Although I'm a Premium member, and have been playing on BGA for nearly 5 years, I rarely initiate new games. The interface has changed so many times, I now find it cumbersome, confusing and frustrating. I have friends from [another boardgame platform*] that refuse to play on BGA for the same reasons. The biggest problem I see is the unintuitive placement of "realtime" vs. "turn based" outside the game options selection menu. What this means is that you can go through all the effort of setting up a game, then post it, make the invites and suddenly realize you're in the wrong time frame. Now you get to start over, your friends try to join a game that no longer exists, confuse the new invite with the old one, etc... It's frustrating enough to simply not bother.
I guess if I were smarter, I'd learn to check the play time specification first before doing anything else, but for some reason it's just not something I think of doing when I see a game and spontaneously decide to initiate an invite. Rather it's like: hey, I haven't played that one in awhile, let's send and invite to such and such, who would probably like to play it again to. I don't think: hey (all of the above), but first let me check and see which timeframe my BGA browser happens to be in at the moment.
I'd think just adding a plain and obvious selection box to the game options menu that appears on the left during the game creation would solve the problem. I'd make it the first option you select. Alternatively, you could add a dialogue box prompt, or something similar, to confirm the game type that's being created before the game is posted, one that *also* allows you to change the format without starting over entirely.
*Post edited by Moderators to conform to our TOS
I guess if I were smarter, I'd learn to check the play time specification first before doing anything else, but for some reason it's just not something I think of doing when I see a game and spontaneously decide to initiate an invite. Rather it's like: hey, I haven't played that one in awhile, let's send and invite to such and such, who would probably like to play it again to. I don't think: hey (all of the above), but first let me check and see which timeframe my BGA browser happens to be in at the moment.
I'd think just adding a plain and obvious selection box to the game options menu that appears on the left during the game creation would solve the problem. I'd make it the first option you select. Alternatively, you could add a dialogue box prompt, or something similar, to confirm the game type that's being created before the game is posted, one that *also* allows you to change the format without starting over entirely.
*Post edited by Moderators to conform to our TOS
