INFO: Thinking Time, Round Robin, Ties, Seeding

[dschingis27]

This inofficial ReadMe lists information about frequent questions on tournaments but it is written by users and not by BGA itself!

I noticed that some fellow forists wrote great summaries about re-occuring questions. I wanted to document it together into one thread. Feel free to post or link more information summaries that are very relevant. I try to edit it into the first post, either as link or text.

Tournament start and game queue: Tournament games are automatically started, so they will get added to your games in progress. You get an email notification 1 hour before a tournament starts. If you happen to be on BGA at tournament start, you are also notified and you can manually join the games, so then you know exactly what you get into. Obviously, you need to be online at tournament start for real-time tournaments but you don't need to for turn-based tournaments. For turn-based tournaments, it is only important that you finish your games in time (see Thinking Time below).

NOTE: BGA shows you games where it is your turn, based on how much time is left on your clock, so tournament games can often be at the end of your games-in-progress queue during the early part of the tournament.

Thinking Time: Tournament games operate differently from “simple” and “arena” games, in that you do not get more time with each turn. Everybody starts with a fixed amount of time and when it is your turn the clock runs down. It can go negative if you use up all your time throughout a game.

If anyone is in negative time, every other player (including those with negative times) can expell them, the expelled player loses and the other players are tied. (See further below how ties are treated.) This can be prohibited by tournament creators with the option: "Players cannot be expelled during games." but the default is that all players can expell anyone with negative time.

Thinking times are fixed to keep games at a fixed maximum duration, so tournaments don’t drag on. For example, games can have a set maximum length of 7 days. If 7 days go by and the game is not over, then the player(s) with the most time left on their clocks will be arbitrarily deemed the winner(s). The maximum game length also indicates how long one tournament round is expected to last (i.e. the time until the next round starts), but it might be shorter if all games in a round complete quickly.

NOTE: Some games (e.g., 7Wonders, Railroad Ink, Incan Gold) have “simultaneous mode”. Everybody’s turns go at once, so everybody’s clocks run at once. E.g., in a 7p game of 7Wonders with a set maximum length of 7 days, everyone has a personal thinking time of 1 day (7 days divided by 7 players). Because thinking time is eaten up simultaneously, it can happen that several or all players go into negative time while the max game duration is not reached. The game is not automatically stopped until its max duration is reached, even though negative times can pile up.
However, if not prohibited by tournament creators, the game can always end when one player expells any opponent with negative time.

(written by BarnardStar, edited)

Playing hours: Some tournaments have set daily playing hours. This is a 12 hour range for playing where the clocks do not count down outside of this range. The specified times will be in your browser's timezone, and people in different parts of the world will see a different range. The person who creates the tournament might see 9am to 9pm, but you could see 1am to 1pm. Joining a tournament where the clocks only count down while you are sleeping is a good way to run out of time.

Round Robin Schedule: Round robin tournaments mean you play a game against every other player, usually, all of these games start and run at the same time! In tournaments with large round robin groups, you will have to play a lot of games at the same time.

GENERAL NOTE: Anyone with a premium account can create a tournament, and the system does not prevent tournaments with crazy options and absurd time schedules, so you should check them carefully.

(written by Shivaware, edited)

Ties in a tournament game
If the boardgame has its own tiebreaker (for example, in Wingspan the tiebreaker is "number of food tokens at end of game"), that tiebreaker is applied, and then the tournament standings do not record it as a tie. If the boardgame itself designates a tie, or if one player is expelled for being out-of-time resulting in the other players being deemed to tie, then the following rules apply:
Round robin: Each of the tied players receives 0.5 tournament points. Demonstration: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=521696
Swiss: The tournament points are divided among the tied players. For example, suppose it's a 4p game where the attribution of tournament points for each game is "..., +6, +4, +2, 0". Then in a two-way tie for second-third each of the tied players gets +3; in a two-way tie for third-fourth each of the tied players gets +1; in a three-way tie for second-third-fourth each of the tied players gets +2; in a three-way tie for first-second-third each of the tied players gets +4. Demonstration: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=410841
Multiplayer elimination: If one or more (but not all) of the tied players can advance, then the lowest player-id number(s) will determine who advances. (The "seniority rule" or "oldest account advances".)
Single elimination: Who advances is presumed to be a coinflip (random equal-probability selection between the two tied players). See https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41794

Ties in the tournament standings
Round robin: In general, two players tied on tournament points will be ranked according to "score difference"; i.e. the total of their margins of victories in games they won minus the total of their margins of defeat in games they lost. [What I'm not certain about is whether "number of wins" is also a tiebreaker. For example, suppose there are 15 players in the tournament and I have 7 wins, 4 draws, 3 losses (9 tournament points) while you have 9 wins, 0 draws, 5 losses (also 9 tournament points). Do you outrank me because you have more wins and if so, is that applied before or after the "score difference" tiebreaker?] If the number of wins, draws, losses, and score difference is the same, then rank in the standings is determined by player-id number (i.e. older account prevails). See https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34998
Swiss: In case of a tie in tournament points, the first tiebreaker is tournament points of all the opponents that each player faced. Next tiebreaker is "opponents' average Elo" (which does not relate to the present system of Elo but the system which BGA used years ago). [If there is still a tie in the standings after applying both those tiebreakers, then I don't know what happens.] See viewtopic.php?p=178086#p178086 and viewtopic.php?t=18243&start=90#p138745

(written by Mathew5000)

Seeding
Single elimination: This works similar to Tennis tournaments. At tournament start, players are ranked from highest Elo to lowest Elo. Let's say there are 64 players, they would be ranked from 1 to 64 by Elo, and this ranking determines the entire tournament bracket. In the 1st round, rank 1 matches rank 64, rank 2 matches rank 63, rank 3 matches rank 62, and so on. In subsequent rounds, if the higher ranks were to advance in every single game, then in every KO round, the highest rank matches the lowest rank, the 2nd-highest rank matches the 2nd-lowest rank, and so on. It is made sure that rank 1 and rank 2 can only match in the final, players in rank 1 to 4 can only match in semi finals, and so on.
Single elimination with "odd" number of players: The same bracket creation mechanism is applied even if the number of players is unequal to a power of two. That leads to a number of players from the top of the Elo ranking being seeded into round 2, so that the number of players in round 2 is always equal to a power of two. E.g., if there were 61 players in the tournament, the top 3 ranked players are seeded into the 2nd round while the remaining 58 players start in round 1, so that the 3 seeded players and the 29 winners from round 1 complete a field of 32 players in round 2.

Round Robin / Swiss: Let's assume that 64 players must be distributed into 16 groups of 4 players each. The Elo ranking from 1 to 64 determines the spots in the groups. The 64 players are grouped into 4 equal-sized pots, rank 1 to 16, rank 17 to 32, rank 33 to 48, and rank 49 to 64. Each tournament group will have exactly one player from each pot. However, unfortunately there is no random drawing from the pots. Instead, the highest-ranked players from each pot go into Group 1, the 2nd-highest ranked players from each pot go into Group 2, and so on. (E.g., Group 1 consists of rank 1, rank 17, rank 33, rank 49; Group 2 consists of rank 2, rank 18, rank 34, rank 50.)
If there are less than 64 players, then the pot with lowest ranks is made smaller and the lower groups have one less player. (E.g., with 61 players, there is one pot with rank 49 to 61 and Groups 14, 15, 16 have only 3 players. Yes, that means not only are they the "easiest" groups by Elo but also smaller groups.)

Single elimination after Round Robin or Swiss: In a two-stage tournament with round-robin / Swiss groups in stage 1, followed by a single elimination stage, the KO matches are determined similarly to a normal single elimination tournament. There is a ranking that determines the entire bracket and also seeding/byes if the number of players entering the KO stage was unequal to a power of two. The ranking is created from the group results, the 1st places in the groups are ranked on top, then the 2nd places, then the 3rd places, etc. Within each category (1st places, 2nd places, 3rd places, etc.), the ranking is made by Elo. The Elo values at the time of KO stage creation are the ones that count.

(written by dschingis27)

[dschingis27]

2026-02-12: Added information about seeding / matchmaking in certain types of tournaments.
2026-02-16: Tournament start and game queue information was added.

[dschingis27]

If you want an official up-to-date tournament FAQ, please vote here:

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=61176

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=112566

[dschingis27]

*bump*

[truewired]

This is so helpful thank you so much.

It's a bit unfortunate when time decides who qualifies to the next round when a tournament phase run out of time but i feel it's still the best way to not have collusion.

I think 2 of those tie-breakers are a bit unfair though, and those are the 2 ones people have been complaining the most about.


Some proposals i had in mind : (tell me if there is a better place to post those)
- multi-player elimination when a player is skipped/leaves the game (where all other players are considered joint winners) : currently based on lowest player-id number(s)

option 1:

Should be done differently to avoid someone abusing the rule by skipping another player. I think the situation is rarer with good tournament settings (where basically nobody can time really time out before the end of the phase), but still an issue when setting aren't taking this aspect into account.

The problem is to also avoid collusion or decisions that would abuse the new rule .

I think the fairest should be that for games that are above 50% completion at the time of the skip/departure, that there is a vote in each game to determine who goes through amongst the non-skipped players, one person = one vote for one player, regardless of amount of qualifiers.

Eligible voters:
- winners from other tables in the current phase (amongst the tables that finished their games at the time of the skip) EDIT: important (almost forgot)
- the non-skipped players from the game

EDIT: Ineligble voters:
- players that are friends with one of the players in the table (even if it's the skipped player and even if it's the table they're both playing in).
//// added this because it makes sense to take friends into account to minimize the risks of collusion, and it's very unlikely that some people would remove a friend on purpose before the situation happens (snapshot for the eligible voting pool would be the moment the game ended)... some shady collusion can still happen behind the scenes with players that are actually friends but aren't on each other's friend list on BGA, but the situation would be so rare (and the friend would still need to win their game to be able to vote on the table) that it's practically a non-issue, and that behaviour would likely be possible to flag anyways (specially if the players remove themselves before the tournament starting only to add each other back after the tournament ends), possibly adding a "buffer friend list" (a removed friend would still be considered a friend for tournament purposes during 3 months after the friend removal or something like that)///


Vote would be optional, the vote would end when the current phase ends.
In case of a tie, the tie-breaker would be votes from players in the table affected by the situation, then and only then, age of the account.

This would basically ensure that a consensus on who would actually have won the game if the game had reached the end, and the fact it would be a rare occurence would normally avoid collusion. (even if it adds a "popularity contest" aspect but it would be minimal, and it would still much better than the current situation where old accounts can just use this rule to their advantage even when they're losing)

option 2 (arguably much simplier):

the player with the oldest account qualifies to the next round , but every other qualifying spots are decided purely at random instead of player id. exactly like it is the case in 2 player games eliminations (this is a compromise to improve the current rule without the headache of my previous idea , while still favouring the oldest players on the website (it's still nice to have a slight reward for them, but it wouldn't be too bad if only 1 player (instead of several) get to qualify to the next round that way))

At more than 50% completion of the game, It is also possible to determine a threshold per game below which a player would NEVER be eligible to be picked at random or qualify even if it's the oldest account of the game (if all of the non-skipped players are below that threhold, this rule wouldn't apply and the previous rule would apply instead). For example, for Wingspan it could be 20 points or something like that. EDIT : or players that aren't covering 10 dots for Tacta (haha, edit on April 8th after i unfairly haven't qualified in the TACTA tournament i was in due to lack of tournament based tie-breaker and newest account)





- Single elimination or multi-player elimination in case of a full tie - currently a coin flip for single, and oldest player id for multi-

This is trickier, as there are a few fair ways to solve this, that i list in the order of which they'd be checked to break the tie.


- If it's the final of a tournament, both players share the tournament win. (it would only be fair). The tournament host can then decide who actually won based on their own "non-BGA" rules, if any , but as far as BGA is concerned, it would be a shared tournament win.


- If deemed possible in a game (and possibly with the desginer's approval), play X more turns (where X would be a fixed pre-determined amount for each game in BGA (example for Magic The Gathering IRL tournaments, it's "6" turns (more precisely current player ends its turn and 5 more turns are played , and then whoever have the most life points win (in case of single elimination phases, as of course during swiss rounds the game is considered a tie if it wasn't completed after the additional turns)). The problem with this is that a lot of games cannot play "X more turns" without breaking the game logic or having to rewrite part of a game's code in a significant way (for example it wouldn't make any sense to play one more round in Wingspan after the end of the game and after bonus cards are scored (unless the code is updated to take this into account), or in "Welcome to" playing one more round after game ends can definitely punish some strategies as well. as players have been playing the game based on the normal way that a game can end. That's ironically a drawback from how modern board games work, in the way they cannot easily play X more turns after the end of the game, without either breaking the game's logic (and basically not solving the randomness issue) or making the game too long even with only one added turn).))


- With the designer's approval, determine an exclusive last tie-breaking rule exclusive to ties in single elimination tournaments if the 2 previous points i mentioned still don't break the tie (or if the previous tie-breaker is impossible to implement in a game) , that wouldn't be used in any other situations. Some ideas for the games i play on BGA would include for example amount of covered dots in Tacta (which would be interesting as covering own dots would have yet another possible utility other than a position one), "Most unused bird cards remaining" and then "was latest in turn 1" for Wingspan (found this in the rules of Euroquest, a tournament held in the Netherlandss, that added those rules after most amount of unused food tokens (personally i'd even skip the "most amount of birds in hands" rule as it's sometimes a consequence of the little first player advantage in the first place, though i agree that the "most birds in hand" tie-breaker make sense for the base game to counter-balance egg-spamming a bit)) , player that went last on Ticket to Ride games, assuming there is first player advantage on a version (saying this because this is a "tournament only" last tie-breaker for the US map at least (used by WSBG notably) , for trick-taking games, use a mechanic specific to each game twist (player that have the less tokens on the last column of the research board for Cat in a box, to "punish" luck of getting good cards at the end (the first tie-breaker is already good at rewarding comebacks from causing paradoxes in previous rounds so that's good), player that scored the LESS points in round 1 for Skull King (as it's clearly the RNG round, both for who wins/loses a trick and specially for bonus points (that reward a guaranteed victory even more in round 1))) etc etc

- Coin flip, after everything else i mentioned was checked and if everything is STILL a tie despite all of this (but ideally the last tie-breaker shouldn't lead to a tie and therefore try to avoid the coin flip if possible, unless of course there is no significant advantage for one of the players in a game (whether the advantage is going first or going last)).

Initially had the idea to check amount of wins (if a tournament have multiple phases) or swiss round logic even in elimination-based tournaments, but those ideas come with some issues : - wins in a tournament can come from games that had skipped players, so it would be unfair to some players . - Swiss round logic in single elimination tournaments would require the use of ELO to determine the strenght of the beaten players, which feels a big random as well (but less than a coin flip arguably)
An example of a tournament that sort of solved the issue was the Ticket to ride 20th anniversary tournament, that basically had the final phase as a swiss tournament instead of elimination (therefore allowing for all swiss-round tie-breakers to apply in the last phase, and also applying their own policy if needed (though this tournament then did a proper tournament with the qualifiers in real life so i guess it was a special case ))

EDIT on April 8th:
Ironically i've just faced an elimination after tie in the tacta tournament i was in right now, multi-player elimination, tied but didn't qualify because i have the newest account...for Tacta covering dots are counted so i feel that should be the tie-breaker for tournaments instead of player id (then sure if there is still a tie why not player id but shouldn't be the first criteria for a tournament qualification) . There is also "covered" dots counted but that is more passive so "covering" is the best option (because rewards active play, while "covered" would reward kingmaking too much)).
Then again it was my fault for taking part in a multi-player elimination tournament with a new account but i still feel the tournament rules should be updated to add at least one tournament exclusive tie-breaker for those situations.
It's the first and last time i take part in a multi-player elimination tournament while things are like that (unless amount of qualifiers in a phase is at least 3 (or 2 in a 3 player games tournament), which is rare because most tournaments qualify 1 or 2 lol)