Board Game Arena

A few game groups I play with would be very pleased with a "Room" or "Group session" feature.

Basically, we get together to play games. Every night we chat (over Discord) to decide what games we are going to play. After a while we select a game. Then one of us has to either: a) invite the individuals on the call, or b) share a link so the others join (sometimes bypassed by some that go and see what tables the creator is in). Note that this is independent of limiting the invite to a specific group, which by itself doesn't create invites.

A very nice workflow would be:

- Create "Game Room"
- Invite people to "Game Room"
- Allow people in Game Room to create games for anybody in Game Room.
- Either/or:
-- People in game room will be automatically invited
-- People in game room see a list of games in the room they are in and click to join


This is very useful when the games being played are not the same game over and over (and hence rematch doesn't work), or when people may join or leave the room/session as the night progresses, so the invites are not always the same.

Note that advanced modes may include things like:
- auto-suggest a game for the group
- let participants suggest games, then let participants vote/rank
- Seed the "Game Room" from a specific Group.

I didn't see this in the a few pages of search, though I did see a discussion about Group chat and auto-suggesting games for a group.

The main difference with what we have today is that the main concept that acts as the anchor is the specific group of people that have gathered to play. As opposed to "an instance of a specific game".

I used the name "Game Room", but it's possible "Game Session" or "Group Session" may be a better term.

I like this idea! It makes playing on BGA more similar to playing in real life. It also brings some more advantages than you mentioned, such as that it is easier to offer a continuous chat for the group during the whole session.

Please, will you create a suggestion report here https://boardgamearena.com/bugs on which we can vote?

If you're not aware currently the easiest way to do this is to add everyone you play with as a Friend, go to the Play page and use the "Play with Friends" option:



That being said, I think a better way to do this (for BGA to change) would be to add an option in this list for "Play with Group" which would create a manual room and automatically invite all online members of a chosen Group. That way you could create a private group with your friends and get a one-click invite for all of them.

You can actually restrict access to a certain group when creating a table. You have to go manual, then a bit above and to the right of the player number selector, you have a link to restrict the access to the table to a specific group... Doesn't mean that unwanted members of the group won't be accepted though...

There's a forum for making suggestions and this is a good one.