What do you do in games you've shut your opponent out before they can concede?

[Ceaseless]

When you're playing a game and have locked your opponent from playing entirely, but didn't get the game progression past 50% and the best plays result in slowly accumulating free resources for a guaranteed win, what's your main policy? Do you just grind out the slow win all the way? Do you ask if your opponent is willing to concede if you speedrun to 50% progression and then do so if they say yes? Whether a player waits it out, quits, or gets timed out, I've had it all happen. I haven't tried making an offer for their planned resignation yet though. I dislike how BGA's concession policy makes such situations possible when a player should have every right to concede and not sit through this.

[FrankJones]

Do you have a table that illustrates this point so I can get an idea what this would look like? I've rarely been in a game in which the outcome was decided so far from 50% progression that we couldn't just get to 50%, allowing the losing player to concede.

[Ceaseless]

Do you have a table that illustrates this point so I can get an idea what this would look like? I've rarely been in a game in which the outcome was decided so far from 50% progression that we couldn't just get to 50%, allowing the losing player to concede.

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=751044838 From today.

[FrankJones]

That is a hilarious game replay.

Can't buy any cards. Can't draw green or white tokens needed to buy anything. Cannot reserve a card. Completely blocked from doing anything.

Mayb this is above my pay grade - I'm only 300 Elo - but what the heck was your opponent doing???

Reserving cards on the first 3 turns? And then somehow spending all the jokers and ending up without the tokens necessary to buy anything on the board, AND without buying any of the 3 reserved cards to be able to reserve another one to get a joker?

[FSKFSK]

The game I was thinking of based on the scenario was Splendor Duel. If you hold both pearls and all 3 gold tokens, and your all the cards on the board require a pearl, your opponent can get blocked out of playing completely.

[FrankJones]

The game I was thinking of based on the scenario was Splendor Duel. If you hold both pearls and all 3 gold tokens, and your all the cards on the board require a pearl, your opponent can get blocked out of playing completely.

The game Ceaseless posted had a situation in which the opponent could literally do nothing.
Had it played out, one player would have eventually had all three royals and could have then bought 2 game-winning cards, but the point Ceaseless was making is that it's an obvious win, eventually, but one that would take an inordinate number of turns to actually get to.

I assume 50% progression would be reached once a player had 8 points, so that might not have happened until all 3 royals were obtained.

[robinzig]

I haven't watched the full replay, but I don't understand how you can get totally "blocked" in Splendor. You can always take 3 gems (according to the normal rules) - while there is a limit of 10, you can go over that during your turn and then just have to discard down to 10 at the end.

And it's news to me that there is a hard limit on the number of cards you can reserve - although I don't think I've ever had more than 1-2 cards reserved at a time so I guess I've never come across it?

Sure, if you play badly enough you can put yourself in a position where you're miles behind the opponent in the race for points with no hope of catching up - but surely it's not a major inconvenience to keep playing moves, however pointless (grab 3 gems and discard 3), until your opponent has got enough points to win (or reach the 50% point where you can concede). I don't see how you wouldn't be able to afford to by some cards at some point while doing this, either...

[FrankJones]

I haven't watched the full replay, but I don't understand how you can get totally "blocked" in Splendor. You can always take 3 gems (according to the normal rules) - while there is a limit of 10, you can go over that during your turn and then just have to discard down to 10 at the end.

And it's news to me that there is a hard limit on the number of cards you can reserve - although I don't think I've ever had more than 1-2 cards reserved at a time so I guess I've never come across it?

Sure, if you play badly enough you can put yourself in a position where you're miles behind the opponent in the race for points with no hope of catching up - but surely it's not a major inconvenience to keep playing moves, however pointless (grab 3 gems and discard 3), until your opponent has got enough points to win (or reach the 50% point where you can concede). I don't see how you wouldn't be able to afford to by some cards at some point while doing this, either...

1) The two players had in their possession all the tokens except 2 blues. Gaining additional blues was not helpful to the blocked player. All the blocked player could do every turn was draw a blue token and return a blue token.

2) There is a limit of 3 reserved cards.

3) All the cards on the board required either White or Green tokens that the blocked player did not possess and could not obtain.

4) No new cards came up in the common pool, because Ceaseless simply kept reserving blindly from the first row.

[dschingis27]

I think I would have done exactly what your opponent did - just leaving the game and accepting the Karma penalty, it' not a big deal. It's not worth my free time to sit in front of a screen and doing a very boring thing. Even if it were only 2 or 3 minutes to get to 50%, what's the point of that - only to not have an artificial Karma level go down?

I think in the current framework, that's the best you two could do, not wasting each others time. And I agree that BGA should offer the option to concede early at least in 2p games, or maybe the threshold can be at least lowered to 25% game progression in 2p games.

[robinzig]

I haven't watched the full replay, but I don't understand how you can get totally "blocked" in Splendor. You can always take 3 gems (according to the normal rules) - while there is a limit of 10, you can go over that during your turn and then just have to discard down to 10 at the end.

And it's news to me that there is a hard limit on the number of cards you can reserve - although I don't think I've ever had more than 1-2 cards reserved at a time so I guess I've never come across it?

Sure, if you play badly enough you can put yourself in a position where you're miles behind the opponent in the race for points with no hope of catching up - but surely it's not a major inconvenience to keep playing moves, however pointless (grab 3 gems and discard 3), until your opponent has got enough points to win (or reach the 50% point where you can concede). I don't see how you wouldn't be able to afford to by some cards at some point while doing this, either...

1) The two players had in their possession all the tokens except 2 blues. Gaining additional blues was not helpful to the blocked player. All the blocked player could do every turn was draw a blue token and return a blue token.

2) There is a limit of 3 reserved cards.

3) All the cards on the board required either White or Green tokens that the blocked player did not possess and could not obtain.

4) No new cards came up in the common pool, because Ceaseless simply kept reserving blindly from the first row.

Thanks for explaining.

Sounds like a case of unnecessary "torturing" of the opponent in the case of the winning player then - because surely at some point they would want to spend their non-blue gems to get a useful card? Thereby both returning potentially useful gems to the pool, and also revealing a new card.

What you descibe sounds like a purely artificial stalemate, consciously maintained by one player, where neither of them is making any progress at all.