Dude! Take Your Turn!
A Gaming Life
Friday Night Shots – Tiebreakers
Hey there!
It’s another Friday, and it’s time to belly up to the bar, have a drink (whatever you like), and chat a little bit about board games.
Don’t mind the music. I’ll turn it down.
Steely Dan is so good that it can make it hard to talk.
Anyway, where were we?
Oh yeah, how about chatting about tie breakers!
Nobody likes ties (except soccer…sorry, football fans).
Most games that have points have the potential to have ties in them, though.
So a good board game is going to have a series of tiebreakers in the rulebook.
I can’t think of any game where it just says “you tied? Oh well, you tied. Sucks to be you.”
Some games have a long series of various tie breakers, before they finally say “ok, if all that’s tied…you might as well tie.”
This week, I’ve played a couple more games of Red Flag Over Paris (from GMT Games and Fred Serval), which I haven’t played since last year sometime, when I first got it.
I actually do kind of like the tie breakers for that.
This is a game between the Versailles government and the Commune in Paris right after the end of the Franco-Prussian war.
Versailles wins if they have more Military points than the Commune has Political points. The Commune wins if they have more Political points than Versailles has Military points.
However, if there’s a tie, there are four tiebreakers, and the winner is the player who has achieved the more of them than their opponent.
What’s hilarious in terms of this post, though, is that if there’s a tie for those (Versailles and the Commune have an equal number of tiebreakers), the Commune just wins outright.
That’s right, there is no tie.
Of course, the classic tiebreaker is Arboretum, the card game about building a wonderful tree garden.
If there’s a tie at the end of the game, the tied players plant a tree and whoever’s is the biggest in five years is the winner.
That’s cute, but it’s also kind of useless.
And there is no other tiebreaker!
In other words, if there’s a tie, it sucks to be you.
Most games have a series of tiebreakers, though.
Architects of the West Kingdom (do I always have to include a Garphill game in these posts? Yes I do) has a number of different tiebreakers before they finally give up and say “ok, it’s tied.”
First, it’s highest Virtue. If that’s tied, most remaining silver is the winner. After that…
Yeah, it does.
Some games do have three or four tiebreakers, though.
Part of me wonders if the number of tiebreakers is related to how likely it is for there to be a tie.
If a game goes into the 100s of points, it’s very unlikely for a tie to happen, but not unheard of.
Dune Imperium only goes to 10 points (and whoever has the most after somebody has reached 10, so it could be 11 or even 12).
That game has four tie breakers: amount of spice, Solari (money), water, and garrisoned troops.
It’s very unlikely all of those will be tied.
And sometimes the tiebreaker is really simple, and almost kind of annoying (I’m not sure of the rationale for this one).
Ascension‘s tiebreaker is simply “the last player wins the tie.”
I mostly play 2-player games so that’s how it works out, but I guess in multiplayer it’s the “whoever played last among the tied players is the winner.”
That can be kind of heartbreaking when it happens, especially in an asynchronous digital game.
It doesn’t happen that often, but in my 7000 games, it’s happened quite a few times.
Why is the last player the winner?
I have no idea.
You could be playing a game where there are no points, and then of course there is no tiebreaker.
Racing games, like Charioteer, it’s whoever is the furthest at the end of the game.
Even if it’s just one space.
And of course there are cooperative games!
No ties there.
And wargames, of course.
I guess the Romans and the Carthaginians just tied and all go home!
Not really possible (though it is theoretically possible in an extreme fringe case in Commands & Colors: Ancients)
This is another topic that doesn’t really require a lot of words, so I think I’ll cut it short there.
What are your favourite tiebreakers?
And what do you think of them?
Are you ok with ties?
Do you like kissing your sister? (Editor: “Oooo, you just aged yourself there”)
Let me know in the comments.
Dude! Take Your Turn! 
Ah, the rare topic on which we disagree!
I am fine with ties, as long as they don’t happen too often. Examples from games I recently played:
Stone Age has tie breaker rules – but if you score 100+ points, you will only rarely need them, and if two players tie at 154 or so, why not just share a victory?
Sushi Go Party also has a tie breaker rule – which came into play in my only game of it. Players tied at 49 points, they also had the same amount of desserts. Good for them! Nobody felt cheated here.
So, where do I think tie-breakers should exist: Some games are just built to be very close in points, to an extent where you normally would not expect to have a points difference (and are rather playing for the tie-breakers – say, The King Is Dead/King of Siam). There, of course, you need tie-breakers.
Hot take: Incidentally, that means that I am in favor of tie-breakers (or something to the same effect) in chess – on a pro level, that is. I understand that people don’t get stoked about an event like the 2018 chess world championship in which every single one of the twelve games ended in a draw, before world champion Magnus Carlsen made short work of challenger Fabiano Caruana in the, well, tie break games (played as rapid chess). If the tie-break games are so much more exciting (because the players are operating with much less time on the clock), why go through this ordeal instead of just playing rapid chess in the first place?!
Chess rant over.
Finally, on war games: I’m also fine with ties there (also provided they don’t happen too often). Most wars end in some kind of negotiated settlement for which the campaigns, battles, and sieges only provide the bargaining chips (“if you accept me as your legitimate king, I’ll give you your castle back”). So, a tied war game on the strategic level just means that nobody gained an advantage (and if the war ends there, both parties agree that it’s likely to remain so, probably confirming the status quo ante).
In tactical war games, a tie means that – as happens sometimes in history – the battle was inconclusive. Heck, Grant’s entire Overland Campaign of 1864 was a series of inconclusive battles. So, if you’re tying a game on the Battle of the Wilderness, you just did what Grant and Lee did. Follow their lead and get a game on the Battle of Spotsylvania going!
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Wow, thought-provoking stuff! Which is no surprise from you 🙂
I do see your points, definitely about Wargames. I think it’s a cultural thing about games with points ending in a tie, though. Hell, they changed the rules of NHL hockey to eliminate ties because fans didn’t like them.
North America is definitely different in some ways 🙂
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Definitely cultural! I think even the Major League Soccer (in its early years) had a mandatory penalty shootout if the game ended tied after 90 minutes because draws in competitive games were deemed unacceptable to an American sports audience.
Which brings us to another matter: In tournament games, having tie-breakers may be essential (even in games that normally don’t require any).
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Nice overview of various tie breaking mechanics. Our recent plays of Red Flags – although did not need the tie breaker so far – seems to have a very elegant system.
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My first game ended in a tie, I believe. But we may have been scoring wrong (forgetting that -2 Military points for Versailles and -3 Political points for the Commune does mean a Versailles victory, because -2 is higher than -3).
I can’t remember what our score was, though.
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