We are happy today to present you with not just one, but two abstract games involving hexagonal pieces! Circle of Life, a game from Nick Bentley, and Tock, a classic from the public domain, are now available online on Board Game Arena.

Play Circle of Life now!

Those of you who played Blooms, a sleek and deep abstract reminiscent of Go, will immediately recognise the Zen aesthetics and taste for a minimalistic but efficient rule set from Nick Bentley.

In Circle of Life, on your turn you have to set one stone of your colour on the board. Then if that stone creates a species pattern that is in contact with one of your opponent species following it immediately in the food chain (which is displayed as a circle around the board), the other species is immediately devoured! You win either by eating 20 of your opponent's stones, or if you can't play any more (which means that you managed to fill up the whole ecosystem with your species). Really simple, yes? But so many choices and possibilities!

A big thank you to the game designer Nick Bentley (El Poopo), and to the software developer Adam Novotny (A-dam) for bringing this brand new game to the BGA community!

Play Tock now!

Tock is a classic game that is believed to have originated with the early settlers of Quebec, Canada. It is similar to Ludo, but no dice here! You'll get cards, and move your tokens around the board by choosing which card to spend.

This makes the game much less luck based and much more challenging and interesting. The different cards allow for distinct special functions beyond just moving forward, and you'll have to make the best out of each new hand you are dealt in order to be the first to circle the board with all your tokens and win the race.

And for some extra challenge, you can even play in teams!

For this game, our thanks go to the software developer Jean Portemer (Woodruff) who after Innovation and French Tarot, got interested in Tock and created an adaptation using BGA studio to allow everyone to enjoy it online!

This September, we have the pleasure to bring online a quick and tense market game: For Sale, a game from Stefan Dorra published by Eagle-Gryphon Games is now available on Board Game Arena!

Play it now!

In For Sale, you'll play a real estate agent buying then selling property. To win, you have to be the richest investor at the end of the two phases of the game. Sure, to get rich the trick is to buy cheap and sell dear. But guess what? Everybody knows that, so you have to be really good at it!

You start with a limited amount of money, and the first phase is a bidding game. Place your bids carefully in order not to buy a doghouse for a fortune, but don't be a miser either, or you might miss out on big opportunities!

Once the market has been drained from all valuable properties, the second phase will be matching your properties to the best offers of purchasers ready to sign a big check. You'll consider the offers, and propose one of your properties. If you propose the best property of all realtors in play, you'll get the best check for your coffers!

For Sale is available on BGA as a Premium game: a Premium member is required to create a new table, then as usual everyone can join. Thank you all for supporting us!

We would like to thank Eagle-Gryphon Games for licensing this adaptation of For Sale on Board Game Arena, and to the developer hersh who implemented the game with a nice and elegant interface that makes it really quick and fun to play!

So, do you think you have the right gut feeling for real estate? Try your skill!

5 days ago, we published a new lobby for Board Game Arena. Thanks to your feedback, more than 10 updates have been made since then, with many improvements compared to the initial version.

If you didn't read the first news, we recommend you to read it before this one.

We received A LOT of feedback on the new lobby. Board Game Arena is now a huge website, with a much larger audience than before, and it is REALLY hard to satisfy everyone. So we've not been surprised by the volume of the feedback. And of course as it was new, many of you have been at first disoriented by the new interface. As a consequence you played less on BGA during the 2 first days (-5% to -10%).

But the good news is: we made it! Thanks to your patience, your feedback and our updates, the number of players, tables, games played, waiting time is now back to normal. Yesterday, 21.290 games have been played on BGA, which is a very common number for a Monday. Some others statistics are encouraging:

• The average waiting time before starting a game has dropped by 3%.
• The % of tables that did not find enough opponents to start has dropped by 1.5 point (39,42% now, 40,96% before).

Of course, it is particularly hard to have such a big bang without disturbing you. We worked hard these latest days, to analyse your feedback, to publish updates, and to make sure that everyone of you is comfortable with the new lobby.


So if you have been disoriented by the new lobby in the past few days, here are the main things we did for you:

• At first, NO FEATURES have been removed from BGA. Everything that was possible with the old lobby is possible with the new one.
• In particular, we re-introduced the "available players for this game" and the associated "suggest table to player" feature. This feature was not initially planned for the new lobby, but a lot of you requested it and it is back now.
• For those who are playing a lot of different games here, we added a "See all available tables", which provides a list of tables for all games in a single view. This view is exactly the same than in the previous lobby, so you shouldn't be disoriented.
• If you have many games in your favourites, you can use the top-right "Display options" menu to make the game icons smaller.
• Today, we introduced a tutorial for the lobby, to explain all its features.
• (and many, many small things )

If you are really nostalgic from the old lobby, you can do the following:

• Click on "Display options" and select "Small icons"
• Click on "See all available tables" to display tables like in the old lobby.

Once you have done this, your preferences are saved (for this browser), and the interface is really really close to how it was in the old lobby.

Once you get used to it, you can benefit from the cool new features of this lobby:

• Tables grouped by games: you see immediately if a table of game X is available, and you see all the available tables for game X at the same place.
• Join from the lobby + join multiple real-time tables.
• Your ELO rank + stats for each game is now directly visible in the lobby.
• If you didn't already, we recommend you to test the Automatic mode, which is very powerful and very easy to access now.

This is of course not the end of the story. We still have many things to fix and to upgrade to make this lobby better, and we will continue to push updates in the next days/weeks.

To conclude, I'd like to thank the whole BGA community for your patience and your feedback. Unfortunately, we had a lot of - quite - aggressive feedbacks and comments these past few days, so I'd like to give a special thank you to those of you who took the time to really test the new lobby before giving a feedback, and who explained their situation (and frustrations) in detail instead of just posting a basic "this is awful / I prefer the old one / you are stupid" comment. The feedback from these players has been really helpful to identify what needed to be done, so thanks again.

We are absolutely delighted to continue an incredible series of releases this summer by opening online on Board Game Arena a wonderful strategy board game published only 2 years ago: Clans of Caledonia from designer Juma Al-JouJou (Karma Games).

Play it now!

In Clans of Caledonia, you'll take the head of a Scottish clan of the 19th-century to manage its development from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Yes, we said Scotland, so you'll produce whisky of course!

This mid-to-heavy game is a lot of pleasure to play as actions very closely match the theme of a clan expanding on the Scottish territory, with very diverse and charismatic clans to choose from at the start of the game. You'll chop wood, mine mountains, grow livestock, plant fields, build cheese dairies, bakeries and distilleries in order to - did we mention it already? - produce whisky!

But more than everything, as a kilt bearer, your task will be to manage your money in the most efficient possible way. You'll spend, yes, you'll trade, yes, you'll export, sure, but you won't do it lightly! Every action has a cost, even expanding to the nearest pasture. So for sure, you'll spend time counting before spending!

Clans of Caledonia is one of these powerfully enticing games that you like more each time you play, and that has a huge replayability through the use of a composite map (16 different configurations), variable scoring tiles for each turn, variable port tiles for special actions (if you can reach them), and 9 clans to master, making each new game a new challenge.

Clans of Caledonia is available on BGA as a Premium game: a Premium member is required to create a new table, then as usual everyone can join. Thank you all for supporting us!

We would like to extend a warm thank you to the designer Juma Al-JouJou (Innovatormentor) for his authorization to host Clans of Caledonia on BGA and his invaluable help for playtesting, and to Leo Bartoloni (bartoleo) the developer who did the really hard work of implementing such a complex game using BGA studio. Kudos to him for this top notch work!

Enjoy and remember, it's ok to have a sip for tasting, but you need to keep some ot this whisky for exporting!

PS : Clans of Caledonia allows to play in "Solo mode" which is perfect to learn the game basics before challenging other players. We recommend you to try it!

We are incredibly proud and happy to introduce on Board Game Arena one of the most successful and fun board games of the last few years: Kingdomino!

Play it now!

Kingdomino is a tile placement game from Bruno Cathala released in 2016. This family strategy game for 2 to 4 players has won the "Spiel Des Jahres", the most prestigious award for a board game, and is already considered a classic and a masterpiece.

In Kingdomino, you are a King seeking new lands to expand your Kingdom. You must explore all types of land, including wheat fields, lakes, and mountains, in order to find the best plots to add to your realm, while competing with other lords to acquire them first.

Your goal is to build a 5x5 grid using dominoes (tiles made of 2 terrain sections). Each time you place a domino in your Kingdom, at least one side of the tile must be connected either to a tile previously played or to your castle.

After placing a tile, you must select the tile you'll play on the next turn. However, the selected tile also determines the next turn play order, so selecting a better tile this turn will often mean playing and choosing the following tile after other players on the next turn!

To achieve the best score, you must have as many matching terrains as possible, with a lot of crowns. The squares connected with the same type of terrain form a "territory", and each territory gives you a number of points equal to the number of squares multiplied by the number of crowns visible inside this territory. For example, a 4 squares forest territory with 2 crowns inside scores 4x2 = 8 points.

Kingdomino is a great game for all audiences. We highly recommend 2 players games with "The Mighty Duel" additional rule! With this configuration, you will use all the dominoes to create an impressive 7x7 Kingdom, which can be quite tricky and strategic

Kingdomino is available as a Premium game: a Premium member is required to create a new table, and then as usual everyone can join! Thank you all for supporting us!

Board Game Arena would like to thank Blue Orange and Bruno Cathala for allowing their great game to be available online on your favorite website

Enjoy!

We are happy today to update one of the most played games on Board Game Arena. Terra Mystica is a wonderful game and since its release in February last year, some of you have really played it a lot. Almost 2000 players have played more than 50 games here on BGA! So we are really happy to add more game elements to discover and enjoy!

Play it now!

So what's new? Here is the list!

• The Special Landscapes expansion is now available! You can find the rules here.
• Two new maps have been added. Revised Base Map is an update to the original game map moving some terrains around to shift the balance between factions, and Lakes is a new map (designed by Jason Counihan) that has been illustrated by Feuerland Spiele just some weeks ago: it's really new and should be a complete discovery for all but the most well-informed players!
• The starting VPs are adjusted using the most up to date system devised by the publisher depending on the faction and the map. For the curious who want to know all about it, here are the tables: Base Game, Revised Base Game, Lakes.
• You can now select factions through an auction system. This way, you'll have to use your own evaluation of the strength of each faction relative to each map and other factions in play to make the best bid. That's quite a challenge! As suggested by the publisher, the auction system on BGA follows a proposal made on BGG for Gaia Project (original post here).

We know that a lot of you always want more, and will ask "What about Fire & Ice?" (yes, we know you will ). For now, it's not possible to have Fire & Ice on BGA. We sure hope that this may change in the future (even if it will be quite a lot of work to implement), but only time will tell!

Have fun discovering this new expansion and options!

We are happy to introduce today The Werewolves of Millers Hollow the very famous social game from Philippe des Pallières and Hervé Marly (Lui-Même).

Werewolves is one of the most played game in the world: because it is very accessible and lightweight, you can find it everywhere, and even non-regular gamers know it already.

During a Werewolves game, each player has a secret role: some players are nice villagers, but some are Werewolves. Each night, the Werewolves are killing a villagers, and each day, the villagers are voting to execute one of them - if possible, a werewolf. To win as a villager, you must eliminate all Werewolves, and to win as a Werewolves you need to eliminate all villagers.

Werewolves is a game that is way deeper than it looks like. Deduction and bluff is important, but also strategy. To make the online adaptation even more "strategic", we chose to make immediately available the Village expansion. With this expansion, each villager has a visible role (ex: Teacher) in addition to his/her secret role. It introduces some asymmetry from the beginning of the game, and give you additional interesting possibilities. If you find the base game too simple, we recommend you to try it

Adapting a game primarily based on discussion was not an easy things to do. However, we took it as a challenge, and did our best to keep the spirit of the original game. We did special adaptations to the BGA interface just for this game, and we worked with talented graphic designers to create the beautiful village you can see in the adaptation (thank you Maëva Kosmic, Christine Deschamps and Ian Parovel for this). We hope you'll enjoy it!

Werewolves is available as a Premium game on BGA: only Premium members can create new tables, and everyone (even non-Premiums) can join.

Board Game Arena would like to thanks Lui-Même for making possible to have this great game here

Enjoy!

We are happy to introduce today the upgraded version of Though the Ages, the well known civilization game from Vlaada Chvátil, for online play on Board Game Arena.

"TTA" is considered one of the best strategy games of all time. We are particularly proud about hosting it here on BGA for 5 years now, and that players have been enjoying this adaptation so much, with more than 500.000 games played until now (thank you for this!).

In 2015, the game publisher CGE published a revised version of the game: "Through the Ages: A New Story of Civilization", with new art and rule changes. Everyone knows how hard it is to upgrade an existing "best selling" game... But it has been an incredible success: the revised version of the game is unanimously considered better than the original game, and this new edition is now ranked as the 3rd best game in all categories on BoardGameGeek.

For those who already know TTA, you should not be surprised by the new game rules and should be able to play it immediately. However, we recommend you to read the very last part of the rule book "What's new in the New Story" that summarize all the changes.

For those who do not know about the game: TTA is a civilization game, which by the way holds some similarities with Sid Meier's Civilization videogame. During the 4 ages of the game (from Antiquity to Modern Age), you must earn a maximum number of Culture points (little "harp" symbols) by setting up an efficient combination of technologies, military units and buildings. You have to face various events and attacks from the other players. You have to choose your leaders carefully, and to improve your government from the initial archaic "Despotism" to the most modern political systems.

BGA would like to thank CGE for giving us this possibility to offer the new version of TTA here!

Enjoy

You and the other members of your expedition just arrived on the mysterious planet Artemia... But the thing is... You are Not Alone. And you should definitely worry about that!

We are happy to introduce today Not Alone, a game from Ghislain Masson (Geek Attitude Games), for online play on BGA

Not Alone is an asymmetrical game: all players but one are "Hunted" explorers who are playing together against the last player who is "the Creature". No one seems to know much about this Creature, but it looks like its main objective is to assimilate the Hunted before they are rescued... In this game, as a hunted player your objective will be to collaborate to make sure that the "rescue" counter reaches the victory space BEFORE the "assimilation" counter reaches this same victory space. And the objective of the player acting out the Creature will obviously be the exact opposite

We apprise you that a good collaboration between the hunted players requires communication... But guess what? The Creature will be listening

At the beginning of each turn, the hunted players choose a place to explore by playing a card face down. Then, the Creature must place one "hunt token" (or several, depending on the available powers). Of course, the Creature attempts to target the places chosen by the hunted players. The players who manage to avoid the Creature will be able to use the power of the places they occupy, thus contributing to their future rescue. On the contrary, those who are caught by the Creature will only contribute to the assimilation of the whole group...

While the game is progressing, there are fewer possibilities for hunted players to escape and more and more special powers on both sides. New places are discovered by hunted players, and special cards can be used on both sides to trigger powerful instant effects.

To learn the complete rules, we recommend this excellent "Watch it played" video:



Not Alone is a game with a very special atmosphere and a powerful theme. This is a true "horror board game": there is a lot of tension around the table until the very end of the game. A lot of "cooperative games" can feel a little mechanical because you are playing "against the game", however in "Not Alone" the Creature is a player and this makes each new game unique. On BGA we strongly recommend to play with 4-5 players to fullly enjoy the cooperative aspect of the game. We also recommend you to play both sides since they are very different.

BGA would like to thank Geek Attitude Games for allowing us to propose this extraordinary game online. We hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do!

And the next time you feel alone, remember to ask you this question: are really sure you are?

We recently received a very original and special email from David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut from NASA, currently on mission in the International Space Station.

David is a board game addict, and plays from time to time on BGA. He usually plays here Jaipur, Carcassonne and sometimes Puerto Rico. The extraordinary fact is that he also plays online directly from orbit!

Believe it or not, but the astronauts in the ISS have an Internet connexion available. It is slow, but it is functional, and apparently it is good enough to play on BGA! During one of his (few) free time slot, David played a game and probably became the first person to ever play on BGA from Space, and maybe the first person to ever play board games from Space. It's a small step for (a) man, but a giant leap for a Meeple!

But David's message is going way further: it seems that NASA is looking for new activities for astronauts, in order to stimulate their cerebral capacities while improving the ambience between teammates. Board games is of course their first choice ... except that without gravity this is really hard to manipulate boards, cards and dice... This is why NASA is thinking about using online boardgaming platform "officially" during its long-term missions.

Following this, before the end of this year, we are going to organize on BGA a big contest to select a dozen of candidates for a future job of "Board games instructor" (these are the words from the Agency). The Job Of Your Dreams: you will organise board game sessions for the astronaut crews - on Earth of course, but why not in Space at some point in the future?

Get ready to launch!

UPDATE April 2nd: April's fool! Thank you everyone for your nice comments