Board Game Arena

For the final phase of a small tournament, I wanted to create a Swiss system with 4 players and 2 rounds. Why Swiss? I wanted to include a game for 3rd place and I thought a Swiss system with 4 players and 2 rounds would exactly do that. However it seems that 3 rounds are the minimum for Swiss system on BGA. Am I overlooking something here? Is it really not possible?

The obvious workaround would be to create a KO instead and self-organize the game for 3rd place, but it's just not as official and convenient as I thought it was.

I assume you are talking about a 2p game?

I don't know of any way to do that with certainty, but I did achieve it one time accidentally, in this tournament: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=383402

Relevant settings:
Number of players in a match: 3
Number of players in a match (minimum): 2
Number of matches: Auto

There were 4 entrants in the tournament, so each round consisted of two 2p tables. The tournament stopped after two rounds. In every other tournament I've created with the number of matches set to Auto, it runs for at least three rounds.

Thanks for the reply! Very interesting that it went to 2 rounds with this particular setting in this particular tournament.

I will check at some point if it's replicable.

Also just sad that there is this arbitrary limit of at least 3 games and there is no real documentation about the Automatic.

This is a bit of a reach, but depending on the game you could contact the developer and ask them to add an game option for "best of 3" built into the game. That way you select it for tournament, players can see it and should be easy enough to code.

Games would need a new icon to show current game number and current game wins for each player and alternate going first/second for each game in a logical way, then add the BO3 logic to determine end of game.

Scores would be ruined though which is a major downside for games with scores other than 1-0. Results from BO3 would be either 2-0 or 2-1 score for winner.

BananaHarambe wrote: ↑26 August 2025, 23:13 This is a bit of a reach, but depending on the game you could contact the developer and ask them to add an game option for "best of 3" built into the game.

But this wouldn't help in what OP was asking for, i.e. a two-round tournament for four players where round 2 has a championship game and a bronze-medal game.

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑23 August 2025, 22:03 I don't know of any way to do that with certainty, but I did achieve it one time accidentally, in this tournament: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=383402

Relevant settings:
Number of players in a match: 3
Number of players in a match (minimum): 2
Number of matches: Auto

There were 4 entrants in the tournament, so each round consisted of two 2p tables. The tournament stopped after two rounds. In every other tournament I've created with the number of matches set to Auto, it runs for at least three rounds.

I tried to replicate that, and it did not work! See https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?i ... ge_display

As far as I can tell, there are no relevant differences between 383402 and 428143 so why did the first one stop after two rounds whle the second went three?

In 428143 it was particularly bad to have a third round, because three of us tied with a win-loss record of 2-1. But after round 2, there was exactly one undefeated player.

Here's another case that just finished: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=417930

5p in each match, and 5 entrants in the whole tournament. So each round has just one match, with nobody skipped. "Number of matches" set to "Auto". You might have expected this to last just 2 matches under the formula log_5(5) + 1 but instead it went 3 matches. I might have thought that 3 matches is the absolute minimum in all circumstances, except that I did have that one tournament I linked to upthread, which went 2 matches.