Board Game Arena

I have a question regarding the timers for tournaments. In a turn based game the timer indicates the time needed to do your turn. My guess for tournaments it means your total time. Is that correct? Is there some documentation somewhere?

Tanstaafl22 wrote: ↑28 December 2025, 02:28 My guess for tournaments it means your total time. Is that correct?

Correct.

Tanstaafl22 wrote: ↑28 December 2025, 02:28 Is there some documentation somewhere?

No. Even the so-called Tournaments FAQ doesn't address this basic fact. "Documentation" for tournaments is basically crowd-sourced in the Tournaments forum.

Thanks.

Tournaments do not give additional time per move ("Fischer clock") like in normal turn-based games. Whatever time you get at the start of the game, that's all the time you get. Make sure you check the time settings before joining a tournament.

For the fifth time in two months, a tournament game is stalled with a player whose time is now in the red. Seems like a lot of players don’t pay attention to the timer…

Your only choices are to kick them and accept a tie among the remaining players, or hope they finish the game.

The karma penalty for running out of time in a tournament game is too low. If you repeatedly get kicked from tournament games for running out of time, you shouldn't be allowed to enter tournaments again for awhile. I think it's just -4 for getting kicked from a tournament game, which you can earn back by play 4 quick normal games and finishing them.

Tournament karma probably should be tracked separately from regular karma, with bigger penalties for running out of time.

Note that there's a timer for the tournament game overall such as 15 days. The player times are then their share of that total. So, if it was a 3 player game with 15 days overall then they would get 5 days each.

If there's no kicking of players who run out of time, then the tournament might easily hit the overall limit, e.g. if one player uses 7 days and the other two use 4 each. When this happens, the game is terminated and the player with the most time left is the winner. As this is quite significant, it would be good if the overall timer was more visible.

FSKFSK wrote: ↑30 December 2025, 04:56 Your only choices are to kick them and accept a tie among the remaining players, or hope they finish the game.

The karma penalty for running out of time in a tournament game is too low. If you repeatedly get kicked from tournament games for running out of time, you shouldn't be allowed to enter tournaments again for awhile. I think it's just -4 for getting kicked from a tournament game, which you can earn back by play 4 quick normal games and finishing them.

Tournament karma probably should be tracked separately from regular karma, with bigger penalties for running out of time.

They should just implement these 2 fixes which wouldn't be overly complex (and one already exists):

#1 Is more games should have the whole Heat games finish regardless. Like it negates the reason to turn off expel if you have this rule on the game.

#2 Creators should be able to boot/block players joining tournaments. Problem is there are very often repeat offenders who join lots of tournaments and play nowhere near fast enough. Your tournament karma idea would work, but I suspect is seen as overly complex. One of the issues though is you lose so little karma for timing out in a tournament that it has no impact whatsoever, so there's no effective way currently to police against repeat offenders.

There is signs of little fixes being implemented for tournaments, for example the recent addition to remove the option to expel, but it's another option that only really works in 2 player properly. The problem with using this option multi-player is it doesn't actually solve the unfairness of who qualifies consequently. The WSBG freerolls they put up have had a lot of problems with this, because lots of people signed up for time zones they probably weren't even in, and timed out, but their fix of only allowing you to sign up to 1 tournament per game doesn't solve the issue either, because they all have a relatively fast clock, and there will be loads of players signing up who are never going to keep to the listed pace of the game, because of the lure of prizes.

n5nx wrote: ↑30 December 2025, 03:00 For the fifth time in two months, a tournament game is stalled with a player whose time is now in the red. Seems like a lot of players don’t pay attention to the timer…

At the current time the holidays may have impact, Christmas was in the time limit for most tournaments and December 31 and January 1st will be soon. On these days not everyone has time to play actively on BGA. So I am a bit more lenient at the moment, especially for players that have a low average % out of time or users who are just a few hours out of time.

But I still hate it when there is a player at my table with 2 days negative on their timer and there is no option to kick him/her.

koningco wrote: ↑31 December 2025, 01:25 But I still hate it when there is a player at my table with 2 days negative on their timer and there is no option to kick him/her.

So, maybe don't join tournaments with the no boot option?