Board Game Arena

In my game, It was my opponent's turn.

My opponent, a super nice person and a good player under my tutelage, was in strong position to win.

But then an unheard of bug occurred.

The game interface simply skipped his turn.

What the heck !?

Has anyone ever had this happen?

[Edited to change caps to italics, as the intended use of caps was for emphasis, and italics is a better way to do that.]

If you give us the table number and move number, we can try to find out what has happened and if it was indeed a bug or maybe not.

cigma wrote: ↑05 July 2025, 06:23 If you give us the table number and move number, we can try to find out what has happened and if it was indeed a bug or maybe not.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=174959

It's a bug, and a game-ruining one. It literally skipped my opponent's turn.

The game is in beta. These things happen. You've raised a bug, go start another game if it bothers you so much. The developer appears to be engaged with you to try and fix it, so I'm really not sure what the point of posting in the forums is.

I was curious whether this had happened in any other game, being that it is such an unusual bug.
There have been 6800 games of Aquatica played, and I have never seen or heard of a player's turn being passed to the other player. Which makes me think it is not a bug in the code for the game, but rather, that something weird occurred in the servers or something.

As someone who has some programming skills, I am puzzled as to how the game interface passed over one player's turn. It's not like Terraforming Mars, for example, where "pass" is a valid play at any time. In this game, a turn MUST be taken by each player.

If I could just "pass" my own turn, the game would then be back where it is supposed to be.

Being that this bug has never occurred in 6800 games (which likely means close to 100,000 turns taken), and, considering that nothing unusual occurred on my turn before my opponent's turn was skipped, I find it unlikely the game's code is at fault.

There are more than 1000 different games on this site, so I was curious whether this has happened to anyone. I know there are a lot of bug reports where a player could not access the game for various reasons, or got kicked from a game because they did not realize it was their turn (The game was showing it to be the opponent's turn), but this is entirely different and very puzzling.

Can you only make that claim if you've experience all the other bugs in order to make a fair comparison?

RicardoRix wrote: ↑05 July 2025, 19:49 Can you only make that claim if you've experience all the other bugs in order to make a fair comparison?

My apologies; I am not sure what you mean.

Are you referring to the title of my original post in this thread? I don't know why I wrote it in all caps, or why I used the word "ludicrous"; perhaps "most puzzling" or "most baffling" would have been a better word choice. [EDIT - I changed the title to better reflect the situation.]

I have encountered many bugs in many games on many gaming platforms, and read thousands of bug reports on various websites. I cannot recall ever seeing a bug report in which the game lost track of whose turn it was and switched the active turn to the other player (in a game in which passing is not a valid action).

I understand this game (Aquatica) is still in Beta, but it doesn't need to be. The game works; there are 3 or 4 relatively minor or rare remaining bugs.

If a 1 out of 100,000 occurrence happens, I am disinclined to think the game code was to blame. My move that preceded the bizarre bug was a standard move, almost certainly made in all 6800 of the games that have been played.

Which is why I am so puzzled. This was not an access issue, or an internet connectivity issue. Something impossible happened. When I read other bug reports, for example Terraforming Mars, I can easily envision exactly what the code looks like that allowed the bug.

In this case, I cannot envision any block of code that would trigger the bug that occurred. It just makes no sense.

FrankJones wrote: ↑05 July 2025, 20:03 My apologies; I am not sure what you mean.

They mean you are making a claim that depends upon complete knowledge of all the games that have ever been played. Just because you haven't heard of it happening before doesn't mean it hasn't happened before. Even if you have read 100% of the bug reports and haven't seen it, that still doesn't mean it didn't happen because sometimes (often?) people don't make bug reports even in beta because they are treating it as a early access opportunity rather than a testing mechanism. And not everyone participates in the forums to gripe about it there.

So all you can confidently say based on personal knowledge is that it hasn't happened to you before and you have not seen anyone report it before, but it is an invalid logical leap to say it therefore has never happened before.

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑05 July 2025, 20:57

FrankJones wrote: ↑05 July 2025, 20:03 My apologies; I am not sure what you mean.

They mean you are making a claim that depends upon complete knowledge of all the games that have ever been played. Just because you haven't heard of it happening before doesn't mean it hasn't happened before. Even if you have read 100% of the bug reports and haven't seen it, that still doesn't mean it didn't happen because sometimes (often?) people don't make bug reports even in beta because they are treating it as a early access opportunity rather than a testing mechanism. And not everyone participates in the forums to gripe about it there.

So all you can confidently say based on personal knowledge is that it hasn't happened to you before.

1) It has never happened to be before in the hundreds of thousands of turns I have taken in tens of thousands of games.
2) I have never heard anyone say that such a bug occurred in any game, and I have read countless thousands of bug reports.

This occurrence is very rare. From a programming standpoint, I am curious how something like this could happen. A chess game does not suddenly skip a player's turn. Or Azul. I am struggling to envision the flawed code that could permit this, but that would only happen 1 time out of tens of thousands of times, after a standard play that happens regularly.

I wrote this post because I was curious whether it has ever happened, and if so, what the flawed code was that permitted it to happen.

Additionally, I was wondering whether any experienced developers might have some insight into how such an unusual bug could occur.

Could it have been a database glitch that corrupted the game state into thinking it was the other player's turn? My curiosity here goes beyond just fixing the game in progress. Yes, I would like for my opponent to get to play the turn that was skipped. I have no desire to take two turns in a row. That would be like taking two turns in a row in chess. It just doesn't make sense.

I was hoping for maybe some insight, and instead I am receiving criticism for my semantic word choices. Or, it was suggested what I could do if I am "so bothered" by this. I am not "bothered"; I am baffled and seeking information and insight. I like to understand why bugs happen. Usually, it is obvious that the code failed to cover a rare edge-case scenario, or, the bug reported is not an actual bug, but a mistake by the player or a misunderstanding of the rules.

This does not look like a crazy bug to me at all. Complex games requires complex engines and complex engines are not free of bugs. Depending on how they are made, it's clearly something that could happen.