FrankJones wrote: ↑17 April 2025, 08:24
Terraforming Mars: The player simply takes the "pass" action every generation.
Wingspan: The player cycles through the three habitat actions every 3 turns, decline all gains and declining all brown powers.
7 Wonders; The player randomly picks a card and sells it.
Splendor: The player's turns are simply skipped (even though that would not usually be a valid action).
Removing players tokens from the board is one thing, but these plays aren't the same as a player leaving the game as if they were never there. 7 Wonders had a 2p variant before Duel existed, and it wasn't "include the cards for 3 players, and just randomly discard one from the third player's hand every round". Instead, the other two players take turns choosing the card to discard from the dummy player's hand - so there is still a level of strategy in it. And that was widely considered to be a pretty poor 2p implementation (though I know it had its fans too).
Wingspan occasionally has a power where you choose another player to benefit. So this has to be handled as well (yes, you could either choose a player at random, or just skip that altogether, but that's also not usually an option). In TM, it's possible for there to be drafting of project cards each round - so now the quit player just picks randomly? Splendor has a token pool setup for the number of players - if you're playing on a 4p token pool with only 3p, it's now not the same game. You could say, well, just take some of the chips away to make it 3p size, but what if players have all the blue chips right now? Who loses their blue chips? Or do they just get them until they spend them (which still has to be coded for, making this a not so simple implementation - it's not "just skip all turns" anymore)?
A player who plays oddly without a discernible strategy makes a game feel not fun for the other players. In fact, most games on BGA seem to continue on in this way now and you can play them through to the end with remaining players (just the result isn't counted, the game is set to the quitter/bootee as loser and everyone else wins regardless of the actual outcome). I haven't tried them all, but I've been in a few in my early days, and they were largely unsatisfying, so now when someone is booted, I also typically quit once that happens. Where a game is almost finished is one thing, but where a game is in the early part is quite different, and I wouldn't want to be forced to play it out with a randomly acting "dummy" player, nor do I think it's a great scenario for one player to wait for everyone else to quit (assuming quitting after the initial player quits/is booted is still allowed without penalty) and then (probably) win by default and gain full Elo - and one I assumes I'd lose Elo if I chose to quit.
I agree that where it's possible, just removing the player from the board (as per Heat, many roll and writes, etc.) makes sense. But where a player has to take a seemingly random action each turn, even if that action is just to pass, that then affects other players (which it definitely would in something like TM, 7 Wonders, Splendor, maybe Wingspan a bit less so), then that's going to make a game not satisfying to finish, and people would still cry it was unfair. Lots of work for probably minimal benefit (in those cases - in the case of Heat, etc., obviously a much more viable option).
