Higher resolution

[Jest Phulin]

And, this is a direct violation of copyright laws. BGA cannot legally just scan in any graphics since they are going to be redistributed. If the owner of the copyright has provided the files for distribution BGA cannot modify or replace them.

So copying a whole game, adapting it to digital format and making it fully playable for free is all completely legal - as long as you use lower quality images, but it suddenly becomes illegal if you use better quality images?

No. Copying a whole game, adapting it to digital format and making it fully playable online is a violation of copyright laws.
BGA has licenses to develop and allow play on each game on the site. This is the main reason certain popular games (and even expansions to games where the base is available) are not on BGA -- they don't have the license to do it. But, with those licenses, there are often limitations. Some are more obvious to the user, such as the restriction of only premium members being allowed to create tables. Other restrictions are not so obvious, such as using only the files provided by the copyright owner. Scanning in the graphics of a physical copy is a violation, unless the owner has given explicit permission in its license to BGA.

[shadowphiar]

I believe it is currently programmed to download only at the game load screen. But even still, sending larger graphics files only once still is sending larger graphics files. Larger files equals greater bandwidth for images. Greater bandwidth for images equals less bandwidth available for game move information.

I think there's at least some hope - the graphics files are static and will respond well to caching. They can be served by a separate machine instance, potentially even a third-party CDN. I realise that none of this comes for free, I'm just saying that serving bigger images doesn't necessarily have to be a direct bottleneck on actual game moves.

[shadowphiar]

Will they be uplifted someday? We certainly would like to improve the look and feel for some of the most popular games.

What's stopping you?

I think you underestimate the scope of the task - there are over 170 games here and I'm sure that the admins are quite busy just keeping the service running at the moment!

Scanning game pieces to create new graphics files would be quite a difficult task. If you change the size of any object (or even just its position in a composite image) there would have to be a lot of corresponding changes to make sure everything still lines up properly in play, and a lot of testing to make everything is right. BGA might not even have copies of all the games to scan, because many were developed by third parties.

What I hope might be possible, in some cases, would be if the developer originally made a lossless-quality version of their images, that was downsampled or compressed for distribution. i.e. the original file would be very big, and heavily jpg compressed to make the download size reasonable. But many of these games date back several years, and the file size that's acceptable for a web page has grown as people's internet bandwidth has improved. It may be possible, then, to use a higher quality version of the same images, which wouldn't require so many other changes to match and so would be improvement for much less effort.

But that relies on those files existing in the first place, and having been kept. And of course in a lot of cases BGA don't have the files anyway andthis is something for the individual game developers to deal with.

[shadowphiar]

By the way, if any developers do decide to update their game graphics as a result of this discussion, can I heartily recommend creating double or even triple resolution graphics for people using hi-definition screens. Sure, not many users necessarily are playing on a 5K iMac or retina Mac Book Pro -
but an iPad isn't out of the question (and it's worth testing that all your interactions work properly on a touchscreen, as well). Without wishing to blow one's own trumpet, I did this for the Ponte del Diavolo pieces and you really can tell the difference.

[Idsky]

While individual devs can improve it per game as mentioned in this thread, are there any plans to support higher resolution versions of the game box or game icon? I mean for *mobile* app stores, a 1024px icon is required (which can be downsized as appropriate for viewing device) and here it's 50px.

I totally agree that the graphics in almost all BGA games I've played are fuzzy and low-res and it makes me sad because the real board games are beautiful to look at.

An easy way to upgrade a game that uses a sprite sheet is to use one background-size line in the CSS to scale down the new HD sprite sheet image to the original size -- that way, everything else stays exactly the same! You can have multiple files, add media queries and dont preload, but one file if optimised works well, and even users with non-'retina' screens can zoom in to see all the nice detail.

Between phones with resolutions like 458PPI and players with big monitors, I expect most players are currently looking at up-scaled fuzzy graphics. I play zoomed in because playing in one corner of my monitor is awkward. Cached HD well-optimised jpegs really don't take that much space for most games, there's not much reason to be looking at extremely blurry still icons when most people are watching HD videos on their devices.

I'd like to see HD graphics at least mentioned in the docs and encouraged.

[Grateful to the Dead]

Unfortunately, I find Race for the Galaxy simply unplayable on this site, for this reason. I am relatively new at the game, and I simply can't parse the icons at the left margin of each card - therefore I can't make good decisions. So disappointing, since I decided to spring for the premium membership on the basis of other games, but would really also love to play RftG as many of my friends do. I'm 57 with subpar vision, but the resolution won't yield the necessary information for me even when greatly magnified on my screen.