I’ve been thinking a lot about tiebreakers, or more specifically, not tie breakers. I have a game that has a specific way to win it, and a way to determine a winner when that primary condition isn’t met, but I wouldn’t call it a tie breaker. I don’t know what to call it, but lets see what are tiebreakers.

The Next Best Thing

So you have a game with points, but oh no! Multiple people ended the game with the same number of points! What do you check next? Well, presumably, players were working hard for those points. If it was the end goal, then what was the next-most end goal? If you get points by doing a certain action, what do you need to do right before that certain action, and is it quantifiable? If you spend some resources in order to get points, perhaps you can count up those resources and see who has the most of them. Bascially, it’s a shorthand for asking which player would be most likely to get points if the game continued for a bit more. A lot of players consider this one of the most fair and straightforward tiebreakers in games, and they happen a lot. Tough to go wrong here.

The Best Next Thing

The first thing you often need to tell a player (you’ll see this advice a lot on articles about writing rules) is how to win the game. What is the objective. Well, if the game has a tiebreaker, you might need to tell them it as well, but you also might want to be able to infer it based on what the game is asking you to do. This is not quite the same as above, because it’s not about how close you were to doing the thing the game wants you to do, but how close you were to understanding what the game wants you to do. What do I mean?

In a lot of games, one of the tiebreakers is whoever has the fewest of something important. That feels kind of contradictory doesn’t it? If you have the most total points on your cards, you win, but if you have the fewest cards total, you win the tie. Why is this? Because you understood what the game wanted of you. It doesn’t just want you to get points, it wants you to do it efficiently and explosively. One card worth 10 points is better than two cards worth 5, if only barely. If you managed to save up for it, then you should be rewarded for that. This can even go to resources: some games might give the tiebreaker to whoever has the most remaining resources because they were closest to getting more points, whereas others might give the tiebreaker to the player with fewer resources because that player was able to maximize their engine and most efficiently spend what they had.

Bug Fixing

Tie breakers aren’t always pretty. Sometimes it’s just a way to cram soemthign in that you couldn’t fit elsewhere. Does your game have a first player advantage? Then the tie goes to whoever went last. Is there a particular mechanic that’s too powerful? The the tie goes to whoever used that mechanic the least. Are different player powers better than others? Rank them from best to worst then give the tie to whoever had the worst one. This is a very dangerous tiebreaker for a couple of reasons. First, you might still need to fix those bugs elsewhere. The tiny advantage of a tiebreaker might not be enough to counterbalance it. Second, if your players are smart, they might catch on to the system and, for example, purposely try and use the strongest player powers because you just told them which one is the best. That’s right: players who read the rules might end up learning something about how your game is designed by how you break ties. Which leads neatly into the next section.

Opposition

What if you don’t think of a tiebreaker as something done to determine the person who played the game best, but as someth9ing entirely different? What if you want to suggest something completely new for players? If you game maxes out in points at, say 6 or 7, then ties might end up being very frequent. Why not use the tiebreaker to make players do something else? If the winner is whoever conquered the most planets, maybe the tie is won by whoever planted the most flowers. It’s wholly different from the win condition by both of our earlier definitions, and it doesn’t seem to be trying to fix any bugs. It’s just there to give players something else to do. If you look like you’re going to win but want to secure it, sure you could try and conquer another planet, but wouldn’t it be easier to plant some flowers? If you treat the tiebreaker as a secondary goal, the game could end up getting very interesting. It’s just very important to communicate to the players that it is a goal, and not just a thing to be considered after playing the whole game and realizing there was a tie. A secondary goal still needs to be presented as a goal.

The Last Resort

From what I’ve seen, there are two final options for tie breakers if nothing else works. The first is using turn order. So long as turns exist in your game, then it’s something that is unique to each player. No players are both going to have gone next or last. So come up with something tied to that. Maybe it’s whoever was going to go next, since they would have theoretically been closest to getting a turn. Maybe the player who went last, since they got the worst parts of the game. As you can see, this overlaps a bit with the above options, but it’s still an option.

The actual last resort is to just… not have tie breakers. But even there, there’s choices to be made. Do all the tied players share the victory? Do all tied players lose? Does everyone lose? There’s so many ways to do this. Most players aren’t a fan of this, but will accept it if it’s at least a few tie breakers down. Like, yes we happen to have the exact same number of points AND coins AND cards left, so I guess we both win. After all, if we both ended up this close to each other in scoring, then surely we’re both equally skilled at this game right?

Conclusion

There’s so much you can do with a tiebreaker. It can be very useful to really think about what you’re telling your players when you tell them how to break ties. These even exist at levels below winning the game, like determining ties during combat or when two of the same effect are played. Make your tiebreakers with meaning.