On the 21st July 2021, playstrategy.org was launched and so today we celebrate one year of PlayStrategy! We started with just Chess (including the lichess variants) and Lines of Action. In just 365 days we have:

• Had more than 1200 different users play a total of over 28000 games
• Added 5 more Game Families (Draughts, Shogi, Xiangqi, Othello, Oware)
• Added 20 different variants, giving us a total of 28 on the site
• Ran 15 tournaments for the 2021 Mind Sports Olympiad in August/September
• Partnered with and ran 36 tournaments for the Mind Sports Olympiad's inaugural Grand Prix in April/May
• Introduced Medley tournaments - Swiss where each round is a different game/variant

And we have something special to unwrap on our birthday - Medleys have now been extended to Arena! In a Medley Arena the game/variant will change at fixed intervals. For example, every 15 minutes the variant that everyone is playing changes, and this continues throughout the duration of the Arena tournament. This means, that unlike Swiss Medleys, players will get the opportunity to have multiple pairings before the variant changes.

To celebrate one year of being live, and to launch the new Medley Arena format, we will be running a special tournament on Friday 29th July where all 28 variants that are on PlayStrategy will feature for 15 minutes each. That's right it is a 7 hour arena! We hope you will drop by and join us for some of the tournament which you can find here along with the full schedule: https://playstrategy.org/tournament/NtTT6Rk2