Agricola Tournament

Snakes & Lattes is holding another after work tournament later today and the game of choice is going to be Agricola. This is by far the longest and most complex game they've run a tournament for thus far. (Previous tournaments have been for Dominion, Settlers, Ticket To Ride, Carcassonne, Seven Wonders, King of Tokyo, and Puerto Rico.)

I really like Agricola and will use almost any excuse to play the game so I'm certainly going but I have reservations about the tournament format. Agricola is a long game and it's not going to start until after 6 so there's really not enough time to play 3 games. So there's going to be 2 games, and there's 27 people registered so far. The game plays at most 5 to a table... How do you determine a winner?

You could play two rounds of random pairings and hope to only have one person win two games, but that doesn't seem great. Agricola has a high skill threshold so I would imagine there would be multiple two game winners.

You could pair the winners up against each other in some manner but since there are going to be at least 6 winners how do you divide them up? 3 winners playing 3-player games with two people winning the tournament? 3 winners playing 5-player games with some spoilers with the hopes that exactly one table has a double winner?

Put 5 winners at one table and declare the winner of that game to be the overall winner? Has the advantage that you should get a 'good' final table and an undisputed champion. Has the disadvantage that someone who won their first game actually can't win the tournament.

How would you even pick the 5 who advance? Highest score? Largest margin of victory? Largest percentage of second place's score? Largest percentage of the points at your table? None of those options are very good in Agricola since the games play out very differently based on the cards dealt to each player.

Highest score in particular has problems since a game with a lot of food generating cards rates to eat fewer animals/vegetables and therefore should just have more points scored in it than a game where people get most of their food by eating points. It's the same sort of problem that Dominion has with comparing scores between games.

That said, I don't know what I'd do if I was making the decision. (And I don't currently know what decision has been made!) Ideally I'd want to have the games go really fast so there'd be time to play a third game for the 'top five' after two preliminary games with some non-perfect but reasonable way of breaking ties to determine the top five. Possibly you could fix the cards for each seat of the first game to try to deal with the variation from cards and then use largest percentage of points at your table to determine the finalists.

I wouldn't go with a plan that didn't result in a final table. One of the things I like about board game tournaments is the (generally) high quality play that exists at that final game. It's one of the reasons I think the World Boardgaming Championships is so awesome and why the Great Canadian Board Game Blitz is, while fun, not as awesome. I knew when I walked away with 3rd place in Le Havre that I'd gone up against the best and legitimately didn't deserve to win. This year when I came 3rd at the GCBGB (both the Toronto one and the Fan eXpo one) I didn't play a single game against the people ahead of me. Was I better that day than they were? I don't know! I didn't get the opportunity to find out.

At any rate I enjoy playing Agricola so I'm going to go and have fun building an awesome farm.