Board Game Arena

A few points: 1. This has been discussed/suggested/raised many times before. 2. There's nothing specific to Mountain Goats here. 3. You can already "select" players by playing at certain times or turn-based/real-time. So the idea of getting a random opponent is already flawed. 4. Differen...

A quick tip, in case anyone doesn't know: When you view a player's profile in the "About" tab, if you don't see the line "Last seen" - it means they've given you a red thumbs-down.

Hi everyone, First of all, this is not a bug report. The red thumb works exactly as the site describes it. This is a discussion about whether the rule itself is the right one for Arena tournaments, and a suggestion for the admins and the community to consider. I play Mountain Goats every day and I’m...

stikelrw wrote: ↑25 August 2026, 04:28 Yes I do! So I think in 2 player games, there should be a Competitive option to play back-to-back games with a rotating starting player and the total points counting for the win. They recently added this to Double Seven (which has a first player advantage)

Agree

Some tactics that are effective when playing second often don't work when you're the one starting the game. Some tactics for playing first often tied to high stakes and high risk, and they don't often work. There are no universal or guaranteed tactics. The tactic is chosen individually ;) , based on...

My forum access has been restored, so I can finally write this myself.

Thank you to everyone who supported me in this thread. It meant more than I expected.

The accusations were never backed by any evidence. I think that says enough.

Collusion to game the elo system is a punishable offense. If you see it, report it. No amount of tweaks will eliminate it. That's the theory, but in practice a lot of obvious cheating reports go unanswered and unrelieved for months, if ever. That's exactly the point of this proposal — make it struc...

Fair point on variance across game types — that's true and probably unavoidable. But that's a different issue from what I raised. Complexity/player-count variance is just natural noise you can't game. Opponent selection is different — it's a mechanic someone could exploit to inflate their Elo, not j...

Cigma, you're right that ELO rating doesn't affect the arena results. But the thing is, all players participate in the ELO rating - both arena players and play mode players - but under different conditions: arena players can't choose their opponents, while play mode players can. That's why, in my op...

I don't know if this is the case in all games, or if it's just an imperfection in Mountain Goats' rating system, but here the rating is calculated across all games indiscriminately — with no distinction between invite-only matches and games where the opponent was matched automatically. And on top of...