Great board game—bad BGA implementation

[Papa Boris]

I tried Gunsen last night with 2 friends and we were all in agreement on 2 things:

1) The board game is fantastic

2) The BGA implementation is bizarrely terrible

I noticed that Gunsen only just came out this year. Was there a marketing push to rush it out on BGA, and as a result, it was released without any playtesting? That's the only explanation I could come up with to account for the numerous glaring errors and shortcomings. It's not like my friends and I were hardcore playtesting—we just sat down to play 1 casual game, and we were bogged down by obvious problems that would have raised a swarm of flags in even the most half-hearted playtest.

The map is so big that it's impossible to fit it and anything else on the screen at the same time. If you want to look at your clan board, special orders, heroes, buildings, or tactics, you have to scroll down. If you want to see any of that stuff for your opponents, you have to scroll down even more. It was an unbearable amount of scrolling in just a 3-player game; I can't imagine how awful it would be with 5–6 players.

Sure, there's "fast travel" buttons, but these just scroll you up and down the page. That should never have been necessary in the first place. Ark Nova takes up way more table space than Gunsen does, yet everything fits neatly on one screen in BGA. Gunsen should use tabs the way Ark Nova does: there's one frame where your clan board goes, and you can click arrows to cycle among the clans.

It's standard practice for the BGA player panels to show important static information about each player. In Ark Nova, for example, they show each player's number of continent and animal icons. In Gunsen, the first thing anybody would think on learning the game is, "The player panel should show each player's number of rolls, rerolls, and keeps." It doesn't. Want to know this information about someone you're planning to attack? Have fun scrolling a mile down the page. Every single time.

One of my tactics was to hire one of 3 mercenaries. These were named, implying that they can be looked up before the tactic is purchased, but there was no way to see them before committing to the action.

In battle, the text says "choose which dice to keep," but if you're doing a reroll, the selected dice are rerolled, not kept. This caused my friend to lose his first battle instead of easily winning it.

Basic stuff like this makes it look as though the game was published on BGA without even a smidge of testing.

If a publisher wants to rush a game on BGA as part of a marketing strategy, I don't necessarily have a problem with it. I did, after all, fall in love with Gunsen despite BGA'a awful implementation, to the point where I'm considering buying the physical game, so mission accomplished, I guess? But then I really hope you go back and raise the implementation to modern, Ark Nova-level quality standards. Having rushed implementations in 2026 that would have been below average in 2016 is a bad look for BGA.

[Jykten]

Afaik the game has been in alpha and beta.

I've played a bit of beta an beside some bugs/rules errors, I didn't notive any change. I still meet some rules infringments.

Moreover, I don't know why there's no undo button. It has been a feature asked for a long time, there's no info revealing action that would justify this lacking.

But I don't know how games are developed on BGA. Is it a community thing or we have to hope that one person rewrite the whole thing ?

[Marcus1980]

Papa Boris, I understand most of your points, but with two of them I disagree and I would back up a designer a litte bit.

1) some of the rolls, rerolls and keeps come from heroes or tactic cards and they do not apply in every battle. So showing them in the player panel would be misleading,
2) considering that a game goes up to 6 players I dont think it would be possible to fit mainboard and player boards on the same screen. They just take too much space, so as far as scrolling down for info can be frustrating i am not sure if it could be done much better,

Some other issues that you mentioned cause less troubles after a few games when you learn an interface a little bit...but here I agree it can and should be fixed.

The biggest issue for me and many players (as Jykten mentioned) is lack of undo button...it really should be here as misclicks happen and before battle dice are rolled there is no reason to not allow rollbacks.

[Papa Boris]

Thank you for the context, Jykten! I'm sad to hear that playtester feedback wasn't followed up on. To this question:

But I don't know how games are developed on BGA. Is it a community thing or we have to hope that one person rewrite the whole thing

Every game page lists a designer, so maybe it's just the luck of the draw. Some games get great designers, and some games ... don't.

To respond to Marcus:

some of the rolls, rerolls and keeps come from heroes or tactic cards and they do not apply in every battle. So showing them in the player panel would be misleading

I disagree. You can hover over a hero in an army to see their stats; that is not a problem and requires no scrolling. Having baseline stats in the player panels is better than having nothing at all. Or, okay, let's say the majority of players prefer not to see baseline stats in the player panel. Then hovering over a hex should show the full stats of the army in that hex. Looking at the situation and going, "welp, the only thing we can do here is make the player scroll down 5 pages and read the roll/reroll/keep numbers off the clan board; that is literally the best possible solution!" is indefensible.

considering that a game goes up to 6 players I dont think it would be possible to fit mainboard and player boards on the same screen. They just take too much space, so as far as scrolling down for info can be frustrating i am not sure if it could be done much better

Ack, that's on me, I could have done a better job explaining this in my original post.

Have you played Ark Nova? In that game, the public area (equivalent to the map in Gunsen) and ONE personal player board are visible simultaneously. Within the player board, there are arrows you can click to cycle through the boards of the other players, which show up in the same space.

So theoretically, Gunsen could be like this:

By default, I see the map and my clan board. Then I click a little arrow and *click* now I see your clan board instead of mine, then *click* the third player's board instead, then *click* back to my board. Ark Nova also has a little eye in each player's panel that you can click on to jump to their board. The key is that the page doesn't scroll—you only ever seen the map and ONE player board, it just changes WHICH player's board you're seeing in the same space.

[Marcus1980]

Ok. Now I see your point. The way you put it, it would probably be better.