Board Game Arena

I'm really enjoying using the platform to play both with my regular boardgaming group and with friends and relatives who are significantly older. It's very accessible and generally works great. However, we are all still learning the platform and figuring out the quirks; sometimes a person just can't get their turn to load, and wind up getting scolding emails and a penalty of auto-losing the game despite it being a training game with friends only.

My suggestions:
-Is there a clear troubleshooting procedure when a turn appears stuck? Other web-based platforms, like Tabletopia, I just refresh the page and there's no side effects, but here it seems exiting and reentering a game (even one set to training, with only friends) still warrants a light moderation action. Then I have to explain to my mom why they are getting scolding emails just for troubleshooting a new game. I just want something easy to walk people through, whatever the equivalent of "refresh your browser page" is here.

-Training mode does shut off the timers, but it doesn't seem that way to players, since it still warns you about timing out for taking a few minutes for a turn, which is pretty normal when teaching a new game and platform to other players. Is it ok to ignore those? How long can you take in a turn before it will time out, so that I can know how fast I have to move during a game explanation? Is there a "pause" button somewhere?

Thanks!

For the troubleshooting: Hitting the key F5 = refreshing the browser page helps 90% of the time. Sometimes you get back to the game lobby page and have to click on the button "Go to Game". Very rarely you need to restart your browser and log in again. In any case, you do not get any penalty for just refreshing.

In any game mode except tournaments, you ONLY get a penalty if someone at the table actively kicks you out after going over time or you actively abandoned the game. You DON'T get a penalty from going over time alone, you are then at the mercy of your co-players. Only if one player decides that you should be penalized, you get the penalty. (Instead I suspect that your mother hit the menu button "Leave the game" at some point.)

From what you describe, you were definitely not playing in Training mode. As far as I know, there are no penalties nor time limits nor time warnings in Training mode.

Either you confused something and you did actually not start a Training game, or the site made you feel you started Training but it didn't. In the second case, you should probably make a detailed bug report with the exact table number to help that it not happens again.

Thank you for the prompt reply. We'll check that more carefully next time. I did doublecheck that "training" was selected in the pulldown menu, but I will keep an eye on it next time. We'll be at it again next Monday for sure!

Thank you again!