VICO

The Very Intense Conceptual Open (VICO/The New SCIENCE) was a "thought"-based, tossups-only subject tournament, written by Will Holub-Moorman and Jacob Reed as a side event for the 2015 VCU Open. The tournament mirrored the standard quizbowl distribution by including not only social science and philosophy questions (roughly 1/2 of the tournament), but also questions on "literature," "science," and "trash" thought (broadly conceived). Several of these more nontraditional "-thought" categories were integrated into the distribution of 2016's MYSTERIUM, also edited by Reed.

The tournament was mostly well-received, with Marshall Steinbaum declaring it "the future of quizbowl" and Chris Ray claiming that it was "fairly widely recognized as finding rich new material to fold into the canon"; most complaints focused on the high difficulty, length, and some poor/unclear wording.