I searched through the tournament rules but I can't find any guidance on how to record the score when a player gets a "bye" in a tournament with an uneven number of players. For our inaugural event at Your Local Game Store in Matthews NC last night we had NINE players (a great turnout for a random Thursday night) and so we had a bye each of our three rounds.

In the absence of an official rule, I decided the bye was worth 6 prestige since you are considered to have won the match. But this ended up being a bit too strong, I think. Is there an official policy?

There's nothing in the official tournament rules (although I expect there to be in the next update).

A bye should get 6 prestige points, 10-0, 10-0. Anything else is unfair to the player who may have actually performed that well had there been an opponent.

With the exception of the first round, the players getting byes will be the lower-performing players, so this will rarely make a difference.

Not to derail, but this is the largest problem I have with the match play rules. A player getting a bye often has to sit out over an hour. Not fun.

FFG should follow the format that Decipher used in the old Star Wars CCG: Matches are only one game with players alternating sides. That way a player with a bye only misses one game instead of two.

Doing that would screw the system completely, since 2 prestige points are split according to the results over 2 games. A better way to avoid someone sitting out is having a member of the organizing team willing to play or not according to the number of other players, making an even number.

Eh, I should have added that Prestige Points would just be added for winning a game. There would not be "matches" except in a final or elimination round. This worked in other CCG's like Star Wars and it works in Netrunner.

I suppose that if match play is the most important to a play group then then play that way. Personally, I don't find anything particularly exciting about match play, I would rather not double the amount of time people have to sit out.

If someone is indifferent to playing in a tournament then there is no problem with them volunteering to sit out. If everyone wants to play then asking someone to sit out of the entire tournament is a horrible idea.