"Multi Swiss" Tournament Ideas for 3+p Games

[BananaHarambe]

Hello, I host a lot of tournaments and find it easy to make good formats for 2 player tournaments, but 4 player turn-base tournaments can be a struggle for many reasons. One of them is that most games need 30 day duration and all current formats need to be "one at a time" so 4 player tournaments tend to take FOREVER and there's limited options for the organizer to work around this. Also, players signing up for a single 4 player tournament for their favorite games have an insane amount of downtime, but there can only be so many tournaments.

I propose a new type of "Multi-Swiss" tournament format where players get paired at multiple tables at once with unique opponents for each. The number can be customized within reason, I was thinking 3 or 4 simultaneous games for a 30 day 4 player game is a good amount. After all games are complete the scores are calculated and new tables are generated based on the standings like a normal Swiss tournament.

This would allow for tournaments with a high number of matches to be complete much faster. With 4 games at once, a 20 match tournament would be reduced in length 4x. The tournament would go from an insane 600 days down to only 150 days, 5 months.

I think this style would fit the preferences of most multiplayer turn based tournament players and be quite popular. Any thoughts?

[Hey_Listen]

This sounds like a fantastic idea.

[BananaHarambe]

Any new tournament system that allows for 3+ player games and has multiple games start at once would be great. An alternative to a semi-Swiss style would be to make it more like group stage where it splits players into equal size groups, assigns everyone a bunch of games from their group, then uses the same scoring system as Swiss and players advance to the next stage based on their final standing.

For a 4 player game, getting groups of 16 would work well because you could assign everyone to 5 matches so they would play all 15 opponents, creating a total of 20 tables at once. The top 4 or top 8 players from this group would advance to the next stage and repeat.

[Mathew5000]

For a 4 player game, getting groups of 16 would work well because you could assign everyone to 5 matches so they would play all 15 opponents, creating a total of 20 tables at once. The top 4 or top 8 players from this group would advance to the next stage and repeat.

That sounds good! A generalization of a round-robin, for a four-player game. At first I wasn't sure it was possible to arrange 20 tables so that each pair of players is at exactly one table, but I found this: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1828942

[BananaHarambe]

For a 4 player game, getting groups of 16 would work well because you could assign everyone to 5 matches so they would play all 15 opponents, creating a total of 20 tables at once. The top 4 or top 8 players from this group would advance to the next stage and repeat.

That sounds good! A generalization of a round-robin, for a four-player game. At first I wasn't sure it was possible to arrange 20 tables so that each pair of players is at exactly one table, but I found this: https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1828942

Yeah you can make some really intelligently size pods when the numbers line up nicely. I just came up with 16 players, 5 games each in my head, then figured out that it would work just fine. Another example is a 3 player game with groups of 9, playing 4 game against 8 opponents. I believe that's 12 tables (9x4/3=12).

This setting would match what players already try to do with the Swiss tournament type, which is turning it into more of a multiplayer “round robin”, which it is not really meant to do. Swiss tournaments are meant to pair players based on their tournament performance, which creates balanced tables once everyone is sorted.

If a Swiss tournament is configured so that players will play over half of their possible opponents then it’s not really making “Swiss” pairings anymore. The tournament would be better suited as a round robin style tournament when everyone plays everyone (minus uneven play counts) to fit that type of tournament system.