Board Game Arena

One other idea I had was to make an Arena variation that's one big turn-based Swiss tournament. That would avoid the commonly cited problem of top players not playing each other.

Another bad thing is that once you get the reward you can only get it once. For instance I got 1st place in all these games. In captain flip I got it early. And maintained it for a long time later on. But I would never be able to get the 30k xp that it deserves. I got the pocket cats reward really early but that did grant 30k. Also 10,000 isn’t the lowest. I got 6,000 for first place in caravan and dig up.


Captain flip 10k - 100,000+ players
Super mega lucky box 3k 100,000+ players
Pocket cats 30k 50,000+ players
Survive the island 10k 50,000+ players
Sobek 2p 15k - 27,000
Tic tac match 10k - 30,000 players

I’ve also seen my xp lower on numerous occasions and don’t believe it has anything to do with removed games.

The xp prize for some awards depends on the number of active players. If the number of players increases or decreases, they won't change an award that was already won, even if you qualify for the improved version, such as still being top elo.

Bottom line: Just plain ignore the XP numbers, pretend they're not there, and you'll be happier.

Ceaseless wrote: ↑01 September 2026, 02:14 XP isn't really worth anything, you get it for all sorts of random stuff and I'm not aware of it being connected to anything in particular besides how your XP game page orders your games. Though some of the orderings are strange. Elite league is a joke, getting master is worth far more than that.

Though I disagree with your assessment of consecutive win awards, that's just a matter of good luck and/or lots of weak pairing in honest cases. I get plenty of decent sized streaks without much trouble, but I can't claim it was from any real action on my part. It's just something that eventually played out over time because things aligned to give me such circumstances.

I agree with you, but that's my point. When I open BGA on the home page, it lists the all time XP leaders, so they're obviously trying to sell it as something. I've also seen many posts over the last months about how much XP is x worth, particularly in the tournament forum.

I feel like to legitimately get a 20 or 50 game win streak is definitely harder than making Elite League on Arena, at super lucky games it must be hard to get those win streaks full stop, and at games that aren't super lucky you've got to at least be good at the game to win 20 or 50 in a row even if you're getting good pairings.

FSKFSK wrote: ↑01 September 2026, 02:19 One other idea I had was to make an Arena variation that's one big turn-based Swiss tournament. That would avoid the commonly cited problem of top players not playing each other.

I imagine the perceived Arena problem varies from game to game. So eg. at Heat, Arena has these issues, #1 that players can't really vote the best way to play the game, it's currently set to 4 players (+1 Legend), the majority of players will tell you Heat is best at 6, but you can't in good conscience vote Arena to be 6 player as it will destroy the ability to find real-time games. 5 player is hotly debated, but even then the consensus view (and one I agree with) is that you will destroy real-time. Which then likely in part contributes to #2 that most the best players don't play Arena, they're all playing tournaments or private leagues.

No. Bottom line is that ,while many of you here in forums don't care about xp. Some of us do. We earn it by playing. Using our time. Some people collect butterfly's or board games, which most of the world could care less about, but those people would be upset and wondering what happened, if they wokeup one morning and found butterfly's or board games missing. Same with xp. It is collected. For some of us, it is a goal to keep us going at bga. To reach a certain ranking or xp amount. All we ( those of us that care ) want, is an explanation as to why xp loss happened. And it is not about games being removed. Happens way to often.

RazorOz wrote: ↑31 August 2026, 21:53

FrankJones wrote: ↑29 August 2026, 21:30 Both of the above replies give plausible explanations.

I still consider this a silly system considering there are more logical ways of awarding XP.

It's also the weighting of various achievements is ludicrous. Tournaments are capped at 300XP for winning, under valued like 100-fold, when Arena victories are awarding 60k.

Arena and top ELO achievements are worth so much more than everything else to the point of it being ludicrous. Tournaments are one thing, but things like Master rank ELO you get 500XP, you get like 1200 for making Elite in Arena at a game for the season, these are in no way in touch with the level of achievement. 20 and 50 consecutive win badges are insanely undervalued too, albeit in that case they'd need to clean the system as well, because most people getting those badges that I see are cheating the system, maybe it's not the same for all games, but in the games I see, most people are not earning them legitimately, friendly games should not count towards those badges, as it's way too open to abuse.

The problem is you expect XP to correspond to the difficulty of the achievement, whereas the site seems to treat it more as a prestige thing. Getting consecutive wins is difficult but it's more of a fun side thing. It's not like we look at the people who earned those trophies with admiration or anything. To illustrate this, in the games I play, I don't even know off the top of my head which ones of the top players have earned those badges. It's just not something I check and easily remember, because there are things that are more important.

Reaching top spots in Arena and ELO on the other hand is prestigious. I can tell you roughly who earned what in those metrics. And making it to Elite league is somewhat prestigious as well since it's the main competitive mode on this site. Tournaments can be prestigious but the system has no way to know which ones are considered prestigious by the players, so they settled on giving it a not too high amount of XP.

The possible explanation from before still doesn’t make sense because as stated above I won 15k for 1st place in sobek. Meaning there is at least 1 tier in between 10k & 30k. So the idea of a game falling 2 tiers in a very short period of time and also increasing back 2 tiers is extremely unlikely

yodamus wrote: ↑01 September 2026, 11:50 No. Bottom line is that ,while many of you here in forums don't care about xp. Some of us do. We earn it by playing. Using our time. Some people collect butterfly's or board games, which most of the world could care less about, but those people would be upset and wondering what happened, if they wokeup one morning and found butterfly's or board games missing. Same with xp. It is collected. For some of us, it is a goal to keep us going at bga. To reach a certain ranking or xp amount. All we ( those of us that care ) want, is an explanation as to why xp loss happened. And it is not about games being removed. Happens way to often.

Yeah. Some forum users can’t seem to wrap their head around this concept.

RazorOz wrote: ↑01 September 2026, 01:11 For example Arena seasons, particularly for games where the optimal player count isn't 2, have to bear in mind the ability to actually find games when voting, whereas tournaments don't operate under the same constraints.

Voters seems to be very biased against multiplayer in Arena. In my opinion it's a great competitive mode for many games, because of the added complexity of having more opponents to analyze, while at the same time making the results less luck based in my experience. Those games usually reward the players who put the most thought into everything, and an additional benefit is that even if you don't win the game, you can still gain points or at least not lose too much if you have a good ranking, as opposed to two players games where the result is a binary, regardless of how well you did in the game. So multiplayer seems to lead to a more precise ranking of skill.

Unfortunately other voters don't seem to agree, either because they don't think it's less luck based, or like you say they worry about games being harder to find, or taking longer to finish. They'd rather have a two players system that is maybe less precise, but allows them to put out a lot more games.

RazorOz wrote: ↑01 September 2026, 01:11 What's funny is tournaments are actually scalable up to 300XP, but that cap is so low that basically any tournament hits that cap immediately, so you will get an 8 player tournament award the same XP as a 500 player tournament. It should be much more scalable, and capped much, much higher, like I'm not talking hyperbole when I say it should be 100x, if you base it off the Arena XP, the cap should probably be like 30k.

I agree that it could be higher, but 30k for a tournament win seems crazy. Even if it's 512 players, that's not anywhere near in the same ballpark as winning Arena. For one, Arena is the competition that the site has declared is the most important (actually, it's the only one that is organized by the site per see), so it's normal that its XP gains would be way beyond winning any tournament. Secondly, tournaments are a lot more uncertain than Arena. Anyone who is relatively good at the game can win a 100+ players tournament, if they happen to get a good streak of wins. In order to win Arena however, there is no question that you have to be one of the top players of the game.

Another problem is that if tournaments earned so much, people could amass crazy amounts of XP just by winning lots of 100+ players tournaments, which would overshadow the earnings of those who won Arena. When you think about it, this may be why they decided to make the cap so low: putting it at 300, you ensure that the people who do great in tournaments have almost no chance of getting close to the amount of XP won by winning Arena. They wanted to maintain this hierarchy where winning Arena is always worth more than any other combination of things.

tbhp wrote: ↑01 September 2026, 13:01 The problem is you expect XP to correspond to the difficulty of the achievement, whereas the site seems to treat it more as a prestige thing. Getting consecutive wins is difficult but it's more of a fun side thing. It's not like we look at the people who earned those trophies with admiration or anything. To illustrate this, in the games I play, I don't even know off the top of my head which ones of the top players have earned those badges. It's just not something I check and easily remember, because there are things that are more important.

Reaching top spots in Arena and ELO on the other hand is prestigious. I can tell you roughly who earned what in those metrics. And making it to Elite league is somewhat prestigious as well since it's the main competitive mode on this site. Tournaments can be prestigious but the system has no way to know which ones are considered prestigious by the players, so they settled on giving it a not too high amount of XP.

Prestige should be linked to the difficulty of the achievement otherwise you devalue the whole thing, that's the entire point. They are devaluing the system with the choices they have made.

Consecutive wins is a red herring, I don't really care about consecutive wins either, but I don't see how anyone can argue the winning 20, 50 games in a row legitimately is easier than reaching Elite in Arena. But as I say those badges are being massively cheated anyway, so you'd have to sort that out first, but that does show in some sense that there are people who care about those badges if people are cheating to get them. In terms of actual player skill, the Master and Expert ranks are a better judge, but again those badges are massively undervalued.

I'm not really doubting that reaching top of Arena/ELO should be prestigious, but not to the extent it is weighted vs everything else in the XP system. Reaching Elite at a game is trivially easy over the course of an Arena season, you don't even really have to be good at the game in question, you just have to play it enough. It wouldn't be hard to work out what a prestigious tournament is at all, in fact the way it already works would work, it just needs a much higher cap. Ie. The more players, and the more higher ranked players in the tournament the more prestigious it is, and the more XP it would award, that's already how it works, just it's capped ludicrously low at 300XP, so in effect every tournament awards the same.

BGA should want to encourage a thriving tournament scene, and for people who do care about XP system it does matter to some people, so while I get the point some making of who cares/why does it matter, my feeling is more players would play tournaments if the XP was higher, which would be a good thing.