We have had a few updates to tournaments in the last 6 months or so. There have been small, minor improvements that have been all upside since they are additional options for tournament hosts.
As of writing this the new 2025 features are: 1) Option for Auto number of rounds for Swiss and 2) Option to prevent skips.
I wanted to gather everyone's thoughts on the most want tournament features for the developers to add. Ideally these requests would be options, not forced on players, be universally of interest, and fairly easy to implement. Sorry, no rewriting of the swiss pairing algorithm for example, not going to happen. Let's be realistic.
My top requests:
1) Allow only 1 group for group stage tournaments: Outside of BGA the most popular style of competitive tournament is Stage 1 single group Swiss with a top cut to finals (usually 8 or 16 players). We should really be able to implement this in BGA. There is not usually a benefit to splitting up players into groups in Stage 1, all it does is reduce the quality of matchmaking and force more byes or uneven table sizes. This effect is most noticeable with 3p particularly where players need to be split into 3 groups in order to get a sensible player count for Stage 2. When tournament size is lower, this issue becomes even worse by splitting into groups. 3p Swiss would work much better with the option for 1 group, but all group sizes benefit. No changes needed to how many players advance. 32 players advancing is more than enough as is.
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=77238 bug report for "Group Stage Tournament Mode: allow 1 Group" please comment and thumbs up! I will recruit more thumbs up via other ways. Currently at 15.
2) New option for Round Robin: Time between each game start (with drop down menu): This is the most common request for round robin, which is the ability to stagger the start times of the games. Currently the time between each game start is 0 minutes, which is unintuitive to players new to BGA and catches every single player by surprise (in my experience). Just have it as a listed option with 0 minutes would clarify that all games start at the same time. For options, I mostly play turn based 2p games in the 5-7 day range so I would want to be able to select 24h/1day or 48h/2day most often. 3+ player does not exist in round robin so no considerations there
The drop down times for game duration would be totally fine for this setting, just include 0 minutes at the bottom before 10 minutes and go all the way up to 30 days.
Round Robins can technically be staggered already, but also not really because the host needs to manually set the match date times AND needs to make the start times at least as far apart as game duration. This means you can set up one at a time round robin, but it is incredibly tedious and the scheduling may not work well for group stage and/or when number of participants is unknown. If the matches need to be one at a time, why not just make a Swiss? In my opinion the lack of staggering for Round Robins pushes players to try and solve the issue using the Swiss system, which ends up creating its own problems since Swiss is not supposed to be used for low player, high match number setups.
I would love to be able to set up Round Robins with 8 players per group and use my regular 7 day game duration, but stagger the game starts by 1-2 days to prevent overwhelming players. 7 games staggered by 2 days would mean 12 days between the start of the first and final game, adding about 2 weeks to the tournament. If this were group stage with both Round Robin and groups of 8 the tournament would take about 6 weeks to complete 14 games, which is pretty reasonable.
If sped up to 1 day between game starts it would be 14 games in about 4 weeks, also reasonable.
With current settings this would be 14 games in 2 weeks, which is too fast IMO. I use 10 day game duration instead to stretch it out to up to 20 days, but it always feels rushed regardless.
3) New option for Multiplayer Elimination: number of qualified players OR number of eliminated players (one or the other): I want to make tournaments with the ability to host 3-4 player tables (3 player to smooth out player counts) with only 1 player eliminated per round. From what I've seen, 4 player with 3 qualified is guaranteed to be very clunky as the numbers get lower with no smooth way to progress down even with ideal player count. For 3p 2q this is not an issue because numbers like 90, 60, 40, 27 all work their way down quite smoothly.
3-4p with one player eliminated is currently impossible because a 3p game with 3 qualified would not work so all games would need to be 4p.
4) Add more maximum game duration options: 20 days and 40 days at least. This is a comment request based on the thread below.
As of writing this the new 2025 features are: 1) Option for Auto number of rounds for Swiss and 2) Option to prevent skips.
I wanted to gather everyone's thoughts on the most want tournament features for the developers to add. Ideally these requests would be options, not forced on players, be universally of interest, and fairly easy to implement. Sorry, no rewriting of the swiss pairing algorithm for example, not going to happen. Let's be realistic.
My top requests:
1) Allow only 1 group for group stage tournaments: Outside of BGA the most popular style of competitive tournament is Stage 1 single group Swiss with a top cut to finals (usually 8 or 16 players). We should really be able to implement this in BGA. There is not usually a benefit to splitting up players into groups in Stage 1, all it does is reduce the quality of matchmaking and force more byes or uneven table sizes. This effect is most noticeable with 3p particularly where players need to be split into 3 groups in order to get a sensible player count for Stage 2. When tournament size is lower, this issue becomes even worse by splitting into groups. 3p Swiss would work much better with the option for 1 group, but all group sizes benefit. No changes needed to how many players advance. 32 players advancing is more than enough as is.
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=77238 bug report for "Group Stage Tournament Mode: allow 1 Group" please comment and thumbs up! I will recruit more thumbs up via other ways. Currently at 15.
2) New option for Round Robin: Time between each game start (with drop down menu): This is the most common request for round robin, which is the ability to stagger the start times of the games. Currently the time between each game start is 0 minutes, which is unintuitive to players new to BGA and catches every single player by surprise (in my experience). Just have it as a listed option with 0 minutes would clarify that all games start at the same time. For options, I mostly play turn based 2p games in the 5-7 day range so I would want to be able to select 24h/1day or 48h/2day most often. 3+ player does not exist in round robin so no considerations there
The drop down times for game duration would be totally fine for this setting, just include 0 minutes at the bottom before 10 minutes and go all the way up to 30 days.
Round Robins can technically be staggered already, but also not really because the host needs to manually set the match date times AND needs to make the start times at least as far apart as game duration. This means you can set up one at a time round robin, but it is incredibly tedious and the scheduling may not work well for group stage and/or when number of participants is unknown. If the matches need to be one at a time, why not just make a Swiss? In my opinion the lack of staggering for Round Robins pushes players to try and solve the issue using the Swiss system, which ends up creating its own problems since Swiss is not supposed to be used for low player, high match number setups.
I would love to be able to set up Round Robins with 8 players per group and use my regular 7 day game duration, but stagger the game starts by 1-2 days to prevent overwhelming players. 7 games staggered by 2 days would mean 12 days between the start of the first and final game, adding about 2 weeks to the tournament. If this were group stage with both Round Robin and groups of 8 the tournament would take about 6 weeks to complete 14 games, which is pretty reasonable.
If sped up to 1 day between game starts it would be 14 games in about 4 weeks, also reasonable.
With current settings this would be 14 games in 2 weeks, which is too fast IMO. I use 10 day game duration instead to stretch it out to up to 20 days, but it always feels rushed regardless.
3) New option for Multiplayer Elimination: number of qualified players OR number of eliminated players (one or the other): I want to make tournaments with the ability to host 3-4 player tables (3 player to smooth out player counts) with only 1 player eliminated per round. From what I've seen, 4 player with 3 qualified is guaranteed to be very clunky as the numbers get lower with no smooth way to progress down even with ideal player count. For 3p 2q this is not an issue because numbers like 90, 60, 40, 27 all work their way down quite smoothly.
3-4p with one player eliminated is currently impossible because a 3p game with 3 qualified would not work so all games would need to be 4p.
4) Add more maximum game duration options: 20 days and 40 days at least. This is a comment request based on the thread below.
