New Monthly 2p Top Cut Swiss Tournament

[BananaHarambe]

Hello All, I will be hosting a monthly tournament for Faraway. First one is created, see below. Tournament starts mid month to avoid clashing with existing monthly tournaments.

Starting March 15 at 14:00 UTC - https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=365337 -Swiss with top cut. Try and get 4-1 record or better to advance to single elimination finals. This is the closest to a "Double Elimination" tournament that we can make on BGA with the current tournament settings. The idea is to be a bit more forgiving than a single elimination tournament and allow players to stay in the tournament for longer with at least 5 matches. Maximum 64 players.

I will wait and see player count for this tournament before making the next one, which will be mid April. I will adjust tournament size based on popularity, either up or down. I hope you all enjoy this format! Here's a link to an old tournament with the same setup: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=335519

[Iacta Alea Est]

I’m curious, it doesn’t look like you have played Faraway — at least on BGA — why are you hosting a tournament?

[BananaHarambe]

I’m curious, it doesn’t look like you have played Faraway — at least on BGA — why are you hosting a tournament?

Edit: I’m 100 Elo in Faraway and playing in the Swiss tournaments.

Hi, great question! I’ve actually played Faraway before, just not on BGA. I’ve also hovered over a friend of mine at work playing it on BGA a bunch at lunch.

If you look at my profile and groups, I mostly play Vale of Eternity and have hosted many tournaments (and participated) for the last 6 months. The list for all the 2025 ones is in the tournament group I made. It’s been fun organizing tournaments and growing a community around my favourite game on BGA.

Turn based tournaments have been a good way to bring all the strong players together to compete against each other and sort players by rating better. Strong players naturally encounter each other in late rounds of Swiss and in stage 2 of Group Stage. Either single elimination from Swiss qualifiers or something like a Double Round Robin structure. Using regular play mode or arena does not match strong players against each other very often from my experience(just because of player distributions and very limited matchmaking).

I’m branching out monthly tournaments, mostly 2p Banana Top Cut Swiss into other games. Faraway was a good contender based on a combination of my personal interest, current tournament schedule (no 2p Swiss/Group Stage), popularity at 2p, game duration (mostly expected # of turns). I think this Swiss Top Cut structure is great for 64 players since it makes a “double elimination “ style Swiss portion, needing 4-1 to advance. It’s nice to join and always get 5 matches and be able to recover from a loss.

Why join tournaments? Many reasons to join including actual skill-based matchmaking (Swiss does this well), regularly scheduled games, trophies and XP, competition, ability to make friends via regular tournament encounters.