Board Game Arena

A suggestion. There are several games--Amyitis, Caylus, and Spyrium--that tend to be very slow to play in turn-based mode, especially with 3, 4, or 5 players, because they involve a lot of small moves and the end of a player's turn is marked by passing, which is an extra move. In the case of a 5-player game this means that 5 extra turns are added EVERY round, just to hit the "pass" button!

I would suggest that in turn-based mode, if a player has no legal move, the computer should automatically "pass" them and move on to the next player. It could just say "[XXX] has no legal move and must pass." -- It is very annoying to log on to a bunch of games to discover that actually I have no legal move, and it really slows things down.

I realize that some players may for whatever reason like to do the passing manually; so I think that there should be an optional "Automatic pass when there is no legal move?" button when a game is created, to give them the opportunity to choose otherwise.

Amyitis in particular would really play faster if forced passes were automated--it is very frequent that you neither have money nor camels at the end of a turn.

Isn't easy to implement it because some games you can pass just for strategy -example: in Keyflower-

I am not suggesting it be a feature of games where you can recommence playing after passing, such as Keyflower. It would also not be suitable for games with hidden information such as Race for the Galaxy--even if I have nothing in my hand that I can develop or settle, I do not want my opponents to be given a hint about what is in my hand. Automated passing should only be implemented for games where it makes sense. All three games I mentioned--which are open-information games where passing is the final action of one's turn--would benefit from automatic passing when a player has no available move.

I know a reasonable solution on Caylus, but it could be a pain to implement, plus I don't know if they'll make changes to older games. (I also don't know if they'll make turn-based work differently, cause all the turn-based are just the real-time plopped into a slow setting.)

But what about a "pass on next move" kind of option? That is, I just placed my last worker and of course I have to pass on my next move, so I can select that option and it passes for me.

By pure coincidence I just got done doing that wasted passing move on Caylus. I'm one of those people who sort of likes to do things for myself, but that is probably a case where I'd do the auto pass.

Yeah--it just really slows those games down badly... especially Amyitis, which already has a very slow mechanism for turn end (everyone must pass, then three actions are required from different players to resolve the temple procession--add a cube, make 1 choice in the 1st temple, make 1 choice in the 3rd temple). The end of a round in Amyitis thus involves often 4-7 turns of doing very little, including multiple passes.

That's a bit of a shame. I inherited Amyitis from someone but it has a bunch of missing parts and I don't even know if I like it and whether to bother with getting parts. I was going to learn it on here some day so I could play it and see what I think.

I think it's a terrific game and I wish I had a copy--it doesn't seem to be available anymore in North America. But it's one of those "lots of tiny, crucial moves" games--each move is small and needs to be quite exactly timed and thought-through, since there is no hidden information (which is what makes it, Spyrium and Caylus very similar in flavour aside from the common publisher). It's not like e.g. Troyes where typically a lot will happen between turns (since each player can scoop up up to 3 dice).

Really the option should be "automatically play moves when there is only one legal move." Only when that can be determined without hidden information of course.

Automatic passing in Caylus should be easy to implement and would really speed up the game. No money OR no workers and you must pass. There are a few other instances where passing is mandatory but I would only suggest these two for ease of programming.