We are proud to introduce today 3 new improvements of the BGA time management system:
1. Fast turn-based.
2. Better "initial time" and "additional time" values.
3. "No time limit" improvements.
On Board Game Arena we have chosen to give an high importance to the game clock, because when you play against strangers over the Internet there is nothing more frustrating than waiting for an opponent who takes way too long to play each move (or who decides to stop playing).
But our focus is to allow you to play with your preferred game speed: fast if you don't want to wait, slow if you don't care. And we have built these 3 new improvements exactly for this.
1. Fast turn-based
Since some years now, BGA has been supporting 2 modes: realtime and turn-based.
Realtime is good because it is really like a real boardgame. Turn-based is also cool because you are not stressed with the timer and can take your time for each move.
However, the drawback of turn-based is that a single game may takes weeks - and sometimes months - to be played. The fastest available speed on BGA is 4 moves / day (ie: 6 hours per move), and even at this speed a single game may be veeeeeery long.
At first, we didn't want to propose faster speeds: it makes no sense to play a 8 moves / day turn based game because it means that you would have only 3 hours / move. Even boardgamers must sleep sometimes...
However, we wanted to propose something between realtime and turn-based. Something that would allow turn-based players to make sure a game will not last more than 2-3 days, with the comfort of a turn-based game. So we are happy to launch now the "Fast Turn Based" feature.
Fast turn based introduces 3 new speeds for turn-based: 8 moves / day, 12 moves / day and 24 moves / day. But the most important thing is that you can define, for each tables some Playing Hours. A playing hours period is a 12 hours slot, for example "10:00 to 22:00". During the playing hours period, everything is like a normal Turn-based game. On the contrary, outside of the selected playing hours period, during the "night", the clock is not decreasing. Of course, you can play during the night if you want, but all clocks are "frozen" during this period.
Consequently, playing a Fast Turn based 12 moves / day (10:00 => 22:00) means that you get +1 hour additional thinking time on each move, and that the clock is frozen between 22:00 and 10:00.
Of course, all clock times are always displayed in your local time.
Note: this new feature is also particularly appropriate for turn-based tournaments, since in a tournament you expect each match to be played in a short time.
We hope you'll enjoy this new game speeds
2. Better "initial time" and "additional time" values.
When playing on BGA, whatever the game speed, the game clock has an "initial time" (which is also a maximum time) and an "additional time per move" values. These values are different for each game.
Ex: 3mn + 45s / turn.
We introduced a few weeks ago a new algorithm to compute the best values for each game. It is now based on the actual average time the players community is using to play each game on BGA, so it's really more accurate now.
With this new algorithm, we'd like to avoid some situations you may have encountered before:
Situation 1: you start a very quick game which should last only 3-4 minutes, but a player leaves the game and you have to wait 5 long minutes to expel him/her. With the new algorithm, we tried to reduce the maximum time for quick games so that you don't have to wait very long.
Situation 2: one of your opponents decides to take 3 minutes for each move, while most players play usually in 10-15 seconds. With the new algorithm, it's impossible to have an additional time really too long compared to the average thinking time, so your opponents cannot do this anymore.
Situation 3: in a turn based game with 1 move / day, your opponent plays 10 moves during a day to accumulate a lot of time, then does not play during 5 days. The new algorithm sets a more appropriate maximum time for turn based game so that a X moves / day game stays close to a X moves / day game, as expected.
Please note that for real-time the introduction of this algorithm decreased the allotted time for "fast" and "normal" speeds, and increased the time for "slow" speed for a majority of games. If you think the new allotted time is too short for you, please switch to "slow" speed for more comfort when setting up your game.
3. "No time limit" improvements.
A lot of you like to play with the "No time limit" option, for example to play with friends without worrying about the clock, or just because they don't want to have to pay attention to the clock.
So we made this option a little more visible and attractive when setting up the table options, and in addition, we actually removed the clock from the interface for games using "No time limit". So now they really look like "No time limit" games
Enjoy!
