Marc Hartstein wrote:
One alternative I thought of after the tournament was to have a tiebreaker rule instead. I see two possibilities: 1. Having an empty quadrant breaks ties. [...] 2. Having at least one piece left breaks ties. [...] I was originally leaning toward choice 2, but I'm not sure any longer which I prefer. Neither covers the situation in which a player who's not one of the ones in the tie for the lead empties their quadrant, but that might be ok.
3. The person with the empty quadrant chooses a winner among those tied.
There could be a problem, though, where players are simply unwilling to move the game toward an end if they're not in a winning position.
This is slightly alleviated by the above rule, but perhaps not much. - Eric