Board Game Arena

You probably already know, but for years now, we haven't spent a day without questioning how Board Game Arena works and how to improve it. We are avid users, gamers, and above all, we love to have discussions with all of you to share thoughts about our platform.

Since the early versions of Board Game Arena, more than a decade ago, you've developed your own habits that have evolved with our ever-growing platform. We know that facing changes is never easy, but it’s not only about being the cool kid in town. Some changes are necessary. We don't want to disrupt your daily gaming routine, but we have to keep up with new habits, new players, and new technologies – and they're evolving fast!

That’s why today we would like to present you a new part of an ongoing process of change happening here. You have already seen the new game pages, slowly moving from the wooden background to a lighter and easier to read one, also bringing a lot of new tools for you to play with (filters, game covers, titles, etc...).
Now is time to bring the change to our most-visited page: the homepage.

There’s plenty of stuff for you to discover, new features and possibilities that we'll be expanding to the entire website.

Old habits die hard. We have taken care to keep the important elements, rearrange all the information, but also to help mobile users have a way much better experience than they could have before. This should give you a taste of how we envision shaping BGA's future interface. The new homepage is a new step, but we’re still far from the end product you all deserve and that we want to deliver.

It’s also a significant step for us as there are plenty of new features to bring to all of you: improved reliability, interface readability, accessibility for all, and all of that in more than 40 languages... It may not have been a challenge if we were only based on content, but we are more than that: forums, players, games, files and rules, settings, Arena and tournaments, ELO, ranks, moderation, platform compatibilities... and tutorials! You will like some, if not all, of these features, and that’s the beauty of it: you might be the only one to use BGA the way you do. And everyone has their own way to enjoy some good time here.
It’s not only a cosmetic change, but also the start of something bigger that we initiated 10 years ago, and a message of hope to all: Never take anything for granted, always question yourself.

We hope you will get used to it quickly, and that new habits will replace old ones - slowly but surely.

At the same time, we are taking caring of our servers, databases, optimizations, and getting us up to date on all levels. So, thanks to all of you (you’re more than 10 million users now!), and let’s celebrate this new face for the years to come (and our beloved testers' team for their dedication and valuable feedback)

May the randomness of the dice be with you!

Sincerely,

The BGA team.

Ich möchte die alte zurück. Das ist unübersichtlich und man wird einfach erschlagen. Da sind soviel unwichtige Informationen . Die andere war einfach informativ. Das ist für mich definitiv ein Daumen nach unten. Viele dieser Informationen brauche ich nicht immer wie meine XP Punkte was ich zuletzt spiele welche letzte Trophäe ich gemacht habe. Wieviel spiele ich gespielt habe wieviel ich noch nicht. Die Info vorher war nicht immer präsenter ich will das auch nicht immer sehen. Für was soll das nützlich sein. Sie haben größere Probleme als diese spielerei

Please, give the option the select the old version, this new one is too convoluted, I liked the simplicity of the old homepage, it was good enough, all the information displayed now I could easily get it from my profile or the Games and Play Now section, don´t see the need to change something that was working perfectly well with no notice to the users. Thanks for all you do for us, but this one really was a miss.

I know the current trend on BGA site development is just to make everything worse for everyone for no reason but please can you rethink this new design. It does not communicate information in any sort of a useful way. It actively removes things that were useful on the home page and looks absolutely awful on a mobile device, like a lot of your users will use.

The new lobby is an absolute travesty of awful ux design and seeing the homepage follow suit is sad to see. Do the designers not use the site and see their choices just make it harder to use for both novice and experienced users?

I think it looks nice, but how do I find the messages posted before that I could see on the old home page?
For me, that was the most useful feature of the old home page; all the announcents from my groups were very visible.

I hope publishers pay for the ad space on the new front page, nobody can tell me this is for users

Honestly I am currently hating this redesign. With the old home page one of the main features I wanted to see and use was the "Newsfeed" and that's now relegated to a small box.
Having the option to launch a new game from a list I don't care about is useless. If I want to do that, I'll go to the page to do so. It also feels cluttered in a way the old one didn't. Frankly, while it might be useful for getting new people interested in the site (I'm not qualified to judge that), it feels useless to me and just wants to make me click off onto pretty much any other page.

Oof.

This is the worst design change I've seen on this site - and I've never in the past complained about design changes. The new main page on a laptop is simply unappealing, cluttered, and messy, but technically usable. On a phone it is much worse than that - a massive ad for one of your newest games (Azul Summer Pavillion) and very few resources to navigate the page at all. If I was not such an experienced user I wouldn't attempt to navigate this.

Holy shit this looks so cancerous. Gotta bookmark a different page as my bga landing page so that I don't have to witness that ugly piece of work ever again.