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Starting from less than a month ago, you have had the possibility to enjoy on BGA a new playing mode: the Arena.

This new competitive mode has been a real success: a lot of you are competing to win the trophies for this first Arena Season, and it has increased the number of games played on BGA by +20%. We'd like to thank you a lot for making this feature such a success!

If you want to read more about what is the Arena, how it works, and why we developed it, please read the following FAQ:
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For now, Arena remains a BETA

Despite this success, the Arena is still not perfect. We still consider it a BETA, and you may have seen that we are changing/testing things from time to time.

We know that these changes may be painful, but we to do it in order to find the best way to make this competitive mode work.

During the last 24 hours, we have experimented an alternative lobby for the Arena, described here, in order to decrease the waiting time, to increase the chances to meet opponents from the same leagues, and to try to make the less popular games more popular. Unfortunately, it didn't met our expectations, so we decided to put an end to this experiment.

The good news is that we're done now with the major updates. The Arena is going to remain in its current shape, with minor changes, for the rest of Season 0.

We know that there is still room for improvements. In particular, we'd like to improve the waiting phase, and the "confirmation before playing" phase. However, a lot of you are enjoying the Arena like it is now so there is no reason not to let you play!

Season Zero is now official

Considering all of this, we decided to make Season Zero an official season for BGA rankings.

It means that at the end of the Season, Arena champions will be the first official Arena champions on Board Game Arena, and will be the first to put their names on the winners list for each game.

The end of the Season is planned around April 9th 2020 (this date may still be adjusted).

In conclusion

Our ambition stays the same: make the Arena an enjoyable permanent competition, and allow you to win the most prestigious BGA achievements with it.

This is not an easy task, and it may take a lot of back and forth to reach this objective, but we intend to work on it until we reach that point.

We wish good luck to you all for this Season!

This January, we have the pleasure to release 3 more new games! Following on the 3 card games released 2 weeks ago, 3 abstracts are now available on Board Game Arena: NXS, a self published game from Kevin Kane, Gorami designed by Klaus-Peter Rudolph and published by Bambus Spieleverlag, and Mammalath, a game from Grant Fikes published by nestorgames.

So that's 6 new games for January!

NXS is an invasion game. Taking control of your armada, you'll send your ships into enemy territory and try to grab dominion over their space while defending your own. Each hexagonal piece has different move and capture characteristics for its different sides, so rotating pieces to prepare your next moves will be a key component of your strategy! The first player to manage to capture a predefined amount of the enemy territory wins. NXS has been created by Kevin Kane (w3r3wolv3s on BGA). He developed first an online version on his website nxsgame.com, then decided to also develop a version for Board Game Arena. A big thank you to him, we hope that you'll enjoy discovering NXS!

Gorami is one of three games published in the Gurami box based on Gurami puzzles. Players alternate placing tokens of their colour with value 1 to 3 inside a grid of triangles. The objective is to control the most "stripes" (adjacent triangles in a line when looking from the outside in one of the 3 possible directions). You control the stripe if the sum of the values of your tokens is greater than that of your opponent. When placing tokens, there is an additional strategic element: if you surround one of your opponent's pieces, it will turn to your color. Thanks a lot to the author Klaus-Peter Rudolph, to the publisher Bambus Spieleverlag and to the developer DrKarotte for allowing this elegant abstract to be played by the BGA community!

Mammalath will have you try to claim three free adjacent spaces on a square grid. But at the start of the game, all spaces are filled by animals. So you'll have to strategically free animals while capturing space, but be careful! If at any point you capture three adjacent spaces while there is still an animal on one or more of those spaces, you lose! Mammalath is a game from Grant Fikes (mathgrant on BGA), who is also the author of Battle of LITS which is also available on BGA and has been played more than 100 000 times! Our thanks to him, to the publisher nestorgames and to the developer apollo1001 for bringing one more of their games online here on BGA!

Each of these games has its own unique feel and mechanics to enjoy. We encourage you to be curious and discover all three!

For the beginning of this Happy New Year, we are delighted to gift you with not one, not two, but three new card games. Skat, a classic very popular in Germany, Saint Poker, a game created by a member of the BGA community and Palace, another popular classic, are now available on Board Game Arena!

Skat is a 3 players trick-taking game played in teams which has some similarities with French Tarot. After a bidding phase, the player who made the highest bid chooses the type of game played, then has to fulfill his contract against the two other players to win.

Saint Poker is inspired from the Texas hold 'em poker card game (without bidding). It plays over several rounds with cards being moved to and from the River and your hand over the rounds which makes the game more strategic as you can try to influence the later rounds from the knowledge gained from previous rounds. This game has been designed and implemented recently by a player of the BGA community, Ricardorix so you have certainly never heard of it before! Please give it a try and give him feedback

Palace is a popular classic known under many names and having numerous variations. The goal is to get rid of your cards before the other players. You'll follow the other players laying down cards in a central pile as long as possible, but if you can't play, then you have to take back in hand all the cards from the central pile. Of course, you want to avoid that as much as possible...

For Skat, our thanks go to DrKarotte, and for Saint Poker and Palace, to RicardoRix. Thanks a lot to both of them for their work developing games for the community using BGA Studio!

Happy New Year everyone, we wish you a lot of fun and games!

For 3 years now, Premium players have been able to enjoy Dungeon Twister on Board Game Arena, the extraordinary strategy game from Christophe Boelinger.

To celebrate Christmas, the game designer and BGA would like to offer you very nice gifts:
_ the base game is now free for everyone, starting today.
_ Premium players can now enjoy new rooms (those from the "3-4 players" expansion).

For those of you who don't know "DT", this is a very good occasion to discover this board game masterpiece, that has become a cult game.

See the game page on BGA

Dungeon Twister is a strategy game for 2 players. You lead a team of 8 adventurers in a dungeon, trying to escape from this maze before getting killed by the other team.

Dungeon Twister is a race : you win 1 point each time one of your characters manages to escape the board, and 1 point each time you manage to kill an opponent's character. The first player to score 5 points wins the game.

Each of your characters has its own strengths, weaknesses and special abilities, and you have to use them wisely to reach your goal. In addition, the maze is full of tricky mechanisms that allow you to rotate the rooms and change completely the situation.

Playing Dungeon Twister is like playing a modern version of Chess, with a medieval role-playing universe and endless possibilities. Are you ready to enter the Dungeon?

Watch a DT introduction video by Board to death.

BGA would like to address a very special "thank you" to Yannick Tchobello who developed the new additions, and to Christophe Boelinger for making it possible to build this amazing story together around this very special game.

Let's play!

We have the great pleasure today to bring online a new game that fans of Splendor will probably like a lot! The King's Guild, a limited supply trading and set collection game designed by Matthew Austin and published by Mirror Box Games, is now available on Board Game Arena.

Play it now!

In the King's Guild, you'll take the lead of one of the powerful guilds of Greycastle, competing to gain the most influence in order to get its leader (hopefully you) in a dominant position to succeed the dying King!

So what does a Guild do? First, you need to stock natural resources in your warehouses. Then you need to earn fame and money. Both of these can be earned by crafting specialty items to help adventurers on their quests! In return for this service, you'll get money, and a share of the treasures earned on the quest, that you'll be able to use to further expand the power of your guild. When you have enough money, you'll be able to invest it to build some new rooms to expand your guildhouse, and to hire specialists to gain new abilities.

But resources are in limited supply, and other guilds will be collecting them too! You'll need to plan for your future needs, and if possible hold on to some rare resources to block your opponents from getting them in their moment of need. Nothing personal here, the throne is hanging in the balance!

A fair share of the end of game points can be scored through the Master Rooms which offer various scoring objectives. You'll need to buy them just at the right moment, when you know already that your strategy will allow you to get a lot of points from them, but before one of your opponent snatches the one you want right from under your nose!

The King's Guild is a fast paced game with simple rules offering a deep and varied gameplay thanks to multiple sources of tension between the players and a lot of possible combinations to upgrade your guild. Fortunately, a Solo mode is available to allow you to discover the game and get familiar with its many possibilities before challenging other players... Or after losing to them, in order to prepare for your next encounter!

For the King's Guild, we would like to give many thanks to the publisher Mirror Box Games for offering us the possibility to adapt the game, and to the developer Adam Novotny (A-dam) who lovingly crafted this adaptation on BGA studio, with a lot of skill and care! If you love the game, you can buy it directly from Mirror Box Games on their online store here.

To learn the game, we would like to recommend the following enthusiastic video review from the Dice Tower. So will you manage your Guild to prominence, or to extinction?

We are happy today to introduce a type of game we didn't have yet on Board Game Arena. Dragon Castle, a game inspired from the traditional Chinese Majhong game, designed by Hjalmar Hach, Luca Ricci and Lorenzo Silva, and published by Horrible Guild, is now available online!

Play it now!

In Dragon Castle, you are a feudal lord building a castle on your realm. Luckily for you, the mighty Dragon Castle, once the pride of the whole country, is now crumbling. You'll be able to draw resources from its waning power to consolidate your own, and if you take care of flattering Dragons and invoking Spirits at the best possible time to help you, maybe your castle will be the next to rise above all others!

On your turn, you'll pick a free tile from the top layer of the Dragon Castle, then choose to pair it with another if possible, or sometimes to take a Shrine instead of a second tile. Then, you'll use these tiles to build your castle. Each time you create a set of 4 connected tiles or more of the same type, you'll consolidate them to score points, and place one or more Shrines (depending on the tile type) to score even more points. Paying attention to what type of tiles other players need in order to prevent them from getting those is advised: it's a powerful way of staying ahead of the competition.

The Dragon will grant you bonus points at the end of the game if you match its conditions, so you should try to please it. Anyway, it's always a bad idea to displease a Dragon! The Spirit's power can also be a big boost on your way to the top, but can be summoned only with a cost: you should make sure it's worth it. Every game is a new challenge since the shape of the Dragon Castle, the Dragon card and the Spirit card in play will be different, creating a lot of combinations to explore.

We would like to give a huge thank you to Horrible Guild for granting us an authorization to host their game online on Board Game Arena, and to the developer hersh who crafted a really great implementation using BGA Studio.

We should also say that the art for the game, created by Cinyee Chiu, is really distinctive and beautiful, transporting you in a colourful Chinese dream of castles, spirits and dragons.

Enjoy the dream and the game!

Although a lot of you are playing here with random opponents, there is nothing better than playing board games with friends

That's why we decided to make friends invitations way easier, and to reward you with a free Premium account when you invite your friends on BGA!

How does it work?

1. Go to the our sponsorship program page
2. Send your sponsorship link to your friends (or share it on a social network)
3. That's it! You get +5 gift points each time a friend finishes their first game, and +20 gift points each time a friend finishes their 5th game.

Then you can get 1 month free Premium membership for every 100 gift points


We also made inviting friends to play with you way easier

We totally redesigned the Play with friends section, and upgraded it with a lot of new features:

• You can now add a friend in only 2 clicks: click on "Play with friends", then click on your friend's name, and you are ready to play with him/her.
  
  

• You can now play with a friend that is not registered on BGA (yet). Just send your friend the invitation link and he/she will be able to join your table, even if he/she has no account on BGA. In addition, if he/she decides to register after the game, you'll be their sponsor and get gift points!

• You can now add a hotseat friend, namely a friend that is playing on the same device as you, from the "Play with friends" panel (this is a Premium feature).

With this new stuff, it has never been so easy to invite & play with friends on BGA

By the way, you may be able to convince them that the best Christmas gift ever for you would be a BGA Premium membership

Enjoy!

From the rhinoceros and the elephant, which one is the strongest? This question has been hotly debated since the dawn of mankind. Now, you get to pick a side! Siam, a game from Didier Dhorbait published by Ferti Games, is now available on Board Game Arena.

Play it now!

In Siam, rhinoceros and elephants are competing to be the first to push a rock out of the board. An elephant or a rhinoceros can push a rock, but you need two animals pushing in the same direction to push two aligned rocks. An animal can push another animal too, except if the other animal is pushing in the opposite direction. And finally, an animal can push a whole line with multiple rocks and animals, if opposite forces don't cancel his effort. So you will have to be very mindful of the direction in which every animal is pushing, which is indicated by an arrow above the animal.

On your turn, you can do one of the following actions:

• place one of your animals on the board (on one of the border cells)
• remove one of your animals from the board (if it is on one of the border cells)
• move one of your animals, then choose the direction it is facing
• stay in place and change the direction one of your animals is facing without moving it
• or push! Either with an animal already on the board, or with an animal outside of the board, pushing while entering the board.

This simple set of rules creates a lot of possibilities. You'll be really surprised to see how often a situation seems hopeless, and still, one push done the right way will change everything! Siam is a clever and elegant game, with a fun theme, and beautiful illustrations by Biboun. We like it a lot, as well as the other games from the colourful Sugoï series created by Ferti Games:



We would like to thank Ferti Games for their authorization to create an adaptation of Siam on Board Game Arena, and the designer Didier Dhorbait for helping us playtest the game!

So, from the rhinoceros and the elephant, who do you think is the strongest?

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!