Improving the friends feature

[CelticPride]

I play some games that don't get as much traffic, and so when I find someone else that plays the game as well, I friend them that way I can see they are on and invite them.

The problem is I have so many friends that it's getting harder to keep track of who plays what.

The solution would be a feature that allows me to create groups/categories to place my friends in. Maybe one for "friends and family" and another for "Haiclue" or something to that effect. Or, even better, let me tag my friends and then filter them by those tags.

Thoughts?

[Arnott]

I'm sad to see no love for this idea. I had to "temporarily" move away from home to deal with my parents (for, like, 2-3 years), and BGA was my only way to play games with my local face-to-face friends. Alas, there was no way to group/filter them when setting games up, so I went old school and deleted all my "friends" who were not them.

This meant also declining friend requests.

Now I get that this was perhaps a bit extreme on my part , but it was kind of a PITA, and I got tired of it.

Is there really no simple way to "fix" this?

[BarnardsStar]

I'm sad to see no love for this idea. I had to "temporarily" move away from home to deal with my parents (for, like, 2-3 years), and BGA was my only way to play games with my local face-to-face friends. Alas, there was no way to group/filter them when setting games up, so I went old school and deleted all my "friends" who were not them.

This meant also declining friend requests.

Now I get that this was perhaps a bit extreme on my part , but it was kind of a PITA, and I got tired of it.

Is there really no simple way to "fix" this?

Not downplaying the original suggestion, but for your purposes, I'd think you could create a new private group called, say, "Arnott's Hometown Friends". Then, choose one:

1. on the game's page you can click on the "green door" (upper right corner of the game configuration panel) and restrict players to that group, or
2. on the Play Now screen when set to Automatic, you can click on a game's "gear" icon, and click "show advanced option" and likewise restrict to your group (no idea why this is "advanced"), or
3. also from Play Now, when set to "Manual", you can click on the "Create " button and then "Restrict table access" (right side, above the player list) to restrict to your group.

Hope this helps!

[angrypuppy]

I want to second (third?) this idea... I too sometimes send friend requests to people I played a less-popular game with, or who actually made conversation during a game (surprisingly rare! I'm not talking deep sharing of our thoughts, but I sometimes make silly comments such as "wow, I've never had so many disreputable guests at once! Is there something we need to know about this family?" while playing Obsession, or whatever, and it's fun when someone actually reads it and replies... same with if you compliment someone on a move, complain about bad luck, whatever... you know, normal table talk like you'd have in real life, even with strangers). However, I also have the issue of wanting to keep my real life friend group separate, and then there's people I friend from other places (discord, BGG forums, facebook groups, whatever). I do put little notes on them to try to remind myself why I friended someone, but there's no good way to filter or even see things like those notes without going into the person's actual profile page. Since my RL friends mostly don't have super obvious usernames and if we don't play together often I won't remember which ones are them, I don't want to add too many people or they'll get lost, and the lack of ability to keep people straight means I friend a lot less people than I otherwise might want to...