Board Game Arena

This has happened many times, and maybe I just don't understand how to set up games properly or something:

1) I set up a 2-player game of, say, Arboretum. (This has happened with multiple different games.)

2) I am waiting for any random player to join my game.

3) Someone else has set up a 4-player game of Arboretum with the same settings as my game, apart from player count.

4) BGA automatically puts me at their table, joining their game. Sometimes, this starts the game (if I'm filling the last seat) and then I just have to cancel out and inconvenience everyone.

Why is BGA auto-joining games that are different than what I'm looking for in a game?

Thanks!

How do you "set up a 2-player game"? Possibly what you're doing is just effectively saying "I want to play Arboretum, preferably with 2 players and this or that setting". My advice is to use the real lobby (click on "PLAY NOW" at the top) and manual settings.

yearofglad wrote: ↑23 June 2025, 15:50 This has happened many times, and maybe I just don't understand how to set up games properly or something:

1) I set up a 2-player game of, say, Arboretum. (This has happened with multiple different games.)

2) I am waiting for any random player to join my game.

3) Someone else has set up a 4-player game of Arboretum with the same settings as my game, apart from player count.

4) BGA automatically puts me at their table, joining their game. Sometimes, this starts the game (if I'm filling the last seat) and then I just have to cancel out and inconvenience everyone.

Why is BGA auto-joining games that are different than what I'm looking for in a game?

Thanks!

There are three different pages from which to start games on BGA. And on at least one of those pages there are three different modes for starting a game. Without knowing exactly how you tried to set up your game we can only guess what went wrong (as Jellyby did). As Jellby suggested, if precise control over the game parameters matters to you and you don't want any surprises, use the Play Now page (see my signature) and set the right setting to Manual, as opposed to Automatic or Friends.

^ That method ^ definitely works; It's the only method I use, and I have never had a game start that wasn't exactly as I intended. It does mean my open invites sometimes sit for days and expire, but I'm okay with that.

FrankJones wrote: ↑23 June 2025, 19:23 ^ That method ^ definitely works; It's the only method I use, and I have never had a game start that wasn't exactly as I intended. It does mean my open invites sometimes sit for days and expire, but I'm okay with that.

Perfect - that's what I've set it to. Thanks for your help.

Glad the lobby is working for you!

There are a number of open bugs -- https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=77723 for example -- about game restrictions of various sorts not being honored. My guess is an issue in combining virtual tables. Adding any information you can provide about the game(s) you shouldn't have been placed in to one of the open bug reports might be helpful.

If I've interpreted correctly, when you set up a game from the lobby, a table with an assigned game number is created (and you can look at that table's page & its parameters & chat & such). Numbered tables exist (somewhere in the database of active games) and will not be combined. When you set up a game from the game page, a virtual table (which has no table number yet) is created, and that virtual table can be combined with other virtual tables. If that always happened correctly, that'd be great, because then people who separately set up games with matching parameters could be placed at the same table. The merging of virtual tables seems to be too enthusiastic or outright buggy. Virtual tables don't have assigned table numbers until the game is started (or maybe until the table is full?).

A developer perspective on this would be lovely, but their time is better spent on debugging.