ACF Regionals is a difficult tournament that serves as a qualifier for ACF Nationals. ACF Regionals prepares teams to ramp up to Nationals difficulty while still providing a rigorous qualifying experience. Many players will find ACF Regionals to be a significant but rewarding challenge.

2024 ACF Regionals

2024 ACF Regionals

2024 ACF Regionals will be held on January 27, 2024.

Editors

2024 ACF Regionals is head-edited by Eve Fleisig.

The subject breakdown by editor is:

Editor	Subjects
Mitch McCullar	American Literature, British Literature
Eve Fleisig	European Literature, World Literature, Linguistics
Will Alston	American History, Abrahamic Religion, Mythology, Painting/Sculpture
Erik Christensen	European History, Other History, Philosophy
Ashish Subramanian	World History, Non-Abrahamic Religion, Other except Sports
Shahar Schwartz	Biology, Chemistry
Vincent Du	Physics, Other Science except Math and Computer Science
Kevin Ye	Math
Karan Gurazada	Computer Science, Other Fine Arts except Opera
Chris Sims	Classical Music, Opera, Social Science except Linguistics
Ryan Rosenberg	Sports

Format

Mirrors of this tournament may be held in-person or online. If you have any questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator at hosting@acf-quizbowl.com.

Packet submission

Any team with at least two people on it who played a mainstream, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2022, is required to submit a half-packet. Email regionals@acf-quizbowl.com if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional packet by the no-penalty deadline for a $50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular, collegiate, academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

If your team is obligated to submit a half-packet or wishes to do so, email regionals@acf-quizbowl.com by January 2, 2024. A half-packet distribution will be mailed to you. Emailing to request a half-packet does not constitute registration for ACF Regionals; please be sure to also register with the official form.

In order to minimize the number of submissions that cannot be used for distributional reasons, half-packet assignments may ask for questions from specific subcategories. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on 20th-century American poetry, or a bonus on economics instead of “Social Science.”

The submission schedule is as follows. All deadlines are 11:59 PM Pacific time.

Submission deadline	Packet discount
October 25, 2023	−$75
November 10, 2023	−$50
November 25, 2023	−$25
December 13, 2023	−$0 (no penalty)
January 27, 2023	+$25
January 3, 2024	+$50

After January 3, 2024, teams that submit late packets will be required to pay an additional $10 per day after the deadline. Teams that have not submitted a packet by January 13, 2024 will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

The submission discounts and penalties – but not the schedule – may differ for teams attending sites outside of the United States, and will be detailed on the relevant site’s forum post.

In order to meet a deadline, you must submit your half-packet to regionals@acf-quizbowl.com by 11:59 PM Pacific time in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format. Please do not submit packets as pdfs. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team letter (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player who is not expected to play on that team (e.g. a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editor at regionals@acf-quizbowl.com. Teams should email in their submissions separately and may not collaborate on packets; i.e. a school’s A team and B team should not write two half-packets together and should remain blind to one another’s packets. However, if anyone who works on a packet or has access to that packet ends up playing on a different team (e.g. if someone originally intended to be on a school’s B team instead plays for the A team), please inform the head editor and your site’s TD as soon as possible.

Fees

Team entry fee or discount
Base fee per team	$150
New to quizbowl discount	−$100
Shorthanded discount (1–2 players)	−$75
Travel discount	−$10 per 200 miles traveled one-way
Buzzers	−$10 per functional buzzer system
Staffers	−$25 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance and affirm that they have completed ACF’s moderator training. Staffers who have not completed the training may scorekeep.

The new-to-quizbowl discount is intended for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively novice tournaments do not count) since September 2022, and which have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, bank transfer, cash, or PayPal.

Distribution

ACF Regionals uses the standard ACF distribution.

Question Guidelines

This tournament is intended to be similar in difficulty to 2023 ACF Regionals. Tossups will be capped at 800 characters and bonuses at 850 characters. However, you are free to write longer questions if you wish. Please do not write questions that are significantly shorter than the target length (i.e. tossups under six lines or bonuses in which each part is only one line). Half-packets should be formatted in 10-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Please do not add extraneous spacing or paragraph breaks between question text and answerlines. For answerlines, please bold and underline minimum acceptable answers and include the most likely answer first. Include diacritics in foreign words if applicable. For example:

ANSWER: Panama [or Republic of Panama or República de Panamá]

More information can be found in these question guidelines and ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

Submissions that flout the length, difficulty, or formatting guidelines, or which include unoriginal material (e.g. plagiarized text or recycled questions from a previous set), will be sent back to teams and will be considered unsubmitted for the purposes of packet discounts.

Registration

Once sites are finalized, the team registration form, staff registration form, and fields for each site will be available here.

Hosting

If your school would like to host a mirror of ACF Regionals, please submit a bid to host here. We are looking for hosts in the regions listed in the “Hosts” section below. If you have questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator, Tomás Aguilar-Fraga, at hosting@acf-quizbowl.com and CC regionals@acf-quizbowl.com. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

Sites

Mirrors will by default be regional. If any sites end up being online, ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2024 ACF Regionals in the following regions:

Region	Site
Northeast	MIT
Upstate NY	Cornell
Upper Mid-Atlantic	Rutgers
Lower Mid-Atlantic	James Madison
Southeast	Vanderbilt
Florida
Great Lakes	Ohio State
Midwest	Purdue
North	Minnesota
South Central
California	Berkeley
Northwest
Eastern Canada	Ottawa
UK
Online	Nebraska-Lincoln

If you have any questions, email regionals@acf-quizbowl.com.

Past tournaments

Sample questions from previous iterations of ACF Regionals are on the Collegiate Quizbowl Packet Archive.

Announcements and information about previous iterations of ACF Regionals are archived below:

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