FrankJones wrote: ↑07 September 2026, 23:15
It could be affecting the game in a manner the game designers did not intend.
For example: In Terraforming Mars, yes, it's legal to just pass and do nothing. But most Terraforming Mars players recognize that in a 3-player game, playing onward after one player quits would result in one of the 2 remaining essentially players having the 1st-player disc 2/3 of the time.
Exactly. I personally don't see a state where a player passes every turn (whether done by an absent zombie player or a present non-caring player) as a legitimate game either. I'd rather stop playing if my opponent is so determined to be checked out of a game, and I have and will red thumb any opponent who starts playing nonsense moves at a table I'm at. Where it's a game where card counts or board size/spaces vary, yes, you can still play, but I've also played those games IRL and realised, oh, that's why the game felt dissatisfying, because we played it wrong.
While I agree that the ranking based on remaining time isn't a great solution either, I can accept that a lot better than ranking by account age. Generally I think the time-based ranking is designed to eliminate the player who caused the slow down and the table to hit max time (which is probably somewhat fair, and I say that as someone who times out a LOT on tournament tables, but rarely on non-tournament tables). Where it gets tricky is multi-player elimination. And the way I see that is that random elimination through no fault of your own is a risk in multi-player elimination tournaments - if I play them, I accept that risk.
But look, whether or not I agree and would enjoy playing against a zombie player isn't a reason not to implement that as an option - if I don't like the idea, then I don't play in tournaments where it's implemented. So long as it's optional (my understanding was that for Heat and Formula D, it's not optional, it just is the way it works? But not playing those tournaments, I'm not sure).
As to only being able to name a handful of games where player count matters? Well, I spent a few minutes thinking about it, and while I have a vague idea of gameplay across the probably thousands of games I've tried (some moreso than others), I don't typically memorise variable player setups because the rulebook is there to guide me through that part. And as I say, on BGA, even less effort, since BGA does the variable setup for me. My gut feeling is that variable player setup exists in more games than it doesn't. And even where it's not necessarily an issue (eg. I don't think Terraforming Mars has any change to setup for different players), as noted above, a player passing every turn does impact balance, there's no getting around that.
