Next December we are going to celebrate 5 years of Board Game Arena! Yes, FIVE years! After all these years, BGA has become the leading website for online boardgaming, and you are today more than 400.000 registered players playing more than 300.000 games each month.
BGA is a community website: it works thanks to your help as translators, moderators, developers, money contributors, and all of you that contribute to make this place the best website to discover & enjoy board games on the web.
The least known fact about BGA may be the following: no one is working full time on BGA. No one. We (= the 2 founders of BGA) have jobs apart from BGA, and during the last 5 years we had to organize and negotiate with the rest of our lives to find enough time to run this service.
As you can imagine, it has been harder and harder to keep this approach as the service is growing and growing. Even if the community is doing a fantastic job, BGA now needs someone to coordinate all the contributors and to make sure everything is running smoothly. To speak clearly: one of the 2 founders is going to quit his job to focus on BGA. This will allow us to have a more professional website, to be more responsive to your emails, forum posts and developers requests, and to have time for features you have been a long time waiting for (like tournament creation for example).
Of course, we need money to do this. Thanks to BGA club members, we already have some, but not enough to be sure to make this situation permanent. And the thing is we don't want to change the way this website is working now: free, run by the community, without invasive and off topic ad banners.
What we decided to do is to give more visibility and more functionalities to BGA club members, to thank them for their support. Currently, a Club membership essentially allows you to access statistics (such as your ELO rank). In the following weeks, there will be some announcements concerning new stuff for players that choose to support us, and we will also make the BGA Club and BGA Club members more visible.
To experiment this, we'd like to introduce a special "premium" game for BGA Club members, and this game is the famous Lost Cities from Reiner Knizia. The principle is the following: anyone of you can join a Lost Cities game, but only BGA Club members are able to create new tables with this game. This is a little bit like in real life: you can buy a game to play it whenever you like, or you can wait for a friend who owns it to extend an invitation to you. We don't know yet if this will be appropriate, if this will be efficient, or if this will be enough, but we'd like to experiment this and we hope that BGA Club members will appreciate it
Note that for now this is a BETA test for Lost Cities: please report any bug you may find along your plays in "Community / report a bug".
BGA is a community website: it works thanks to your help as translators, moderators, developers, money contributors, and all of you that contribute to make this place the best website to discover & enjoy board games on the web.
The least known fact about BGA may be the following: no one is working full time on BGA. No one. We (= the 2 founders of BGA) have jobs apart from BGA, and during the last 5 years we had to organize and negotiate with the rest of our lives to find enough time to run this service.
As you can imagine, it has been harder and harder to keep this approach as the service is growing and growing. Even if the community is doing a fantastic job, BGA now needs someone to coordinate all the contributors and to make sure everything is running smoothly. To speak clearly: one of the 2 founders is going to quit his job to focus on BGA. This will allow us to have a more professional website, to be more responsive to your emails, forum posts and developers requests, and to have time for features you have been a long time waiting for (like tournament creation for example).
Of course, we need money to do this. Thanks to BGA club members, we already have some, but not enough to be sure to make this situation permanent. And the thing is we don't want to change the way this website is working now: free, run by the community, without invasive and off topic ad banners.
What we decided to do is to give more visibility and more functionalities to BGA club members, to thank them for their support. Currently, a Club membership essentially allows you to access statistics (such as your ELO rank). In the following weeks, there will be some announcements concerning new stuff for players that choose to support us, and we will also make the BGA Club and BGA Club members more visible.
To experiment this, we'd like to introduce a special "premium" game for BGA Club members, and this game is the famous Lost Cities from Reiner Knizia. The principle is the following: anyone of you can join a Lost Cities game, but only BGA Club members are able to create new tables with this game. This is a little bit like in real life: you can buy a game to play it whenever you like, or you can wait for a friend who owns it to extend an invitation to you. We don't know yet if this will be appropriate, if this will be efficient, or if this will be enough, but we'd like to experiment this and we hope that BGA Club members will appreciate it
Note that for now this is a BETA test for Lost Cities: please report any bug you may find along your plays in "Community / report a bug".
