PuceDesbois wrote: ↑01 November 2025, 12:31
Hey !
How can I promote a game and its championship ?I really like Festival as other games which unfortunately don't have enough players, so I l wonder what are the ways to promote a game within BGA ?
Festival championship is waiting for players to subscribe !
https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=490282
Tips:
Good settings will attract more players. Set a more reasonable game duration. Tournaments use a fixed time clock. I would suggest allowing 4-6 hours per turn (~3-6 moves per day) for each player. For example a game that takes 20 turns to complete should have 80-120 hours of thinking time per player. For a 2p game that would be 7 day duration for 84 hours per player (7*24/2=84 hours) or 10 days for 120 hours per player. For Festival, make sure you know the expected number of turns per player so you can set reasonable time settings that work for the vast majority of players. From tournament hosting experience, setting a shorter game duration has barely any effect on player behavior. Players will generally play at the natural pace regardless so it's better to be pragmatic and match the actual playing pace of the vast majority of players than expecting them to play faster. Shorter duration will just lead to more timeouts and/or more policing of players abusing timer/skip or asking players to play faster leading to more "management" required.
10 day leadup time is reasonable for some games with the right promotion strategies, but longer leadup time is generally recommended. I prefer 15-30 day leadup time personally. Excessively leadup times aren't beneficial since it can lead to more abandoned accounts being signed up for the tournament. Trust me, many players will sign up for things many months in advance, then stop using BGA which leads to inactive players ruining tournament games and the BGA tournament system has no real way to kick them out of a tournament once its started unless they are naturally eliminated. Avoid long leadup time for Swiss tournaments especially since inactive players won't filter out.
Be aware of the tournament XP system and how it affects tournament visibility on BGA. Tournaments with 0-9 players are always 0 XP which makes them always at the bottom of the line in tournament menus which makes them practically invisible to players. I recommend promoting the tournament so it can reach 10+ early on so that the tournament awards XP and is more visible. Sometimes it will start at 300 XP with 10 players if their Elos are high enough, sometimes it might only be around 100 XP. Maximum visibility is achieved once it reached 300 XP with the number of players required varying from game to game for some reason.
To the main topic of how to promote, the most common way is to invite players. Invite your friends that play the game. Invite players from the arena leaderboard and Elo leaderboard preferably players that have been active in the game recently and regularly play tournaments (check their history on profile) so you are inviting players with a higher chance of being interesting. Also invite players from finished, ongoing, and upcoming tournaments as another source of likely interested players. Once you start making regular tournaments you can keep inviting players that previously join.
Looking at Festival it appears to be a low player count and low tournament attendance game. That can change with a bit of work from you. Active Arena players are a good source of players to invite.
