Bounties and Second Chance Games Without Breaking Your Season
A bounty is the easiest thing in a league to overweight, because it feels small. Fifty points for a knockout sounds like a rounding error until somebody collects three of them in a night.
What a bounty is worth, exactly
A bounty is a fixed reward for knocking another player out: flat points added on top of your placement score, and 50 is the number every example below works from. Leagues add them to give players something to chase once their own night stops looking promising, and to spread scoring beyond the same three regulars who always reach the closing places. The idea is not the problem. The price is.
Placement points scale with field size: your multiplier times the number of players. First place has a multiplier of 10, so a win in a 20 player game is 10 x 20 = 200. Fourth has a multiplier of 6, so fourth is 120. A flat bounty does not scale. It is 50 whether eleven people turn up or forty five.
| Field size | First place | One bounty | Bounty as a share of a win |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 120 | 50 | 42% |
| 20 | 200 | 50 | 25% |
| 30 | 300 | 50 | 17% |
| 40 | 400 | 50 | 12.5% |
Flat bounties are worth more the thinner your field gets, which is the opposite of the way a flat number makes them feel.
In a 20 player game first is 200 and a bounty is 50, so three bounties is 150 and beats fourth place at 120. A player who knocked out three people and went out in tenth for zero placement points still beats the player who ground out fourth. In a 12 player game a win is 10 x 12 = 120 and three bounties is still 150, so the player who went out well short of the scoring places outscores the winner. The winner usually has a bounty or two as well, so read those lines as the ceiling on a deep run with no knockouts. That is an ordinary Tuesday when a short field turns into a race to knock people out.
Flat versus escalating bounties
Escalating bounties grow: knock a player out, collect their bounty, and it is added to your own head so a hot run compounds. Fun in a one off charity event, bad in a season long league, for one reason. You cannot price it in advance. With a flat bounty you know the ceiling before the first game is played. With a compounding bounty there is no ceiling you can compute and the tail is long. One player runs hot for two hours in November and carries a lead nobody catches by February.
The one escalating idea worth keeping is a larger bounty on the current standings leader, say 100 when your default is 50, because that taxes whoever is already in front rather than paying whoever is already hot. Check what your scoring settings actually support before you announce it.
How bounty heavy scoring changes the way people play
Scoring tells players what to do, and they notice. In a 20 player game, moving from fifth at 100 to fourth at 120 gains you 20 points. One bounty gains you 50. Taking a reckless risk to knock somebody out is worth two and a half places, so the correct play against a player who is nearly out is obvious, and it is not waiting.
A livelier, shorter game is the intended consequence. Here is the one nobody plans for: patient players get punished for playing well. Someone who waits their way to a genuine fifth place finish is beaten by someone who threw everything at three big swings, won two, and went out in tenth. Run that for a season and your standings stop measuring who plays well and start measuring who took the most risk.
A bounty ratio that holds up
Set the bounty roughly equal to your median field size. A win is ten times the field, so a bounty equal to the field is exactly 10% of a win at a typical turnout. Three bounties becomes 30% of a win, half a fourth place finish instead of more than one, so bounties break ties rather than decide the season.
A league averaging 20 players wants a bounty near 20, not 50, and one averaging 12 wants about 12. A league that packs in 45 can leave the default alone, since it is priced for a big room.
To make bounties feel significant without paying significant points, give them a trophy instead. Keep your own count and name a bounty leader at the end of the season. A trophy that sits outside the standings distorts nothing, which is the whole reason to put it there.
Second chance games, and why the points are flat
A second chance game, the consolation, runs alongside or after the main game for players who went out early. The Chiprally default awards flat points: 100, 50 and 25 for the top three.
Flat is the right shape. Field scaled points measure something real in the main game, because a win in a 30 player field genuinely beat more people than a win in a 12 player field. A second chance field measures nothing of the kind. Its size depends on how fast people went out, which is mostly noise, so scaling by it rewards players for a night when the main game happened to collapse early.
When second chance points are set too high
This is where a scoring system usually springs a leak, and it is self inflicted. Compare the default 100 point second chance win against the main standings:
| Field size | Main game win | Where a 100 point second chance win lands |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | 300 | Between 6th (120) and 7th (90) |
| 20 | 200 | Exactly 5th (100) |
| 12 | 120 | Between 1st (120) and 2nd (96) |
At 30 players that is sensible: the second chance is worth a middling main game finish. At 12 players it is a disaster, paying 100 when the main game pays 120.
Put yourself in the seat. Twelve players, nine left, and you are nearly out. Ninth pays 1 x 12 = 12, so your realistic expectation is about 12 points while the second chance is worth up to 100. You do not need to be a cynic to work out the next move, and nobody can prove a bad decision was deliberate.
The tell that your numbers are wrong is when the lowest scoring place in the second chance game beats the lowest scoring place in the main game. In a 20 player game, ninth in the main game scores 1 x 20 = 20 and third in the second chance scores 25. That should never be true.
Set the second chance win at about a third of a main game win for your median field, then halve it for second and quarter it for third. At 30 players a third of 300 is 100, which gives 100, 50, 25, exactly the default. At 20 players a third of 200 is 67, so round down to 60, 30, 15. At 12 players, 40, 20, 10.
Structure matters too: only admit players who are already out of the main game, never allow a re-entry, and run the second chance where people can see it.
Keeping the two records apart
A second chance win is not a main game win, and your records should not pretend otherwise. Decide before the season which column a second chance result lands in, then write it into the rules. The default split is the straightforward one: second chance points count toward the season standings, because points are points, while only the main game counts as a win on a player's record. Somebody who takes three second chance games banks what those are worth without reading as a three time champion.
Settle the same question for the last night of the season in September, rather than arguing about it in March.
Check the numbers before you vote on them
Before you change a bounty value or a second chance table, run your own turnout through the new numbers and see what a three knockout night is worth against a deep run in your league. It turns a rules argument into an arithmetic question, which is far easier to end. Then publish the numbers before game one and leave them alone, because mid season scoring changes cause more resentment than any bad ratio ever will.
Run this on your own league
Put last season in, tick bounty points on, and untick them. If the order changes, the ratio is wrong, not the players. The points simulator will show you in one pass.