Board Game Arena

bergerOUS wrote: ↑11 July 2026, 11:02 Used screenshots from BGA

I'm sure it worked out just fine with screenshots, but I'll note that the publisher has posted pdfs of the alternate maps (link) for those who want to do them print and play.

BGA winner's average also includes solo games, I'm pretty sure. So even though 2p are the majority of games, we really can't use that BGA metric to evaluate first player advantage. There are statistics with a sufficiently large 2p game dataset collected which show first player advantage is somewhere...

As Azoken noted, BGA does not provide the stat.

But the best stat I know of (for 8000 base(?) games) is that first player gets a win probability somewhere within a confidence interval of 50.0% - 52.3%.

I also find the match making in Arena very annoying. I am playing really low, Silver with aroud 150 ELO. But still I constantly get matched against players with 300-500, so they win for sure and we both waste an hour of time as they don't even get many points for winning agains a low rated player. ...

You only had 1 appeal at the time. You can't be targeted by interactive effects (such as pilfer) when you have less than 5 appeal (even when it targets based on cp), so it targeted the player with the most cp who was eligible.

Thanks, that's very interesting! Do you have a source URL for that analysis? I'd like to read more about it The overall "analysis" occurred as discussion is the Discord server, so there's not a full documentation as easy to link to. The analysis I was looking at was done in this google sh...

I believe a more recent look at a much larger selection of high-elo 2-player games found a first player win rate somewhere around 51%. I don't have the number of games for that statistic, so can't calculate the confidence interval on it. OK, going back and looking for more details on this, the data...

It feels like you've got two topics merged into one thread... 1) Should BGA arena allow abandoning games based on initial game state? (Or a question you didn't ask but is closely related... what about abandoning based on opponent elo?) 2) Does Ark Nova have a significant first player advantage? I im...

Matchmaking does not use ELO by default, it just fills you in to the first eligible table. In non-Arena games, when creating the table, you can filter by ELO ranges. I forget the exact levels, but it's something like... Beginner = 0 Apprentice = 1-99 Average Player = 100-??? Good Player = ???-??? an...

Current (at least preliminary) ruling is no, arch's bonus is not doubled. Bastian (with the publisher) posted the following reply in Discord on Jan 6, 2025: Thanks for posting this question and good catch on a pretty big loophole I dont think anyone has ever asked about yet! With the currect wording...