Board Game Arena

Hi all this is my first post here and i hope you understand what i want to ask because English is not my language. I play a game of TTR with someone living in a totaly different time zone. The game was set on 12 moves a day. I have read on the FAQ page that that is 12 moves devided bij 24 hours is 1 move per 2 hours..... (or more if you want to) but i have to sleep too! I did several moves in the evening till i had to go to bed and when i wanted to play again in the afternoon today i had lost karma points because i was 5 hours late? I have to sleep and my oponent has to sleep too. And my oponent wasn't there all the time so we could do more moves before bed time... the game is still not finished but now my oponents timer shows a " sleeping moon " symbol.... i don't know what to do with this game or how to get my karma points back. Can anyone tell me what is best to do now?

The only way to get the Karma back is to finish more games without running out of time. It's not a huge problem, assuming you do usually finish games, it will come back quite quickly.

I personally don't like anything much more than 4 turns a day (6 hours) for turn based games for exactly the reason you've run into. When playing in diferent timezones, it's not clear to me when or if a game will clock off for sleep time as I don't think it's something I can manage under Automatic game settings. It's also not mentioned under the How does the game clock work exactly F.A.Q.

The moon on your opponent means that the clock isn't running because it's 'nighttime' and the game is essentially paused.

Jontia wrote: ↑07 April 2026, 23:23 I personally don't like anything much more than 4 turns a day (6 hours) for turn based games for exactly the reason you've run into. When playing in diferent timezones, it's not clear to me when or if a game will clock off for sleep time as I don't think it's something I can manage under Automatic game settings. It's also not mentioned under the How does the game clock work exactly F.A.Q.

The moon on your opponent means that the clock isn't running because it's 'nighttime' and the game is essentially paused.

The game I think the OP referred to (their talk about losing karma made this confusing), has listed time hours. Is this not something you can see/decided when you create a table, as well as join it?

Ceaseless wrote: ↑08 April 2026, 01:19 The game I think the OP referred to (their talk about losing karma made this confusing), has listed time hours. Is this not something you can see/decided when you create a table, as well as join it?

Not when you play on Automatic, you just get stuck into tables. You'd have to either be creating your own or joining specific ones.
I don't know either parts of the UI well enough to guide a newbie around it, and as I linked before it's ignored in the F.A.Q.

You should probably not join games on automatic if you need to go that long without playing, since you can't control what time frame the game will have. When I end up in a game in a very different time zone, I always make sure to check in first thing in the morning to make my next move since my clock will usually have been ticking down for hours at that point while I sleep, and even then I often go a little bit over time. I've never gotten karma penalties for going over time though unless the other players kicked me out of the game, so I'm not sure when that is triggered.

ampfaff wrote: ↑08 April 2026, 13:37 You should probably not join games on automatic if you need to go that long without playing, since you can't control what time frame the game will have.

That's good to know that it is uncontrollable, not just that I don't know where the settings are.

If you're playing turn based games that are 4 moves a day or slower, they don't have night-time in them and it's totally safe to play on automatic.
I think you have to set your time preferences on each game individally, though as far as I can tell the default are 'never' on games with hours-of-play.

I don't have a premium account so i wait for an open table to show up and then click in a hurry and hopefully i get in the game . It goes so fast that you dont have time to read the game settings... i did not realize this could happen. I figured out that the game was set to sleep till 9.00 this morning so the first thing i did this morning was take my turn and then i had to go to work..... and when i opened the game again later today the negative clock was ticking again.... now i did my turn but my oponent isn't online.... how can we ever do 12 turns a day this way... i thought it would not be a problem because i thought we had the whole 24 hours or now i know the game goes in sleep mode, 12 full hours for all 12 turns but it looks like you have only 1 hour per turn effectively..... this doesn't feel oké. Than i have to be online every hour even when i'm driving my car to work....

blklaver wrote: ↑08 April 2026, 18:15 I don't have a premium account so i wait for an open table to show up and then click in a hurry and hopefully i get in the game . It goes so fast that you dont have time to read the game settings..

Ok, keep calm. We'll sort it out. I'm going to make a series of assumptions and then give you some instructions to follow to get you into games where you can repair your Karma and get some games played. If any of the assumptions are wrong, or you can't find the buttons let me know and we'll fix it.

Let's assume for now that you want to play turn-based games of Ticket To Ride, you're interested in the base game only, but you're not bothered about the number of players or any other settings.

1. Go to the Search bar and search for Ticket to Ride, open the game page.
2. If it's not already favourited, click the heart at the top right to make Ticket to Ride a favourite game
3. Click where it says Play now, you'll get a screen showing you all your favourite games with 3 boxy options at the top
4. In the box options, click and set the choices for "Simple Game", "Turn-Based" and "Automatic"
5. You should now see Ticket to Ride somewhere on this page with 3 little boxes on the left. Your ELO, a Cog and a Heart. Click the Cog.
6. In here you should see an option for Game Speed that you might need to expand. Turn the options for 24 moves, 12 move and 8 moves a day to Red "I never want to play with..."
7. Set the other options to "I'm ok playing with" unless you want to avoid very slow games, in which case set the last 2 to "Never" as well.
8. Find the section that says 1910 Expansion. Set Disabled to "I'm ok with" and the other three to "Never"
9. Go to the bottom of the options and hit Close

You're now set up to queue up for automatic games with Ticket to Ride with a minimum of 6 hours to take a turn.
To get a game going, hit "Play now" under Ticket to Ride on the Play Now screen.

You'll get put into a queue and something will fire in a bit. Set up some other favourite games while you wait. Hit "Play now" on them too. As you're not premium, you can only queue for three games at a time. But once the games start you can queue for more.

Ty for the advice.

The "number of turns a day" is really confusing at first, because I don't think there is any relation to the actual number of turns that will be taken in a day. It's just used to calculate how much time is added to your clock for each turn.

I totally understand the "hurry up and click" mentality when you aren't premium, but don't you have the option once you've initially clicked into the game to have a minute to review the options before actually accepting? I could be wrong, I only play TTR in real time, but in real time games you click the game and then everyone has to accept before it actually starts.

Another solution is just to play in real time 2 player games usually take less than 10 minutes so it's a lot less frustrating that way. Lol