Board Game Arena

So, I've played 55 games of Teotihuacan on BGA, and I've just noticed something. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, every game has had three 1-gold cost technologies on the first row of the Alchemy board and three 2-gold cost technologies on the second row.

I now own the physical game, and I realised that randomly drawing the technologies and ordering them by tile number would not always result in this distribution: it is perfectly possible for a 1-gold cost tile to appear in the 2nd row or for a 2-gold cost tile to appear in the first row.

One would think in 55 plays that this should have occurred at some point, but as far as I recall it never has. Is this a bug? A deliberate feature of the BGA implementation? Or just the way chance has fallen in my games or my memory playing tricks?

You are not imagining it.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=21478

Great find! I just checked your 10 most recent games, and then my own 5 most recent games, and the pattern you see happens in all 15 of them. If the rules from the rulebook are followed, 6 out of 9 tiles are randomly selected, which gives (9 choose 6) = 84 possible combinations.

As there are 4 tech tiles costing 1 gold and then 5 tech tiles costing 2 gold, the number of combinations with exactly 3 of each cost is equal to (4 choose 3) times (5 choose 3) = 40. This means roughly half of the games should have this pattern of 3 of cost 1 followed by 3 of cost 2 (the ones of cost 1 will always go before the ones of cost 2 due to the ordering of the tiles).

If you can confirm that all 55 games you played indeed featured this distribution, this would be way outside of reasonable chance, and I think this would be highly indicative of an error / deliberate choice in the game implementation, and a bug report would be valid.

Shivaware wrote: ↑07 July 2022, 04:12 You are not imagining it.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=21478

Thanks, I've now voted for this. Glad I'm not imagining it!
It doesn't seem as if there have been any updates/bug fixes for quite a long time though

Yeah, I reported this bug two years ago. It's frustrating that BGA hasn't fixed it. It should be an easy fix!

Fixed now
No-one is currently maintaining the project beyond translation fixes.

salty-horse wrote: ↑20 April 2023, 12:02 Fixed now
No-one is currently maintaining the project beyond translation fixes.

That's great, thanks! It's a shame that no-one is maintaining it... getting the expansions implemented would be amazing! Especially with the current reprint Kickstarter.

Is there a mechanism for getting someone to take over maintaining it and possibly implementing new content?

First game with fixed tech distribution was quite a surprise as I had not read about the fix before I joined the game. Will have to change my tactics.
Thanks for taking care of it. Better late than never

Fix is not correct. I just bought a tech tile that costs 2 gold, that was sitting in the top row, for just one gold

Well, partial fix I have a fix for the cost, it's waiting for deployment.
Also, since I missed some checks in the original fix, the game might get into an unrecoverable state if it allows you to choose the Tech board but you can't actually purchase anything. Sorry if that happens.