The "alpha" community review process launched in May has been really successful. With close to 2.000 experienced players registered to take part in the program, and with some hindsight about what's important from the experience of running it, we would like to provide some guidelines in order to help the reviewers know how they can best contribute to the release of awesome games!
The objective of the release process is not just testing to find bugs, it's quality.We will update these guidelines along the way to keep them up to date, when we'll see that some games have received a lot of approvals while not being ready from our point of view as admins
- all rules should be implemented
- the interface should be as good as possible both on desktop and on mobile
- the game should be of the same quality as other games of the same category on BGA (or better).
If you haven't played other games of the same category on BGA, you should play some of them to get an idea of the expected quality level before approving.
Here is a list of things to check before giving your approval. If anything is not OK on this list, you should create a bug or suggestion report to notify the developer about it (we suggest you to print this and use it as a check-list).
☐ The adaptation is faithful to the original board game;
☐ All rules have been correctly implemented;
☐ All the material of the original board game is there, nothing is missing;
☐ There are tooltips on all icons and elements to explain what they are;
☐ The interface is clear and intuitive;
☐ The interface is centered horizontally for big screens;
☐ The interface resizes correctly to allow for mobile play (if you don't play on mobile, you can test this by resizing your browser window);
☐ The game can be played from start to finish without issues or bugs;
☐ The game plays well in turn-based as well as in real-time (except if turn-based is disabled for this game);
☐ The game can be replayed correctly from start to end;
☐ The game progression percentage doesn't stay stuck at zero from start to end;
☐ The information about the game on the game page is correct and complete;
☐ The game page has a link to the rules in English;
☐ The game page has a 3D game box visual (for published games), a nice banner visual, and a game presentation text;
☐ The adaptation is as good as (or better than) adaptations of similar games already published;
☐ If you know the real game, you can just start a game, and play!
You can also double-check our guidelines and pre-release check-list for developers, and let the developer know if they missed something.
Here are some examples of review remarks from the BGA team on some games (NB: those remarks are not meant to be taken as absolutes to just copy; some of them were abandoned in the ensuing dialogue with the developer; they are presented here only as examples of what to look for to improve quality):
~~ BGA admin early feedback on Martian Dice after the developer requested to move the game from "studio" to "alpha" ~~
Ok, I moved the project to alpha. I have sent you an email with all alpha information.
The game is functional, but the interface is very minimalistic at the moment
You'll see the suggestions from the community, but I would recommend:
Have fun!
- to make the dice look more like dice (maybe with some 3D mapping effect), and give them some shadow
- to have an animation to roll the dice
- to have some scoring animation so that it's easier to understand what's happening at the end, for example
- the tanks and death rays could anihilate each other with some explosions
- display the points earned visually with displayScoring http://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/Game_i ... ed_display
~~ BGA admin feedback on Thurn and Taxis requested by the developer after 10 community approvals in "alpha" ~~
Here are our remarks to improve the interface:
We always have a lot of remarks for the games we love, but those are really small ones and the game rules are perfectly implemented. Well done!
- There should be some more space around icons in the player panels
- The player aid (short help) quickly becomes not really useful for experienced players. It should not be displayed by default. It should be available with a gray style "Player aid" button in the status bar triggering a popup (just like in Marco Polo for example). This will free up space to have cards to draw on 3 or even 2 lines instead of 4.
- The bonus acquired by the player should be displayed in their player panel. This is usual on BGA, and will free some space above the carriages, so that they don't push the routes down too much (as much as possible, routes should be displayed just below the map to minimize scrolling). At the end of the game, all bonuses should be revealed in the respective player panels (and stay displayed in case of a refresh).
- The road of the current player should be titled "My route".
- When the number of points is secret, we recommend to use a question mark "?" instead of a hyphen "-" (because the hyphen can be misunderstood to mean "0" instead of "secret")
- For counters and cards, there should be some css box-shadow to make them look prettier / stand out more
- The text in buttons should stay short, and the text description on the button should match the action as closely as possible. "You may add a city card to your hand, or replace all cards (administrator) [Use the support from the administrator]" could be "You may add a city card to your hand, or use the administrator [Exchange all display cards]
- In the logs, for route that cannot be scored (less than 3 towns), the log says "X skips the scoring of their route". It should be nothing or "X cannot score their route yet".
- It would be nice to see the carriage progression directly on the carriages for all players. Maybe have a small token of the player color displayed on their current carriage value?
- For the discard phase, the action is discarding, so it's counter intuitive to select the cards to keep. It would be more natural to select the cards to discard, then click on a "Discard" button to validate.
- For the number of cards on the deck, I think it would be nicer to have it black with text-shadow 3px 0 3px white, 0 -3px 3px white, 0 3px 3px white, -3px 0 3px white and to place it at the bottom of the deck.
- There is no confirmation on the "Start a new route" button. There should be one, as a misclick can be really tough there.
- When selecting a card, the selection red border is very small, almost invisible. You can use a class for stock selection to make it more beautiful.
- Finally, let's talk about the routes!
- Maybe I missed something, but I think the circle is useful only for the first city card. As soon as there is more, the circles can be forgotten.
- "Extend existing route at start" / "Extend existing route at end" was pretty confusing to me. I like a lot that we can just click on the map, but I found out late in the game about that. So maybe other players will struggle a bit with that. In the rule book they talk about "Left" and "Right" in regards to the line of cards forming the route, but this is also a little awkward for the adaptation which relies mainly on the map. What about using the names of the cities like [Budweis to Linz] [Linz to Budweis] [Start a new route]? (start a new route should always be the last option as it's very uncommon). I think it would really help.
~~ BGA admin feedback on Dingo's Dreams requested by the developer during development on BGA studio ~~
Here are my remarks for this first review:
Actually you had already a number of these remarks in your TODO list
- the game box image should be 3D
- a slight border-radius to round the tile corners would be nice
- the play zone should be centered (it looks better than aligned left on big screens)
- in landscape mode, set the top block with the goal and the walkabout cards vertically on the right or left of the main zone so that everything is visible without scrolling (for portrait mode it's nice like it is now)
- the clickable zones should have arrows inside indicating the way the tile will slide in place to make it easier to understand what to do on the first game
- there should be a counter on the deck of walkabout cards
- there shoud be a tooltip on it indicating "Walkabout cards deck"
- it would be better if the pushed out tile always came back in the top left corner (especially because depending on the resolution the bottom of the play zone can not be visible)
- the walkabout phase happens really too fast
I think we need some animations so that players can follow what happens. For example: revealing the card on top of the deck, then sliding it to the revealed walkabout cards, then having some sort of "magical light" or whatever moving to the matching tile, zooming that tile out, flipping it then zooming it back to its normal size.
- It would be nice to put the text of the walkabout card in a div on top of the card (that way it would be translatable) to be closer to the look and feel of the physical cards
- in the player panels, icons with tooltips would be nicer than text to indicate the marks & hazards (hazards should be visible only if the option is activated)
- in the player panels, marks number could be indicated as X/Y with Y the number of marks, it would give a better idea of the progress
- you can remove your comment text zone and add it as a comment on your project on the manage page. It's the same idea and it's visible directly in the list of projects
- currently, the board of other players is not visible... and yes, it's not really needed, but the feeling I get is a feeling of playing alone... without being able to look at what my opponent does. I think the other player boards should be visible below the current player board (maybe not at the same size, but, I think they should be there to give an idea. You can look at the "Buttons" project that is in the same category to get an idea.
This game is really beautiful and feels really nice to play! Thanks for working on this!
~~ BGA admin feedback on Marco Polo in preparation to approve the game for moving to "beta" (about the black die, we were wrong
I have finished my first game of Marco Polo, and it went really well. I have some remarks, most of them about small visual improvements:
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- to make them stand out a little more over the board, I think there should be some shadow (and in some cases rounding to make them closer to the physical game) for the city cards, the city bonus markers and the outposts bonuses
- when zooming, the images quickly get blurry (board and cards). I have seen that there is a larger-size image in the img folder, so I'm not sure why it's not used?
- the blue highlighting is not always easy to spot on the board. It would be nice to use the same color than in the rules (a kind of magenta) and maybe even have a kind of dynamic "glowing" effect that would allow them to be spotted more easily
- it's useful when there are icons in the logs to have a 'title' attribute on them
- a little more padding in the tooltips and a shadow on the card/tile would make them nicer
- for the player board, it could be pretty to display the contracts over the two parchments background (it would also make it clear that there it's only possible to have two at the same time). I have attached a png of the parchments with transparent background if you want to try that.
- like for La Granja, it would be useful to have a button to remind the player about actions (player aid). I checked the game files and didn't find it. Did I miss something or should I ask it from Hans Im Gluck?
- the free space between the top and the board seems to be double the free space between the left side of the screen and the board. Maybe the free space at the top could be a little smaller ?
- in games where there is an optional action at the end of the turn that makes it necessary to pass, players often forget to finish their turn by clicking pass. One solution we have found about that is to make the "Pass button" blink after a few seconds to get the player's attention so that they remember.
- during the game, we encountered an SQL error Unexpected error: Error while processing SQL request: UPDATE player SET camel = camel - 2 WHERE player_id = 1550150 BIGINT UNSIGNED value is out of range in '(`ebd_marcopolo_97326732`.`player`.`camel` - 2)' so it seems that a check is missing somewhere to have a clear error message if the user doesn't have enough camels to do the action
- each time I bought a black die it rolled a 1. Of course it's possible, but maybe it's not rolled?
- the number of points is presented with laurels in the player board, in the player panel, and also at the usual spot on BGA with the star. That's a lot of redundancy, why not just in the usual spot, while changing the star for laurels?
- it's nice that clicking the cards allows to highlight the cities matching the objectives, but I was a little disturbed that it selects both cards at the same time. It took me a while to figure it out. Also, the display of an icon was not immediately clear to me. Maybe allow to select the cards independantly, and add some highlighting effect for the cities with a brightness filter in addition to the icon?
- during the optional phase, contracts are highlighted even if they cannot yet be fulfilled. It would be best to highlight contracts only if they can be fulfilled (since the highlight usually indicates what's possible)
- I had Rachid al Din Sinan as a character and found him so powerful, I was surprised that he didn't have to at least pay 2 camels to change the die values. Is that really like that? He can change the values of the dice all the time without paying anything?
- the round counter is not very visible and not very pretty, it could be more visible written simply "Round X/5" somewhere on the board (top left? or near the dagger?) with some white text-shadow effect
- it would be great if there could be a visual effect for rolling dice (the effect in RallymanGT for example is clear, quick and nice)
Very small remarks overall, it's a top notch adaptation! This game will be played quite a lot, especially with the expansions to add depth and replayability. Thanks a lot for this development!
The most important thing we request from reviewers is: please give your approval only when you really feel the game is ready. Do not give it to "speed up the process". Opening a game in beta if it's not ready is not a good thing as a lot of people will start playing it in an imperfect state (and may get penalties or broadcast a bad buzz about the implementation).
But of course, if for you everything is perfect please do give your approval! We do want to go to beta as soon as the proper quality is reached!