Board Game Arena

I am assuming preludes (and all other current arena settings. And yes, without them the game will go on longer

I just won my first Arena game, and I dropped AI Central on generation 4.

I played AI in gen 3 today and lost

kristofferkhorst wrote: ↑28 May 2025, 20:13 I just won my first Arena game, and I dropped AI Central on generation 4.

Congrats! Time to play a lot more Arena, see if your opinion of it (and other cards) change

Some food for thought. Below I'm posting some data collected among steam players by anthracite. The data is sorted by % wins / option giving us some idea which cards are performing best when drawn regardless of the gamestate. We can see that AI is actually outranked by 3 (!!) other science card draw cards (mars u, restricted and olympus). At the same time when actually played AI has a high 80% winratio among >1900 elo players. Conclusion is that AI is a strong card when you manage to get it going in reasonably good conditions, but at the same time is very unflexible. At the same time Mars U has almost the same wr (80 v 79) while being a lot more flexible.

Thank you for posting that chart.
Just for clarification, what exactly does "% win rate / option" mean?

charliec247 wrote: ↑27 May 2025, 14:32

Kulikk wrote: ↑27 May 2025, 13:37 It's not even the best science draw card

I'm curious what the best science draw card is, in your opinion.

MarsU is generally better than AI. AI can be great but also is very highly overrated, especially by newer players who don't understand rush/tempo well (because it is strong against them and against opponents who also don't understand rush strats). AI is a great card in general but there are a lot of cards that are really strong like GIA, deimos, NRA, EC, insects, viral, eco zone, AGT, MarsU, etc that are better in many circumstances. I am assuming this is about base + prelude

FrankJones wrote: ↑30 May 2025, 17:43 Thank you for posting that chart.
Just for clarification, what exactly does "% win rate / option" mean?

How I understand it:

General win rate is how often the player won when they played that card
%win rate/option is how often the player won when they saw that card (draft etc.)

That's part of why some cards (like AGT) have a big difference between the 2. If you play AGT you are pretty likely to win, but you aren't winning just because you see AGT in a draft

I think a lot of people consider %win rate/option a better indicator of how strong a card really is (Eco/Viral/Insects/RO/Kelp)

That makes sense. Thank for both for the clarification.

Hey, no argument from me regarding Mars University. I once told my friend that EC and MU were my two favorite cards, but I thought I was being weird by picking Mars U.

And overall, that chart makes a lot of sense. Those are all tremendous cards that have the high win rates.

I would also argue that AI central needs more support than just the 3 science tags and energy production. Without discounts, AI central can result in a person having a lot of great cards and zero money, at the mercy of a person doing a rush Terraform.

FrankJones wrote: ↑30 May 2025, 20:21 That makes sense. Thank for both for the clarification.

Hey, no argument from me regarding Mars University. I once told my friend that EC and MU were my two favorite cards, but I thought I was being weird by picking Mars U.

And overall, that chart makes a lot of sense. Those are all tremendous cards that have the high win rates.

I would also argue that AI central needs more support than just the 3 science tags and energy production. Without discounts, AI central can result in a person having a lot of great cards and zero money, at the mercy of a person doing a rush Terraform.

Precisely, you need economy to develop the cards you have drawn