Board Game Arena

For the base game, 1st player tends to have a sizable advantage. This suggestion, which was used in the "7 Wonders Duel" tournament at WBC this year, worked well:

Normally, 1st player gets first pick of the first set of 4 wonders and 2nd player gets first pick of the second set; i.e., 1-2-2-1 and 2-1-1-2 for selections.

Suggested alternate: for each set of 4 wonders, 2nd player chooses who picks first.

This usually leads to 2nd player have the greater share of 'doubler' wonders (the ones that let you go again); I think this helps mitigate 1st player's advantage.

How do others feel about this?

I agree. Also see ZeusAI proposal: https://sites.google.com/view/zeus-ai/r ... authuser=0

We (the ZeusAI team) tried to contact BGA with this exact request. We got told that they needed approval from the publisher to go ahead with the proposal. We tried to reach out to the game designers: Bruno Cathala seemed very open to the idea, and told us that he would contact Asmodee and ask, but we got no further answer. This was December 2024.

We would love to see this variant implemented, as it is heavily supported by the data we collected.

SashaIr wrote: ↑11 August 2025, 09:55 We (the ZeusAI team) tried to contact BGA with this exact request. We got told that they needed approval from the publisher to go ahead with the proposal. We tried to reach out to the game designers: Bruno Cathala seemed very open to the idea, and told us that he would contact Asmodee and ask, but we got no further answer. This was December 2024.

We would love to see this variant implemented, as it is heavily supported by the data we collected.

Publisher are Asmodee, right ? literally the owner of BoardGameArena (?)