Improvements to the User Interface

[torvaldur_makan]

The implementation of Agricola is amazing and with the additional cards coming the replayability is increasing exponentially. Personally, I see myself playing it on BGA for years to come.

There are, however, some fundamental issues with the user interface.



Background
Agricola is a game that takes up a lot of screen space. You need to see the main board, all players' farms, their played cards and their resources. At the moment it is very difficult to see all this at the same time. The top suggestion for improvements to Agricola is related to this.

To choose which action you take you need to predict which actions your opponents' actions. And to do this you need to know which options they can take. A few examples:

I have built a room but I want to know if any of my opponents are able to use the "Wish for Children" action space. I then need to check:

• How many rooms do they have?
• How many people do they have?
• Do they have any cards that allow them to use the space without additional rooms?
• Do they have any actions left this round?
• Do I act before them?

I want to Fence, can any of my opponents do this? I then need to check

• Do they have any wood?
• Do they have any cards that allow them to fence cheaper or with different resources?
• Do they have any available fence pieces?
• Do their farm layout allow them to fence?
• Do they have any actions left this round?
• Do I act before them?

The problem
All of this is currently quite difficult to figure out with the current user interface. The major issues are:

1. Player resource panel is not located close to that players' farm, meaning you have to ALWAYS have to piece together which player panel belongs to which farm.
2. Screen space is not optimized to fit all information on one screen. This often leads to having to scroll up and down endlessly to piece together the information needed as described above. Various elements are scaled poorly so that even with bigger monitors and browser zooming it is difficult to make everything fit while still being able to read text and numbers.
3. Play order is not obvious from where the farms are located on the screen and the farms move around as more cards are played. There is no number indicating a player's position.

Proposed solutions
While there are certainly several solutions to the issues described I propose the following:

1. Move the players' resource panel to their farm. This has been suggested before but was instantly rejected. I have created a new suggestion.
2. Scale down the farm size, this is bigger than it needs to be. Or add a size slider much like the one available for card size.
3. Ensure that farms aren't moving around as more cards are played. Optionally add a play order number.
4. Allow hiding elements that you don't need as frequently, such as Configuration Panel and Play History

I have created a demonstrator that you can try out yourself by installing a user script. It moves the resource panel to the farms and it scales down the size of the farms slightly. There are a few bugs (like remaining people don't show in the panel but you can easily see this by looking at their farm). It can be improved and optimized much more but this demo is only a few lines of code.

userscript_bga_agricola_large.jpg (213.17 KiB) Viewed 1352 times

Anyone else agree with me? Do you see any other solutions?

[jooool]

This would be greatly appreciated for me as well, to be able to scale down the size of the farms and also see the resources next to the corresponding players farm.
*upvote*

[RicardoRix]

The player panels and log are always on the right, for all games.

Doesn't mean you can't have 2 separate player panels and keep the one as displayed in the image, but you need to add the standard panels on the right.

[Lumin_S]

I zoom out my web browser to 67% and have all players' boards on the right with my hand of cards under the main board. This works well for me even when players play 7+ cards expanding to a 2nd row of them. I feel no need for any extra change to the implementation.

[torvaldur_makan]

The player panels and log are always on the right, for all games.

Doesn't mean you can't have 2 separate player panels and keep the one as displayed in the image, but you need to add the standard panels on the right.

Certainty! And is probably how such change would be implemented to keep consistency between games. That way the farm resource panel could be made even more condensed. I tried copying the panel at first but that caused issues with animations and such, which is why I moved it instead. Of course, this wouldn't be an issue with a native implementation.

[Dunderkulan]

This summarizes my feelings about the Agricola implementation here on BGA very well. The potential is huge, but the disorganized GUI gives me a headache every time it's my turn in a match. Due to this i've actually refrained from playing more Agricola matches here and instead gone back to playing it on Boiteajeux for the time being.

[torvaldur_makan]

With today's update most of these options are added. Huge improvement!!! Props to the developers, great work!

The only minor improvements I would want are indications on the farm who's Starting Player and who's turn it is currently.

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