Board Game Arena

Last March, I started an ongoing series of tournaments for the game, Spite & Malice. A new tournament starts every 5 days. On average, 173 people were registering for these tournaments before this Not Better, Not Faster, Not Friendly release was implemented.

Today, the first of my tournaments partially impacted by the no more invites feature started with only 108 participants, a 37% reduction.

I'm very disappointed that this release was deployed with so many known deficiencies. I might be less critical if BGA was more transparent about what drove their decision to impair and alienate their tournament hosts; the very people that were helping drive the success of this platform.

The only nice change I saw, was the Tournament names included in: https://boardgamearena.com/gameinprogress
down at the TOURNAMENT Tables (xx) section. Tournament names looked so great!!

But on FEB/22 they just returned to the old not usable text stack of options 99% meningless.
At the avalanche of messages complaining for the changes I hope not only THAT change (sorry for -it was really good-) has been cancelled.

Now I am scared for the next time I want to open a Tournament. INVITE has been laid off !!?? Guac!

I get in to review.

It is actually far harder to select a Tournament. Tried to open a new one, but coldn't find # of players advancing on each match. Was easy. Now it is not easy.

The idea of the Tournaments (filtered list) Right "detailsColumn" is good. But contents -Specifically for Heat- have a bad choice of info.
The Tournament page should have all the details. It is terrible, with information missing that you can only see in the preview.

All Designed as a marketing page, with lots of space and BLUFF icons; hiding the information we care about in a little blue bottom bar.
NIce try. Missed it. Was better before.

In the new pages it is harder to find out the name of the game. There is only a small image of the box in the right-bottom corner. I think the name of the game is the most important information I need to register to a tournament. The name of the tournament is useless. Could you please include the name of the game e make it more visibile? Thank you.

BoosPeople wrote: ↑24 February 2026, 01:57 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.

Yeah, I clarified in my post that it is the big boxes that I'm opposed to. Of course it's good if there's still some, less obtrusive, way to access the log.

Am I the only one not being able to push tournaments with thumbnails anymore? When I upload a thumbnail, and then try to publish the tournament, I get a red message on screen: "Htt Error: 500", I am using Edge on Laptop.

You guys are crazy to release this module already.
- thumbnails not working
- annoying tournament recommendation very prominent on top of the list giving ridiculous suggestions
- tournament end time predictions not working (look at any tournament with at least one round-robin stage)
- scoreboard not working
- invites gone
I refuse to believe that this was not brought up during testing. At least two of the above, I gave as feedback.

Two of my favorite tournament organizers have the exact same issue, as repeated here in this thread hundreds of times "Why cant we invite players via a link anymore? Thats a needed feature for those under 100 ELO."

I am also a tournament organizer, and if I can't invite players to my tournament, and there is also a cap on sending private messages, I'm basically not able to have any ability to get enough players for a decent tournament.

Acho muito interessante a ideia da comunidade participar e ser bem recebida pelo BoardGameArena, primeiramente meus parabéns, gostaria tb de pedir pra adicionar link para compra do jogo regionalizado, pois seria bem legal eu jogar um jogo gostar e clicar para comprar sendo direcionado para uma revenda no Brasil. Creio q é valido para todos.

Just here to second the missing "invite" button. That's a real loss.

Today I created the 65th railroad ink tournament. For the first time I created a private one since I read beforehand that the invitation of friends or other players has been removed from the public version. Then I had to copy the link and select 25 profiles of players that usually join these tournaments and send the link one by one: it took me 25 times more than the previous UI. Also newbies cannot join this tournament as in the past and I have to continue sending invitations until the tournament gets filled, if this will happen.
It is also not possible to load a trophy pic. The same pic I used in the previous 64 tournaments.

I like what yzemaze wrote: there are so many valid open bugs that could have been implemented instead of this release which clearly is not better, much slower and very unfriendly.

One of the reason I like to create tournaments is the extremely poor quality of the arena: since years players ask to have multiple arenas for the same game with different settings. Example in railroad ink, multiplayers vs always the lame 2p, lake or river expansions etc.
instead of improving the arena mode you have damaged the tournament one!

Now you wanted to get a feedback and you got 190 pretty clear feedbacks. I guess now we want a reaction from you bga and a quick fix of the points that clearly are a failure in this new release.

Thanks