Board Game Arena

Too many times (on automatic mode) a game will be ready to start, but then one of the players isn't active to actually click they are ready to start. So then everyone else who is ready just has to leave & then try again.

This is even more annoying when you then click to try & get that game going again to find that person is still "in the queue" -- which continually keeps that game from being able to get a start.

There should really be a way to "kick" a player from the "start the game screen" so that everyone else can still enjoy the game.
I'd be fine with a 30-second timer so that the feature isn't used in a mean way.

Sometimes trying again actually works (and it's not always the person's fault, it can be technical problems). And note that the table administrator can already kick the unresponsive player after someone cancels. But starting the game with fewer people than shown on the screen would mean that people who only want to play a 4-player game could be forced into a 3-player game, which IMO would make your proposed solution worse than the problem.

Another solution is to switch to Arena mode. In Arena mode, people can't bail once the pairing is made.

You can do the arena thing, and it's even worse there.

Had it very often that we were waiting for the game start for one guy. Then someone got tired and cancelled game start.
This happens when one of the players does turn based moves in the meantime

All that makes you go back to the play now page with your searches still "looking for X players", but behind the scenes the searches have been cancelled. You just aren't told.

I quite liked the original suggestion.

Give the table owner the ability to kick someone directly from the waiting screen (and give other players the option to directly quit from the waiting screen).

With just the cancel game start, it happens so often that the game start is triggered again and again with the wrong players (either automatically or because the table owner had a faster connection and restarts before you can quit)

Related question: other than doing it on purpose, what might the benign reasons be for one the players to not start? Is it possible, for example, for a player looking to play multiple games to somehow be taken simultaneously to multiples games by glitch/accident?