Board Game Arena

spaceman256 wrote: ↑19 February 2026, 18:32 I would be awesome if we could set different game options for different stages of the tournament. For example, i'm imagining a Heat tournament where the beginning stages are single races, and then the final stage is a 4-race championship game. Maybe i missed it but it looks like this is still not possible, you can only set the entire tournament to be single races or championships, regardless of the format.

This would be amazing!

EnlightenedThing wrote: ↑23 February 2026, 06:52 Tournaments should be realtime. Not turn based ! its really frustrating to play competitive and wait hours and hours for a single move of your opponent ....geez who agrees?

You are wrong, games are the place where you have to think, and not press the buttons at speed.

EnlightenedThing wrote: ↑23 February 2026, 06:52 Tournaments should be realtime. Not turn based ! its really frustrating to play competitive and wait hours and hours for a single move of your opponent ....geez who agrees?

Strong disagree.

But you know you can filter the tournaments to just find real-time, right?

It's nice that you're investing in improving the site UX and functionality. I hope you take the opportunity while you're at it, to keep iterating this so it gets even better. Here's my feedback, focusing on the UX side of things:

Please remove the reserved spot for "Recommended for you" in tournament search results. It is not useful. When I'm searching and filtering for something I want to see only that thing! You don't make money for showing a particular sponsored search result on top like Google, right? So there is no reason for it.

The Tournament Status box needs a revision.
- It should not require drag-drop vertical scrolling. It should extend vertically so that all the content fits.
- It should not extend horizontally off the screen unless absolutely necessary. I could understand it when showing Overview, where it shows the rounds of the tournament extending horizontally. But why does it do that when showing Registered Participants? This is just a 1-dimensional list! Have it adapt to the available horizontal size instead. It is madness that this is shown as a kind of table which is longer to scroll horizontally than vertically.

When opening a tournament page, different information has different importance to the user depending on whether
- this is a tournament I'm hosting or not
- a tournament I'm registered for or not
- a tournament in progress or not

For example if it's a future tournament I'm not registered to, I'm probably here to check if it's something I would be interested in playing. So the game rules, tournament rules, and planning, would be the most important.

If I'm registered and it's in progress, the standings may be the most important information ("Tournament State"). Maybe seeing at a glance when the next match is expected to start as well? Below that, a reminder of the game rules and tournament rules in case I've forgot.

What is never the most important to me are:
- Latest Activity -- Before a tournament has started, this is a list of random users who have signed up. When it is in progress, it is a list of arbitrary matches that have recently finished. If I want to see that I just look in the standings. This could be only a popup link and not a huge box.
- Host -- it's nice that this info/link exists now just in case, but is it ever one of the the most important things for any user so it should be close to the top? Move this to the bottom instead. Or, maybe this information would fit on the very large heading as a little link?
- Announcement is typically a huge box with nothing important in it. Maybe it can be important? Maybe the existence of the box could depend on whether there is an announcement?

With these three always on top, I have to scroll very far on mobile to get to any of the relevant information. Every time.

So even if you don't make the order and prominence of information depend on the state of the tournament, at least please remove or deemphasize Latest Activity, Host, and Announcement. EDIT: Remove them as big boxes that take up space you need to scroll past every time. It's good that the information can be accessed from somewhere.

Rwain wrote: ↑21 February 2026, 22:15

Could you explain to us what are the collateral issues going on with the invite system ? Maybe it could help us understand why it disappeared, and why we are losing such an essential tool for our tournaments.
The only misuse I can think of is unsollicited players complaining about getting invite notifications. If so, deleting the invite system feels like using a hammer to kill a fly. I receive tournaments invitation almost daily. I join when it seems interesting, I ignore when not. Not a big deal. Is there something else ? Another collateral damage ?
If not, maybe could you just had an option in our player profile to allow tournaments'invitation ? Or to allow it only for friends... or for players from our groups...
Or maybe could you restrict the possibility to invite only friends or groups...
I don't know, but it could be very nice to have it back, so that many tournaments'hosts could keep up hosting...

As someone who's quite active in hosting tournaments, one of the biggest issues I faced with the old version was having to check if invited players had actually seen my invitation. I frequently received messages like, "Oh thanks for the invitation, I didn't see it, I'm joining now."

Relatedly, the lack of an option to reject an invitation was also a problem, that is, both for the host and the player. I never knew if someone wasn't joining because they hadn't seen the notification or if they simply weren't interested.

It would have been great if the new version provided a solution to these issues. Instead, we got the total removal of the invite feature. I believe the "collateral issues" that have been rightly questioned by users are directly linked to the flaws in the old invitation system. Rather than addressing the lack of a "reject" button or improving notification visibility, removing the feature entirely feels like a shortcut that ignores the actual needs of tournament hosts.

Instead of discarding the invitation feature, it should have been made more central to the tournament setup. Ideally, there should be an option to allow invited players to register first, giving them a priority window before the tournament opens to the general public. This would actually solve the coordination problems we face as hosts, rather than just stripping away a vital tool. Removing it feels like a step backward for anyone serious about organizing high-quality tournaments.

/EDIT-CORRECTION: I exaggerated, sorry. There is still the "invite by link" option, so it's wrong to talk about "total removal of the invite feature".

The loss of the ability to invite players to tournaments is a real problem, as many others have said. Please could you address this?

It would really help if someone from bga would spend at least a few hours if not a day on this subject in forums so that we can have some conversation. In real time. Not once every 3 days. Left everyone over the weekend in the dark to stew over the epic failure of this update. Now you have loads of angry customers that feel ignored. Left out..any reply from bga has just caused more anger as is was basically. This is how is going to be. Too bad we wrecked the tourney scene. We are not going back. Worse thing you could ever say. Your not listening except with your ears. In one. Out the other. Please start listening with more than your ears. Use your brain. Realize you have messed up. Fix it

I've seen empires collapse for much less. As a UX/UI developer, I can honestly say I'd be fired for something like that, with so much backlash.

Since you still have to fix this giant mess, maybe you should add some useful tournament options like:
- Double elimination tournaments
- Best of 3/5/7
- Rematch for ties in elimination tournaments

Yeah, since this stuff needs to be redone in the meantime.

There are a lot of things I like about the update! Namely, being able to find the tourneys I am in quite easily. However, I miss being able to see the tournament at a glance with all the brackets. E.g. I am in a 2p agricola tourney right now and it is impossible to see the whole thing in once glance. I do like seeing my steps clearly but it was nice to see how the other players were doing as well. The whole use the arrows feature does not work well at all.

ErikLevin wrote: ↑23 February 2026, 11:52 What is never the most important to me are:
...
- Announcement is typically a huge box with nothing important in it. Maybe it can be important? Maybe the existence of the box could depend on whether there is an announcement?

I never valued the announcement section before either, but I recently saw another tournament organizer using it effectively to encourage tournament participants to go to specific bug/enhancement reports and request their support for resolving the important defects in this poorly conceived release. I plan on following their lead, more out of frustration than with a sincere expectation that it will do any good. I am so disheartened after spending many hours providing feedback while testing this release only to see it going into production with important issues intentionally unresolved.

For those organizers that do have an announcements, I think those announcement should still be prominently displayed near the top, but an empty announcement block is a waste of everybody's time and should be suppressed.

As a tournament organizer I sometimes use the recent activity log to find out when specific participants registered or deregistered; typically while looking into an issue they've contacted me about. So, I hate to see it eliminated, but agree that it does not merit being placed near the top of the page.