Board Game Arena

FrankJones wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 00:02 The best way to handle the hummingbirds (or similar birds) would be to have the active player's clock paused while the other player chooses the food, then resume the clock when the active player's sequence resumes. From this thread, I assume that is not how it is done?

The issue that I think OP brought up, is that each of the other players got a full "turn" worth of time when your clock was paused and they had to choose food, even though they weren't actually getting a new "game turn". So one turn of yours could end up taking as long as several players' full turns.

Cos- wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 03:03

FrankJones wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 00:02 The best way to handle the hummingbirds (or similar birds) would be to have the active player's clock paused while the other player chooses the food, then resume the clock when the active player's sequence resumes. From this thread, I assume that is not how it is done?

The issue that I think OP brought up, is that each of the other players got a full "turn" worth of time when your clock was paused and they had to choose food, even though they weren't actually getting a new "game turn". So one turn of yours could end up taking as long as several players' full turns.

Well, yeah, I agree that makes no sense.

Suppose you are playing turn-based, and say you choose 1 turn per day because you can only log in once per day. Suppose a 4-player game.

You make your move and log out, now you got 1 day for your next move.
Player #2 immediately makes a move and you get the chance to react.
Next day, you log in, react... but don't get 1 more day because it was not your "game turn". You log out for the day, 0 time left.
Player #3 immediately makes a move and you get the chance to react.
Next day, you log in, react... but don't get 1 more day because it was not your "game turn". You log out for the day, 1 day overtime.
Player #4 immediately makes a move and you get the chance to react.
Next day, you log in, react... but don't get 1 more day because it was not your "game turn". You log out for the day, 2 days overtime.

I think it makes sense to increase the timer every time the "BGA turn" switches to you. You could argue that turn-based and real-time should work differently, but I don't think that's a realistic expectation for BGA. Also, if the timer doesn't increase, that could be a tactic in some games for making the opponent run out of time, by forcing them to react (even if it's just to decline an action) again and again.

Cos- wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 02:52 I don't agree with some of these points.

"Timers per game turn are much more consistent"

Timers per "game turn" would be much less consistent, and more unpredictable. Different games would define what counts as a "turn" in different ways, and it wouldn't always be obvious to someone who plays different games - they'd get surprised.

I think you and I are talking about different things. You are talking about consistency between different games across BGA. I am talking about consistency between different games of Wingspan. If certain cards or game actions (within Wingspan) give you a lot more time than others, some games (of Wingspan) can take a lot longer than others. That's the inconsistency that I am talking about.

Cos- wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 02:52 "Timers per game turn are not affected by developer choices about game implementation"

As I described above, it's the opposite: Developer choices would make a much bigger difference in how game timers work. Currently, they have very little choice, but if BGA tried to make it possible to do it by some nebulous concept like "game turn" then the developers would be much more responsible for figuring out what that means, and there would be a lot more possible variations.

Once again, I think this boils down to whether we're talking about different games or different games of Wingspan. I'm talking about the latter (this is a Wingspan forum after all). What I mean, very specifically is things like this:
A developer chose that when Ruby Throated Hummingbird is activated, each player gets an additional turn worth of time.
But not when, say, Black Tern is activated.
Why not? The extra thinking you might need when drawing an extra card and discarding is presumably at least as much as when gaining an extra food (especially if you're a newer player and have to read the card, etc.)
This is a developer choice that affects timers.

I don't think "Game Turn" is a nebulous concept, I think it's very concrete.

I suspect the only tricky thing is dealing with timers when another player must make a choice during your turn. There aren't too many birds where this happens, but I guess Common Loon is another one, and probably has the same property of giving both you and your opponent a full extra turn worth of time in the middle of a (game) turn (I'll try to remember to watch next time someone plays this bird in a game).
But why a full turn worth of time? Why not something smaller? Or make this a game setting?
This is a developer choice.

Cos- wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 02:52 "It's much easier to have a sense of how long the games will take in advance."

Not really. It's just as predictable now with the current system. Many games have a very variable number of "game turns" anyway, so there's no way in advance to know how many turns will happen in a game. Even if there were, you can't know in advance how complex turns (either BGA turns or game turns) will be, so you don't know whether most of the moves will be made quickly or whether a lot of times people will use most of their available time. But on the whole, it averages out well enough over many tables of the same game with the same number of players, that BGA's estimates are as okay as they can be. Trying to institute a "game turn" time system would probably make it harder for a person to estimate, but I doubt it would change the quality of BGA's estimates.

Again, I am just discussing Wingspan here, but I think you are thinking more about average, and I am thinking more about maximum. You may think BGA has good estimates of the average time for a game - I am not arguing that point.
But in a real-time game, I think maximum time is just as important (or maybe more) to estimate than average. If I have a 30-minute window of time before I need to leave, and a game says it takes on average 25 minutes, do I have enough time to play it? If my opponent ends up taking 25 minutes on their own, I might have to forfeit because I need to leave (a bad game experience for everyone). Knowing whether this will (or may) happen is useful information.

FrankJones wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 00:02 It is possible that social birds such as hummingbirds reset the clock.

But it is definitely not true that each action resets the clock. I just had a game where I had 4 brown power birds in the grassland, so each turn, I was laying 4 eggs and then activating each brown power. My clock never reset at any point during my turn.

The best way to handle the hummingbirds (or similar birds) would be to have the active player's clock paused while the other player chooses the food, then resume the clock when the active player's sequence resumes. From this thread, I assume that is not how it is done?

Yes, this definitely doesn't happen with most birds. I have only observed it happening with humming birds so far, but I suspect it happens with any bird where the opponent has to make a choice on your turn. There aren't too many of these, but there are some others, for example Common Loon. I am trying to keep an eye out to confirm, but haven't had a good opportunity to check yet.

Jellby wrote: ↑20 March 2025, 09:33 Suppose you are playing turn-based, and say you choose 1 turn per day because you can only log in once per day. Suppose a 4-player game.

You make your move and log out, now you got 1 day for your next move.
Player #2 immediately makes a move and you get the chance to react.
Next day, you log in, react... but don't get 1 more day because it was not your "game turn". You log out for the day, 0 time left.
Player #3 immediately makes a move and you get the change to react.
Next day, you log in, react... but don't get 1 more day because it was not your "game turn". You log out for the day, 1 day overtime.
Player #4 immediately makes a move and you get the change to react.
Next day, you log in, react... but don't get 1 more day because it was not your "game turn". You log out for the day, 2 days overtime.

I think it makes sense to increase the timer every time the "BGA turn" switches to you. You could argue that turn-based and real-time should work differently, but I don't think that's a realistic expectation for BGA. Also, if the timer doesn't increase, that could be a tactic in some games for making the opponent run out of time, by forcing them to react (even if it's just to decline an action) again and again.

This is a great point. I don't have any response to this. I probably just need to give up thinking about this issue because of this point alone. I do think that real-time and turn-based games should probably be handled differently, but concede that might be unrealistic.

I feel that changing this would cause more trouble than it would solve. As has been deftly pointed out, it's simply not an option in turn based games where a player may choose a time setting because they know they can't, for instance, take more than one turn a day.

In speed games, what if you have to go to the bathroom? You take your turn and go, expecting you'll get at least the time you get plus a little bit from the other people taking their turns. Only you return to find you timed out because there was a hummingbird activated and you didn't get any extra time. And, given the fact that some use the clock as a way to get a cheap victory, you can't count on people being reasonable.

All in all, I think we just need to accept that birds like the hummingbirds were not designed with online play in mind and are a hassle. And, in reality, they're far less of a hassle in speed games where, presumably, everyone is there and engaged the whole time and likely rarely even needing the extra time. In turn based games, where people can literally be asleep when it's their turn to draw food from the feeder, they can stretch a game out a lot.