Board Game Arena

I just realized Arena is different matchmaking than "Play".
Is there a way to just say "I want to play this game"?
ELO is cool but I want a mode if there are players playing Arena, let me play them. If there are players searching in Play, I want to play them.

If you use the old lobby and start a normal manual search for tables, you will see the available tables in normal mode. But there will also be a message to tell you if there are players searching in arena.

You can’t list the tables for both mode at the same time.
But maybe you can open two tabs in your browser, one with the normal playing mode, the second for the arena.

I dont think that works because the game page maintains its state

Just click on GAMES. that will bring up all the games.

On the Pages for individual games, there is a menu that includes learn or play. If you click on play you can choose Arena or a play. Is that what you are looking for?

The Arena game queues are intentionally kept separate from non-Arena queues (for a variety of reasons), so you can't really look at both at once. (Though the multiple tab option mostly works if you really want to find a game.)

thanks!