Scythe Tournament Rating

About

Scythe is a competitive 4x board game by Stonemaier games. From its critically acclaimed release in 2016, Scythe has established itself in the board gaming world for its strategic gameplay & thematic design elements alike. With its depth of engine-building, asymmetric design, and 1920+ world, Scythe is often referenced as one of the best games ever made.

In competitive settings, Scythe is played with 2 to 4 players and commonly utilizes bidding or drafting as a form of game balance. While many different types of events have been run since the initial release, the leading provider for competitive Scythe events continues to be the community run Scythe discord.

What is Tournament Rating?

Tournament Rating is a method of assessing and measuring player skill in multiplayer games like Scythe. The working model for tournament rating is derived from the openskill library, a multiplayer rating library which provides statistical models when analyzing the results of competitive multiplayer games. With Scythe tournaments being played in a variety of formats, this modeling system is a great fit for the competitive Scythe community.

New players are introduced into the rating system with a default rating of 1200. As players continue to compete in games and events the system becomes more confident in their skill level and the degree to which their rating will change from a single game decreases over time. For more information on the statistical model behind the rating system, reference the PlackettLuce model from openskill.

What events contribute to Tournament Rating?

While we have not been able to collect perfect records of every competitive event, organizers and community members have done a great job preserving the history of competitive Scythe. Through those efforts the following events have been fully recorded and processed into the current tournament rating system:

What about other events?

There are plans to expand the rating system to include other event formats, most notably the 1v1 League-style events frequently run on discord. Currently, the tournament rating system will continue to collect the results of 3 and 4 player events as other features are developed.