Board Game Arena

Hi everyone,

I’m wondering if it’s possible to adjust tournament settings after people have already started signing up, but before the tournament actually begins.

Here’s the situation: our tournaments sometimes attract very different numbers of participants — anywhere between 12 and 90. We like to run preliminary rounds in Swiss system groups, followed by knockout finals. We currently have the groups set to “auto.”

The challenge is that we need to decide the number of groups in advance. This means we sometimes end up with groups of only 3 players, and other times with 15+ players in one group. Ideally, we’d like to be able to adjust the number of groups shortly before the tournament starts, once we know the final number of participants.

If that isn’t possible, would you recommend fixing the number of players per group instead? And if so, what happens if the total number of players doesn’t divide evenly into those groups — do some players get excluded, or does BGA handle that automatically?

Thanks a lot for your insights!

It isn't possible to create super-scientific and perfectly fair tournaments on this site. There always will be luck/randomness.

I would just construct the tournament with 2 groups and 4 per group qualifying for the knockout phase (or however you want to do it), and accept the groups can be really large if a lot of people sign up.

aSeriousGamer wrote: ↑16 August 2025, 11:05 I’m wondering if it’s possible to adjust tournament settings after people have already started signing up, but before the tournament actually begins.

To answer this question, no. The tournament framework works assumes that when someone enters a tournament they see its settings and agree to those settings, and never look at them again. You cannot change the parameters the players agreed to when entering the tournament because there is no mechanism to ask the players if they still want to play based on the revised format.

I understand that people sign up for something and dont want to be surprised. The thing is though that they are surprised right now. I would like to facilitate them and keep the amount of people in a group roughly the same regardless of how many people sign up. That seems like a fair request to me without disrespecting sign up conditions.

Some tournaments now last for months since so.many people are in a group. Or they only have 2 people in a group...that doesn't help either in setting clear expectations.

Now that I'm thinking of it maybe we should just setup the tournament for 20 people and if we are full we setup another one for 20...when people are from the same community though this does feel like a weird workaround.

I'ld rather submit a feature request to update the amount of groups...or set the amount of people per group and that the amount of groups are generated. Hope someoneelkse can shed a light on this situation. I can't imagine other communities don't face the same problem

If you are proposing that tournament creators should have the option, in setting up a tournament of type "Groups", to say, for example, "2 groups if there are 18 or fewer entrants; 4 groups if there are 19 to 59 entrants; and 8 groups if there are 60 or more entrants", that would be reasonable. It would address the problem you are having currently, and I don't think it would create too many other problems.

I don't like your other ideas though. Being able to say, for example, "I want each group to have 8 entrants, so if N people enter then set the number of groups at N/8" means that you're bound to have problems if the number of entrants isn't a multiple of 8. And aside from that, if your "Stage 2" is an elimination style format then don't you want to set the number of groups so that it's a power of the number of players in each match?

And the ability for the tournament creator to change the settings (revising the number of groups) just before the tournament begins, I don't like that idea either. That's so different to how tournaments currently work on BGA that it would presumably take a great deal of effort to code, for minimal benefit.

I don't see how that would require a lot of code, but I don't know the architecture so I might be wrong. I like you suggestion of being able to set this up upfront. What i think I'll do is make a feature request. And as a work around set up a set number of groups and participants that advance to the next stage. It might be that (almost) all player proceed or that players that have won everything are not selected, but it's the least annoying option I guess.

aSeriousGamer wrote: ↑16 August 2025, 11:05 Hi everyone,

I’m wondering if it’s possible to adjust tournament settings after people have already started signing up, but before the tournament actually begins.

Here’s the situation: our tournaments sometimes attract very different numbers of participants — anywhere between 12 and 90. We like to run preliminary rounds in Swiss system groups, followed by knockout finals. We currently have the groups set to “auto.”

The challenge is that we need to decide the number of groups in advance. This means we sometimes end up with groups of only 3 players, and other times with 15+ players in one group. Ideally, we’d like to be able to adjust the number of groups shortly before the tournament starts, once we know the final number of participants.

If that isn’t possible, would you recommend fixing the number of players per group instead? And if so, what happens if the total number of players doesn’t divide evenly into those groups — do some players get excluded, or does BGA handle that automatically?

Thanks a lot for your insights!

I think your situation could also be improved if BGA allowed Group Stage to have only 1 group so you could do all preliminary rounds in one big group, then make an interesting knockout finals.

That wouldn't solve the issue of adjustable number of players in finals, which I do not expect to be an option.

If you are having that large a difference in participation I suspect the issue is a difference in effort to promote the tournament and scheduling. When I properly promote my tournaments and boost them to 10+ people via invites with at least 5 days advance notice the tournaments always fill up consistently. However, if I let my tournaments sit with 9 or less players for too long they will never get good attendance because they all basically invisible to players.

One frustrating tournament feature on BGA is that tournaments with XP are always listed above ones at 0 XP regardless of start date. This means that most games (except the most popular) with 3+ tournaments with 10+ players signed up already will be unable to be seem by players naturally on BGA until they are very close to starting and too late. Many games are currently plagued with multiple tournaments created way too far in advanced that do not start for 90+ days, which makes it very difficult for other players to create tournaments and have players join. I wish BGA would adjust the tournament visibility to remove tournaments that start in 90+ days (or even shorter like 30+ days) to reduce this issue. Why do players need to see a tournament listed that doesn't start until April 2026 for example when there are other tournaments starting sooner?

BananaHarambe wrote: ↑18 August 2025, 18:14 When I properly promote my tournaments and boost them to 10+ people via invites with at least 5 days advance notice the tournaments always fill up consistently. However, if I let my tournaments sit with 9 or less players for too long they will never get good attendance because they all basically invisible to players.
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One frustrating tournament feature on BGA is that tournaments with XP are always listed above ones at 0 XP regardless of start date. This means that most games (except the most popular) with 3+ tournaments with 10+ players signed up already will be unable to be seem by players naturally on BGA until they are very close to starting and too late.

I didn't know how the number of players who have entered affected the visibility of the tournament.

BananaHarambe wrote: ↑18 August 2025, 18:14 Many games are currently plagued with multiple tournaments created way too far in advanced that do not start for 90+ days

IYKYK