Carnival of Death
The Carnival of Death is a yearly celebration of T.A.Death, a game mode in TAP, held on the week of March 25th. Players have a week to submit scores from the mode, from the original game or fan made games to a leaderboard. At the end of the week, all the scores are tallied up into a DEATH TOLL.
History
So in Japan, when TAP was the latest TGM instalment, players would meet up for a "celebration of death mode". These gatherings, wholly unofficial, were simply a way assemble enough players together to have a vs death mode tournament, to share strategies, or even to just simply observe famous players in action. Awesomely enough, when machine translated, "celebration of death mode" turned into carnival of death. Hardcore. Twisted Evil I'm looking to try and organize a carnival of death on the March 25th, or 3/25 by the American calendar. The so called "torikan date".—colour_thief, tetrisconcept.net[1]
Results
As of 2021, the Carnival of Death is now hosted on theabsolute.plus.
| Year | # Players | Death Toll |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 17 | 7,906 |
| 2009 | 46 | 19,365 |
| 2010 | 41 | 20,596 |
| 2011 | 41 | 22,082 |
| 2012 | 25 | 14,963 |
| 2013 | 22 | 13,583 |
| 2014 | 34 | 20,797 |
| 2015 | 53 | 27,201 |
| 2016 | 63 | 30,520 |
| 2017 | 89 | 42,045 |
| 2018 | 58 | 30,477 |
| 2019 | 46 | 22,304 |
| 2020 | 59 | 33,390 |
| 2021 | 118 | 52,447 |
| 2022 | 83 | 41,258 |
| 2023 | 98 | 46,967 |
| 2024 | 101 | 49,503 |
Side shows
Carnival of Derp
The Carnival of Derp is a side event, originally organized by TPM2209, that takes place at the same time as the Carnival of Death. First held in 2016, the aim of Carnival of Derp is to play T.A. Death mode using a ruleset different from normal (e.g. Ti-ARS, SRS). Since its inception, the Carnival of Derp has turned into a demo scene of rule exploitations, looking for ever more creative ways to bend the rules of a rotation system to get an optimal score in a game mode that's still technically T.A. Death.
Because players can play multiple rulesets and submit one score per ruleset, the Carnival of Derp has two tolls: a Derp Toll, which counts all scores from all players and all rulesets, and a Herp Toll, which only counts the best score from each player.
From 2021 onward, the Carnival of Derp is hosted on the Cambridge Discord server.
| Year | Herp Toll | Derp Toll |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 1,998 | 1,998 |
| 2017 | 3,131 | 5,072 |
| 2018 | 6,562 | 12,460 |
| 2019 | 6,583 | 12,213 |
| 2020 | 1,998 | 5,976 |
| 2021 | 10,168 | 28,192 |
| 2022 | 13,335 | 96,511 |
| 2023 | 16,663 | 169,110 |
| 2024 | 14,972 | 248,727 |
Carnival of Darkness
The Carnival of Darkness is another event held on May 23, to encourage the playing of Phantom Mania, a version of Death where the pieces turn invisible once they lock.
As of the 2023 Carnival, there are four leaderboards for players to try getting their best score on.
- The Classic leaderboard tracks plays of Phantom Mania using the Classic ARS ruleset (Classic2 in Nullpomino).
- The Terror leaderboard tracks plays of Phantom Mania 2 using the Ti-ARS ruleset (Classic3 in Nullpomino).
- The Super leaderboard tracks plays of Phabtom Mania 2 using the Ti-World ruleset (Standard-Hard in Nullpomino).
- Finally, there is an Open leaderboard which allows players to use any ruleset included with Cambridge to play either Phantom Mania or Phantom Mania 2.
The scores from all four leaderboards are added up to create a Dark Toll for the entire Carnival.
| Year | Classic | Terror | Super | Open | Dark Toll |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 806 | 577 | 1,433 | 2,816 | |
| 2021 | 1,762 | 310 | 1,174 | 3,246 | |
| 2022 | 2,059 | 1,762 | 4,010 | 7,831 [a] | |
| 2023 | 2,512 | 1,644 | 3,840 | 5,441 | 13,437 |
| 2024 | 1,551 | 1,163 | 3,695 | 4,443 | 10,852 |
Carnival of Doom
The Carnival of Doom is an event held to celebrate the Shirase mode of TGM3 (known as Devil-Doom in Heboris, hence the name). It starts on February 28 (2/28, which is the "torikan date" of Shirase mode) and goes on for a week afterward.
Both Classic and World rules are allowed for this event, and are tracked on the same scoreboard. Only the best score for each player regardless of ruleset is counted, and all players' best scores are totalled up to make a Doom Toll.
| Year | # Players | Doom Toll |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 31 | 23,089 [b] |
| 2022 | 17 | 12,579 |