Board Game Arena

Hi Everyone,
I am new to BGA, and loving it so far.

I have entered into 3 Terraforming Mars Tournaments so far. However each one has a "thinking time" limit of a few days. This is not near enough time to complete a match. The last two tournaments everyone has run out of time and BGA has ended the table half way through:

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And this is about to happen my current tournament as well:

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I have never been able to complete a tournament match due to this. Why are the tournaments setup this way? Is this expected behavior?

Tournaments are set up by fellow users. So, inasmuch as people can do a poor job of this setup, or have unrealistic expectations (to you, anyway) for how long a game of TM should take… yeah, this is expected behavior.

About the only thing you can do is keep a careful eye on the allotted time for each game and stay away from tournaments that only give you a few days. In the overall listing of tournaments it will show how many people will be in each game, and how long the total time for each game is allotted. So if it says 4 people and 30 days, each person will get about a week of thinking time. The exact time per person is listed on the tournament details page. (Your current tournament says 5 days for 3-4 people and the details say 30 hours per person.)

It should be noted that 30 days total is the longest tournament games can run. If that’s a four person game and you a week for a game like TM still leaves you crunched for time (and I could see that it might) then this may not be the setup for you.

Welcom to BGA! You had the unfortunate experience of ending up in poorly set up tournaments. It is not standard I'd say but it happens too often. Unfortunately some players and tournament creators don't know that time keeping for tournaments is different from normal games.

In tournaments, each player has a fixed overall time without any increment per turn. This is very different to "normal" games on BGA. When you are on a specific tournament page, you have the most important information printed in bold there - number of player and Time allocated to each player. You should always check that value before you register in a tournament. I think for Terraforming Mars, as a "normal person" you should avoid tournaments with less than 7 days allocated time per player, better maybe even aim for 10+ days per player.

When you are in the list of tournaments, you see the intended number of players and max time for a full game (all players aggregated) in the third column below the tournament start date/time. That can give you a first impression whether the tournament is good for you.

In order to get a feeling how much time you need for a normal Terraforming Mars game, you can play some normal non-tournament games. Then you know how much time for a game to expect and what tournaments to look for.

foconoco501 wrote: ↑12 January 2026, 21:43 Hi Everyone,
I am new to BGA, and loving it so far.

I have entered into 3 Terraforming Mars Tournaments so far. However each one has a "thinking time" limit of a few days. This is not near enough time to complete a match. The last two tournaments everyone has run out of time and BGA has ended the table half way through:

785158400
779328429

And this is about to happen my current tournament as well:

787792669


I have never been able to complete a tournament match due to this. Why are the tournaments setup this way? Is this expected behavior?

Welcome to BGA. Please provide links, not just numbers, if you want to refer someone to a particular tournament or table.

As for your questions, any premium user can set up a tournament. There is no licensing exam. You don't even have to have played the game on BGA or even know how to play the game. For example, I just made this tournament: Slide I just typed a couple of random letter and chose the first game that showed up in the search. I've never even heard of this game, but I can guess that one day is not probably not enough time to finish a round. Oh, I also set it to start in January 2028 because BGA apparently didn't think through the consequences of allowing people to do things like this (vote here to disallow this).

Therefore it is very possible (and unfortunately frequent) for someone to set up a tournament with wildly inappropriate time settings. Because there is currently no mechanism in place stopping them from doing it, or training them not to do it, the only thing you can do is look closely at the time setting and not enter tournaments that look like they don't allow enough time.

One problem with this is that it's sometimes hard to tell whether the setting is reasonable. Also, people new to tournament don't know that they are not like other turn-based games in that there is no increment, i.e., your clock only runs down and no time is added back after every turn.

So, no, not all tournaments are set up this way, but too many are.