we're around in Discord if you get stuck.
Keep rolling dice,
Gommo & the OWR team