Board Game Arena

What determines how many tiers a game has and what changes it? Does the number of tiers run off the same criteria for the XP for achievments?

I know spots only came in in season 13 but each new season I am suprised it still only has a a bronze and elite tier.

Being new might mean it gets played more but in seasons 14-16 Spots has had between 173 and 248 elites and this season total is already over 200. In each season it has had more elites than Shifting Stones that has a gold tier.

Shifting stones does have more games played than Spots (last season it had 7383 games compared to Spots 4995) but this does seem to account for 2 extra tiers.

Another example is Fruit Picking this has a silver tier dispite having less than 1000 games in each of the last two seasons (with 34 and 29 elites)

I don't believe there is an automatic threshold, additional tiers have to be manually added by admin staff. I think sometimes, such changes aren't made for a while, so tiers end up outpacing the size of the player pool.