Board Game Arena

I got an email saying I was "running out of time" and that
"If you are not playing, your turn will be skipped and you will get a time penalty."

It's a solo game that I started. Am I expected to skip myself?.

It's considered polite to send yourself a message asking if you're able to play before expelling yourself

That's funny. Jokes aside, this should be considered as a bug. Would be nice if you can create a small report about it. https://boardgamearena.com/bugs

Lol. That’s interesting. Normally, solo tables can only be started in friendly mode. The banner says that “THIS game can only be played solo in friendly mode”, but I haven’t yet found a game without that banner. Even the one you seem to be referring to blocks me and has that message when I try to open a solo table in turn-based mode. So this is most likely a bug - you could open a solo table with a turn-based time limit which probably isn’t supposed to happen.

Even if you are only playing against yourself, it's probably not good for the site's traffic to allow games to go on forever.

tbhp wrote: ↑11 February 2026, 07:08 Even if you are only playing against yourself, it's probably not good for the site's traffic to allow games to go on forever.

It doesn't. If you don't play for a certain amount of time, the game is automatically closed. If you are playing, but slowly, yes, the game can continue forever, but so can it in multi-player games.

I agree this is probably a bug with how the table was established by the sounds of it. But the message can just be ignored, and play on as you like (much like when time runs out in multi-player games - you don't have to boot a player just cause you can).

I couldn't start another turn based sushi go party game today because I'm playing too slowly on my solo game.

Most of the games will only let you start a solo game with the friendly - no time limit setting but I've come across a few that let you start a solo/1p game in regular mode. Last month I accidentally started a 1 player game of trek 12 in regular turn based mode instead of friendly and got an email about running out of time after several days. There are definitely a few other games where you can start in regular mode too but I can't recall which ones they are off the top my head.

In my experience, nothing happens if you ignore the running out of time message. The game will only be closed under the usual circumstances. Although since the FAQ doesn't seem to be accurate about when a game will be closed automatically by the system, I'm not sure exactly what the usual circumstances are. (I just posted about that earlier today because I had a solo turn based game closed automatically for being abandoned 35 days after it was started but only 1 day after I last made a move in it )