Board Game Arena

Good morning.

I would like there to be a 'player vs CPU' mode. It would be a great incentive to pay for the premium pass since there are many games where there is simply no one to play with. Terra Nova is an example. In some cases, a person may not want to learn to play by getting beaten by other players. Or also when you don't know if you will be able to finish the game and don't want to disrupt the fun of other players. I believe that a solo mode against the CPU is what currently prevents me from playing more on BGA.

Developing a program that can play one game good enough that's semi-interesting to play against can take a small team of people several months/years. Doing it for the more than 1000 games available at BGA... I don't see it happening any time soon. In the meantime, you can try hotseat mode and play against yourself.

It wouldn't be fun to play against AI in most board games. If you just unleash an AI it will just straight up crush you or be too dumb to be a challange. Making them play like humans and be a fun opponent, takes a lot of manual tuning and testing i assume. Developer resources BGA certainly does not have, if they don't make it some kind of community effort. There are just too many board games on BGA and the ROI would be rather small.

Making an AI wouldn't be very hard for a lot of games. Games like GO And Chess require a sophisticated approach, but games like 7 Flip would be pretty straight forward. I think even games like arnak won't require too much effort. I am not game ai developer, so maybe there is some kind of engine you can use for BGA Board games.

Problem is the usefulness vs effort invested. Most people just play popular games with other players.