Board Game Arena

This might be a basic question, but I was suprised to not find it in Q&A section or the XP explanation section.
What does the XP display on a tournament mean? Is this something one can win? And is this something the organizer can set or is somehow calculated?

I'm wondering the same thing.

I have 3 insights on that - Tournament XP depends on number of participants. Winner of a big tournament gets like 300 XP.
In earlier days it seems to have been corrupted, as some people started many micro tournaments to farm XP.

So all of it goes to the number one ?
No proportional split between top ranked players?

thoun wrote: ↑22 April 2021, 11:13 So all of it goes to the number one ?
No proportional split between top ranked players?

This is from the BGA site:
In tournaments, XP is not split proportionally among top players — it’s usually awarded to the top rank

As far as I know:
- all goes to 1st place
- 300xp may be the max. I don't recall noticing higher.
- the amount is based on the number of players, but I think it doesn't need to be super huge to get the max XP (if you look at a lot of tournaments and see which are 0xp and which are 300xp or something in-between, you'll get a feel for how many registered players give full xp. it might be 64 or even 32, but I don't recall
- not sure that is documented anywhere, but I might be wrong
- is pretty meaningless relative to the large amounts arena mode gives you, so I've written off XP and just ignore it when joining tournaments. I don't play arena as I hate how arena is structured.

You both realise this was a thread from more than 5 years ago, right? It's very possible that things have changed since this was originally being discussed as well.

Second place and third place get XP too, 150 and 75 if the winner gets 300.

tbhp wrote: ↑27 October 2026, 20:22 Second place and third place get XP too, 150 and 75 if the winner gets 300.

In the tournament with Single Elimination, there is no third place.
But the others participants in a Tournament, that reached the top half, receive 12 or 3 XP.

menettm wrote: ↑27 October 2026, 21:11 In the tournament with Single Elimination, there is no third place.

In that case both semi finalists are considered third places.

There are some edge cases where third place is not awarded, like if a first stage directly leads to a final confrontation between two players, then only those two players get a trophy.