Board Game Arena

Hi!

I've implemented and tested and retested my first game implementation for BGA: Abandon All Artichokes.
(Thanks go to Gamewright for licensing this!)

Now I'm looking for feedback from others.

The rules are simple, the game is for 2-4 players and takes 20 minutes (when it's long).
Please give it a try and give me constructive feedback!

https://studio.boardgamearena.com/gamep ... artichokes

Thank you!
Thomas

Tried this and it was a quick, fun game. Here are my initial suggestions:
* The cards are WAY too small. The tooltip text is essential, because I couldn't read the text on either a small laptop screen or a large 30-inch monitor. It would be nice if the card itself were just larger. Also, a richer (HTML) tooltip would be nice -- maybe the tooltip has the title "POTATO" in large text, a line, and the description below that?
* The positioning is not what I expected based on other BGA games. I expect my hand at the top, with the garden/common area below. This is a personal preference, so perhaps it's fine as you have it.
* Having a separate line for just the discard pile takes up a lot of space. Can this be on the same line as the garden row? I don't understand why there's a gap between the garden and my hand, with this empty space between.
* If there are <= 2 cards in my hand, automatically select those as the cards to pass. No need for a game option about this, just always automatically do it.
* The UI for selecting cards to pass is backwards -- the cards I did select should be fully opaque (or have some kind of border/outline), while the cards I didn't select yet should be ghosted/transparent.
* The log lines starting with "[automatic]" don't look right. Having a log is good, but no need to prefix with "[automatic]".
* End game statistics -- it might be interesting to see the method of compost, so you can see "how" someone won the game? E.g., Composts using potato, Composts using carrot, etc.
* In the player panel, the words "deck", "discard", "hand" look very odd as lowercase. Please capitalize these. Consider adding some icon or perhaps a border/bubble/pill to set it off a bit.
* Something is wrong with the player colors, we aren't getting assigned any player color. Having the color helps tell who is who (even if colors aren't a normal part of the physical board game, it's very helpful to read the logs -- please don't remove it).

Thank you, that was very useful feedback!

We redesigned the main screen again and increased the card size. The game is mostly limited by the 740px width and my wish that all cards in hand stay in one row, that gives me an upper limit on the card width. I used setOverlap() to get a few more pixels out of it.

The positioning is now different too. The "empty" row was used for played card, displayed cards (when you make a selection) and the compost; the played card is now displayed next to the hand, the compost is below the hand and the displayed cards are in a new div that is only shown when something is inside it. I quite like the new look, I hope you find it an improvement as well.

We decided against the automatic passing of the cards for the eggplant. Some test players were already confused by automatically happening stuff and we think the couple extra clicks are a good trade-off for easier understanding of the game flow.

The selection has now be made more BGA like - red border, no change in opacity, and the cards pop up a bit.

I've implemented all your other suggestions. There was indeed a bug in the player color code (I had an extra '#" in the color strings).
If you know of good icons to use for the Deck/Hand/Discard - I haven't found any free-to-use ones yet - let me know!

Thanks again for the helpful suggestions!

I've used https://iconify.design/ in two of my games, which is a JavaScript library that handles loading icons from a huge catalog. If you don't want the overhead of the JS library, you could also use their site to search for and download icons as .svg image files (you can even re-color the icon before you download the image).

I have the same 3 things in the panel for one of my games and I think these are the icons I used, but of course there are many choices among their catalog of free icons.
https://iconify.design/icon-sets/mdi/hand-right.html
https://iconify.design/icon-sets/mdi/cards.html
https://iconify.design/icon-sets/mdi/sh ... riant.html

I'm not confident my usage of these icons in my game is the best example. Since you seem to have more available space in your player panel than me, I'd recommend keeping the word in addition to adding a small icon, perhaps.

Thanks. I looked around the web a bit and then played around with inkscape. This is what I've come up with.