Board Game Arena

How does the site determine who progresses in the case of a tie?

Hosting a qwinto tournament. 2 players tie and only one moves on. No replay

I heard that person with older account moves further. I don't have any official confirmation but this theory worked every time

The account age is definitely used when someone is skipped for being out of time, and people still need to be eliminated from the remaining players.

Account age may still be used if there are actual ties in a game, but there seems to be counterexamples to be found.

Here is a Qwinto game where the older account is eliminated. This was in the second stage of a tournament, and the person that was eliminated did have a lower achievement in the first stage, so there may be some extra logic used for genuine ties.

Something like that happened in the final of a Harmonies tournament:

https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=335138

It's possible that the tournament organizer can pick a metric to resolve ties in those situations, metric that then bypasses the default of account's age.

In this case, that may have been higher elo, since there was no group stages.

blue097 wrote: ↑06 February 2026, 11:57 How does the site determine who progresses in the case of a tie?

Hosting a qwinto tournament. 2 players tie and only one moves on. No replay

There is no official public BGA statement on this, but people who took time and effort to investigate concluded that a random coin toss is the most plausible explanation. If you have some time, you can go down the rabbit hole into this thread and the various links therein. https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=178102
Or this thread: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=44873

It's actually kind of hillarious but also sad how much forum text and speculation was produced on this topic already, instead of BGA staff just making a single clear statement in the FAQ. It really seems like BGA staff is actively refusing to answer simple questions on tournaments.

Andrei3009 wrote: ↑06 February 2026, 14:08 I heard that person with older account moves further. I don't have any official confirmation but this theory worked every time

It doesn't work every time, there are many counter examples documented in various forum threads, see my links above.

tbhp wrote: ↑06 February 2026, 19:19 It's possible that the tournament organizer can pick a metric to resolve ties in those situations, metric that then bypasses the default of account's age.

It's neither account age nor is there an option for tournament organizers, it happens entirely "under the hood" in the backend.

We need to clarify whether we are talking about a tie in a tournament game or a tie in the tournament standings.

Ties in a tournament game
If the boardgame has its own tiebreaker (for example, in Wingspan the tiebreaker is "number of food tokens at end of game"), that tiebreaker is applied, and then the tournament standings do not record it as a tie. If the boardgame itself designates a tie, or if one player is expelled for being out-of-time resulting in the other players being deemed to tie, then the following rules apply:
Round robin: Each of the tied players receives 0.5 tournament points. Demonstration: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=521696
Swiss: The tournament points are divided among the tied players. For example, suppose it's a 4p game where the attribution of tournament points for each game is "..., +6, +4, +2, 0". Then in a two-way tie for second-third each of the tied players gets +3; in a two-way tie for third-fourth each of the tied players gets +1; in a three-way tie for second-third-fourth each of the tied players gets +2; in a three-way tie for first-second-third each of the tied players gets +4. Demonstration: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=410841
Multiplayer elimination: If one or more (but not all) of the tied players can advance, then the lowest player-id number(s) will determine who advances. (The "seniority rule" or "oldest account advances".)
Single elimination: Who advances is presumed to be a coinflip (random equal-probability selection between the two tied players). See https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41794

Ties in the tournament standings
When viewing the tournament standings, click the greater-than symbol (">") to the right of the word "Players" above the standings. That should expand the standings letting you see some of the "tiebreakers".
Round robin: In general, two players tied on tournament points will be ranked according to "score difference"; i.e. the total of their margins of victories in games they won minus the total of their margins of defeat in games they lost. [What I'm not certain about is whether "number of wins" is also a tiebreaker. For example, suppose there are 15 players in the tournament and I have 7 wins, 4 draws, 3 losses (9 tournament points) while you have 9 wins, 0 draws, 5 losses (also 9 tournament points). Do you outrank me because you have more wins and if so, is that applied before or after the "score difference" tiebreaker?] If the number of wins, draws, losses, and score difference is the same, then rank in the standings is determined by player-id number (i.e. older account prevails). See https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34998
Swiss: In case of a tie in tournament points, the first tiebreaker is tournament points of all the opponents that each player faced. Next tiebreaker is "opponents' average Elo" (which does not relate to the present system of Elo but the system which BGA used years ago). [If there is still a tie in the standings after applying both those tiebreakers, then I don't know what happens.] See viewtopic.php?p=178086#p178086 and viewtopic.php?t=18243&start=90#p138745

What Mathew just laid out is close to perfect and should be added to tourney Faq's

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑08 February 2026, 01:30 Next tiebreaker is "opponents' average Elo" (which does not relate to the present system of Elo but the system which BGA used years ago).

Why do you say it "does not relate to the present system of Elo but the system which BGA used years ago"? That may have been true based on the tournament discussed in this thread https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 90#p138745, but that was from a tournament in 2021. If you look at a recently completed Swiss tournament, the second tie breaker column is not displayed in the old Elo format (there are no four-digit Elos). [That is also a Kingdomino tournament like the 2021 tournament, to make the comparison as equivalent as possible.] Are you saying the Elo it shows in the second tie breaker column now is somehow being converted to the current form from the previous form?

Unfortunately there aren't a ton of Kingdomino Swiss tournaments, so we can't nail down the transition precisely, but some time between April 2024 and January 2025, at least Kingdomino switched the display of the second tie breaker to the new Elo format. Whenever it happened, it's not reflected in the BGA Release summaries.

In theory, there's no reason one system would be used for Kingdomino and another for other games, but here is a Kingdom Builder tournament started in May 2023 and finished in June 2023 that used (or at least displayed) the new Elo for the tie breaker.

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑08 February 2026, 01:30[If there is still a tie in the standings after applying both those tiebreakers, then I don't know what happens.]

That second tie breaker has so much granularity (factoring in that there are hidden decimal places to the Elo) that I don't see it ever not resolving the tie.

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑08 February 2026, 15:05

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑08 February 2026, 01:30 Next tiebreaker is "opponents' average Elo" (which does not relate to the present system of Elo but the system which BGA used years ago).

Why do you say it "does not relate to the present system of Elo but the system which BGA used years ago"? That may have been true based on the tournament discussed in this thread https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 90#p138745, but that was from a tournament in 2021. If you look at a recently completed Swiss tournament, the second tie breaker column is not displayed in the old Elo format (there are no four-digit Elos). [That is also a Kingdomino tournament like the 2021 tournament, to make the comparison as equivalent as possible.]

Hmmm. A number of Swiss tournaments that I'm currently in (or reccently completed) do use the four-digit Elo numbers. For example: https://snipboard.io/HJiCy7.jpg (https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?i ... ge_display)

I wonder if 2p games use "modern" Elo but 3p+ use "ancient" Elo. Also, in that old thread where Romain672 explained this, were we talking about a multiplayer game? If so, maybe there hasn't been any change made since then.

More investigation is required.

Thanks for pointing that out. Most of the Swiss tournaments I play are multiplayer games, so I never noticed that some Swiss tournaments use the three-digit "modern" Elo.