RazorOz wrote: ↑03 July 2025, 10:53
Re: the manual lobby, are your only speed options slow, medium, fast, rather than the specific turns per day you'd be happy with?
Firstly, what turns per day is even in each category? But secondly, it does seem quite inflexible, because I might want to play say 3-12 turns per day, but I assume the latter is in fast, which if I then select I can end up in a 24 turns per day game that I don't want to be in, and is quite a big difference.
In
https://boardgamearena.com/lobby ("play now" in the header), there are three boxes across the top that let you specify the type of game you want to set up (or join). The left one lets you select "simple game", "arena", or "tournaments" (which takes you to
https://boardgamearena.com/tournamentlist where you can join an existing tournament or create a new one (premium only)). The middle one lets you select a real time or turn-based game: a real time game has slow, medium, and fast speed settings, which vary by game and generally range from seconds to minutes per turn, and you can only play one real-time game at once; slow turn based games range from 48 hours to 6 hours per move with a clock that runs 24/7, while fast turn based moves range from 3 hours to 1/2 hour per move, and and the clock only runs 12 hours per day ("playing hours"). If you include any fast turn based games speeds in your preferences, you also need to set the range of playing hours that are practical for your schedule -- people joining games where the playing hours run through their sleeping time annoys ~everyone. The third box at the top lets you select who can join your table and/or how you are placed in tables: friends only, letting BGA automatically add you to tables that match your preferences, or manual, where you look through the list of open tables and select which one(s) you want to join.
If you're creating or joining games from the lobby (rather than from the pages for individual games) [edited: I reversed these initially] you can select a specific set of games speeds you're interested individually per game -- it doesn't even need to be a continuous range -- and can also indicate different speeds & playing hours that are best for you or varying degrees of tolerable or unacceptable if your preferences aren't available.
The controls presented on the individual game pages have a very different UI and don't allow nearly so fine a degree of control over the parameters of the games you're placed in if you're using automatic or arena matching.
