Board Game Arena

Buying the wrong recipe has messed up something like 2-5% (?) of the games I've been in (it just happened to me, so there is an element of whining, but just as often it's the other player). Usually it is something like

- forgetting to buy a needed recipe (forgot to buy Soju, oops)
- buying the wrong recipe / mis-clicking (eg Rum instead of Whiskey, double oops)

It can be close to game-ending for the player it happens to and makes for an unfun experience, whether or not it's the player's fault.

I would contrast this against the dreaded "two sugars removed from distillation" which is just an unlucky roll and known risk as opposed to "you forgot your recipe, no points for you".

Perhaps we could reduce this tendency by making the recipe buying more foolproof, eg:

A. Highlight the labels you can make, in the label area, as opposed to just having it in the recipe cube section (which is fine, but too far down)
* I think someone else asked "highlight the recipes you can distill" which is not quite the same thing (I support this too, but I can see its being harder to program/more controversial).
---- You could even imagine two highlights (one = you have the recipe; other = you have the ingredients)
---- If you did that other one you could even imagine highlighting with the probability you would make it! Though perhaps people like the implicit math problem.

B. Confirming the recipe purchase more loudly somehow (not sure about this one, extra clicks are annoying and I think the player would just blindly click anyway, so I think it would not have the right effect).

I think IRL you would let the person do a takeback i.e. "oops I meant to buy Cachaça not Aquavit" though I can see that not working in BGA,

Thanks as always for the nice implementation. Implicit in the first sentence is: 95-98% of the games are pretty fun..

I fully support this suggestion. It should be done to improve game experience.

yep agree, like a end market phase warning option, "ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO END MARKET PHASE? YOU HAVE INGREDIENTS FOR RECIPES YOU DO NOT YET OWN!"

It is not the game's job to keep you from play badly. Sometimes you play badly, and that's ok. Play better next time.

To the people supporting this, please give other examples in BGA implementations where the game is helping you play better or explicitly making sure you aren't making mistakes.

The game already has multiple confirmations and additional visual clues that are not present in the physical game. If you keep missing recipes due to missing a critical item, slow down and play more carefully.

Next you'll want a warning that if you buy item A you won't have enough money to buy recipe B.

People can well disagree on the level of forgiveness / safety buffers to give and I think different games allow different things either in BGA or OTB play, whether to enforce touch-move (or click-move?) on chess.com, etc; in "Its a wonderful world" you get chastised for not using your Krystallium (that one I think we would both dislike, since most of the time the warning is wrong!)' in "Innovation" you get flagged every time you activate something that the opponent will share (that warning I sort of like, on average, but sometimes it's annoying, and I think you could view it either way). The balance is somewhere between the game plays itself, and if you think of playing the wrong move you get an electric shock and automatically lose.

The "you can distill these recipes" feature that c12h22o11 implemented subsumes most of what I was suggesting under A (quite unobtrusively, also!) so I feel like it's moot. Thanks again to c12h22o11 (that's sugar, right? sweet) for a great implementation!

I just want a more convenient way to see what recipes have been purchased by all the players. Scrolling all the way down to see the flight card it tedious. Clicking an opponent overlays your flight in a way that frequently annoys me when when I'm trying to purchase a cube later and I need to switch back. Two areas that I could see improving this would be the player score /summary widgets and / or the label piles. The label piles could throw some sort tags over /near them like the spirit awards do. The score / summary widget could include another row that showed owned recipes in a way that is similar, but distinct from how it shows distilled recipes.