The Chest of Colors Arena miniature painting contest is over. You had your chance to enter, and then your chance to vote. Now it’s time to announce the winners…

The contest

Painters had a month to prepare their entries, and every one was allowed to enter up to 3 models. After the deadline we ended up with 16 entries, presenting a variety of styles, races, approaches and models.

And the winner is…

… Mahon with his Mjolnir the Ogre:

As you surely remember, Chest of Colors members cannot get the main prize, so the Red Sand Black Moon rulebook goes to the second place winner, Madfly-art, for his Lizardman Hero:

And if you are still curious about the third place, it went to Egrim van Horstmann for his “Who Rules the Jungle?”. The base was a bit overkill for a gaming model, wasn’t it? 😉

We hope you like these winning works, and we’ll be happy to discuss them and the contest in comments below.

Random winners

We mentioned there will be some random prizes for random participants. This time lady luck smiled upon Metalchaos, Gnottapan and Egrim van Horstmann. You will be contacted by us soon, so we can send the prizes to you.

Instant runoff voting?

Now you surely wonder how the instant runoff voting worked in this case. Let us explain it to you.

Usual method

Had we been using the normal “vote for the winner” voting, there would be a tie between Mahon’s Mjolnir the Ogre and Egrim van Horstmann’s “Who Rules the Jungle?”. No entry would gain a decisive advantage over others though, but many votes would effectively be wasted, not helping determine the eventual winner. No entry would exceed the 50% threshold, too.

Instant runoff

Now with the instant runoff, every voter chooses more than one candidate and does it in order of his preference. The winner has to collect more than 50% of votes. If there is no such winner, weakest entries are eliminated but their votes are not wasted. They go to the next preferred choices on their lists.

In our case we had a tie between Mjolnir the Ogre and “Who Rules the Jungle?”, so we eliminated all entries which got no “first preference” votes, and were left with 6 entries. No votes discarded yet, right? Then we eliminated all entries which received 1 vote, and checked which models were the next preference choices of voters whose first choices were eliminated. This gave a little boost to Mjolnir the Ogre and a larger boost to the Lizardman Hero. Still no winner though, as these two models tied with an equal number of votes now.

So after another elimination of the weakest, votes were assigned from eliminated models to the next preferred ones, and now Mjolnir the Ogre managed to exceed the 50% threshold and became the winner, with Lizardman Hero being second.

What do we think about this system of voting?

It definitely is interesting as it allows your vote to count even if your candidate doesn’t win. This encourages to vote even when you are sure your candidate cannot win, because your vote still can influence the voting with your next preferred choices. We’re not surprised this method is used for some respectable and recognized awards. We will surely be using it again in future.

Will there be more contests?

Surely!
We’re slowly preparing for another contest now, so stay tuned for official announcements (and unofficial teasers 😉 ).

And in the meantime we would like to thank you for your participation and to invite you to leaving a comment below. What was good about the contest, what was less so, what would you like to see changed in the next contests? And what do you think about the entries?