Board Game Arena Reviews 182

The developers have their own agenda, they don't listen to the users. One example is the new tournament page, the lay-out is a disaster and many users comment about tournament standings not being readable anymore but the developers keep the new lay-out.

Also I have support requests (tickets) that are open for more than 6 months. A general bug for all games is open for 3 months now and despite the ticket and 2 e-mails nothing happens.

ELO assignment is really unfair. After years playing on this platform i'm really upset with the fact that every time i win against an upper ELO i get no more that 9 points. When someone with a lower ELO wins against me, the winner get a huge amount of points. Totally unfair!

I really wanted to like this site, but the management of the site makes it really hard.

The games themselves are plenty and well implemented. This is the only reason the site gets stars at all.

But the platform crashes or is "down for maintenance" several times a week (sometimes daily) and this seems to become more and more frequent.

And the keyword based moderation is infuriating - statements like "damn, I just screwed up :-)" will land you in BGA-jail. This combined with the site being overrun by trolls makes for a bad user experience.

It was with a heavy heart I cancelled the subscription I have held for 14 years and I'm now looking for another online board games site.

I was warned for my language offending people after saying, "sorry for screwing up your game"

Frequent system issues leading to games being abandoned. Very amateur set-up, including overzealous moderators. Paid for premium once but it's not worth the money. Make everyone pay and make bga a stable platform with a professional setup.

Too many things hidden behind a paywall. Be it games or even the ability to talk. The chat is limited to "premium" members. You need help with something, good luck with it.
The tutorials of the games are the stupidest thing I have seen.
They keep playing on their own, not involving you, the screen keeps zooming in and out, tutorials bug and in the end you're left wondering what on earth you just saw...

Worst platform ever. In my experience very few genuine people playing, a lot of team playing by people with multiple accounts and a lot of abusive players. The moderation is a complete joke and whoever reports rogue players is penalised as well. Personally I would recommend avoiding as the whole situation is just toxic and not worth the effort

the karma system is idiotic and a joke, the moderators are fools that cant do anything !!!!!!!
you get karma for not playing becouse the game stuck on they low site in middle of the game!!!!! in other sites you get demmerit for insulting ,in board game arena you get it for the bugs system of theire site! its a joke site

I was told about BGA and to join so I could play and learn the games I have IRL. I got to board game meets and play regularly. I've come to the realization that playing games on BGA is more frustrating that fun. I am a Premium member and that doesn't work either. Some comments about paid players getting better dice/card drops is not accurate. Also, the solo games are unbeatable. I've tried everything and played many games and still lost with different strategy. One last thing, where are all the so-called boat loads of players? I'm always waiting and not even able to play many folks on most games. I think I've wasted my subscription and I believe I have it for a year...paid for the annual I think. Oh well, hope it gets better but I doubt it. It's insane on the low rating of 60%+ of 1 stars...wow. Bad product for sure. I guess I'll go and open up my games and learn them IRL instead. Good luck!!!

I love Catan and am very good at it irl, but in Board Game arena the dice are rigged in favor of paying members (premium). Worse, at one point a turkish speaking guy threatened to rape me in the game's chat; I reported to support but nothing was done about it. As a non paying member I was only able to win two out of around twenty games I played and only because the premium member in those two games were newbies who literally didn't know what they were doing. Lame and toxic, awful experience

The site itself is extremely unstable. Sometimes it does not work at all, sometimes you are in the middle of a game and the site decides that you cant do anything anymore. And because of their insanely stupid karma ratings, you lose your karma for the sites problem, meaning you cant join or play games.
The site promotes toxicity and cyberbullying. There is no way to mute certain people ingame, so if you get into a game with somebody toxic, you just have to leave and lose even more karma, losing acces to even more games. This site also promotes and protects kingmaking. If you get into a game with people that are just farming karma and elo, you will get cyberbullied and every person will target you into losing. And the response from developers? "Just dont play with them next time".
The site is extremely predatory with its premium membership.
If you complain about anything on their forum about their site, you get banned.
The site has problems with licencing their games. Very scummy developers.

Games are fun, comunity is not. I was unished for a literal WTF and when a player threatened me and used the sarcasm to call me dumb, I reported it, but I again was the one punished. If you want to organise a game, you have to pay, otherwise be so fast or you won't get a chance.

Penalties for silly are terrible!!! And I pay annual subscriptions

Unstable and unreliable platform. Power crazy moderators

Despite great graphics... the amount of errors, horrible scoring, and asinine "Moderators" makes this site almost not worth the frustration. The ONLY consolation is that everyone else seems to have the same exact opinion. The only 5-star reviews here are by the Moderators themselves!

Too little free speech. Too much moderation. What is moderated is ridiculous.

The idea of this site is great and there are a lot of good games available, but the technical support is worse than nothing. Games crash often, there are bugs in games repeatedly reported to the BGA team, but no solutions. Instead you get a rude email telling you that "this bug was reported before, so stop telling us about it". As a subscribed member who actually pays money and contribues to the site, this is not exactly the customer support you would expect.
The system of being reported is ridiculous as you can get "a friendly reminder and minus points" for anything you say, no conversation available.
The most frustrating thing on the website is the horrendous mandatory chat box - you can't turn it off. People constantly bicker and argue about who is the worse player and the notifications ruin your game. Not the experience you need when you just want to relax after hard day at work.

The absolute most hypocritical site full of moderators who claim they want "everyone to just get along" but if you disconnect or have to leave a game for some reason they come down on you like a ton of bricks wielding the "we are the almighty" hammer and punish you with various things and treat you like SCUM for it - and THEY do nothing to prevent collusion, cheating etc on their site as their pathetic Red Thumb bs does absolutely nothing to prevent cheating, harassment by other players etc and overall leads to an extremely unpleasant place to play games online

The site seems fun at first, but there are a lot of bugs. The server crashes almost every evening, at least once. There is also a ridiculous karma points system. You get deductions for the most idiotic reasons.
You can get reported for a lot of things and then you're not even able to appeal their decision.
There is also a 'red or green thumb' system, which gets abused by a lot of players, so it's almost impossible to have a decent rating.